Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, July 10, 2022

When Jenin terrorists thought they shot an IDF soldier, and other Abu Akleh updates

One piece of evidence that I had not noted previously was that Jenin militants had claimed that they had injured an Israeli soldier.

Here's video of where militants to the south got the news with translation from Palestinian Media Watch:

What makes this more compelling is the timeframe. The false news that a soldier was down spread quickly throughout Jenin, as this screenshot from the (pro-terrorist) Jenin camp Telegram channel shows.

The second message is the same video shown above.

This was minutes after Abu Akleh was shot, so she is the only person who the militants could have been referring to. (It takes a couple of minutes to upload the video and type in the caption. Abu Akleh was shot between 6:30 and 6:35.)

This is a strong indication that the Jenin terrorists thought that the crowd of journalists (with helmets) were IDF soldiers, and shot in their usual wild manner without verifying what they were doing, and then celebrated their "successful" hit before realizing that the hit one of their own heroines.

_____________________

Meanwhile, very, very slowly, the idea that Palestinians killed Shireen Abu Akleh has started to percolate into the media.

CAMERA's Karen Bekker noted at JNS that the two main journalist witnesses to her death initially said that the gunfire came from a building, when the IDF was in their vehicles.

Fox News reports that Shurat HaDin filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court saying that the Palestinians were responsible for Abu Akleh's death, although they do not cite any of my evidence.

I made a new poster with all the latest evidence in one place:

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 BDS Cult protesting Israeli team at Tour de France

It turns out that the BDS movement has been energetically calling for the Tour de France to ban an Israeli team, with multiple protests at different venues of the event.

Outside BDS social media, no one has noticed.

BDS France has been spending hours on protests that are not noticed by anyone, at each stage of the event.

Their major "victory" was to paint their message where the cyclists would speed by at the start of the race in Copenhagen:

They placed a Palestinian flag on a beach adjacent to another stage in Calais on July 5, where again no one noticed.

In fact, they are planning protests every day at different spots:

July 8: 7th stage Tomblaine – La super Planche des Belles Filles, 176.3 kmJuly 9: 8th stage Dole – Lausanne (Switzerland), 186.3 kmJuly 10: 9th stage Aigle (Switzerland) – Châtel, 192.9 kmJuly 11: rest in Morzine12 July: 10th stage Morzine – Megève, 148.1 km13 July: 11th stage Albertville – Col du Granon, 151.7 km14 July: 12th stage Briançon – Alpe d'Huez, 165.1 km15 July: 13th stage Bourg d 'Oisans – Saint-Etienne, 192.6 km16 July: 14th stage Saint-Etienne – Mende, 192.5 km17 July: 15th stage Rodez – Carcassonne, 202.5 km18 July: rest in Carcassonne19 July: 16th stage Carcassonne – Foix, 178.5 km20 July: 17th stage Saint-Gaudens – Peyragudes, 129.7 km21 July: 18th stage Lourdes – Hautacam, 143.2 km22 July: 19th stage Castelnau-Magnoac – Cahors, 188.3 km23 July: 20th stage Lacapelle- Marival-Rocamadour, 40,7 km (individual time trial)July 24: 21st stage Paris La Défense Arena – Paris Champs-Elysées, 115.6 km

Each of these actions take hours to organize, all for a few seconds of shouting, as can be seen in this video:

One gets the impression that the point of these protests isn't so much to attract people to the cause, or even to garner news coverage.

It is to keep their members in their cult.

Psychology Today describes how cults work:

Cult leaders want people who will be obedient to them and their rules. They look for ways to “break” people; they want people who will work hard and long hours for little or no pay. They want “willing” slaves.... When the mind is controlled, a victim may appear happy and willing to suffer for the profit or benefit of the leader/group.

For members, happiness comes from "good" performance within the group, along with elitist thinking—believing they have the "truth" or the the best way of life. But strict obedience is required.

Cult leaders must spend at least as much time keeping their members from defecting as they do in attracting new members. To do this, they need to use mind control techniques, such as forcing their members to work hard at activities that keep them from thinking about anything else but their cause and having them engage in repetitive chanting.

When you look at these protests from that perspective, it all makes sense. Latent antisemitism helps recruit people to the cause, but cult techniques keep them there.

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!

CAIR, the Council of American Islamic Relations, released a poll of American Muslims ahead of the midterm elections.

The poll asked them, "What are the most important, Muslim-related, foreign policy issues to you in this election year?" They could choose as many topics as they wanted.

Here were the results:

Israeli occupation of Palestine 90.5%

Chinese Genocide of Uyghur Muslims 87.4%

Oppression of Muslims in India 80.8%

Burma Genocide of Rohingya Muslims 75.8%

Starvation in Afghanistan 67.4%

Discrimination against Muslims in France 61.9%

Conflict in Yemen 59.6%

Conflict in Syria 54.5%

Indian occupation of Jammu and Kashmir 37.5%

Civil war in Libya 31.6%

Security in Somalia 29.1%

Presidential Coup in Tunisia 24.2%

Tens of thousands of Muslims have been killed in Myanmar (Burma), Libya, and Yemen, and hundreds of thousands in Syria. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims have been ethnically cleansed from Myanmar. A million Muslims are incarcerated in China. A million Muslims are on the verge of starvation in Afghanistan. Yet when American Muslims only have to check a box to say they are concerned about these issues, they claim that the Palestinian issue is more important to them than direct physical threats to the lives of millions of Muslims.

