Wednesday, June 29, 2022


Anna Rajagopal may be confused about when she converted to Judaism (was she 10, 11, or 12?), but about one thing she is certain: Rajagopal hates Israel. She also hates any Jew who believes in the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in the Jewish homeland. Which is funny for someone who converted through a Temple that has always been Zionist.

But let’s back up.

Of her conversion, Rajagopal wrote in a blog entry:

I converted to Judaism as a child, when I was around ten years old, but my conversion journey began at age nine, when I felt an inexplicable tug at my very being that I attribute to my Neshama (soul) being present at Har Sinai (Mount Sinai) when G-d revealed Themself to the Jewish people. For me, conversion was G-d calling me home, after thousands of years in exile. Where's the shame in that? (Spoiler alert: There is none). 

Converting as a child was by no means easy, so I understand how difficult, overwhelming, confusing and even upsetting this process, and subsequent life can be. 

One month later, writing for Hey Alma, Rajagopal had moved up the age of her conversion from “around ten years old” to “around age 11.”

I converted to Judaism around age 11, coming from a multicultural household with both Christian and Hindu influences. 

Not a huge difference, for certain. Except that neither version of the Anna Rajagopal conversion story is true. From these two accounts, dated one month apart, the reader might have inferred that Anna converted alone, on her own, as a young child. According to a 2013 temple newsletter, however, we learn that the entire Rajagopal family converted when Anna was 12.



Anna Rajagopal did not convert as a lone brave child because of something tugging on her soul, but alongside her parents and brother, a decision made and taken as a single family unit. At the time, Rajagopal was not around 10 or 11, but age 12, the age of Jewish womanhood, when a girl becomes fully responsible for her choices and actions.

Is this stress on the small difference of a year or two or three in a personal narrative important in the scheme of things? Yes. Because conversion would have been something momentous, something Rajagopal would have remembered with all the details, including her age, intact.

Of course, if Anna Rajagopal were otherwise a person of integrity, we might have looked the other way. We might have shrugged and said, “Big flip, so she got the age wrong by a year or two (or three).”

Rajagopal however, is not a person of integrity. How do we know this? Because of her visceral dislike of certain Jews—really all Jews—expressed as remarks about, for example, their physical appearance. In March 2022, for example, Rajagopal tweeted:

"sometimes I sit here and just wonder why zionists are so physically unattractive. it's very interesting to me how every zionist is just extremely ugly. like actually very unpleasant looking. it’s like you have to be horrifically grotesque to be part of the genocide club.”


This is not Rajagopal’s sole antisemitic tweet, but in a nutshell, it is certainly one that should disgust all humanity, no matter what they think about Jews and Israel. Let’s flip it for a moment and rephrase her tweet in terms that might make this blatant example of bigotry easier for the world at large to comprehend and digest:

"sometimes I sit here and just wonder why BIPOCs are so physically unattractive. it's very interesting to me how every BIPOC is just extremely ugly. like actually very unpleasant looking. it’s like you have to be horrifically grotesque to be part of the genocide club.”

If reading the above shocked you, it should. Good people do not generalize about the appearance of another people, no matter their identity. We learn this at our parents’ knees. But then again, when someone raves like this, it has nothing to do with looks, Zionist or otherwise. It’s just a bigot ranting on Twitter. If Rajagopal had something substantive to say, she’d say it, instead of resorting to baseless insults that generalize about the physical characteristics of a people.

Instead she says Zionists are ugly. And she didn’t say it only the one time. In an earlier tweet, for example, Rajagopal wrote, “Zionists are genocidal freaks. If there’s ever a circus show for ugly, sunburnt, violent outcasts, that’s where you’ll see them.”


Where does this hatred for Zionists, really Jews, come from? Not from the temple that converted Anna Rajagopal, her father, mother, and brother. Billed as the first Reform Jewish congregation in North Texas, and the largest synagogue in the South, Temple Emanu-El of Dallas is a member of the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ). Under Israel Engagement, the URJ website states that: “Reform Zionism accepts and supports the foundational aim of Zionism: the establishment of a Jewish State in Israel, the homeland of the Jewish people.” 

Foremost among the goals of URJ’s Reform Zionism work is “To increase each Reform Jew’s relationship with Israel and make Israel a core component of every Reform Jew’s identity.” To that end, the URJ website links to its affiliate branch, ARZA (Association for Reform Zionists). The acronym “ARZA” is a Hebrew imperative: “To the Land.”

It is no coincidence that Temple Emanu-El of Dallas, under whose auspices Anna and her family embraced Judaism, is affiliated with URJ/ARZA. The temple is nothing if not Zionist. In fact, the synagogue just completed not one but two group trips to Israel.



It’s not just the trips to Israel that mark Temple Emanu-El of Dallas as Zionist. The Reform congregation also provides adult education classes in Zionist philosophy. As recently as 2019, for example, Temple Emanu-El offered a course called The Zionist Ideas

Here’s the course description:

"The Zionist Ideas: Visions for the Jewish Homeland—Then, Now, Tomorrow” will be the textbook for the class exploring the vision of Israel as a democratic Jewish state. Author Gil Troy profiles more than 170 Jewish visionaries from the 1800s to today in this book, which builds on Arthur Hertzberg’s “The Zionist Ideas."

Temple Emanu-El is Zionist both by nature and by deed. How does Rajagopal feel about this? How did she feel during services as a “child convert,” seeing the “horrifically grotesque” congregants sitting all around her?

And why would Rajagopal convert if the people are so ugly, er Zionist? 

While attempting to join the Nation of Israel, did Rajagopal somehow miss the fact that there’s an actual, physical location associated with that nation? And if she thinks the idea of Jews having land or wanting to live in it and govern themselves is so bad, then why did she sign on?

Like all antisemites, Rajagopal has tried hard to cut the indivisible ties that bind the Nation of Israel to Israel the nation. She does this “as a Jew,” using the fact of her Reform conversion to lend legitimacy to her rejectionist views on the Jewish State. She assumes her Jewish persona at will when convenient to the ultimate purpose of eradicating Israel.

