Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, August 15, 2022

19th century Arab Palestine was a bunch of squabbling groups who hated each other

Some claim that the Palestinian people have existed for centuries. Here is an account of what Southern Syria (what Arabs called Palestine) was really like in the 19th century, from an 1883 article in the Fortnightly Review by Captain C. R. Conder, about how absurd the idea of a unified Palestinian Arab population was:

Why do not these oppressed subjects of a foreign power [Turkey] help themselves to liberty? There are, it is true, perhaps only a dozen real Turks in the country, for the Pashas even are Kurds, Armenians, or Europeans. Yet to expect a national rebellion is to argue a great want of acquaintance with Oriental character. The power of combination for a common object is unknown in Eastern communities. Arabi's army might — so some of his officers said — have deserted en masse if any one of them had been able to trust another with his real wishes. To the peasant, the village faction appears more important than any national league, and the Turk knows well how to rule by dividing. Southern Palestine, within the memory of living men, was divided into two fierce factions — the Keis, who seem to have been mainly the original peasantry on the west, and the Yemini, allied with the Eastern Arabs, who were pushing northwards from Yemen. The battles fought between these factions are yet related by the village elders, and much courage and daring was then exhibited by the peasantry.

In Jerusalem itself, three of these factions still divide the Moslem population. The Hoseini, in the middle of the town, are the most powerful ; the Khaldi occupy the east quarter ; the despised Jauni abide among the Jews on the south. A Hoseini mother would rather see her daughter die unwedded than suffer her to take a Jauni husband. The same survival of faction I have traced in many other towns of Palestine, and the division of these Moslem parties, even in the petty villages, is almost as great as that which separates the Moslem from the Arab Christian, Latin, Greek, or Maronite. It is by fostering such ancient enmities, and by playing the Druze against the Maronite, the Arab against his elder brother, the Greek against the Latin, that the Turk retains his power over the numerous sects which are found in Syria. It was the same spirit of disunion which in older days gave birth to fifty Gnostic sects in the Holy Land, and which created the twelve Christian creeds which are now to be found side by side in Jerusalem.

The same spirit of disunion exists also among the Bedawin, and, indeed, manifested itself among the early conquerors of Islam as soon as their prophet was dead. Recent events in Egypt and Sinai have not shown us the "noble Arab," in whom we have been told we are to place our trust, in a very favourable light ; and the student of history, whether in Omar's time or in the days of Napoleon, will find that the Bedawin have never fulfilled the expectations of their admirers, and have rarely evinced any great nobility of character. As allies no nation could be more unsatisfactory. They skulked over the Kassassin battle-field to rob and mutilate the dead ; they took money to murder Englishmen who trusted to their reputation for good faith ; and they stole a few cows from the British camp. They never took a side heartily for or against Arabi, and they deserted him at his need. Truly, the noble Arab is not found either in Moab, in Sinai, or in Egypt; and we may well question if he exists in Arabia, for those who know the Syrian Arabs well say that the Nejed and Yemen tribes differ only in being fiercer and more warlike ; while as regards the Sakhur and the Anezeh and other large clans who are more remote from European influence than the Belka Bedawin, it has been my experience that they only differ in being greater savages, more ignorant, crafty, and unreliable than those who know better the power of the West. Truly, one is tempted to regard the noble Arab as " an extinct race which never existed."

This is the history that has been excised from not only Arab but Western textbooks as well.

(I had excerpted much more from this article in 2008.)

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The Gaza fauxtography continues

During Operation Breaking Dawn, the amount of damage Israel inflicted on Gaza was very limited. As far as I can tell, in only two cases did we see an entire building leveled in an urban area as the IDF successfully targeted top Islamic Jihad figures.

But Gaza photographers need to make the most of these incidents. They must find ways to frame their photos to make the damage look far more devastating than it is.

Here you can see the area of the airstrike. Although there was some damage in the buildings surrounding the strike, for the most part this is the entire area with large amounts of rubble.

The Rafah airstrike that killed Khaled Mansour has become the favored area for Gaza news photographers to stage scenes that they hope to sell to Western agencies.

And nothing sells like sad looking children.

The photographer, Omar Ashtawy, hedged his bets - in case no one wanted to buy photos of sad children, he also wanted to stage photos of the same children "playing" in the rubble, showing how resilient they are.

Hey, if one meme doesn't work, maybe another one will.

The same photographer has some shots of the cemetery where four kids were killed by an Islamic Jihad rocket - but his caption says it was an Israeli airstrike. He gain staged it with a child. Yet his photo shows the damage that Gaza rockets, deliberately filled with nails and sharp shrapnel are designed to inflict as they pockmarked cement gravestones.

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In recent days, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas:

- Offered condolences to Egyptian leaders on the tragic church fire

- Offered condolences on the assassination of a Fatah military leader in Lebanon by unknown people

- Called three terrorist prisoners who were recently released by Israel

- Congratulated Chad's leader for its independence day, as well as those of Ecuador and Singapore

- Offered condolences to the families of three terrorists killed in Nablus by the IDF

- Condemned Israel for its "continued aggression against our people"

With this busy schedule of statements and phone calls, his choice not to condemn a terror attack in Jerusalem that targeted religious Jews is not an oversight. It is a deliberate decision.

Because Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority support, tacitly or explicitly, every terror attack.

The only time they condemn terror attacks is when they are pressured to do so by the United States. Otherwise, while they don't issue congratulations like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, they definitely don't issue condemnations.

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

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Book review: The Arc of a Covenant by Walter Russell Mead

The Arc of a Covenant is a well-researched book about the history of the US-Israel relationship. And it destroys many myths in the process.

Most books about the US and Israel are written by one of two kinds of people: Zionists and anti-Zionists. Both of those suffer from a skewed vision where the American Zionists and Israeli politicians are considered critical players in the drama.