Moreover, look at the questions they didn't ask: Palestinians are discriminated against in Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt. Tens of thousands of Palestinians are still refugees from Syria, living in camps in Lebanon and Jordan. But these issues are so unimportant to CAIR that they are not even asked about!

The American Muslims polled don't care about Palestinians - unless their oppression can be blamed on Jews.

These priorities cannot be explained by concern about Muslim lives, or by concern about Palestinian lives.

The only explanation for this twisted set of priorities is Muslim American antisemitism.

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!

07/09 Links: Putin perverts historical truth about Nazism; Owner of Toronto Kosher Store Reports Death Threats from BDS Activists; Wanting the Iran Nuclear Deal for the Wrong Reasons

From Ian:

Putin perverts historical truth about Nazism - analysis

Similarly, you would think by listening to Putin’s ubiquitous war propaganda that the Russian people alone were the targets of Hitler’s hatred and that only the Russians – and not every ethnic group of the old Soviet Union certainly, including the Jews – did any fighting in the war and ultimately defeated Germany.

And so Nazi crimes against everyone else except ethnic Russians go unmentioned. And, since Nazism was an ideology specifically directed against the Russian ethnicity, it makes sense that Ukrainians, whom Putin accuses of harboring aggressive plans against Russia, are Nazis.

In this picture, the antisemitic nature of Hitler’s ideology disappears and it becomes possible for Zelensky, a Jew, to become a Nazi. At the same time, since Nazism in this conception was an ideology of aggression against Russians, then invading “Nazi” Ukraine makes perfect sense and is merely a continuation of the Great Patriotic War. Reportedly Putin was planning to announce that Nazism in Ukraine was defeated at the May 9 Victory Day parade.

While hollowing out the judeophobic substance of Nazism and wantonly throwing around the term itself, Putin is adopting Nazi modus operandi. Hitler, an Austrian born in Austria-Hungary, could not accept the dissolution of the empire; for him Czechoslovakia and Poland, which became independent as a result, were pseudo-states. Putin, a KGB colonel born in the Soviet Union, similarly considers Ukraine a pseudo-state. His propaganda maintains the genocidal lie that there is no Ukrainian nation.

The Kremlin legerdemain of writing Nazi crimes against the Jews out of Nazism is only too familiar to Jews born in the former Soviet Union. At the same time, having escaped the iron clutches of the Soviet empire we can’t help but sympathize with the Ukrainians who are valiantly defending their own right to live free of the bear hug of the big Russian brother.

Lawmakers Want To Know Why Biden Made It Easier for Terrorists To Enter the US

Congressional Republicans on Friday launched a formal probe into the Biden administration over its decision to alter federal law so that individuals tied to terrorist organizations can more easily enter the United States.

The investigation, led by House Armed Services Committee member Jim Banks (R., Ind.), comes on the heels of a Washington Free Beacon report last month that detailed how the administration amended federal immigration law to permit foreigners who provided "insufficient material support" to designated terrorist organizations to receive "immigration benefits or other status" inside America.

The State Department said the law was altered to make it easier for vulnerable Afghans who might have worked with terror groups to find refuge in America, but current and former U.S. officials who spoke to the Free Beacon said the rule is so broadly written that it could also apply to those who worked with al Qaeda or Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the country's paramilitary fighting force that has killed hundreds of Americans.

"These loose and overly broad definitions will open the floodgates for supporters of terrorism to enter the United States," Banks and three Republican colleagues wrote in a letter to the White House that was obtained exclusively by the Free Beacon. "Such a general waiver, if implemented, would create additional difficulty in immigration vetting process, have catastrophic consequences on border security and put American families at increased risk from terrorism."

The lawmakers—Banks and Reps. Claudia Tenney (R., N.Y.), Greg Steube (R., Fla.), and Rob Wittman (R., Va.)—want the administration to provide Congress with information about whether this rule change was implemented as a concession to Iran meant to entice the country into inking a revamped version of the 2015 nuclear accord.

"This order was also released just weeks before negotiations with Iran over restoring the nuclear deal recommenced," they write. "Your administration may be trying to entice Iran back to the nuclear deal by using broad executive authorities to weaken the penalties connected to the [foreign terrorist organization] designation without requiring the IRGC and other Iran-supported terrorist organizations to verifiably cease their terrorist activities."

These Dem Activists Want To Save Biden’s USAID Nominee Who Criticized Israel Peace Accords

A group of Democratic consultants, think-tankers, and activists is soliciting signatures for a letter to the U.S. Senate defending President Joe Biden's embattled USAID nominee Tamara Cofman Wittes and arguing that she is a strong supporter of the Abraham Accords — a peace treaty between Israel and the United Arab Emirates that she previously belittled.

The Jewish Democratic Council of America (JDCA), an activist group that bills itself as pro-Israel, is circulating the letter, which was obtained by the Washington Free Beacon and is expected to be submitted next week to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The Jewish group has a spotty track record on calling out anti-Israel members of its own party and once endorsed a candidate who claimed the Jewish state was not a democracy.

"We write today to convey our strong support for Dr. Tamara Cofman Wittes's nomination to serve as assistant administrator for the Middle East at the United States Agency for International Development," said the group.

The letter is a signal Democrats are concerned that Wittes's stance on the Abraham Accords—Israel's diplomatic agreement with the United Arab Emirates—could hurt her chances of confirmation. Some of the Democrats who signed on to the letter are the same ones who stepped up to save Biden Pentagon nominee Colin Kahl after Republicans expressed concerns about Kahl's involvement in crafting the Iran Nuclear Deal and his incendiary partisan Twitter posts.