When Rajagopal talks about her Neshama being at Har Sinai and how for her, "conversion was G-d calling me home, after thousands of years in exile," we wonder: of what nation were we to imagine her becoming a part? To where was she being called home? Was her soul’s presence at Sinai, her being called home from exile, meant as some sort of metaphor for something else?  

Perhaps so, since her actions since that time have been directed toward the purpose of ethnically cleansing the Land of Israel of its entire Jewish population, as per her tweet: “Free Palestine by any means necessary: Decolonization is not a metaphor but a call to immediate action in which any form of resistance or rebellion is deemed moral under any immoral circumstances.”

We need not wonder about the borders of Rajagopal’s would-be Jew-free Palestine. The borders would be the borders of Israel. Zionists, according to this “child convert” are not to be allowed to live in any part of their ancient, biblical homeland, or in fact to live. Rajagopal’s “call to immediate action” is a call to murder Jews.

What is it about Zionism that so disturbs Rajagopal? Is it the aspiration to have a Jewish state, or is it the actual fact of Jews living in Israel? Is it Jewish self-determination on Jewish soil that bothers her? What is the real Zionism in her Rajagopal's eyes? Which aspect of Zionism is it that makes us Jews so ugly to her?

Who knows? But the Avodah Institute for Social Change must agree with Rajagopal’s antisemitic* views because they hired her for their social media team. That can only mean that her prospective employers monitored her Twitter and liked what they saw. Else they would not have hired her to assist in the running of their own Twitter account.

The Avodah website describes itself as “[providing] Jewish leaders the tools, experience, and networks they need to create change.” If Avodah likes what Rajagopal is tweeting out, this mission statement must be some kind of code. Based on the hiring of Rajagopal, “creating change” is likely code for getting Jewish leaders to stop being Zionist, to stop standing up for Israel and the welfare of the Jewish people

A truer Avodah mission statement, one not couched in code, might have said, “We agitate for and support the murder of Israeli Jews by Arab terrorists and the annihilation of the Jewish State by any means.”



Note that there is nothing about Israel in the Avodah values statement, because Israel is not a value for them.



The kind of people who found groups like Avodah, and those who work for them, all use coded language. They can’t come right out and say they hate Israel and want to annihilate its Jewish presence. Not yet. Not as an organization. 

Instead, they encourage people like Rajagopal to say it for them until it becomes a natural part of the conversation. Lucky for us, this time Avodah was stymied in its efforts to amplify views that would appear to mirror those of Rajagopal. The Avodah tweet announcing her hire is gone. So is the page devoted to Rajagopal on the Avodah website. This is because Rajagopal was caught out for her tweets and the buzz went out until Avodah likely had to fire her in order to save face for what will probably be its next salvo against the Jewish State

As a people, we need to learn how to see and interpret anti-Israel, antisemitic code. There’s the code of Avodah regarding Jewish leadership and the unsaid need to change the way the leadership feels about Israel. There is the code of Rajagopal excusing murder, as long as the Jewish victims love and/or want to live in Israel. All of this is in code. The code is necessary because the aims are wrong and immoral, so they dare not voice them aloud.

At least not yet.

It is inevitable that some readers of this column will assert that Rajagopal is not really Jewish. They will say that Reform conversion is not the same as Halachic conversion performed according to Jewish Law. I will go a step further.

Could Anna Rajagopal and perhaps even her family, have duped the people of Temple Emanu-El regarding their sincerity in wanting to be Jews? Did she/they trick the rabbis who performed the Reform conversion into thinking that some or all the members the Rajagopal family shared the Jewish dreams and aspirations of this so-Zionist congregation? As a “child convert” could 12-year-old Anna have already been poisoned about Israel and the Jewish people? Could she have absorbed this lesson at home?

We might also ask: what was the group conversion about? What is the real reason the Rajagopal family sought conversion? Was the conversion genuine for some, not so much for other members of this family? Could the conversion have represented a bid to be upwardly mobile, to angle for a portion of what they might have seen as outsized Jewish power? Or was there some other dark, nefarious political purpose to the family conversion, an infiltration, perhaps, of enemy lines?

At this point, we cannot know. There is no backstory to hint at the answers. There is only the backstory supplied us by Anna Rajagopal, in which her age at conversion changes on a whim and the conversion of her family is entirely omitted. Rajagopal's Twitter rants reveal more, showing signs of a highly disturbed personality filled with antisemitic loathing.

Without a backstory all we have is what we know of Rajagopal, and what we know of Rajagopal tells us all we need to know about Avodah, the organization that hired and subsequently fired her.

Despite the Jewish-sounding name of this organization, Avodah is clearly a hornet’s nest--one filled with hate-filled hornets like Rajagopal, brimming with hate for one specific people:

The Nation of Israel.

The Jews.


*From the IHRA examples of antisemitism: “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.”




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!

 

 




UN Watch reports (via email):
 The UN agency that runs schools for Palestinians announced to donor states yesterday that it has just placed six employees on administrative leave after a report on Thursday by UN Watch exposed UNRWA teachers who publicly call to murder Jews.
This has upset a Gaza-based "human rights" NGO, called the Hemaya Center for Human Rights:

Today, Wednesday, Hemaya Center for Human Rights sent a letter to the UNRWA Commissioner-General regarding arbitrary administrative measures against a number of Palestinian UNRWA employees.

The Center expressed its disapproval of the position of the Administration of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Refugees (UNRWA) against ten of its employees in its various areas of work, due to their expression of their adherence to national principles and rights on social media pages and websites, and participation in national events and activities.
Yes, this NGO with "human rights" in its name supports teachers who call to murder Jews - because terrorism is part of their national principles and rights.

I didn't say this - they did.

 I wonder what European country funds this anti-human rights organization. (It is not on NGO Monitor's radar.) 

Just a reminder that some organizations that say they are for human rights are actually quite the opposite.



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!

 

 

From Ian:

‘Selling Without Discrimination’: Unilever, Ben & Jerry’s Israel Reach Agreement to End West Bank Boycott
Unilever on Wednesday announced the divestment of its Ben & Jerry’s interests in Israel to its local licensee, allowing the ice cream maker’s products to be sold throughout Israel a year after its controversial move to end sales in eastern Jerusalem and in the West Bank.