Walter Russell Mead calls the anti-Zionists who believe in a nefarious and outsized role of Jews in steering the US towards a disaster in foreign policy "Vulcanists." In the late 1800s, astronomers noticed irregularities in the orbit of the planet Mercury, and postulated that there was a hidden planet they called Vulcan that could explain them. Some claimed to have observed the planet. In the end, the irregularities were found to be because of the sun's gravity bending the fabric of space under Einstein's theories, but they didn't have a clue - they convinced themselves that there was a fictional planet. They couldn't even imagine that there was an alternate theory that could explain things better.

The field of research into the US-Israel relationship is likewise skewed, according to Mead, by writers who are convinced that Jews have been at the center of the decision-making. The entire book zooms out from this tunnel vision and looks more fully at history and sees that US (and other countries) made their decisions about Palestine and Israel based on their specific political circumstances at the time, and the Jews (or Zionist lobby, or Christian Zionists) were only a small component of what went into national decisions.

The centerpiece is an analysis of Harry Truman and what went into his policies towards Palestine. Mead notes that Truman was very unpopular in his own party after FDR's death - he was reluctantly chosen as a vice presidential candidate to help Roosevelt get elected in 1944 - and that Truman had a great deal on his plate: political pressure from the Left, including from the very popular former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, a State Department that disagreed with Truman's ideas, a war-depleted Great Britain that wanted to hold onto some Middle East oil fields to help regain money and power, a devastated Europe that needed to be helped without the danger of a new menace arising, and a Soviet Union that had been an ally and looked to be becoming an enemy again, but which many American Leftists preferred to Britain. Truman needed to balance these with many domestic concerns and his own weakness as President.

The Jewish lobby, and keeping Jews happy, was very far down on his priority list.

Mead busts myths right and left - for example, he notes that the State Department's opposition to a Jewish state was more out of concern that the Jews would certainly lose any war and there would be a new Jewish humanitarian and refugee crisis than any pro-Arab tilt. And he also destroys the myth the Harry Truman's meeting with Chaim Weizmann arranged by his old business partner, Eddie Jacobson, was critical in changing Truman's mind about the Jewish state - it notes that the US announced it opposition to the partition plan a day after that meeting in March 1948. Mead notes that Weizmann may have convinced Truman that the Jewish forces were better armed and prepared than the State Department thought, so the meeting may have had an effect, but this was not the Queen Esther moment that Zionist sources like to portray it as.

The entire book is this way - looking at all the factors that went into decisions, some of which were far afield from the Middle East itself.

Mead is scrupulously unbiased and hardly a right wing Zionist (he supports a two state solution and is very sympathetic to Palestinian Arabs). The overriding theme of the book is that Jews have not been as critical in important decisions as the many books written by Zionists and Vulcanists have implied. Sometimes the context that Mead adds to an episode goes on for tens of pages; in this sense this is almost a general history of American foreign relations and the different streams of thought behind it.

Even though the role of Jews in this history is far more limited than had been previously assumed, to me the story is no less remarkable. On the contrary.

Four years ago, I gave a lecture at a Queens synagogue for Yom Haatzmaut. Given the venue, instead of concentrating on the facts as I do in this site, I spoke about the miracles behind Israel's rebirth - the improbable coincidences that set the stage for the English speaking Christian world to be interested in Jewish return to Israel, the improbable set of circumstances that led to the Balfour Declaration, and the almost unexplainable turn of the Soviet Union toward Zionism in exactly the time period of 1947 and 1948 when it mattered most (a topic Mead goes into here.) To me, seeing the intricate sets of circumstances that all happened to converge to US and Soviet support of Israel when it was most needed is more incredible than any story about Jewish genius that could have helped bring it about.

The book is long, and the necessary context is at times lengthy. I was surprised that the biggest crisis in US-Israel relations, the 1956 Sinai war, is barely described. But Arc of a Covenant is an essential and important book that explains the history of the US-Israel relationship - through Donald Trump - much better than any other I've seen.

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!

08/14 Links: Who speaks for the Arab world about Israel? Biden under pressure to suspend Iran talks after Rushdie attack, weak condemnation

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: Who speaks for the Arab world about Israel?

Israeli diplomats at the United Nations often speak of how their Arab colleagues talk one way about the conflict in public and very differently in private. The United Nations can be dismissed as a mere talking shop with no power. But that ignores the genuine damage that U.N. agencies can do to Israel and to aid those boycotting and trying to destroy it.

Even if Arab statements at the world body were merely a cynical show, the fact that they feel it is necessary to behave this way is not insignificant.

Public opinion in Egypt and Jordan is still heavily anti-Semitic and lags far behind their country’s leaders when it comes to the acceptance of Israel. Popular culture in the Arab world is also still hostile to Israel and Jews. There is no sign of a popular groundswell backing an alliance or closer ties. On the contrary, even governments that have made peace are wary of going too far when it comes to abandoning the Palestinian desire for Israel’s destruction. Authoritarian regimes in Egypt, Jordan and in the Gulf don’t depend on popular approval. But they are acutely conscious that by getting too close to Israel, they are giving ammunition to radicals backed by Iran who seek their overthrow.

Saudi Arabia’s modernizing ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salmon, has embraced closer under-the-table ties with Israel though that has stopped short of normalization. But even the Saudis fear the possibility of a restive Arab street. That is accentuated by justified worries that a new and even weaker nuclear deal between the West and Iran, which may be concluded soon, will reinforce the impression that the theocrats in Tehran—and not the moderates in Riyadh or Cairo—are the “strong horse” of the region. A new pact will strengthen Iran’s economy and military, and could also help Iran sway opinion in those states that have relations with Israel.

Recognizing the persistence of Arab and Muslim hostility to Israel doesn’t negate the historic importance of the Abraham Accords. Indeed, as Jason Greenblatt, the Trump administration’s Middle East peace envoy, told me in an interview, the question to ask about the Saudis is not what they haven’t done but the distance they have traveled from their former stance of unremitting hostility.