Wittes in 2020 promoted articles denouncing the Abraham Accords on social media and cautioned other Arab countries against signing similar agreements, the Washington Free Beacon first reported last month.

But she told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that she supports the accords, a position that prompted skepticism from Republicans.

"I get that that's the right political answer to say now. But it's not what you said then," said Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) during a hearing.

07/08 Links Pt2: Misogyny and Antisemitism in the Contemporary Western Left; Presbyterian Church (USA) Scrapes the Bottom of the Antisemitic Slippery Slope

From Ian:

Fathom: Fathoming the Intellectual Revolution of our Time (1) | ‘Punch a Terf’ and ‘Smash the Zionists’: Misogyny and Antisemitism in the Contemporary Western Left

Series Introduction: Huge waves of intellectual change are sweeping the Western world at an astonishing speed. Liberal democratic societies are being transformed by Postmodernism, Gender Identity Ideology, Critical Race Theory, ’Whiteness Studies’ ‘Postcolonial Theory’, ‘Intersectionality’, and related upheavals in the realm of ideas. Some see in these changes an exciting new Critical Theory and a necessary and welcome extension of the liberation struggles of recent decades. Others see a new ‘Cynical Theory’ – as a recent book by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsey dubbed it – a dangerous new irrationalism, polarizing anti-racist racism, woke homophobia, and Wars on Women and the West. Whatever position one takes, it is inconceivable that this intellectual revolution will leave untouched the form taken by the ‘oldest hatred’ because, as David Nirenberg’s monumental study Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition showed us in exhaustive detail, no intellectual revolution ever has. Radically new paradigms of thought have always seen antisemitism shape-shift again, new notions of Jewish malignity and new anathemas emerging out of the ferment. Over the next two years Fathom will explore the ramifications of the intellectual revolution of our time for the shapes taken by antisemitism and for global perceptions of Zionism and Israel, so often understood within the emerging intellectual orthodoxies as ‘White’, ‘Western’, and ‘Racist’, and so marked down for ‘cancellation’. We anticipate the series will provoke debate, but here is one old idea that we hope still has some life in it: rather than seek to cancel the debate, why not join it? We begin the series with this critical reflection on Gender Identity ideology by Kathleen Hayes. (Alan Johnson)

Essay Introduction: Misogyny and antisemitism are very different things, with different aetiologies and histories, but there is an interplay between the two in the contemporary Western progressive left, argues Kathleen Hayes. Today’s bien pensant is permitted to hate both women and Jews with a deliciously clear conscience. Jews are fine people, some of my best friends, the leftist will declare—it’s the Zionists who are racists and must be driven from the planet. I love women, he’ll say; of course they deserve equality and dignity—it’s the TERFs who are fascists and must be cancelled and assaulted. Even as he congratulates himself on his lack of prejudice, progressive and identity politics allow him to indulge in a socially sanctioned variety of … antisemitism and misogyny. Hayes warns that ‘once truth is up for grabs, all truths are up for grabs’ and ‘a mind that rejects the reality of biological sex is one unlikely to recognise basic facts about the Holocaust, or about living Jews.’

A few decades back, without a vote being taken, a handful of intellectuals decided to roll back the Enlightenment. Holding hands and chanting ‘Down with grand narratives,’ they dismissed as hubris the paradigmatic Western belief that it was possible to know anything approximating truth. Equating the Enlightenment with slavery, colonialism and women’s subjugation, they declared positivism the greatest sin and announced they were post everything. They burned an effigy of Universal Man and amid the ashes erected an elaborate new scaffolding comprised of everyone he was not. Because Universal Man had been an oppressive lie—a white, able-bodied heterosexual man who was far from being universal—they deemed that henceforth, history’s unrepresented would cohere around, and fixate on, their isolated individual identities. The universal is dead; long live the particular.

As these specific identities were arrayed against one another in practice, it was necessary to differentiate between them on the basis of their respective victimhoods. By tacit agreement, a points system was created in which some were deemed worthy of respect as victims while others were not. With the advent of ‘intersectionality’ the points system became ever more elaborate, determined by layer upon layer of victimhood. Those who failed to rack up the requisite points were declared privileged and told to accept their places on the bottom of the pyramid. This was done in the name of historical justice. What unfolded was a grotesque parody of it.

This essay seeks to explain how ideas so absurd that—as Orwell put it—only an intellectual could believe them became the basis for a seismic shift in public policy around the world, with devastating consequences most immediately for women; lesbians, gays and bisexuals; and distressed children and their parents. It describes how the flagrantly anti-materialist, ostensibly progressive but actually deeply retrograde set of ideas called ‘gender ideology’ took root far outside academia, and how it became an unchallengeable cult. Because social and intellectual turmoil inevitably means increased targeting of Jews (who are often labelled ‘white’ and ‘privileged’ and ‘powerful’ in this new intellectual orthodoxy), I will draw attention to how these ideas impact Jews, even though they may seem at first to have little or nothing to do with us. Finally, I will gratefully invoke the Frankfurt School’s writings about authoritarianism to argue that if today’s madness cannot easily be fought, it can at least be better understood.

Presbyterian Church (USA) Scrapes the Bottom of the Antisemitic Slippery Slope

In 2014, the Presbyterian Church (USA) became the first Protestant mainline denomination to call for divestment from Israeli companies. When the PCUSA reversed itself in 2016, we at the Simon Wiesenthal Center cautioned against too much optimism.