The decision follows a months-long legal dispute between Unilever, the parent company of Ben & Jerry’s, and Avi Zinger, owner of American Quality Products Ltd. and the current licensee of the ice cream maker in Israel.

Last July, the independent Ben & Jerry’s’ board resolved not to renew a licensing deal with its Israeli partner at the end of 2022, saying it was “inconsistent” with its values to sell products in “the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”

Zinger thanked Unilever for resolving the issue and for the “strong and principled stand it has taken against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.”

“There is no place for discrimination in the commercial sale of ice cream,” stated Zinger. “It has always been important to me to ensure that all customers — no matter their identity — are free to enjoy Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.”

According to the deal, Zinger will be Israel’s exclusive producer and distributor of Ben & Jerry’s and sell the ice cream under its Hebrew and Arabic names throughout Israel and the West Bank.




Major Victory Against BDS: Avi Zinger’s Legal Team Blocks Ben & Jerry’s Boycott of Israel
Avi Zinger, Ben & Jerry’s Israeli licensee, has settled the federal lawsuit filed on his behalf by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and co-counsel, following Ben & Jerry’s refusal to renew Zinger’s 34-year-old license to manufacture and sell Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.

The settlement prevents Ben & Jerry’s from boycotting Israel and ensures that Zinger will continue selling Ben & Jerry’s ice cream throughout Israel and Judea and Samaria without interruption. The settlement signals a major defeat for the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement which had pressured Ben & Jerry’s to stop all Ben & Jerry’s sales in Judea and Samaria and eastern Jerusalem.

In March, Brandeis Center client American Quality Products (AQP), Zinger’s company, sued Unilever and its subsidiary, Ben & Jerry’s, for unlawfully terminating its multi-decade business relationship to boycott Israel. The lawsuit requested the U.S. federal court deem Unilever’s termination illegal, enabling AQP to continue selling Ben & Jerry’s products throughout Israel. Today, Unilever and AQP announced an agreement that resolves the legal dispute and defeats BDS efforts to keep the premium ice cream out of Israel. Under the agreement, Zinger and AQP will continue to manufacture and sell Ben & Jerry’s ice cream products to all customers in all parts of Israel, Judea and Samaria, and Gaza. Unilever has sold its Ben & Jerry’s business interests in Israel to Zinger to enable him to continue selling the same Ben & Jerry’s ice cream consumers have been enjoying for 35 years with its Hebrew and Arabic name.

“I thank Unilever for resolving this matter and for the strong and principled stand it has taken against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. There is no place for discrimination in the commercial sale of ice cream. It has always been important to me to ensure that all customers – no matter their identity – are free to enjoy Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. BDS lost. I now have the right to sell Ben & Jerry’s using its Hebrew and Arabic name to all our Israeli and Arab customers throughout Israel and Judea and Samaria – forever. This is a victory for those who seek cooperation and coexistence, and a resounding defeat for discrimination. It is particularly significant for those who have stood united against BDS,” stated Zinger.

“On behalf of myself and my employees, I am grateful for the support we received from Israeli Knesset members across the political spectrum; from the Foreign Ministry under the leadership of Foreign Minister Yair Lapid; for the efforts of governors and state attorneys general from numerous states in the United States who initiated severe sanctions in response to the boycott; and for the individuals and Jewish organizations from around the world who on their own initiative spoke out against BDS and contributed to this successful resolution. Thank you also to Alyza Lewin and her team from the Brandeis Center, Marc Zell, and Nathan Lewin, who worked tirelessly to help me. It is the support we received from all corners of the globe that made this resolution possible. I am grateful to once again be able to focus on what I do best – making high-quality premium ice cream for all to enjoy,” added Zinger.


Facing Illinois blacklist, Morningstar commits to resolving anti-Israel biases
Morningstar, Inc., the Chicago-based financial services firm that came under fire earlier this month for providing analytical tools that were found to have a bias against Israel, committed to addressing concerns that the company harbors anti-Israel attitudes at an Illinois investing board meeting last week, according to two individuals present.

In last Tuesday’s meeting, the Committee on Israel Boycott Restrictions subdivision of the Illinois Investment Policy Board (IIPB) voted not to place Morningstar on the state’s “prohibited investment list,” subject to the firm’s implementing of recommendations put forth in a report published by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and a separate independent report commissioned by Morningstar and conducted by New York City-based law firm White & Case LLP.

The unanimous vote cleared Morningstar from penalty under an Illinois law requiring the state pension fund to divest from firms that support the Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement targeting Israel.

The concerns raised in the two reports focus on Sustainalytics, a Morningstar subsidiary firm that rates companies based on Environmental and Social Governance (ESG) criteria, metrics that have recently become popular among investors who desire to understand companies’ social impact.

Critics assert that Sustainalytics unfairly targets Israeli companies in its ratings and that it supports the BDS movement.

The White & Case recommendations focus on transparency, internal consistency and addressing conflicts of interest. The FDD proposals go further, calling for ending Morningstar’s reliance on reporting from “anti-Israel sources” in addition to a request that Morningstar “address [the] unfair policy of punishing businesses just for operating in Israel.”

Morningstar did not acknowledge that the board vote was conditional on responding to the FDD-recommended reforms, and told Jewish Insider, “ultimately, the IIPB voted not to place Morningstar on the Prohibited Investment List.”


By Daled Amos


The media is very big on speculation.

With the Supreme Court overturning Roe vs. Wade last week, doomsday predictions are already available: Fall of Roe will have immediate economic ramifications, experts say:

"Abortion rights are economic rights, and this decision means the loss of economic security, independence, and mobility for abortion seekers. Low- and middle-income people, especially Black and Brown women, will bear the brunt of the impact."

Speculation is one of the services the media provides -- it is a handy substitute for reasoned argument and debate.  

Twenty years ago, before fake news became a thing, the author Michael Crichton called out the media on its penchant for speculation and cast doubt on its value. In a talk he gave to the International Leadership Forum, entitled Why Speculate, he referenced a front page article in the New York Times about then-president George Bush raising tariffs on steel. The New York Times speculated on the friction tariffs would cause with allies -- especially those allies Bush was relying on in the fight against terrorism. Crichton dismissed the drama:

Isn’t it reasonable to talk about effects of current events in this way? I answer, absolutely not. Such speculation is a complete waste of time. It’s useless...The reason why it is useless, of course, is that nobody knows what the future holds.

