Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, August 26, 2022

08/26 Links Pt2: The Jewish and intellectual origins of this famously non-Jewish Jew; Ottawa's approach to anti-racism like asking Big Tobacco to cure cancer

Alexander Pechersky Led a Successful Prisoner Revolt at the Sobibor Death Camp. His Extraordinary Story is Also That of Millions of Soviet Jews.

In November of 2018, at the National Arts Club in New York City, I attended a screening for the film Sobibor, which was described in the program as “First Russian Oscar Contender About Holocaust” (sic). The screening was part of a promotional campaign to secure a nomination in the best foreign film category, and was presented by the film’s producers, along with the Alexander Pechersky Foundation and the Russian American Foundation. Annexed to the auditorium where the screening was to happen was a small exhibition about Alexander “Sasha” Pechersky and the uprising he led at the Sobibor concentration camp, which was the subject of the film.

Konstantin Khabensky, the film’s star and director, had come to the screening from Russia. A panel of historians and experts was convened. The audience consisted of members of the local Jewish community and the Jewish press, not a few of them Russian-speaking. A group of elderly Russian Jewish war veterans, some in uniform, all decorated with their medals, were seated near the front of the room. Among them was a woman who wore a yellow star button on her blouse to identify her as a Holocaust survivor.

In opening remarks, a scholar of Soviet Holocaust cinema commended the producers for making a Russian film about the Holocaust, a suppressed subject for most of the Soviet period. In fact, any acknowledgment of the unique nature of the tragedy experienced by Soviet Jews in painting, sculpture, poetry, fiction, history, public monuments and other forms of remembrance was practically forbidden. In a nation that suffered so profoundly, with as many as 27 million citizens perishing during the war, the official position was that it was wrong to divide the victims. At sites of mass killings, if there was any commemoration at all, it memorialized “peaceful Soviet citizens” who had died at the hands of “the German occupiers.” Sobibor might therefore be regarded as the Russian equivalent to Schindler’s List.

Films are subjective things and it’s not my intention to engage in criticism of a film released two years ago. Also, the quality of the film is of negligible importance to the larger story of Alexander Pechersky’s life and legacy. But there were many people in the auditorium who were moved to tears by the film, gasped at acts of brutality or laughed at an incident of comeuppance against the Nazis, just like they were watching a regular movie. Unless they’d read the literature about Sobibor and Pechersky, none could have detected the places where the film departed from historical fact, though a partial list would include: Leon Feldhendler (spelled “Felhendler” in recently-discovered archival documents), one of the leaders of the camp underground, wasn’t killed during the revolt; Pechersky didn’t carry the corpse of a young woman named Luka out of the camp in his arms; a Nazi named Frenzel wasn’t shot by Pechersky; there was no crematorium smokestack in Sobibor; and Shlomo Szmajzner, a young Polish prisoner, didn’t, as the end titles assert, hunt down and kill Gustav Wagner, perhaps the camp’s most notoriously brutal SS officer, and 17 other Nazis in Brazil.

At the conclusion of the film, one audience member did inquire about historical accuracy, in response to which the gathered historians offered a general defense of the artist’s right to bend documentary truth for the sake of the emotional one. The Holocaust survivor, a small but pugnacious woman in the Russian Jewish mold, rose to praise the film, which she had now watched for the second time, though it caused her pain in every cell in her body. “Never again!” she proclaimed. One of the veterans took the floor and affirmed that the film showed what had happened in his generation and hoped it would serve as a lesson for the future. He proceeded to make some observations about Arab aggression and, after meeting with a mixed response, resumed his seat.

Nobody in the audience subjected the film to the kind of scrutiny it met in the more exacting corners of the Russian Internet. A widely circulated op-ed written by a commentator on Garry Kasparov’s website accused the filmmakers, and by extension the Russian state, of evading the truth about Sobibor and the heroes it pretended to celebrate: Where was the reference to the Soviet citizens who filled the ranks of the camp guards? What of the local population’s complicity with the Nazis? How about the Soviet Union’s merciless attitude toward its own POWs? And might they have spared a word about the tribulations Pechersky experienced after the war on account of both his captivity and his ethnicity?

Attack on Rushdie mirrors 1925 killing of writer who satirized Vienna antisemitism

Hadi Matar, the man charged with the attempted murder of the distinguished novelist Salman Rushdie, admitted that he had only “read like two pages” of “The Satanic Verses,” Rushdie’s 1988 novel that angered fundamentalist Muslims around the world. Iran’s former Supreme Leader, Ayatalloh Ruhollah Khomeini, who announced a fatwa calling on all Muslims to murder Rushdie in 1989, hadn’t read it at all.