Still, the optimistic notion that all the barriers between Israel and the Arab and Muslim worlds are coming down is, at best, premature. Jew-hatred is still far more popular than acceptance of Israel. As long as that is true—and the governments that made peace are dictatorial and don’t reflect the popular will of their peoples—the progress that has already been made towards true peace cannot be considered irreversible. That is a sobering thought that should inform Israeli strategy as well as those elsewhere who are under the misapprehension that the conflict over its right to exist is over.

Why Was Ilhan Omar’s Antisemitism Erased by the New York Times and Washington Post?

Connection between media coverage and rising antisemitism?
With antisemitism on the rise, the way the media report on it has become crucial in order to prevent more incidents by prominent public figures falling through the cracks.

The media has reported relatively accurately on Marjorie Greene’s hate-filled ramblings in part because her brand of Judeophobia is more traditional, and hence easier to spot. Meanwhile, Ilhan Omar expresses her anti-Jewish animus in a newer, more subtle way – by delegitimizing the world’s only Jewish state.

As a result, media coverage of her controversial remarks has been spotty at best.

Guided by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, journalists would make better-informed decisions in choosing which stories to cover and how to cover them. This is all the more important given that antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories are being spread by individuals across the political spectrum.

These leaders must be held to account for their words and actions.

Biden under pressure to suspend Iran talks after Rushdie attack, weak condemnation

The attack comes more than 30 years after Iran's late leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called for his death in response to Rushdie's book, "causing Rushdie to require round-the-clock security at various points in his life.

According to Fox News, Rubio was joined by several other lawmakers and prominent figures on the Right who pressed President Joe Biden to end his effort to restore the 2015 nuclear deal, pointing a finger at Iran for the attempted murder.

"Iran's leaders have been calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie for decades," Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton tweeted. "We know they're trying to assassinate American officials today. Biden needs to immediately end negotiations with this terrorist regime."

"This White House statement on Salman Rushdie is appalling," author Gary Weiss described the White House's reaction to the attack. "No mention is made of Iran putting a price on his head. Or that the fatwa was reaffirmed by the ayatollah in 2005 and in 2019. Is Joe Biden is THAT anxious to move ahead with the lousy JCPOA?"

In his statement condemning the attack, Biden said "Salman Rushdie – with his insight into humanity, with his unmatched sense for story, with his refusal to be intimidated or silenced – stands for essential, universal ideals," but did not mention Iran or the fatwa against him.

"The silence of @POTUS in response to the attempted murder of Salman Rushdie looks increasingly the result of one thing: A desperation to return to the Iran deal," Foundation for Defense of Democracies CEO Mark Dubowitz tweeted. "American desperation increases regime aggression. It always has."

Fox News said that "a White House spokesperson told Fox News Digital that President Biden has been clear he will not allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon and that the best way to ensure that happens is through diplomacy." Although Iran's current Supreme Leader Ali Khameneihas ostensibly tried to play down the decree from the 1980s, the state-controlled media had jubilant reporting in the wake of the attack, including on the paper that is considered a mouthpiece of the chief ayatollah, calling him an "apostate" over his "blasphemous" writings.

Today, I am a man (under international law.) It's EoZ's 18th birthday!

This blog began on August 14, 2004.

At the beginning, it was mostly links to articles that looked interesting to me, with brief comments. But soon it became more like it is today, a place to find news and analysis about the Middle East and antisemitism that you cannot find anywhere else.

Here's what the blog header looked like in January, 2006: (I don't have any earlier snapshots)

And in 2008:

EoZ has grown a lot since then, and I'd like to thank my loyal readers and fans, as well as columnists, for making it a success.

Thanks!

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!

Amira Hass in Haaretz published a detailed account of the Gazans who died in Operation Breaking Dawn and the circumstances of each death. I disagree with several of her conclusions, and she doesn't identify all of their affiliations with terror groups, but on the whole it is a reasonably fair article that squarely blames Islamic Jihad for the deaths of 19 civilians including 12 children, far more than were killed in Israeli attacks that were targeting terrorists and military targets.

Despite Palestinian media attributing all deaths to Israeli attacks, Gazans know well that a very high number of victims stemmed from failed rocket launches by Islamic Jihad.

The high number of fatalities from so-called internal fire has embittered Palestinians, some Gazans told Haaretz.

Amira Hass is a reliably anti-Israel reporter for Haaretz, often quoted by anti-Zionist activists and faux "human rights" professionals.

Which is why this article is being nearly universally ignored by the anti-Israel crowd who have insisted that every dead child was "murdered" by Israel - and fundraised based on that lie.

The only exception I could find was James Zogby, prominent Arab American and pollster, who took advantage of the fact that the Haaretz article is only visible to subscribers - so he misrepresented the article as saying that all the civilians were "murdered " by Israel.

Mainstream media journalists, who follow Haaretz religiously, have also ignored this story that damns Islamic Jihad for its responsibility for the bulk of the civilians killed. At best they have maintained a "he said, she said" narrative where Israel tells the truth and the Palestinians deny it.

It is essentially a conspiracy of silence to make sure that the world doesn't learn the truth, outside of the one failed rocket attack Israel documented in Jabalia.

But Arabic-language media has no such qualms.

Arabic sites, including the influential UK-based Al Quds, have translated and published the Haaretz article. It was also translated in the popular NABD news aggregator. The article is even in one Palestinian media outlet that regularly translates Hebrew articles into Arabic, as well as in "Palestine Forum."

The Arab world, including Palestinians, is being more honest about Islamic Jihad's culpability in the deaths of children than the Western mainstream media has been.

The worst of all in attempting to hide these deaths are the very "human rights groups" whose job is to protect these civilians. They know the truth very well but have done everything they can to hide it.

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

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The anti-Israel Left makes up new laws, and ignores international law, when it comes to Israel

+972 Magazine has an article about how awful and immoral the IDF is.

The Israeli news site Ynet quoted army officials boasting that the ratio between “non-combatants” and combatants killed was “the best of all the operations.” And yet, Israel admits that it killed at least 11 people who had nothing to do with militant activities, including a five-year-old girl.