The fact that the future is so difficult to predict is often lost on people because of the credibility that the media has, not only when claiming to predict the future, but also when explaining the present. Today, we smirk at the suggestion that the media retains some level of credibility, but the fact remains that what Crichton called the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is still at work:

You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. [emphasis added]

It was at this point that I thought it would be interesting to write about Crichton's view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Or of Israel in general.

Or of the Middle East.

But it seems Mr. Crichton was more interested in Jurassic than Jews.

However, he did have a lot to say about the news media, and that is worthwhile taking a look at. Crichton will get no argument from us when he writes that "media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved." And what goes for the media goes for academia as well.

Periodically, Elder of Ziyon exposes academic papers that are completely off-the-wall:

o  The Transnational Palestinian Self: Toward Decolonizing Psychoanalytic Thought, where we learn that "Zionism is intricately and inextricably linked with and haunted by a Palestinian identity, which it fundamentally works to negate...interpolating all identities through its racialized social and class hierarchy."

o  Palestine and the Will to Theorise Decolonial Queering, which reveals "Abu Hanna is the perfect embodiment of a sexed and gendered other, whose racialised [oriental] essence makes it possible to demarcate the necessity of Zionist conquest, with its moral modern and civilizational attributes. "

o  Veganwashing Israel’s Dirty Laundry? Animal Politics and Nationalism in Palestine-Israel, which exposes how "the contemporary cultural politics of veganism in Israel circulate and reinforce national myths of exceptionalism tethered to a Zionist exclusionary ideology, including claims to unique victimhood, pioneering achievements and moral rectitude, which further entrench Jewish Israeli belonging and Palestinian unbelonging." 

Crichton pointed out this pseudo-intellectual exploitation in academia:

Most areas of intellectual life have discovered the virtues of speculation, and have embraced them wildly. In academia, speculation is usually dignified as theory...This is in part aping science, but it’s also an escape hatch. Your close textual reading of Jane Austen could well be found wrong, and could be shown to be wrong by a more knowledgeable antagonist. But your theory of radical feminization and authoritarian revolt in the work of Jane Austen is untouchable.

This brand of unassailable speculation, he writes, has found a secure home today in the information age because "it is perfect for the information age, which promises a cornucopia of knowledge, but delivers a cornucopia of snake oil." (There is a reason that today no one refers to the Internet as the information superhighway anymore.)

Crichton was writing 20 years ago and things have only gotten worse.

He wrote:

We need to start remembering that everybody who said that Y2K wasn’t a real problem was either shouted down, or kept off the air. The same thing is true now of issues like species extinction and global warming. You never hear anyone say it’s not a crisis. [emphasis added]

Of course, this kind of censorship was before Twitter, so it was not quite so obvious. 

When it comes to speculation, the media is notoriously bad at it -- just as everyone else is. Crichton points out how a major reason for voting for Lyndon Johnson over Barry Goldwater was to keep the US out of Vietnam. But it was Johnson who, once elected, sent 200,000 troops there. Some in the media learned their lesson better than others. The Wall Street Journal gave up endorsing candidates long ago:

The Wall Street Journal last gave its imprimatur to a presidential hopeful in 1928, when it endorsed Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover over New York Governor Al Smith. A vote for Hoover, the paper said, was “the soundest proposition for those with a financial stake in the country.” But when the onset of the Great Depression made it clear that Hoover had been the wrong man for the job, the Journal learned its lesson. It has never again endorsed any candidate. [emphasis added]

The problem is that speculating about the future is not only a great way to attack a political adversary or opponent in a debate. It's a natural reaction to current events. And everyone likes to try their hand at it.

Including Michael Crichton. And he wasn't any better at it than the media he criticized.

In 1993, ten years before he gave his talk on the ineffectiveness of speculating, he wrote an article, Mediasaurus. In it, he confidently predicted the future of the media:

To my mind, it is likely that what we now understand as the mass media will be gone within ten years. Vanished, without a trace...According to recent polls, large segments of the American population think the media is attentive to trivia, and indifferent to what really matters. They also believe that the media does not report the country's problems, but instead is a part of them.

But let's face it: what passes for "information" is devoured by people who welcome the simplicity and emotional manipulation of the media. It is one of the reasons that "news" that puts Israel in a negative light is so popular. 

It is news, but is it "information"? 

A quick Google search will tell you that information is "facts provided or learned about something or someone." -- But the second definition is more accurate: "what is conveyed or represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things."

Which is why Crichton could write about the need for improving the quality of the news and in the same breath write that "there have been some positive innovations, like CNN and C-SPAN."

Writing in 1993, he wondered aloud:

Who will be the GM or IBM of the '90s? The next great American institution to find itself obsolete and outdated, while obstinately refusing to change? I suspect one answer would be The New York Times and the commercial networks. Other institutions have been pushed to improve quality. Ford now makes a better car than it has any time in my life; we can thank Toyota and Nissan for that. But who will push The New York Times?

The answer, I think, is technology. [emphasis added]

True, social media is considered a more powerful force today -- but not because it is more factual. The technology that Crichton saw as part of the solution has merely become an extension of the same sloppiness. Sure, people want real quality information, but that is only for what they need in order to live, for practical purposes. When it comes to the news, however, people are too used to accepting it as a form of entertainment, as something that gets the emotions going:

This is one reason why so many people who regularly interact with the press come to view it as an anomaly. They go about their daily work, which is specific and complex, and then they meet with the press, where interactions are general and oversimplified.

Another anomaly shows itself in human discourse.

Crichton likes the model of the parliamentary debates in Great Britain. No matter how determined they are to attack and even insult each other, the opponents in a parliamentary debate will address each other as "the right honorable gentleman" or "my distinguished friend." And writing in 1993, Crichton believes he has found the one place where civil debate is still possible:

And where can you find this kind of debate in today's media? Not in television, nor in newspapers or magazines. You find it on the computer networks, a place where traditional media are distinctly absent. [emphasis added]

Which just goes to prove Crichton's point that speculating really doesn't hold much weight.

It also seems to show that the much-vaunted quality media that Crichton thought he saw coming over the horizon was just a pipe dream after all.