“The Satanic Verses” wasn’t the first – and won’t be the last – novel to provoke the rage of a fanatic who has no grasp of literature’s nuances.

In 1922, an Austrian writer named Hugo Bettauer published a novel set in Vienna called “The City Without Jews.” It sold a quarter of a million copies and became known internationally, with an English translation issued in London and New York. A silent movie adaptation, which has recently been recovered and restored, appeared in the summer of 1924. The following spring, a young Nazi burst into Bettauer’s office and shot him multiple times. The author died of his wounds two weeks later.

A novel published in a polarized city
As in the US today, there was a major gap between rich and poor in early 20th-century Vienna.

The impressive architecture of the inner city sheltered immense wealth, while there was desperate poverty in the working-class districts beyond. The opulence of the banks and department stores, the culture of the theaters and opera house – especially in the predominantly Jewish district of Leopoldstadt – inevitably stirred deep resentment.

In the years immediately preceding World War I, populist mayor Karl Lueger saw his opportunity: He could win votes by blaming every problem on the Jews. Many a Jewish refugee would later say that the antisemitism in Vienna was worse than Berlin’s. An impoverished painter living in a public dormitory in a poor district to the north of Leopoldstadt was inspired to build a new ideology following Lueger’s blueprint. His name was Adolf Hitler.

Gil Troy: The Jewish and intellectual origins of this famously non-Jewish Jew

Editor’s note: Excerpted from the new three-volume set, “Theodor Herzl: Zionist Writings,” the inaugural publication of The Library of the Jewish People edited by Gil Troy, to be published this August marking the 125th anniversary of the First Zionist Congress. This is the second article in a series. The first in the series is available here.

Theodor Herzl was born on May 2, 1860, in Pest, Hungary, across the River Danube from Buda. The second child and only son of a successful businessman, Jakob, he was raised to fit in to the elegant, sophisticated society his family and a fraction of his people had fought so hard to enter. But it is too easy to caricature his upbringing as fully emancipated and assimilated.

His paternal grandfather, Simon Loeb Herzl, came from Semlin, today’s Zemun, now incorporated into Belgrade. There, Simon befriended Rabbi Judah ben Solomon Chai Alkalai. This prominent Sephardic leader was an early Zionist, scarred by the crude anti-Semitism of the Damascus Blood Libel of 1840, inspired by the old-new Greek War of Independence in the 1820s—and energized by the spiritual and agricultural possibilities of returning the Jews to their natural habitat, their homeland in the Land of Israel. It is plausible that the grandfather conveyed some of those ideas, some of that excitement, to his grandson.

Still, the move from Semlin to Budapest, from poverty to wealth, from intense Jewish living in the ghetto to emancipated European ways in the city, placed the Herzl family at the intersection of many of his era’s defining currents.

The 1800s were years of change—and of isms. Creative ideas erupted amid the disruptions of industrialization, urbanization and capitalism. Three defining ideologies were rationalism, liberalism and nationalism—with each one shaping the next. The Age of Reason, the Enlightenment—science itself—rose thanks to rationalism. Life was no longer organized around believing in God and serving your king, but following logic, facts, objective truth. The logic of reason flowed naturally to liberalism, an expansive political ideology rooted in recognizing every individual’s inherent rights. Finally, as polities became less God-and-king-centered, nationalism filled in the God-sized hole in many people’s hearts. Individuals bonded based on their common heritage, language, ethnicity, or regional pride—and needs.

Ideas are not static. In an ideological age rippling with such dramatic changes, the different isms kept colliding and fusing, like atoms becoming molecular compounds. Some combinations proved more stable—and constructive—than others.

Liberalism combined with nationalism created Americanism, the democratic model wherein individual rights flourished in a collective context yielding the liberal-democratic nation-state. An offshoot of liberalism emphasizing equality more than rights fused with rationalism and created Marxism, although Karl Marx admitted his theories could only be enacted with irrational terror. Marxism with that violent streak, drained of liberalism, became communism, while a hyper-nationalism, rooted in blood-and-soil loyalty, and the kind of Marxist rationalism and totalitarianism also drained of any liberalism, created Nazism.

Fisking Peter Beinart's propaganda, again

I have noted before that Peter Beinart is a master propagandist. He carefully frames his arguments in ways that sound reasonable unless you understand the facts as well as his methodology.