Yes, a five year old girl who was near a top Islamic Jihad target was killed. She was not the target. If there was a way to attack the target without killing the girl, the IDF would have. (Indeed, during Breaking Dawn, Israel did abort attacks on legitimate targets when civilians were around - as long as they could wait and attack the same target later without the civilians.) Since it couldn't attack the legitimate target without killing the girl, she was unfortunately killed as well.

These are the laws of armed conflict. The presence of civilians do not make a military target immune from attack. The fact that there was a five year old girl near the Islamic Jihad commander does not, under any interpretation of international law, mean that Israel must not attack the commander.

The laws of armed conflict are designed to protect civilians without impeding military efficiency in any way. Those words come from the International Committee of the Red Cross, no tme.

And it has to be that way, because otherwise terrorist groups can just ensure that they are well embedded with civilians and can then act with impunity.

That appears to be what +972 wants:

Dana — who asked to use a pseudonym, like all the former soldiers interviewed for this article — is a kindergarten teacher who lives in a wood-furnished apartment full of philosophy books in central Tel Aviv. During her military service, she took part in an assassination operation in which a five-year-old boy was killed in Gaza.

“When I served in the Gaza Division, we were following someone from Hamas, because [the army] knew he was hiding rockets,” she said. “They made a decision to eliminate him.”

Dana served as a signal traffic analysis officer in the operations room, where her job was to confirm that the missile had hit the right person. “We sent out a UAV to follow the man to kill him,” she said, “but we saw that he was with his son. A boy who was five or six years old, I think.

“....They killed the Hamas military operative, and the little boy who was next to him.”

Unless they had a way that they could kill the Hamas operative without killing the boy, this is not only a legal but also a moral decision, albeit tragic. It is a decision any army would make.

But to some, Israel must be held to much higher standards that every other nation. A single civilian killed among a hundred terrorists makes the entire operation immoral, according to them.

And endangering Israeli civilians as a result because of the resultant attacks that would or could happen by not attacking the terrorists? That is not part of the anti-Israel crowd's moral calculus.

That's not the only way this article demands Israel go beyond international law:

The army also admitted that it shoots unarmed people, according to a female officer who gave an interview to Ynet after the latest onslaught. “The [PIJ] operative came down from the position as he was unarmed, and I opened fire,” she said. “When he fell, I fired more.”

Legal combatants are any member of the armed forces (outside medical and religious personnel.) These include those who aid the fighting, not only those with literal weapons. A lookout, a messenger between combat forces, a radio operator helping aim mortars - all are considered combatants under international law, even when unarmed.

It is easy for Israel-hating propagandists to take an incident of collateral damage and frame it as a war crime. It doesn't make it true. From all indications, this operation was as moral as possible in warfare.

That is not good enough for inveterate inciters against Israel.

(The article mentions some other issues that are morally problematic if true. But they aren't publishing them to force the IDF to improve its policies - they are publishing them to incite more hatred against Israel.)

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!

08/13 Links: Salman Rushdie on a ventilator, likely to lose an eye after on-stage attack; Senior UN official loses her post after tweet condemning PIJ rocket fire at Israel

From Ian:

Salman Rushdie on a ventilator, likely to lose an eye after on-stage attack

Author Salman Rushdie is likely to lose one of his eyes and is currently on a ventilator after he was attacked on stage at a literary event in upstate New York on Friday, a report said.

“The news is not good,” the 75-year-old writer’s agent, Andrew Wylie, told The New York Times.

“Salman will likely lose one eye; the nerves in his arm were severed; and his liver was stabbed and damaged,” said Wylie.

Rushdie, who is still unable to speak, was attacked by a lone man while speaking at an event at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, NY, about 55 miles south of Buffalo.

He was scheduled to speak about the United States as a place for exiled authors “as a home for freedom of expression,” according to the institute. After the stabbing, he was transported by helicopter to a hospital in Erie, Pennsylvania, where he underwent surgery.

A witness who was in the audience told The Post that Rushdie tried to run off the stage, and the two men scuffled before audience members rushed onstage to subdue the attacker.

Approximately 2,500 people were in the audience at the time.

Rushdie’s alleged attacker, 24-year-old Hadi Matar, of Fairview, New Jersey, was arrested at the scene by a state trooper who was assigned to the lecture.

Douglas Murray: The best response to Salman Rushdie’s stabbing

It must be said that Rushdie has dealt with all this and more heroically. He does not complain about his lot. He does not make himself into a victim. Instead he has displayed the simple qualities of a hero. In a recent series of Curb Your Enthusiasm he even joked about it. Most impressive, perhaps, was that his well of creativity has never been dimmed. From Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) right up to his forthcoming Victory City the assaults of the illiterate on him and his work never managed to stop that work.

The attack onstage in New York today is still a subject of confusion. Initial reports said the author had walked off stage with assistance. Now it appears that his assailant stabbed him in the neck. Rushdie has been helicoptered to hospital and is currently be fighting for his life.

In his 2012 memoir – Joseph Anton – Rushdie wrote about the fatwa years. The book is a detailed chronicle of all the people who let him down: the MPs who promised support and then whipped up mobs; the political figures of left and right who said that while the Ayatollah may have caused an offence so had the novelist; the authorities who allowed Muslims in Bradford and others on television to call for a British subject´s murder with impunity.

But it is also a chronicle of the people who supported him, the friends who stood by him and the public figures who stood up for him. One of them was the American writer Susan Sontag, who helped organise a public reading of Rushdie´s work in New York. As Sontag said, the moment called for some basic 'civic courage'. It is striking how much of that civic courage has evaporated in recent years. Today no one would be able to write – much less get published – a novel like The Satanic Verses. Perhaps nobody has tried. From novels to cartoons a de facto Islamic blasphemy law settled across the West in the wake of the Rushdie affair. The attack today will doubtless exacerbate that.