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!

 

 


On Tuesday, Hamas' Al Qassam Brigades published a video showing Hisham al-Sayed, one of two Israeli men being held by the terror group in the Gaza Strip, hooked up to an oxygen mask.

Al-Sayed is a Bedouin with mental health problems - but Hamas insists that he is an Israeli soldier. 

Much of the anti-Israel Arabic media is happily parroting the claim, since it would look really bad for Hamas to have kidnapped a mentally ill Arab civilian whom their allies in the human rights community call "Palestinian."

According to Abu Ali Express, as soon as Hamas released this video Palestinians on social media started making fun of Hamas. They had been led to believe that Hamas had captured a Jewish Israeli soldier, and al-Sayed obviously is neither Jewish nor a soldier. They wondered about the timing of trying to pressure Israel to make a prisoner swap when the government is in limbo, they sarcastically asked whether he was on a hunger strike or whether his family could visit - showing the difference between Arabs in Israeli prisons and this Arab in Hamas custody.

Yet some are doubling down, still insisting that al-Sayed is a soldier. A Nablus academic is upset at the pushback, saying, "The cheap media underestimates the achievement of the Palestinian resistance and depicts it as murderous monsters who hold a mentally ill person for political purposes, even though the prisoner is a combat soldier!!"

One popular tweet reproduces his wallet showing a bus card for the Metropoline Public Transportation, claiming that the bus line really only transports soldiers and no ordinary Israeli citizen holds such a pass. (It isn't true.) 

Tellingly, Al Jazeera Arabic calls him a soldier as well. (I cannot find coverage of this in AJ English.)

Hamas' narrative falls apart when people see that they are holding an Arab hostage. 



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 latest Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research poll shows that in the aftermath of a new terror wave, more Palestinians support killing Jews.

The poll, taken last week, finds:

When asked about support for specific policy choices to break the current deadlock, 55% support a return to armed confrontations and intifada.

A majority of 59% say that the armed attack inside Israel carried out by Palestinians unaffiliated with known armed groups contributes to the national interest of ending the occupation.

A majority of 56%  support murderous attacks similar to those carried out in April and May inside Israel.

When asked about the most effective means of ending the  occupation and building an independent state, 50% chose "armed struggle," 22% negotiations, and 21% popular resistance. 

Other interesting findings:

The vast majority (78%) believe the Qur'an contains a prophecy on the demise of the State of Israel.

The largest percentage (33%) says Hamas is most deserving of representing and leading the Palestinian people while 23% think Fatah under president Abbas is.

In an election for president today between Abbas and Hamas leader Haniyeh, Haniyeh would win handily, 55% to 33%.

Only 28% support a two state solution, 69% oppose. But based on this video done recently, the 69% do not want a binational state with equal rights for all: virtually all want a single Arab state.






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!

 

 

Tuesday, June 28, 2022

From Ian:

A Legend of Innocence
France’s wartime past continues to fascinate and divide the public. Eric Zemmour’s failed presidential campaign cast this reality into sharp relief, reviving a legend of national innocence in which France bore no guilt for the Holocaust and precipitating a fierce battle over the legacy of the Vichy regime. Zemmour, the son of Algerian Jews, cited outdated, erroneous historical accounts to claim that the regime and Marshal Philippe Pétain protected French Jews from deportation. He averred that the puppet regime had only collaborated with the Nazis. Zemmour, who has previously questioned the innocence of Captain Dreyfus, sees the historical facts and official commemoration of the Holocaust as an obstacle to his plan of national renewal. He wants to replace France’s guilt with pride, its introspection with self-assertion.

He is not alone. Holocaust education has become a bone of contention in some French schools, as Arab Muslim students refuse to sit through lessons on the topic. Postcolonial intellectuals, meanwhile, insist that excessive focus on the extermination of the Jews distracts from European imperialism, the latest incarnation of which is the Jewish state itself.

The facts, however, remain the same: 75,000 French Jews disappeared into the nacht und nebel of the camps. Historians have shown in excruciating detail how the Vichy regime launched a homegrown program of antisemitic persecution and cooperated in the implementation of the Final Solution. Most scholars maintain that the Holocaust, in the ferocity, intentionality, and scale of murder, stands as a singular crime.

France has done much since the ’60s and ’70s to reckon with its own history. The immediate postwar era saw the coalescence of dueling narratives on the nation’s conduct in the war, both of which served to exculpate French society at large. Resisters maintained that Pétain had usurped power and that the Vichy regime had no claim to representing France. A narrow coterie of villains welcomed defeat and packed off resisters and Jews on trains to the east. High-profile collaborators like Pétain and Deputy Pierre Laval told another story, which also absolved the nation. The Vichy regime had interposed itself between the German occupiers and French society as “a shield.” Collaboration limited the exactions of the occupation, including for Jews, whom officials had quietly saved while ostensibly cooperating with the enemy.

The ’60s and ’70s saw the emergence of cultural production and academic literature that disproved the nostrums of the postwar moment. Robert Paxton dispelled many comforting illusions with the publication of Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order and (with Michael Marrus) Vichy France and the Jews. Prominent collaborators like Rene Bousquet and Maurice Papon came to trial in the ’90s. The debate appeared settled when President Jacques Chirac acknowledged the French state’s role in the Holocaust in 1995. France could now construct a new memorial consensus on the basis of historical fact; the matter might even lose much of its salience as the older generation died out.

But Zemmour’s provocation and the banlieues’ backlash persist. The memorial consensus, itself of fairly recent vintage, no longer musters unanimous approval. It might even appear to some as the product of elite opinion. French Jews, stewards of Holocaust memory in an age of extremes, now find themselves in a delicate position.
Democrats cater to the woke at their electoral peril
Beyond politics, at a time democratic norms and values are under attack around the world and anti-Semitism is on the rise here at home, we cannot overlook the damaging effect of The Squad’s demonization of Israel and history of anti-Semitic rhetoric.

Democratic Squad members consistently single out Israel — the world’s only Jewish state and the only democracy in the Middle East — and label it an “apartheid state,” which is a patently false claim used as a rallying cry by extremists who seek Israel’s destruction.