The goal of the anti-Israel lobby, we said, was not just to punish Israel economically, but to put the Jewish state on the defensive about its policies, its self-defense, and its very existence. The PCUSA introduced all those elements into their church’s conversation. Since then, it has been a fast track down the slippery slope of antisemitism.

We wish that we were wrong in our prediction about PCUSA. Sadly, we were not.

No Jews were invited to committee meetings in preparation for the PCUSA’s upcoming General Assembly, but “Jews” were very much in evidence. A raft of anti-Israel resolutions, all of them unthinkable just eight years ago, were discussed and passed. And it’s not a huge surprise.

Over the last several decades, PCUSA has lost hundreds of thousands of members, and many dozens of churches.

When it comes to Israel, the PCUSA initially focused on the alleged evils of “the occupation.” Now its hate has vastly expanded, from discussions on withholding military aid from Israel, to labeling Israel as “apartheid” and supporting the Kairos Palestine statement — a pseudo-theological document that denies the connection between Jews and the land to which they were attached since Biblical times. PCUSA also gives a moral pass to Palestinian terrorism.

PCUSA’s fig leaf self-description as supporting both sides in a complex dispute has been dropped, leaving PCUSA’s naked anti-Israel worldview on full display.

Over the years, the PCUSA would mourn the destruction in Gaza without mentioning the thousands of rockets launched from Gaza into Israel. Throughout, however, PCUSA was careful not to attack Jews. At most, it was “Zionists” who were guilty.

But now, they’ve dropped the pretense. The commissioners who spoke at recent meetings spoke openly, not about Israelis, but about “Jews,” and things “Jewish” — such as, “The Israeli regime … advances one group, Jews, over another, Palestinians.”

When the IRS Targeted Jewish Activists

FBI agents gathered background information from what they called “persons in New York City who are familiar with Israelite matters.” They also eavesdropped on the Bergsonites’ telephone conversations, opened their mail, went through their trash, and planted informants in the group to steal documents from Bergson’s office. The FBI hoped to find proof the Bergson Group was secretly assisting the Irgun Zvai Leumi, the underground militia in Palestinethat was headed by Menachem Begin. They found no such evidence.

The authorities’ second goal was to find a link between Bergson and the Communist Party. One FBI memo approvingly quoted a rival Jewish organization’s description of the Bergsonites as “a group of thoroughly disreputable Communist Zionists.” In a private letter, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover referred to the playwright Ben Hecht and six other leading Bergson activists as “fellow travelers.” But the FBI’s spying on Bergson did not turn up any evidence of a Communist link, either.

At the same time, the IRS launched a full-scale inquiry into the Bergson Group’s finances, seeking to revoke its tax-exempt status. For nearly a year, IRS agents repeatedly visited the group’s New York City headquarters, once for a stretch where they stayed from morning until night for more than two weeks.

Louis and Jack Yampolsky, a father-and-son accounting team that handled Bergson’s finances pro bono, had to dig out and reconcile every piece of financial information in the group’s records. “There were no photocopy machines in those days, so we had to hand-copy every disbursement and every receipt that was given for every donation,” Jack Yampolsky told me in an interview some years ago. “And because the Bergson Group had enormous grassroots appeal, it received literally thousands of one-dollar or two-dollar donations from people all over the country.”

In the end, the IRS investigators were unable to find evidence of any wrongdoing. In fact, as the IRS team became familiar with the group’s work, they came to sympathize with it, and “when they finished, [they] made a contribution between them–every one of them gave a few dollars,” Bergson later told Prof. David S. Wyman.

The sympathy expressed by the IRS agents contrasted sharply with the sentiments expressed in some of the FBI documents which I obtained. One FBI report about Bergson activist Maurice Rosenblatt derisively referred to the leftwing Coordinating Committee for Democratic Action, in which Rosenblatt was active, as “this Semitic Committee.” The FBI memo complained that Rosenblatt and his colleagues were trying to “smear” Nazi sympathizers in New York City.

“When there is a genuine threat, governments sometimes have to do things like eavesdrop,” Jack Yampolsky conceded. “But in our case, they were doing it for political reasons, and antisemitism also played a role. The fact that we vocally disagreed with U.S. government policy regarding the Holocaust and Jewish statehood was not a valid reason for the Roosevelt administration to enlist the FBI and the IRS in a war against the Bergson group.”

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!

Even in 1951, it was obvious that the UN was useless for solving any Middle East problems

This is a fun article from JTA in 1951 describing how useless the UN had been in the Middle East - -and how the Arab enemies of Israel were hijacking it for their purposes even then.

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!

07/08 Links Pt1: Former PM Shinzo Abe Assassinated, Was Friend of Israel; The defeated do not make demands, the victors do; What Were the Abraham Accords Keys to Success?

From Ian:

Israeli Prime Minister Lapid Leads Jewish World’s Tributes to Assassinated Former Japanese Premier Shinzo Abe

Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid led a slew of tributes from Israel and the Jewish world to the former Japanese premier Shinzo Abe following his shock assassination on Friday.

“The State of Israel mourns the death of former Japanese PM Shinzo Abe following today’s horrific attack,” Lapid tweeted. “He was a fierce and distinguished leader and a key architect of modern Israel-Japan relations. Sending condolences to his family, loved ones and the Japanese people.”