Today he writes in the New York Times that those who accuse Israel bashers of antisemitism are wrong.

Let's look at his arguments:

Over the past 18 months, America’s most prominent Jewish organizations have done something extraordinary. They have accused the world’s leading human rights organizations of promoting hatred of Jews.

Last April, after Human Rights Watch issued a report accusing Israel of “the crimes of apartheid and persecution,” the American Jewish Committee claimed that the report’s arguments “sometimes border on antisemitism.” In January, after Amnesty International issued its own study alleging that Israel practiced apartheid, the Anti-Defamation League predicted that it “likely will lead to intensified antisemitism.” The A.J.C. and A.D.L. also published a statement with four other well-known American Jewish groups that didn’t just accuse the report of being biased and inaccurate, but also claimed that Amnesty’s report “fuels those antisemites around the world who seek to undermine the only Jewish country on Earth.”

These examples are all accurate. It is almost absurd to argue that one-sided, lying accusations against Israel do not stoke antisemitism. But Beinart tries:

Defenders of repressive governments often try to discredit the human rights groups that criticize them. A month before the A.J.C. accused Human Rights Watch of flirting with antisemitism, the Chinese Communist Party newspaper Global Times accused it of being “anti-China.” In 2019 a spokesman for Iran accused Amnesty of being “biased” against that country. In this age of rising authoritarianism, it’s not surprising that human rights watchdogs face mounting attacks. What’s surprising is that America’s most influential Jewish groups are taking part.

The fact that bad people sometimes do the same things as good people doesn't make good people bad. Beinart doesn't say this explicitly, of course, but he is trying to make the reader equate China's defenders with Israel's, which is unconscionable.

Although supportive of Israel’s existence, America’s leading Jewish groups did not make it the center of their work in the mid-20th century. And when they did focus on Israel, they often tried to bring its behavior in line with their broader liberal democratic goals. The A.J.C. repeatedly criticized Israel for discriminating against its Palestinian Arab citizens. In 1960 the head of the group’s Israel Committee explained that it hoped to eliminate “antidemocratic practices and attitudes” in the Jewish state so the organization could more credibly “invoke principles of human rights and practices in our country and abroad.”

This is deceptive on a number of levels.

The AJC had a history of being non-Zionist - sympathetic to Zionism but not explicitly supportive. Other American Jewish organizations, like the American Jewish Congress and the Zionist Organization of America, were more supportive.

By 1960, the AJC realized that the American Jewish community wanted a more Zionist message from them. They therefore decided to open up an office in Israel, but - as Beinart's link shows! - there was still an undercurrent of resentment at Israel starting to take center stage in world Jewry. The entire quote, which Beinart knows most people won't look up, says:

This was not a mainstream American Jewish attitude, as Beinart pretends. American Jews were heavily Zionist in this timeframe - after all, this was the time of Leon Uris' and Paul Newman's book and movie Exodus. He is lying, knowing the NYT won't call him on it.

This began to change after the 1967 war. Israel’s conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip made it master over roughly a million stateless Palestinians, which fueled anger at the Jewish state from leftists in the United States and around the world. At the same time, assimilation was leading many progressive American Jews to exit organized Jewish life, which left Jewish groups with a more conservative base as they searched for a new agenda now that civil rights for Black Americans had become law.

The result was an ideological transformation. In 1974, two A.D.L. leaders wrote a book arguing that Jews were increasingly menaced by a “new antisemitism,” directed not against individual Jews but against the Jewish state. Almost a half-century later, that premise now dominates mainstream organized American Jewish life.

The term "new antisemitism" started in the 1960s, before the Six Day War, as Soviet antisemitism that hid as anti-Zionism became mainstream. The book Beinart references also talks about Arab antisemitism, which is undeniable - and therefore ignored by Leftists like Beinart. In other words, the new antisemitism is quite real and well documented, and not a made-up concept from conservative Jewish Americans like Beinart implies.

But NYT readers would believe Beinart's alternate history.

Largely as a result of lobbying by Jewish organizations, the American government has embraced the proposition, too. The State Department now employs a definition of antisemitism whose examples include opposing Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. This year the Senate confirmed Deborah Lipstadt — a historian best known for fighting Holocaust denial — to be the Biden administration’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism. Ms. Lipstadt has said that Israel’s “continued holding of the West Bank is problematic,” but when asked at her confirmation hearing about Amnesty’s report accusing Israel of apartheid, Ms. Lipstadt claimed that the report’s language was “part of a larger effort to delegitimize the Jewish state” and thus “poisons the atmosphere, particularly for Jewish students” on college campuses. In 2018 several Palestinian members of the Knesset tried to introduce legislation that would grant Palestinians equal citizenship rather than what the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem calls “Jewish supremacy.” According to America’s most prominent Jewish organizations and the U.S. government, this kind of call for equal citizenship constituted bigotry.