In that same vein, Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib have pushed anti-Semitic conspiracies — by suggesting that Jews use their money to buy American support for Israel — and have compared America and Israel to the Taliban.

Now more than ever, Democrats need to reject these false claims and make clear that they stand with democracies around the world, from Ukraine to Israel, and against anti-Semitism.

National Democrats can no longer cater to The Squad and its brand of fringe politics while overlooking the larger political forces at play.

If the Democratic Party’s establishment wing continues to associate itself with The Squad — whose members exist on the fringes of the political spectrum and prioritize political correctness and “wokeness” over the real issues that matter to most Americans — the party will suffer electorally in 2022, 2024 and beyond. (h/t Rodin New York)
Facebook is funding and working closely with pro-Palestine charity that is linked to alleged terror groups that revere convicted killers and had a 'Holocaust denier' as a guest speaker - along with Rep Rashida Tlaib
Meta, Facebook's parent company, provides funding and works closely with pro-Palestine charity 7amleh

The partnership is one of many launched by Meta with the aim of 'keeping harmful content off our platforms and helping to prevent risk offline'

The nonprofit is also a member of Twitter's Trust and Safety Council, and is a part of Twitter's 'Human and Digital Rights Protection group'

A new report claims that 7amleh has links to alleged terror organizations

Pro-Israel think tank the Zachor Legal Institute claims 7amleh has lionized convicted terrorists and had an alleged holocaust denier as a guest speaker

Michigan Democrat Representative Rashida Tlaib also spoke at 7amleh's annual online conference last month on Palestinian online activism

Zachor founder Marc Greendorfer told DailyMail.com that Facebook and Twitter failed in their due diligence by including 7amleh in their advisory groups

A spokesperson for 7amleh said the report was no different to the many 'smear campaigns from extremist, far-right and anti-Palestinian organizations'
‘Discrimination’ Petition Mark Ruffalo Blasted Out To Followers Was Crafted By Palestinian Group Linked To Terror Orgs
Mark Ruffalo, a movie star and left-wing activist, tweeted a petition out to his more than 8 million followers that was in part created by a group with ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a U.S.-designated terror group, and other Israeli-designated terror groups.

7amleh, also known as The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, has voiced its support of PFLP and collaborated with other alleged terror-linked groups.

Nadim Nashif, 7amleh’s director and co-founder, tweeted an article in 2014 calling PFLP member Leila Khaled, who hijacked a plane in 1969 and attempted to do so in 1970, a “resistance icon.”







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Hamas-leaning Al Resalah claims that Israel is flooding the Arab sectors of Jerusalem with drugs:

From the first moment of the occupation of Palestine, the city of Jerusalem, with its inhabitants, was coveted by the "Israeli" occupier. All ways are permissible for them to steal its Islamic and Arab identity. They tried to obliterate the Arabic language and change the habits and behaviors of citizens until they flooded some neighborhoods with drugs by providing them at low prices.

The drug problem began to appear clearly since the eighties, but it multiplied greatly with the immigration of Russian Jews that began in the early nineties, when many of them worked in the promotion of heroin and cocaine, until it deliberately reached young Jerusalemites.

As part of the occupation’s policy of changing the features of Jerusalem’s landmarks and Judaizing it, it worked to destroy its youth by flooding the city’s markets with drugs after they were being sold openly, ....threatening the lives of about twenty thousand young men from Jerusalem.

Jerusalem researcher Nasser Hadmi says that the occupation has been keen to destroy the social fabric in Jerusalem and target young people as they are the hope of the future, especially after he saw that they are the biggest obstacle in confronting its Judaization plans and attacking and appropriating Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Hadmi believes that the occupation found drugs to be one of the effective means to destroy the social fabric and neutralize the youth of Jerusalem from their cause by ignoring their spread among them, and also facilitated their circulation by reducing their punishment for those with whom drugs are seized.
That's some strategy!





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From Ian:

US deplores settler violence, slams Israel at UNSC ahead of Biden's visit
The US condemned Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians, as it issued a harsh critique of the Jewish state's actions at the United Nations Security Council, warning that tensions on the ground were “palpable and it is dangerous.”

US Deputy Ambassador Richard Mills highlighted in particular the stabbing death of Ali Hassan Harb, 27, during a violent incident between Israelis and Palestinians near the West Bank city of Ariel, that happened after settlers trespassed onto the Harb family’s property.

Police have arrested two Israelis, due to their possible involvement in the incident.

The US “deplores the escalation of settler violence against Palestinians, including the death of Ali Hassan Harb, a Palestinian in the West Bank who was killed on his family’s agricultural land,” Mills told the UNSC in New York during its monthly debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“We take note of the May 2022 OCHA report that found over 1,000 Palestinians were injured by live ammunition fired by Israeli forces in 2021, seven times the amount of those injured by live ammunition the prior year,” Mills said.

He referenced US President Joe Biden’s planned trip to Israel on July 13, in which he said the American leader would “meet with Israeli and Palestinian leaders to urge calm and explore ways to promote equal measures of security, freedom, and opportunity for both Israelis and Palestinians.

“The current US administration continues to affirm its strong support for a two-state solution, which remains the best way to ensure Israel’s future as a democratic and Jewish state alongside a sovereign, viable Palestinian state,” Mills said.
Will Biden Visit Palestinian Sites Honoring Killer of his Friend’s Niece?
Joe Biden’s first eight years in the U.S. Senate (1973-1981) overlapped with the final years of his colleague Sen. Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, a fellow Democrat. Biden and Ribicoff were friends and political allies, and the newcomer benefited from the wise counsel of the elder statesman.

So I wonder what the late Sen. Ribicoff would think about now-President Joe Biden visiting a foreign region where there are numerous public sites named after the terrorist who murdered Ribicoff’s niece.

Next month, Biden will become the first sitting U.S. president to visit the territories governed by the Palestinian Authority. The problem for the aides who are planning the president’s itinerary is that, if they are not extremely careful, Biden could find himself at one of the many public squares, schools or other sites named in honor of Dalal Mughrabi.

On March 9, 1978, Mughrabi led a squad of Fatah terrorists who landed in several small boats on the Israeli coast. Another young woman was on the beachfront that morning—Ribicoff’s niece Gail Rubin, an American Jewish nature photographer. She was taking photos of rare birds near the water. Rubin’s work had been exhibited at the Jewish Museum in New York City and other major venues.