The 67-year-old Abe was shot in the back as he gave an election speech while on the campaign trail in the city of Nara in western Japan. Doctors were unable to revive the former premier, who was taken to hospital in cardiopulmonary arrest and showing no vital signs. He was declared dead at 5:03 p.m. (0803 GMT), about five and a half hours after being shot. The accused assassin, 41-year-old Tetsuya Yamagami, was taken into police custody and has admitted to shooting Abe with a homemade gun.

The longest-serving prime minister in Japan’s history, Abe was widely regarded in Israel and by Jewish leaders internationally as a pioneer of improved relations between Japan and the Jewish people. During his second term in office, from 2012-20, trade between Israel and Japan grew from $20 million to over $6 billion, bolstered by two official visits by Abe to the Jewish state.

Abe was also devoted to commemorating the memory of the Nazi Holocaust, energetically raising awareness of the actions of Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara, the country’s wartime consul in Lithuania who defied the authorities in Tokyo by issuing transit visas to thousands of Jews who escaped Nazi persecution by fleeing eastwards.

“The courageous and humanitarian action of Mr. Sugihara provides us with guidance as to how to we should survive in this world, where rule-of-law-based international order is being challenged in various forms,” Abe told reporters while on an official visit to Lithuania in 2018. During a visit the following year to Yad Vashem, Israel’s national memorial to the Holocaust, Abe spoke of his “great solemnity in the face of your forefathers, who overcame profound grief to found the nation of Israel.”

Gilad Cohen, Israel’s Ambassador to Japan, said on Friday that he had been shocked by the news of Abe’s assassination.

“Being one of the most prominent leaders of Japan, Abe san was amongst the architects of modern relations between Israel and Japan, [who] served as a major catalyzer for the flourishing ties we see today,” Cohen tweeted.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog said he had been “horrified” by Abe’s “despicable murder.”

“We met when I chaired Israel’s opposition and I was deeply impressed by his leadership, vision and respect for Israel. Grieving with his family and the whole Japanese people,” Herzog tweeted.

Statement by President @Isaac_Herzog and Prime Minister @yairlapid of Israel, on the assassination of former Prime Minister of Japan, #ShinzoAbe. He was widely acknowledged as a true and warm friend of the Jewish state. pic.twitter.com/dqJhTfTh5Y
— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) July 8, 2022

Japan’s Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe Assassinated, Was Friend of Israel

During his time in office Abe visited Yad Vashem in Israel, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the former home of Sugihara Chiune, “the Japanese Schindler,” in Kaunas, Lithuania. Abe’s administration made a concerted effort to publicize the story of Sugihara, a diplomat who served as an imperial consul for the Empire of Japan in Lithuania during World War II, and helped some 6,000 Jews escape German-occupied Poland and Lithuania.

During his visit to Kaunas, Abe said in his remarks, “The courageous and humanitarian action of Mr. Sugihara provides us with guidance as to how we should survive in this world.”

During his visit to Yad Vashem, Abe said, “Today I find myself [fully] determined. Ha-sho’a le’olam lo od. The Holocaust, never again … I felt great solemnity in the face of your forefathers, who overcame profound grief to found the nation of Israel.”

Abe backed up those words. When Japan’s population re-elected Abe as prime minister in 2012, Japanese investment in Israel totaled about $20 million. By 2019, investments had surged to over $6 billion. The number of Japanese businesses in Israel increased three-fold.

In 2020, despite the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, there were 18 new investment deals by Japanese financiers, adding another $853 million, following two official visits, in 2015 and 2018, during which Abe encouraged senior Japanese industry leaders to do more business in the “Start-Up Nation.”

Abe told his business leaders that he saw “no reason for Japan, which positions ‘innovation’ as the engine of economic growth, not to cooperate with Israel, which produces innovative technologies.”

Dylan Adelman recalled a few years ago that in February 2014, more than 300 copies of Anne Frank’s diary and other books pertaining to the Holocaust were vandalized in Tokyo public libraries. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga described the antisemitic incident – a rarity in Japan – as “extremely regrettable and shameful.” The following month, then-prime minister Shinzo Abe visited the Anne Frank House Museum, making him one of the most prominent world leaders to have ever done so. Abe shared that he had read the diary of Anne Frank as a child and said he he wished to “reiterate lasting and profound friendship between Japan and the Jewish people around the world.”

A brief Twitter thread on anti-Zionism and antisemitism

A follower of mine from Brazil asked me a question on Twitter:

Good morning, Sr. Elder of Ziyon. I'm from Brazil and could you tell why does Palestine hate Israel? In Brazil, all history teachers love Palestine and hate Israel. Why??

My brief response, expanded here:

Anti-Zionism is the modern (and socially acceptable) version of antisemitism. My book describes it in great detail. The unhinged loathing you see for Israel and Zionists have few parallels beyond historic hate of Jews. (And Palestinians admit they hate Jews in Arabic.)

Anti-Zionists will claim that they are only supporting human rights, or opposing Israeli policies. But there is an entire NGO industry dedicated to making up or exaggerating Israeli crimes without context and without comparison to others. See my recent post on how Ben and Jerry's ignore human rights abuses in many countries they sell ice cream to.

In order to accuse Israel of "apartheid," for example, Amnesty and HRW had to create an entirely new definition of apartheid that only applies to Israel. Now haters can point to that and claim Israel is worse than anyone - which is objectively absurd.

The haters also go on to redefine Zionism itself. Zionism is a movement supporting self determination for the Jewish people. Anti-Zionists make up new definitions to justify their hate.

Another way to prove this is that virtually all of these people who pretend to care about Palestinian rights have little to say about discrimination against Palestinians in Arab countries. They are only upset when they can blame...Jews.