So apart from willing, wishing or praying for Rushdie´s recovery, the only other thing that can be done now is to display that civic courage that Sontag called for three decades ago. The Satanic Verses is a complex but brilliant novel. It includes an hilarious and devastating reimagining of the origins of the Quran. I hope that people will read it, and read from it, more than ever. Because what happened in New York today cannot be allowed to win. The illiterate cannot be allowed to dictate the rules of literature. The enemies of free expression cannot be allowed to quash it. The attacker should get exactly the opposite of the response he will have hoped for. Not just hopefully a failure to silence Rushdie, but a failure to limit what the rest of us are allowed to think, read, hear and say.

JPost Editorial: Iran needs to be shown that it cannot win through aggression

On Friday, Salman Rushdie, the Indian-born novelist who spent years in hiding after Iran urged Muslims to kill him because of his writing, was stabbed in the neck and torso at a lecture in New York State. He was airlifted to a hospital, was placed on a ventilator and was said to be in serious condition.

Stunned attendees helped wrest the man from Rushdie, who had fallen to the floor. A New York State Police trooper providing security at the event arrested the attacker. Police identified the suspect as Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old man from Fairview, New Jersey, who bought a pass to the event.

Matar reportedly was caught carrying a fake driver’s license with the name Hassan Mughniyah. The first name is the same as Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, and the last name is the same as Imad Mughniyah, the Hezbollah military commander killed in a CIA-Mossad operation in 2008.

The attempt on Rushdie’s life was made just days after the United States Justice Department announced that it was indicting a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps for attempting to hire hit men to murder former national security advisor John Bolton in an apparent retaliation attempt for the January 2020 assassination of IRGC Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani.

Shahram Poursafi, aka Mehdi Rezayi, a resident of Tehran, attempted to pay individuals in the US $300,000 to murder Bolton in Washington or Maryland on behalf of the Quds Force, according to court documents.

“The Justice Department has the solemn duty to defend our citizens from hostile governments who seek to hurt or kill them,” said Assistant Attorney-General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division. “This is not the first time we have uncovered Iranian plots to exact revenge against individuals on US soil – and we will work tirelessly to expose and disrupt every one of these efforts.”

“Iran has a history of plotting to assassinate individuals in the US it deems a threat, but the US government has a longer history of holding accountable those who threaten the safety of our citizens,” said Executive Assistant Director Larissa L. Knapp of the FBI’s National Security Branch.

Israel says Rushdie stabbing ‘an attack on our values,’ evidence of Iran’s brutality

Prime Minister Yair Lapid on Saturday night condemned the attempted murder of British-Indian author Salman Rushdie the previous day in the United States as an attack on freedom and the consequence of years of incitement by the Iranian regime.

“The attack on Salman Rushdie is an attack on our freedoms and values. It is the result of decades of incitement led by the extremist regime in Tehran,” Lapid tweeted Saturday night.

“On behalf of the people of Israel, we wish him a full and speedy recovery.”

Deputy Foreign Minister Idan Roll also denounced the Iranian regime following the attack on Rushdie during a speaking event in the town of Chautauqua in New York state.

“Yesterday’s shocking attack on Salman Rushdie is further evidence of the brutality & extremism of the Iranian regime, which has gone after and persecuted freethinkers everywhere for decades,” said Roll.

“Iran is a threat to the free world,” he continued.

08/12 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: The closing of the university mind; How six US and UK media moguls aided the nascent Nazi regime; The Sanctification of George Soros

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The closing of the university mind

It takes a brave academic to call out what’s going on. One such is Matthew Goodwin, professor of politics at Kent university. On his Substack blog today, he produces startling evidence to illustrate the extent of the problem. He writes:
Since the 1960s, the ratio of left-wing to right-wing academics has jumped from three to one to eight to one today…[Other studies] similarly find that fewer than 20% of academics today vote for right-leaning parties while 75% vote for Labour, the Liberal Democrats, or the Greens. Last year, in my own work, I found that 76% of my colleagues in the world’s most elite institutions identify on the left while 21% of that group identify as ‘far left’. Just 11% put themselves on the right. And in my own area of political science, a recent study at Harvard found that 72% lean to the left with 14% describing themselves as far left. In America, where this ideological bias is especially pronounced, it is simply no longer unusual to find some departments with not a single registered Republican. Is this healthy for our students? Is this conducive to developing well-rounded, critical thinkers?…

One study finds a third of staff would avoid hiring a known Brexit voter while many openly say they would feel uncomfortable mingling with a colleague who holds gender-critical views. Between one third and one half of left-leaning scholars would consciously mark a bid for a research grant lower if it adopted a right-wing perspective, which really matters because the ability of academics to generate funding has a major impact on their career trajectory. My own survey of academics in the world’s most elite universities similarly found that while two-thirds feel positively about left-wing voters, only one in ten feel the same way about right-wing voters…

Increasingly, in Britain and America, large numbers of academics, around six in ten, support requiring job and research grant applicants to submit ‘diversity statements’ before a decision is made. You don’t have to oppose or question diversity to find the use of these statements deeply problematic. Many influential voices consider them ‘litmus tests’ which are designed to weed out applicants who do not subscribe to the dominant orthodoxy…

One study finds less than half of left-leaning academics think academic freedom should always be put first, even if it violates social justice ideology; another finds that about one-quarter of academics would support some kind of campaign to oust a dissenting academic from their job. Recently, this has been symbolised by prominent cases of academics or honorary academics being harassed, investigated or experiencing negative consequences as a direct result of their beliefs or counter-cultural research, such as Kathleen Stock, Jo Phoenix, Tony Sewell, Selina Todd, Rosa Freedman, Michele Moore, among others. These are not exactly right-wing culture warriors.

This hijack of education has been building up for decades. Back in the sixties and seventies, a mindset became the progressive orthodoxy that the west was fundamentally corrupt — colonialist, imperialist, exploitative, racist and dominated by the “patriarchy” — ie, white heterosexual western men were to blame for all the ills of the world. Western society therefore had to be reconfigured, and the way to achieve this was by the “long march through the institutions” — of which the universities were key — to turn western values inside out.