No. Saying that the Jewish people have no right to self determination is bigotry. Saying that the Jewish state has no right to exist is bigotry. No one says that Arab Israelis (not "Palestinians") demanding equal rights is bigotry. That is more Beinart doubletalk.

Now that any challenge to Jewish statehood is met with charges of bigotry against Jews, prominent American Jewish organizations and their allies in the U.S. government have made the fight against antisemitism into a vehicle not for defending human rights but for denying them. Most Palestinians exist as second-class citizens in Israel proper or as stateless noncitizens in the territories Israel occupied in 1967 or live beyond Israel’s borders because they or their descendants were expelled or fled and were not permitted to return.

Israeli Arab citizens are not second class citizens, although discrimination still exists like it does everywhere else. And Palestinian non-citizens are not...citizens. They can make peace with Israel tomorrow and create their own state. The only reason they haven't is because they do not accept the Jewish state's very existence - which is, indeed, antisemitism.

And make no mistake - the unanimous support for Mahmoud Abbas' Holocaust trivialization this past week shows that Palestinian anti-Zionism is just a cover for old fashioned Jew-hate. Which is another topic Beinart doesn't want his readers to know about.

But the campaign against antisemitism is being deployed to justify not merely the violation of Palestinian human rights. As relations have warmed between Israel and the monarchies of the Persian Gulf, American officials have begun using the struggle against antisemitism to shield those regimes from human rights pressure, too. In June, Ms. Lipstadt met the Saudi ambassador in Washington and celebrated “our shared objectives of overcoming intolerance and hate.” From there she flew to Saudi Arabia, where she met its minister of Islamic affairs and affirmed, once again, “our shared goals of promoting tolerance and combating hate.” In the United Arab Emirates she sat down with the country’s foreign minister, whom she declared a “sincere partner in our shared goals of” — you guessed it — “promoting tolerance and fighting hate.”

This is nonsense. According to a report this year by Freedom House, a human rights think tank funded largely by the U.S. government, Saudi Arabia is more repressive than Iran. The United Arab Emirates is more repressive than Russia. And although Ms. Lipstadt declared that her visits to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi left her “heartened by changes underway in parts of the Middle East,” both countries, according to Freedom House, are more oppressive than they were in 2017. Less than two months after she lauded the Saudi monarchy’s tolerance, it sentenced a member of the country’s persecuted Shiite minority to 34 years in prison for Twitter activity critical of the government.

When it comes to their own disenfranchised populations, Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. are as intolerant as ever.

Again, Beinart is hiding the truth. No one is supporting Saudi or Emirati human rights violations, and to claim that Zionists do is nothing short of slander. His main lie is that last sentence - that they are as intolerant as ever.

The fact that there is a rabbi in Saudi Arabia and synagogues in the UAE prove that the truth is the opposite. Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE, for all their many faults - and not to minimize those faults - have changed course dramatically in recent years as far as tolerance goes.

And Israel is accelerating their slow march towards a more Western-oriented position, where human rights is a factor in their decision making.

Are they free societies? Not at all. But to disparage their positive changes is not a pro-human rights position.

Beinart's premise is wrong, his examples are cherry-picked and deceptive, and his framing and methodology is nothing less than that of the best antisemitic propagandists in history.

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!

08/26 Links Pt1: Phillips: Apoplexy greets Israel’s move against terror NGOs; UNRWA says it faces existential threat as UN prepares to renew mandate; Palestinian brutality funded by Britain

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Apoplexy greets Israel’s move against terror NGOs

So “human rights” NGOs are a key weapon in the diplomatic and political war of attrition aimed at Israel’s destruction. That’s why Human Rights Watch is intimately involved in the Pillay commission set up by the United Nations as a kangaroo court to declare Israel a supreme violator of human rights.

And that’s why a letter disseminated by Human Rights Watch and signed by ten like-minded groups called the Israeli action “an assault on the basic human rights of Palestinians to assemble and organize freely and an example of the Israeli government’s weaponization of ‘counterterrorism laws’ in its relentless attacks against civil society activists.”