By any normal yardstick, Israel cares more about human rights than most countries. It is more progressive. It is far more tolerant of Muslims than much of Europe. It has worked harder than almost every other country to avoid civilian casualties in war.

Haters deflect and ignore the facts. The only reason for their obsession is because Israel is a Jewish 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!

Expert says the Palestinians smashed the bullet that killed Shireen Abu Akleh before handing it over

On Monday, when the US said that the bullet that was said to have killed Shireen Abu Akleh was too deformed to allow a proper forensics exam, I tweeted this graphic as a joke:

It looks like it wasn't a joke.

From Arutz-7:

Leading physicist and ballistic expert Nahum Shahaf, who refuted the story of 12-year-old Muhammad al-Durrah being shot by IDF soldiers in the opening days of the Second Intifada, discussed the US State Department's announcement that it was not possible to determine who killed Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Aqleh as she was recording a firefight between IDF soldiers and terrorists in Jenin on May 11, 2022.

Shahaf points out that "the bullet underwent a severe transformation at the hands of a hammer that created a deep depression in its back, which cannot be formed by the projectile's movement alone", noting that while the Americans ruled that it was impossible to determine who was behind Abu Aqleh's death, they ended up stating that it was likely the result of IDF fire - a fact pointing to the investigators' anti-Semitic bias.

Regarding alterations made to the bullet prior to the PA allowing foreign experts to analyze it, Shahaf says he can detect streaks of crushing as well as an internal depression, which can only be produced by a hammer of enormous weight. The squeezing in question was performed on the back of the bullet and not its front, which smashes on impact.

It does not appear that Shahaf is on the team that is investigating the shooting, so I am assuming that he is basing this on the photo of the bullet that Al Jazeera published, claiming it was the one that killed Abu Akleh.

If you look at it, it indeed looks like someone took a hammer to it.

I cannot imagine how the back of a bullet could be crushed like that only from gunfire, especially given how dense bullets are. Here is a cross section of a M855A1 bullet typically used with an M4:

It would take enormous pressure to flatten that.

To my understanding, the back of the bullet is where the striations would be seen that can match the bullet to a test round from a weapon. If someone wanted to make a bullet impossible to match, the back of the bullet is exactly what they would want to tamper with.

Keep in mind that without comparing the bullet handed over to an X-ray of the bullet in Abu Akleh's head, it is impossible to know whether this is even the correct bullet to begin with. We have seen absolutely no evidence of even a modicum of professionalism from the Palestinian side to prove a chain of custody of the bullet. Again, I am no expert, but I would have thought that the front of the bullet would be more deformed ("mushroomed") from hitting her skull and the inside of her helmet than the photo here shows.

(h/t Andrew)

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Gaza media is announcing the times for buses to transport people to Jerusalem for Eid al Adha:

They will start at Rafah at 4:30 AM and take more passengers as they move northward through Gaza.

There are strict rules that the pilgrims must be over 50 for women, 55 for men, and they cannot take electronic devices and a list of other things. They must return to Gaza the same day.

Israel provided 400 permits to visit Al Aqsa, and 500 permits to visit family members in the West Bank and Israel.

Israel made the decision based on things being currently calm in Gaza. It wants to reward ordinary Gazans when things are quiet - and when Hamas or Islamic Jihad shoots rockets, these benefits are taken away.

This is part of the reason Israel has been allowing workers' permits from Gaza as well.

Giving rewards for acting like normal human beings. What a concept!

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07/07 Links Pt2: Twenty-Year Scars of the Second Intifada; Four Jews Killed in Highland Park Parade Shooting; Do North Carolina Democrats Have an Antisemitism Problem in the Party?

From Ian:

FDD: Twenty-Year Scars of the Second Intifada

20 years ago, on the first night of Passover 2002, the most infamous suicide bombing in Israel took place. That night, and the weeks that followed, marked a dramatic turning point in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians which still dictates the contours of the conflict today. Options for a political settlement that might have existed before, disappeared into a new reality.

In March 2002 alone, more than 100 Israelis were killed in suicide bombings; hundreds more were injured. Sitting at a cafe, riding a bus, walking through an outdoor market became imbued with a feeling of danger. When Israel responded, protests against Israel erupted in all the major Western capitals, though there were few, if any, protests against the Palestinian suicide bombings. The European Parliament passed a non-binding resolution calling for sanctions against Israel. International media coverage of the operation was overwhelmingly negative.

The 1993 Oslo Accords were pitched to Israelis with a promise that they would improve security. And if that first promise remained unfulfilled - even after Israel recognized the PLO and carried out the withdrawals from Gaza and the West Bank as called for in the Agreements - then the whole world would see who the bad guys really were and stand by Israel.

Neither promise was realized and this left deep scars on the Israeli psyche. An enormous skepticism emerged about peace with the Palestinians. Moreover, the broad center of Israeli politics no longer is moved by expectations of global support.

A centenary of the Mandate for Palestine's land rights - whose land rights?

UK Hypocrisy Must Be Corrected
I strongly suggest that Britain recognizes the historic and legal fact that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital from time immemorial and moves its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. More so, move the British consulate from Jerusalem to Ramallah. Both actions would correct the double standard the British government has been and is currently deploying.

These two actions would indicate that Britain is willing to start correcting its wrong behavior toward Jews and their homeland.

London must remember, it does not dictate a capital of a country, rather it must respect a country’s sovereignty. All British embassies are situated in capital cities around the world. No other sovereign nation would accept being told where it should designate its capital, Israel included.