This has now been achieved to the letter.

The corruption of the universities is at the core of most of our society’s ills. Knowledge and rationality have been replaced by ideological propaganda. Instead of teaching young people how to think, the universities have been instructing them what to think. The identity politics which they have enforced upon so many and turned into unchallengeable dogma has meant that increasingly people have been employed or promoted not on the basis of their intellectual achievement (which has been becoming progressively devalued) but their skin colour or sexual identity. All of which helps explain why, across the board in institutions, professions, businesses, politics and the civil service, so many are so incompetent, know so little and can’t even think straight.

The universities, supposedly the crucible of knowledge, rational thought and the free exchange of ideas, are now responsible instead for the closing of the national mind.

Bad news for the Jews: How six US and UK media moguls aided the nascent Nazi regime

In ‘The Newspaper Axis,’ historian Kathryn S. Olmsted details how prior to WWII, press barons including William Randolph Hearst worked to sway the public toward Hitler’s line

In January 1934, Lord Harold Rothermere, the owner of Britain’s Daily Mail, filed a story from Munich praising Adolf Hitler. The article was published when Jews were being ousted from public life in Germany and the Nazi party had already established a large network of concentration camps across the country.

Rothermere assured his readers that stories of these atrocities were wildly exaggerated. The restaurants and hotels in Munich were bustling with German Jews during the festive season, and none “showed [any] symptoms of insecurity or suffering,” the British newspaper proprietor wrote. This was typical of the pro-Nazi line Britain’s Daily Mail continued to promote that year.

The Nazis needed to control the “alien elements and Israelites of international attachments who were insinuating themselves into the German state,” as Rothermere put it in another article he personally penned in July 1934. The Daily Mail also cheered on the British Union of Fascists — a party led by Sir Oswald Mosley in Britain that was notorious for its support of Hitler and for its anti-Semitic propaganda. “Hurrah for the Blackshirts,” read one infamous Daily Mail headline from January 1934.

California-based historian Kathryn S. Olmsted’s new book, “The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler,” profiles Rothermere and five other powerful media moguls in the Anglophile world on both sides of the Atlantic between 1933 and 1945, all of whom took a pro-Nazi editorial line.

“Lord Rothermere was a pro-fascist who had a deep sympathy for Adolf Hitler,” Olmsted tells The Times of Israel from her office at the University of California, Davis, where she chairs the history department.

As she writes in the introduction to her new book, “For years, Rothermere and his fellow press barons in both Britain and the United States pressured their nations’ leaders to ignore the menace of fascism.”

Olmsted dedicates a chapter to exploring how Britain’s Daily Mail, led by Rothermere, championed Hitler’s Germany throughout the mid- to late-1930s. The paper described Germany under Hitler “as one of the best-governed nations in Europe” and continued to boost Hitler’s popularity, even as the Nazis used terrorist tactics against their political enemies.

The Sanctification of George Soros

All well and good. America is a free country, and Soros has every right to spend his vast fortune however he wants within the boundaries of the law, as well as to justify that spending in the public square. The same applies to those of us inhabiting lower tax brackets, who have no less a right to criticize Soros for how he’s trying to influence American public life—which, to repeat, he is very much, and by his own admission, trying to do. That extremely rich people with grand ideological designs should not be immune to criticism—indeed, that they should be subject to even more of it than the rest of us—is a pretty widely accepted view in America, especially on the political left, where the maxim “behind every great fortune lies a great crime” has long been a guiding principle. Indeed, one might go so far as to say that this lack of deference to the wealthy and the titled is one of our major distinguishing national characteristics.

Or used to be. A week after Soros published his piece in the Journal under his own name, proudly and defiantly justifying his expenditure of vast sums aimed at sparking a revolution in the administration of municipal criminal justice, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio introduced an amendment to the $750 billion climate and tax bill aimed at stymying this agenda by providing funds for local law enforcement to keep violent criminals behind bars. The measure had no chance of passing, and when the Democrat-led Senate predictably rejected it, Rubio took to Twitter. “The democrats just blocked my effort to try & force Soros backed prosecutors to put dangerous criminals in jail,” he tweeted in complaint.

What followed was the sort of Pavlovian response one has come to expect from progressive politicians, activists, journalists, and other social media impact influencers whenever the name of their benefactor is invoked.

Soros, in case you couldn’t tell, happens to be Jewish, a fact that has absolutely nothing to do with his ideas about criminal justice reform, or with Rubio’s opposition to them. Yet it was this utterly irrelevant detail of Soros’ birth that the progressive hive mind seized upon, spurring its minions to attack an unsubstantiated presumption about Rubio’s motives to the exclusion of his substantive arguments. The rebuke from American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten was particularly rich in light of her response to parents upset about their children being denied in-person schooling during the pandemic. “American Jews,” she said in April 2021, “are now part of the ownership class.”

Put aside the merits of the criminal justice policies Soros is trying to advance with his humongous largesse. Also put aside the fact that, while he was alive, the right-wing Jewish casino magnate Sheldon Adelson was routinely denounced by progressives in terms that, by their own lights, are no less “antisemitic” than what they accuse Rubio of fomenting. The question before us today is whether, in the course of criticizing activities that the country’s biggest progressive donor has undertaken “transparently” (his word), it is possible to even utter his name without being accused of bigotry.

The argument that the mere mention of the name “Soros” is tantamount to antisemitism, which is effectively the position of the progressive political, media, and activist elite, is made entirely in bad faith. Stating the plain and observable fact that some prosecutors are “Soros-backed” is no more of an attack on Jews than the broadcaster Soledad O’Brien’s warning to “full-time Florida residents,” an antisemitic dog whistle about God’s waiting room. If the mind of a Soros supporter, upon hearing his name, races immediately to an image of a “Jew,” and one who serves as a stand-in for “the Jews,” it’s probably not the motives of the critic that need questioning. The impulse to connect “Soros” with Judaism and Jewishness is not unlike the bigotry that associates the term “monkeypox” with Black people. It’s a form of essentialism that expects us to agree with the antisemites that “being Jewish” is somehow relevant to what Americans like Soros (or right-wing Jewish billionaires, for that matter) do with their time and money.