One of the terrorists, Hussain Fayadh, later described what followed to Lebanese television station Al-Manar: “Sister Dalal al-Mughrabi had a conversation with the American journalist. Before killing her, Dalal asked: ‘How did you enter Palestine?’ [Rubin] answered: ‘They gave me a visa.’ Dalal said: ‘Did you get your visa from me or from Israel? I have the right to this land. Why didn’t you come to me?’ Then Dalal opened fire on her.”

As Rubin lay dying on the beach, Mughrabi and her fellow terrorists walked to the nearby Coastal Road. An Israeli bus approached. They hijacked it. During the ensuing mayhem, they murdered 36 passengers, 12 of them children. Mughrabi was later killed by Israeli troops. Fayadh survived. He was sentenced to life in jail but released in a prisoner exchange. He was later hired as a senior adviser to P.A. leader Mahmoud Abbas.

In the 44 years since the Coastal Road Massacre, the P.A. has never missed an opportunity to glorify Mughrabi and hold her up as a role model for Palestinian girls. Every year on both Mughrabi’s birthday and the anniversary of the slaughter, P.A. leaders and the P.A.-controlled media celebrate the life and deeds of their heroine.


North Carolina Democratic party adopts series of anti-Israel resolutions
The North Carolina Jewish Clergy Association issued a statement last week criticizing the three resolutions.

"Of the seven resolutions devoted to foreign affairs, three are focused on criticism of Israel. While some of our clergy are sympathetic to some of the claims embedded in the statements, on the main, these resolutions are not thoughtful nor balanced," the NCJCA said.

The statement also claimed that "such party stances often lead to the demonization of Jews and Israelis, ignore Israel's genuine security concerns, play upon age-old anti-Jewish stereotypes, and include language which implies that Israel should cease to exist as a sovereign state.

"Furthermore, given the troubling rise in direct acts of antisemitism against many North Carolina synagogues, we consider these resolutions to be potentially dangerous," the organization added.

The pro-Israel organization the North Carolina Coalition for Israel joined the NCJCA in condemning the NC Democrats' resolutions, saying the documents "accuse Jews and Israel of crimes that have not been committed."

"Similar to antisemitic conspiracy theories leveled against Jews in 20th century Europe, these resolutions falsely depict both Jewish communities and Israel as conniving to harm non-Jewish populations," the organization said. "By adopting this platform, the North Carolina Democratic party is signing on to racist hatred of our state's Jewish community."

The coalition called on Democratic party leaders and elected officials to "condemn and rescind these resolutions."

North Carolina Democratic party Chairwoman Dr. Bobbie Richardson confirmed that the resolutions were adopted at the state convention, saying that they were "voted by majority" and the fact that they were adopted "doesn't mean we are anti-Jewish."

"We have a political process and by a political process they were adopted," Richardson told JNS on Friday. "Doesn't mean we are anti-anyone. We follow the democratic process."

"The blatantly antisemitic planks recently adopted by the NC Democrat Party are shameful and deserving of the strongest condemnation. Sadly, such an embrace of antisemitism is indicative of just how radical this Democrat Party has become," the North Carolina Republican Party said Thursday in response to the resolutions.

"The fact that neither [North Carolina senatorial candidate] Cheri Beasley nor any other Democratic candidate has denounced these measures shows a complete adherence to the most radical platform that any political party has ever put forward in North Carolina," NCGOP Chairman Michael Whatley said.



On June 15, 2021, the Biden administration released the first U.S. National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism.

It was created as a response to the January 6 events in Washington, and it is mostly concerned with the threats of white supremacist terrorists, with a smattering of other potential ideologies:

According to this assessment, one key aspect of today’s domestic terrorism threat emerges from racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists and networks whose racial, ethnic, or religious hatred leads them toward violence, as well as those whom they encourage to take violent action. These actors have different motivations, but many focus their violence towards the same segment or segments of the American community, whether persons of color, immigrants, Jews, Muslims, other religious minorities, women and girls, LGBTQI+ individuals, or others. Their insistence on violence can, at times, be explicit. It also can, at times, be less explicit, lurking in ideologies rooted in a perception of the superiority of the white race that call for violence in furtherance of perverse and abhorrent notions of racial “purity” or “cleansing.”

 Another key component of the threat comes from anti–government or anti–authority violent extremists. This significant component of today’s threat includes self–proclaimed “militias” and militia violent extremists who take steps to violently resist government authority or facilitate the overthrow of the U.S. Government based on perceived overreach; anarchist violent extremists, who violently oppose all forms of capitalism, corporate globalization, and governing institutions, which they perceive as harmful to society; sovereign citizen violent extremists, who believe they are immune from government authority and laws; or any other National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism 9 individual or group who engages in violence – or incites imminent violence – in opposition to legislative, regulatory, or other actions taken by the government. Other domestic terrorists may be motivated to violence by single–issue ideologies related to abortion–, animal rights–, environmental–, or involuntary celibate–violent extremism, as well as other grievances – or a combination of ideological influences. In some cases, individuals may develop their own idiosyncratic justifications for violence that defy ready categorization.
Nowhere in this document does it discuss any threat from Islamic terrorists.

It doesn't even mention 9/11 once. 

This is frightening. Federal authorities have foiled many attacks from Muslim extremists over the past two decades, both against Jewish targets and against governmental targets. 

The majority of unsuccessful terrorist attacks foiled by the FBI and others in this Wikipedia page were motivated by Islamist ideology. And there have been hundreds of Islamist terror attacks worldwide in recent years.

It is mind boggling that given the history of Islamist terror attack attempts over the past two decades, the White House implictly declares that this is no longer a problem that deserves strategic thinking - and possibly resources.

Many lives have been saved by US intelligence services and police monitoring for domestic Islamist terrorists. No one can doubt that the desire from both ISIS-style groups and Iranian-aligned terror groups to kill Americans and specifically Jewish targets has not abated. 

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that this national strategy is partially motivated by political factors. American lives, and American Jewish lives, should not be sacrificed on the altar of political correctness - but this appears to be exactly what is in danger of happening.