Jerusalem vs. British Perfidy
From the time it assumed the Mandatory role in Palestine-Eretz Yisrael, Britain has been a fervent obstacle and subverter of Israel’s existence.

There is no “east” Jerusalem, there is only Jerusalem. Addressing Jerusalem as “east and west” is ignoring the important fact that the Western Wall and the Temple Mount are located in the old city of Jerusalem, which was illegally occupied by Jordan for 19 years. That is how Jerusalem was divided into “east” and “west.” By war and occupation, not by willingness to tear the city apart.

President Donald Trump finally followed the ‘Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995‘ enacted by US Congress. That act recognized Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Israel and called for Jerusalem to remain an undivided city, and moved the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. After that move, the sky did not fall and hell did not break loose.

The Arab countries, Israel’s greatest foes, accepted the fair and legal act. Nothing bad will happen, only good will come, if Great Britain follows the US act with dignity, ending its ongoing bias against the State of Israel and Jews. Britain would thereby correct its historic administrative corruption related to the Mandate for Palestine. Other countries should follow suit.

Four Jews Killed in Highland Park Parade Shooting

Multiple area Jewish spiritual leaders told JTA that while they did not want to speculate as to the motives of the shooter, their communities were wrestling with their feelings of security being upended. “I think our Jewish antennae go up a little bit on these things,” said Rabbi Jodi Kornfeld of Beth Chaverim Humanistic Jewish Community in nearby Deerfield.

Moffic, a longtime contributor to JTA sister site My Jewish Learning, told Chicago public radio station WBEZ the day after the shooting that “I do feel safe” in this community as a Jew, but added, “Of course this affects our psyche. It’s why we have many security measures at our synagogue.” Other rabbis noted that, while their own congregants may have been safe physically from the attack, they are feeling the damage psychologically.

Although local authorities have not yet said whether they believe the shooter’s motivation was antisemitic, at least one Highland Park rabbi reported that the suspect, whom authorities said had pre-planned his attack for weeks, had previously visited a synagogue: his own.

Yosef Schanowitz, the rabbi of the Highland Park Chabad, told the Orthodox news site Anash that he recognized the alleged shooter, who he said had been turned away from Chabad by its armed security guard during a Passover Seder this year. A spokesperson for Chabad told JTA the congregation has a security camera but didn’t say whether footage of the incident was captured.

The building’s security guard also confirmed to the Forward that the suspect had visited the congregation during Passover, saying he gave his name and sat in the sanctuary for 45 minutes before leaving.

People who shoot at Jewish worshippers say that Israel practices religious discrimination

Some accusations against Israel are so ridiculous, they can only be made at the UN Human Rights Council.

Al Awda, the "Palestinian Return Center," said at a meeting of the UN Human Rights Council that Israel was discriminating against Palestinians on religious grounds

Speaking with the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, under the ninth item on the agenda of the 50th session of the Human Rights Council, they mentioned that Israel prevented those under the age of 50 from praying at Al Aqsa.

Israel sometimes does this to minimize the chance of terror attacks, but there are plenty of men under 50 who visit al-Aqsa, like this very devout worshiper.

Temple Mount Circus pic.twitter.com/ENQSFGovuq
— Imshin (@imshin) July 4, 2022

"On the other hand, it allows Jewish settlers of all ages to storm Al-Aqsa Mosque, amid provocative and racist expressions and insults against the Palestinians." The "racist expressions" are usually Biblical quotes.

They also claimed that Palestinian Christians were subjected to religious discrimination too, as the Israeli forces recently prevented large numbers of them from celebrating Christmas in the city of Bethlehem. They didn't mention that this was in response to the Omicron variant of COVID-19.

Al-Awda said that restricting worshipers' access to Islamic and Christian holy sites is a flagrant violation of human rights, especially Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It called on members of the Human Rights Council to publicly condemn deliberate religious discrimination by Israel, and to take the necessary measures to protect places of worship in Jerusalem, and support freedom of worship for all worshipers.

Meanwhile, Palestinians are literally shooting at real worshipers attempting to visit Joseph's Tomb. And you can bet that no one said a word about this at the UNHRC (unless Hillel Neuer from UN Watch managed to.)

A pro-terror organization whose entire purpose is to destroy a UN member state is not only allowed to attend UNHRC sessions, but it can promote lies without anyone in those hallowed chambers even considering that they are making things up.

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Antisemitism Removed From Saudi Textbooks Added To Palestinian Books (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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textbooks Ramallah, July 7 - The sea change underway in the Middle East involving the acceptance and integration of Israel into a region once uniformly hostile to the Jewish State continues among numerous avenues, such as the reworking of educational materials in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia no longer to include antipathy for Jews, Jewish sovereignty, or Jewish interests in the form of the Jewish State. Palestinian education officials have seized all that suddenly-available Judeophobia and attempted to fit as much as possible into their textbooks in a curriculum that already features the most such material of any country, observers have noted.

Deputy Minister of Education for the Palestinian Authority Wilqil Dajoussi acknowledged the phenomenon in an interview Thursday. "Over a very short period there's been a glut of anti-Jewish educational material released into availability," he noted. "It began subtly a few years ago when the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and several other Persian Gulf countries began normalizing with the Zionists, and the trend has continued. Riyadh seems intent on joining that group. Obviously, the Palestinian position is clear, and we're not in favor, but my focus is narrower: it's my job to make sure that the quantity of antisemitic materials instilled into Middle Eastern children remains at its historic levels, and we do that by taking all of the antisemitism that no longer suffuses Saudi, Emirati, and other school texts, and making room for it in ours."