Those engaging in this rhetorical tactic are certainly not pursuing the “thoughtful discussion” that Soros says we “desperately need,” but rather the “demagoguery and divisive partisan attacks” he denounces. Worse, they’re minimizing the threat posed by actual antisemitism by cheapening the accusation.

This is very, very typical and mainstream Palestinian fantasy of history and the Israeli Jewish mindset. From Sawalief (Jordan):

Giving from those who do not own to those who do not deserve the Balfour Promise , the British Foreign Minister in 1917 AD sought to rid Britain of the evil, malice and deceit of the Jews by establishing a home for them away from Europe in Palestine if Britain would win the First World War on the Ottoman Empire.

When the war ended , Britain occupied Palestine and colonized it, and began deporting Jews to it from every country until they multiplied in it.

Britain armed them, so they formed armed terrorist gangs such as the Haganah, the Palmach, and the Irgun to frighten and terrorize the defenseless Palestinians of the land.

Gradually and with the malicious British methods that met with the evil Jewish methods, Britain succeeded in establishing a state for the Jews in 1948 on a part of the land of Palestine, including the Palestinian coastal plain, by transforming the Haganah gang and its armed terrorist sisters into a state they called “Israel”.

After that, Britain and its aides continued to invite Jews and foundlings from various care homes in Europe to immigrate to Palestine. Then, with theatrical wars, the emerging Jewish state was able to control all parts of Palestine after it killed those who killed and displaced those who were displaced from the Palestinian people.

Since then and until today, the invading Jews live in a state of constant war in which terror possesses them day and night, as each one of them expects to be killed tomorrow morning, either by being crushed, trampled, or stabbed, or by a heart attack for fear and panic or by stampede when they flee to the shelters in which they spend half their lives.

This is because those of the Palestinian people who remained in their land and homeland, Palestine, swear by God, the Most High, the Great, that the invaders will not be happy to live in their country, and they will not feel safe no matter how long it takes.

The settlers who fled to the shelters are nothing but evidence of the success of this great Palestinian section, which is now being passed down to the new generations.

Therefore, we advise Britain to search again for another safer homeland for her Jews.

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!

In 1922, a Jew who graduated from harvard in 1900 wrote a letter to the president of the university Lawrence Lowell about newspaper reports that Harvard was limiting the number of Jews who would be accepted at the university.

Lowell's response was that limiting the number of Jews at universities was good for Jews.

The logic is convoluted and recognized at the time as being absurd, but this is how antisemites who don't consider themselves antisemites think.

The exchange of letters was published in the New York Times and various Jewish publications in June of that year. Here is Lowell's initial reply:

Dear Mr. Benesch: There is no need of cautioning you not to believe all that you see in the newspapers. As a colleague said to me yesterday, there is perhaps no body of men in the United States, mostly Gentiles, with so little anti-Semitic feeling as the instructing staff of Harvard University. But the problem that confronts this country and Its educational institutions is a difficult one, and one about which I should very much like to talk to you. It is one that involves the best interests both of the college and of the Jews, for I should feel very badly to think that these did not coincide.

There is most unfortunately, a rapidly growing anti-Semitic feeling in this country, causing—and no doubt in part caused by—a strong race feeling on the part of the Jews themselves. In many cities of the country Gentile Clubs are excluding Jews altogether, who are forming separate clubs of their own. Private schools are excluding Jews, I believe, and so, we know, are hotels. All this seems to me fraught with very great evils for the Jews, and very great perils for the community.

The question did not originate here, but has been brought over from Europe—especially from those countries where it has existed for centuries. The question for those of us who deplore such a state of things is how it can be combated, and especially for those of us who are connected with colleges, how it can be combated there —how we can cause the Jews to feel and be regarded as an integral part of the student body. The anti-Semitic feeling among the students is increasing, and it grows in proportion to the increase in the number of Jews.

If their number should become 40 per cent of the student body, the race feeling would become intense. When, on the other hand. the number of Jews was small, the race antagonism was small also. Any such race feeling among the students tends to prevent the personal intimacies on which we must rely to soften anti-Semitic feeling.

If every college in the country would take a limited proportion of Jews, I suspect we should go a long way toward eliminating race feeling among the students, and, as these students passed out into the world, eliminating it in the community.

This question is with us. We cannot solve it by forgetting or ignoring it. If we do nothing about the matter the prejudice is likely to increase. Some colleges appear to have met the question by indirect method, which we do not want to adopt. It cannot be solved except by co-operation between the college authorities and the Jews themselves. Would not the Jews be willing to help us in finding the steps best adapted for preventing the growth of race feeling among our students, and hence in the world?

The first thing to recognize is that there is a problem—a new problem, which we have never had to face before, but which has come over with the immigration from the Old World. After the nature of that problem is fairly understood, the next question is how to solve it in the interest of the Jews, as well as of every one else.

Very truly yours,
A. LAWRENCE LOWELL.

Lowell is saying that hating Jews is a natural part of being human. The more Jews, the more hate. If only there would be fewer Jews, then antisemitism can be limited.

In fact, as Mr. Benesch pointed out in his response, if there were no Jews at all, then that would solve the problem, right?

The last paragraph says it all. Too many Jews on campus is the problem, and Harvard was looking for a solution - and it found one: discriminate against them.

People use similar convoluted logic to justify bigotry today, and they are just as certain that there is no prejudiced bone in their bodies. And in a hundred years, we will marvel at how today's intelligent people accepted today's version of antisemitism as normal.

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!

08/12 Links Pt1: Middle East peace will come despite US policy; Salman Rushdie Attacked on Stage at Event in New York; A revived deal will not stop Iran from becoming nuclear

From Ian:

Mark Regev: Middle East peace will come despite US policy

PRESIDENT Barack Obama entered office in 2009 with aspirations to aggressively move forward on the Israeli-Palestinian track. But despite the efforts of his two secretaries of state, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, no breakthrough was achieved. On the contrary, Obama left the White House after eight years with the negotiations collapsed and any expectation for an early resumption seemingly illusory.