(h/t JM Phelps)




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!

 

 

New York Magazine has an article by Ross Barkan that asks "Is the BDS Movement Too Alienating to Make Real Change?"

Barkan completely accepts and supports the goal of BDS, to destroy the Jewish state, as perfectly legitimate. The author is merely uncomfortable about its strategy and methods. 

The goals of BDS are a blend of the pragmatic (Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied territories in compliance with international law) and the radical (gaining the right of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return and claim the property they lost during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and 1967 Six-Day War). The radicalism of the latter goal lies not in whether it’s just — believers in pluralist, U.S.-style democracy should welcome the idea of a binational state that treats Palestinians and Israelis equally — but in the cataclysm it would likely unleash.  
To Barkan, the problem with BDS isn't that it is manifestly genocidal and antisemitic. It is that it is too polarizing to be accepted by mainstream liberals who, deep down, want to destroy Israel too.

I wrote this comment in a small effort to expose the truth that the BDS movement has managed to obscure about itself:

What a disgusting and gaslighting article.

BDS is an antisemitic movement. It is a direct descendant of the boycotts of Jews that were enforced by the Arab League since before Israel existed. It doesn't boycott Arab Israeli businesses - only Jewish-owned businesses. Its goal is the destruction of the Jewish state. It rewrites the history of Israel and Zionism to recast a national liberation movement for the most oppressed people in history - Jews - into a racist, genocidal fiction.

This article accepts that fiction as truth.

Moreover, while BDS presents itself as a liberal movement and one that cares about Palestinians, it is the opposite. It mercilessly attacks any Palestinian who wants peace. It is silent about both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas' decidedly illiberal policies - against women, against LGBTQ+, against abortion.

Giving legitimacy to modern antisemitism is condoning it.
(h/t Melissa)



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

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Read all about it here!

 

 

As we've been reporting, the Trump decision weeks before his term ended to include Israel in Centcom has been paying dividends, as military cooperation between Israel and Arab states that it is not officially at peace with has been increasing dramatically. Israeli military leaders secretly met with their counterparts from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt and Jordan in March under the aegis of Centcom.

Iran has now officially responded to the news, and they seem unhappy.

 The chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces denounced the Zionist regime’s participation in the US Central Command’s military activities and war games as a source of threat to the region, which he said would definitely trigger a reaction from Iran.
[Monday,] Major General Mohammad Hossein Baqeri slammed the Zionist regime as the root cause of interventions and instability in the region.

The Israeli regime has hatched plots in order to establish contacts with regional countries and achieve its interventionist objectives, the top Iranian commander warned.

He also cautioned that the Zionist regime’s membership in the CENTCOM (US Central Command) and its move to deploy equipment and participate in the war games would present threats to the region, adding, “We do not tolerate such threats and will definitely react to them.”
Iran's usual response to things like this is to ask Hezbollah or Hamas to start something up that will force an Israeli reaction that would upset the Arab world. But the terror groups have their own political problems - neither the Lebanese nor the Gazans want another war that only ends up hurting them. Syria likewise doesn't have the appetite to start a war with Israel.  Combined with  its economic crisis, Iran's leverage over its terrorist allies is much more limited than it has been. 

This is not to say that Iran cannot destabilize things in the region, but it has had its hands tied much more recently.




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!

 

 

Monday, June 27, 2022

From Ian:

David Collier: The truth behind the anti-Israel ‘Apartheid’ smear
Choreography in the twilight zone
What followed proves that everything you know about truth and justice can be set aside. What we are witnessing is a choreographed attempt by extremists to undermine the very foundations of Israel. The ICC despite having no jurisdiction in Israel suddenly claimed that it does. The ICC also decided to go to bat for the Palestinians – even though it breaks their own rule book. Just like we see with the NGOs, the ICC has been corrupted from within.

The ICC decision created a snowball effect and the NGOs needed to play their part. It became important to add the charge of Apartheid to the Israel crime sheet. So B’tselem, HRW and Amnesty produced their reports.

There is no doubt at all, this was an organised and choreographed assault on the truth.

Understanding the Apartheid smear
There is nothing logical or honest about the Apartheid smear at all. It is a deliberate and vindictive lie. Make no mistake. Amnesty and HRW know they are pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes.

It started by demonising Israel’s attempts to defend its own citizens against terrorist attacks. From there – in order to replicate the successful boycott of South Africa – the anti-Israel propaganda machine started building a pyramid of lies. To blur the boundaries until Israel’s very existence was brought into question.

These people break every value that they are supposed to believe in. They appropriate the identity of minority groups, break the ICC rulebook, butcher the definition of a refugee. They have destroyed human rights activism from within.

The Apartheid smear movement opposes peace. It is angered by the Abraham accords. It sees the PA itself as a betrayal (because it recognised Israel). These people oppose a two-state solution. This is not a friendly movement that should be welcomed in leftist circles, but a terrorist supporting group of extremists that promote the destruction of the only democracy in MENA.
Hamas claims health of Israeli captive ‘deteriorating,’ in rare announcement
Hamas’s military wing claimed on Monday night that “the health of one of its Israeli prisoners has deteriorated,” after years in which repeated attempts to reach a prisoner exchange deal between the two sides have hit a dead end.

The terror group currently holds two living Israelis — Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed — as well as the bodies of two Israeli soldiers: Oron Shaul and Hadar Goldin.

Abu Obeida, the spokesperson for Hamas’s Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, did not specify whether Mengistu or al-Sayed were suffering from health issues, nor how serious they were. But he vowed that Hamas would publish proof of its claims in the coming hours.

Mengistu and al-Sayed both had a history of mental illness. The two Israeli citizens crossed the Gaza boundary voluntarily between 2014 and 2015 and have subsequently been held prisoner by Hamas.

In a statement, the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office neither confirmed or disputed the Hamas claims. Instead, it said it holds Hamas accountable for the state of the captured civilians.

“Hamas proved again tonight that it is a cynical and criminal terrorist organization, which holds mentally ill civilians in violation of all international conventions and laws, as well as the bodies of fallen Israeli soldiers,” Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s office said.

“The State of Israel will continue its efforts, mediated by Egypt, to bring the captives and the missing back home,” the PMO concluded.

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