"It's definitely been a challenge," he admitted. "It's not like we had only a token amount of it before in our textbooks. We've tried for decades to cram it into every didactic context imaginable, and a few you wouldn't have imagined under the most absurd circumstances. Our word problems in arithmetic involve the dehumanization of, and incitement to violence against, Jews. Our engineering students must calculate the vectors and necessary force, accounting for air resistance and the shape of the projectile, to hit an Israeli car with a Molotov cocktail. It's hard to find extra space for more antisemitism, but with all the instances of Jew-hate suddenly excluded from Saudi materials, we have to find a place for them."

Leading proposals for the integration of that additional antisemitism suggest replacing standard algebraic variables such as "x," "y," and "n" with symbols such as the Nazi swastika, or Hakenkreuz; introducing more explicit racial, as opposed to religious or cultural, antisemitism, adjusted for the Arab-Islamic context; and highlighting, wherever possible, Jewish involvement in such nefarious enterprises as the transatlantic slave trade. The latter proposal stands less of a chance of adoption, ministry officials concede, in light of the involvement of Muslims and Arabs in the slave trade today.

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07/07 Links Pt1: UNRWA Palestinian Textbooks Still Inciting Antisemitism and Jihadi Violence, Concludes New Report; Saudi Arabia Might Invite Israeli Official to Biden Visit

From Ian:

UNRWA Palestinian Textbooks Still Inciting Antisemitism and Jihadi Violence, Concludes New Report

Educational material for Palestinian students provided by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) promotes jihadi violence and incites antisemitism, according to a new report by Israeli education watchdog Impact-se.

Released on Thursday, the Review of 2022 UNRWA-Produced Study Materials in the Palestinian Territories found that the UNRWA curriculum describes Jews as “impure and inherently treacherous” and teaches that murdering Israelis leads to glory and martyrdom. The findings were made after UNRWA’s maintaining several times that its curricula was purged of antisemitism.

Examples included in Impact-se’s findings include a grammar lesson that uses the sentence, “The Palestinians sacrifice their blood to liberate Jerusalem,” and “Arabic Drill Cards” for 9th graders that say, “When the [Muslim] nation is negligent in protecting al-Aqsa, then the Jews will dare to defile it.” Neither does Israel appear on any maps.

Much of the material is “UNRWA branded,” Impact-se continued, but it cannot be accessed through its online education portal and is essentially hidden from public scrutiny.

“After a similar scandal last year, UNRWA promised that all offending material produced by them would be removed. It seems that UNRWA has interpreted this as removal from the website, where it can be scrutinized, rather than removed from actual classrooms,” Impact-se CEO Marcus Sheff said in a statement. “UNRWA was again made aware of our concerns just two months ago.”

He observed that the US “is currently financing UNRWA to the tune of $338 million annually, the majority of which goes to education. Sadly, it is clear that hate teaching in UNRWA schools is increasing rather than abating since US funding was restarted. Surely, the will can be found to enforce policy, given that red lines are being crossed so egregiously.”

Journalists Lap Up and Peddle Palestinian Propaganda as European Union Renews ‘Unconditional’ Aid to PA

On July 1, the European Union stated it would release a grant to Al-Haq, a Palestinian NGO with long-standing links to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Even though the PFLP is designated a terrorist organization by the EU, the United States and Israel, Brussels’ decision barely made a ripple in the news cycle.

The announcement came just weeks after the European Commission decided to renew funding to the terror-supporting Palestinian Authority government in the West Bank.

As an HonestReporting analysis of leading European news outlets makes clear, rather than calling for transparency in the use of public funds, journalists are promoting a narrative that perpetuates misleading claims made by the authoritarian rulers in Ramallah.

As outlined in our April 12 article, the EU’s funding for the Palestinian Authority was held up for months while representatives from multiple European countries pushed to condition financial support on the PA making changes to the “problematic and hateful” books used in Palestinian schools. Part of the European aid goes towards the salaries of civil servants who create and teach the controversial curriculum.

Following the publication of a 194-page study by the independent Georg Eckert Institute one year ago, which concluded that PA textbooks contain “antisemitic narratives and glorification of violence,” the European Commission (EC) assured members of the European Parliament that urgent discussions were taking place between EU representatives and the PA Ministry of Education. This, to ensure that the Palestinian leadership would act to remove “questionable content” from books to be produced in 2021.

Olivér Várhelyi, the EU Commissioner for Neighbourhood and Enlargement, reportedly demanded “clear process indicators” as to the PA’s commitment to ending incitement, which then triggered a drawn-out “consultative process” in Brussels, delaying the approval of the entire aid package. PA Minister of Foreign Affairs Riyad Al-Malki subsequently called Várhelyi’s request “unacceptable” to Palestinians, since “…placing conditions on the funding embarrasses them internationally.”

Meanwhile, a report analyzing PA textbooks for the 2021-22 semester published in January this year by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) — a non-profit watchdog group that monitors educational resources for extremist materials — found that, in spite of Ramallah’s promises about curriculum reform and the ostensible implementation of “monitoring processes,” the original problems identified still persist.

Amongst other issues, IMPACT-se discovered that study materials present Jews as “devious, treacherous and hostile” people who control “global events through financial power.” Furthermore, students are taught that one of the “rules of jihad” is to die as a martyr while killing infidels, and that they should sacrifice themselves for their homeland and “redeem it with blood.”