Notwithstanding this failure, Obama inadvertently made an immeasurable contribution to peace. His responses to the Arab Spring, to the Syrian civil war, and to nuclear diplomacy with Iran, all negatively impacted the confidence of America’s traditional Arab allies in the US commitment to them.

Moreover, the repeated declarations of a “pivot to Asia” implied the de-prioritization of the Middle East – this when pro-Western Arab states had for decades based their national security on American protection. Feeling less certain of Washington’s support in a crisis, Arab states sought new security partners – the Jewish state becoming the unintended beneficiary.

After his predecessor unwittingly laid the foundations, president Donald Trump embraced the opportunity. His active engagement produced the 2020 Abraham Accords with the UAE, Bahrain and Sudan, and the normalization of ties with Morocco. This while Trump’s much-hyped plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace remained stillborn, having been adamantly rejected by Ramallah.

Last month, when Biden left the region for home, it remained unclear as to whether the current US president will be making any meaningful contribution to Middle East peace – either by design or by folly.

MEMRI: Hamas Member: We Should Consider A Three- To Five-Year 'Hudna' (Truce) Between Israel And The Resistance In Gaza

In an article published August 10, 2022 in the Palestinian Al-Quds daily, Hamas member Ahmad Yousuf, a former advisor to Hamas political bureau head Isma'il Haniyeh, called for an internationally sponsored three- to five-year hudna (truce) between Israel and the Gaza resistance factions.[1]

Yousuf stated that because Gaza is currently weak and besieged, the Palestinian resistance should recognize its diplomatic failures in the Arab and international arena and consider the option of a hudna instead of the recurring ceasefires after conflicts in which Israel always has the upper hand.

Such a hudna, he wrote, would give the Palestinians a chance to catch their breath, and at the same time allow the resistance to reexamine its military and diplomatic options and come up with a policy that is acceptable to the general Palestinian public. He also suggested that the one-state option be examined, which he said could give the moral high ground to the Palestinian people's struggle and gain Western support for their cause.

Defining the recent Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ)-Israel conflict as a political stratagem hatched by Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid and Defense Minister Benny Ganz as part of their election campaign, he said that the PIJ had been dragged into a battle in which Israel set the rules of the clash and inflicted a decisive blow on the PIJ.

Below are excerpts from Yousuf's article.
"There is nothing to prevent Israelis from firing on Palestinians whenever and however they wish. It is already customary, during election campaign seasons [in Israel], to provoke the Palestinians in order to drag them into a military conflict. [These conflicts are] political investments by those in Israel's ruling circles and decision-making [centers]. Furthermore, the [candidates'] rivalry in spouting extreme slogans and [making] security threats eventually reaches the battlefield, and serves as a standard for a particular candidate's ability to maintain security – an issue that is generally a decisive factor [in the choice] between the most important contenders on the right and the extreme right for the governmental and political leadership in Israel...

"If we look at the most recent military conflict, between the Israeli occupation army and the Islamic Jihad movement [PIJ] in the Gaza Strip – in an arena set up by [Yair] Lapid and [Benny] Ganz – we clearly see that the [pre-conflict] tension emanated from [Israel's] fraud and provocation against the PIJ through its arrest and direct humiliation of [West Bank PIJ official] Sheikh Bassam Al-Saadi. This was a stratagem hatched by those who lust after the premiership in the November elections – that is, Yair [Lapid] and [Benny] Ganz...

"We cannot ignore the fact that Israel landed a painful blow against the PIJ and [its military wing] the Al-Quds Brigades by striking the movement's two most important military figures in the Gaza Strip – Tayseer Al-Jabari and Khaled Mansour – and other officials... This was in addition to the destruction of many military targets – that is, PIJ outposts and property.

"Iran Pushing the Violence from Gaza, Israeli Defense Minister Warns"

Iran is driving the escalation of violence against Israel from the Gaza Strip, Defense Minister Benny Gantz warned, saying that the Islamic Jihad terror organization “has an open tab in Iran.”

Gantz hosted his Cypriot counterpart Minister of Defense Charalambos Petrides on Thursday in Tel Aviv and the two discussed “common challenges and reflected on the implications” of the IDF’s Operation Breaking Dawn against the Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip over the weekend.

During a press conference held together with Petrides, Gantz said that “while the world watched ‘another escalation between Israel and Gaza,’ I stopped to emphasize: the Iranian Ayatollahs are involved in this front. Islamic Jihad in Gaza is a violent Iranian proxy. Their leadership visits Iran and meets Iranian leaders frequently.”

Islamic Jihad head Ziyad al-Nakhalah was in Tehran over the weekend, as the members of his terror organization launched about 1,100 rockets into Israeli cities and towns, including toward Tel Aviv and the Jerusalem area, over the course of 55 hours.

The Islamic Jihad “has an open tab in Iran. Iran provides Islamic Jihad in Gaza with tens of millions of dollars per year. Iran, via the IRGC [Revolutionary Guards], transfers know-how and attempts to smuggle materials to Gaza, which are then used to build weapons aimed at civilians,” Gantz underscored.

The Islamic Jihad enjoys extensive material backing from Iran in their arming efforts, which has provided millions of dollars in funding, as well as training and weapons. Israeli intelligence sources are quoted as saying that Islamic Jihad has an annual budget of $70 million, most of which is provided by Iran in payments made via money changers and supposed welfare organizations.

After the fighting, Gazans go right back to the beach

Al Resalah's headline is, "Palestinians enjoying their time on the seashore of Gaza City after life returned to normal and the Israeli aggression stopped."

Nearly all of Gaza was untouched by Israeli weapons, and the Gazans know it, even though the Israel haters (in Western and Arab media) try to pretend that there was massive devastation and permanent psychological damage.