Thus much was entirely predictable. But the reaction of the Biden administration raises additional questions.

For unlike the European Union, the United States hasn’t funded any of the NGOs in question. So although it hasn’t actually repudiated Israel’s claims, why has it called into question Israeli intelligence?

The president of NGO Monitor, Professor Gerald Steinberg, offers two reasons. The groups in question, he says, are heroes to progressive Democrats for championing “human rights” against Israel. To acknowledge the reality would create a major backlash from those for whom the Palestinians can do no wrong and Israel can do no right.

Moreover, in the diplomatic realm, the Biden administration needs European cooperation on a number of global issues. Ukraine, China and Iran are obvious examples. “There is nothing to be gained by being caught between Israel and Europe on the ostensibly minor issue of partnerships with Palestinian NGOs,” Steinberg told me.

This last point accords with Blinken’s own response to the row over the NGOs. The Guardian reported: “According to a federal government source, Blinken has shied away from the issue of the designations since Israel announced them. ‘The secretary himself said basically: this isn’t something we want to touch too much.’ ”

This sheds an intriguing light on the Biden administration’s attitude towards Israel—for it shows that America cannot act alone. It needs European support.

To grasp the significance of this, try turning it around. Suppose the E.U. countries were passionate supporters of Israel and determined to call a halt to Palestinian violence and blackmail. Suppose they reacted to Israel’s blacklist by cutting off all European aid to these NGOs and denouncing their abuse of human-rights culture.

In those circumstances, the Biden administration would feel unable to cast doubt on Israeli intelligence. It would also find it far less easy to side with and empower Israel’s enemies in Ramallah—or in Tehran, as it is now doing.

In reality, the E.U. funds many groups that operate against Israel in the diplomatic sphere, as well as helping fund illegal Arab settlements in the disputed territories and in the Negev.

Just as those trying to resist evil are disempowered if they find themselves acting alone, so too those perpetrating evil can only succeed if others support them.

In their animus against Israel, the Biden administration and the countries of Western Europe draw sustenance from each other. That’s the poisonous nest that was revealed when Israeli forces in Ramallah last week lifted the stone.

EU's reverence for the PA: Old habits die hard

THE ISRAELI government and real human rights organizations like NGO Monitor clearly have demonstrated that the outlawed groups “constitute a network of organizations active undercover on the international front on behalf of the PFLP to support its activity and to further its goals.”

The foreign government funding received by these groups has been utilized to pay “martyr” wages for activists, for PFLP activity in Jerusalem, and for distribution of the organization’s messages and ideology. And there are at least 70 Palestinian staff and board members who hold positions in both the NGOs and the PFLP.

Just one example: The 50-person strong PFLP terror cell responsible for the murder of 17-year-old Rina Shnerb, among others, included numerous members of these same government-funded NGOs. For instance, UAWC’s “accountant,” Samir Irbid, was responsible for commanding the PFLP terror cell that carried out the bombing.

It is therefore both laughable and intolerable that European governments are decrying the Israeli decision to designate the groups as terrorist supporters. European politicians and government bureaucrats have known for years that the six organizations have links to the PFLP terror group.

The even worse dirty European secret is that these groups, whether you might consider them “terrorist-supporting” or not, are the worst anti-Israel actors, who have vehemently attacked Israel, every minute of the day, as an “apartheid state,” “war criminal enterprise,” and “illegal entity” going back to 1948. It’s clear that they seek the complete dissolution of Israel. That, of course, hasn’t stopped the EU from investing heavily in them.

Overall, the European behavior described above – insolence toward Israel alongside reverence for Palestinians – explains why Palestinian leaders do not understand that they will have to compromise to reach an agreement with Israel. On the contrary. The Palestinians can safely assume that their demand for a state on the 1967 lines (or thereabouts) is absolute “revealed truth,” and in the meantime, they can rely on the EU to isolate, vilify, boycott and criminalize Israel.

Meanwhile, dictating impatiently to Israel is in vogue. Therefore, for example, the EU is single-mindedly determined to put a stop to the real fronts of radicalism – like EU scholarships for Hebrew University students who live in Efrat or Ma’aleh Adumim. After all, these students, and their professors (who might also, God forbid, live in the Old City of “oPt” Jerusalem), are the more salient threats to peace in the region.

The EU is perfectly happy to continue lavishing funds on the most anti-Israel “human rights” groups like the seven listed above, but EU commissars are determined not to indirectly fund any more scientific research or to abet productive commercial activity by Israelis who live or work over the Green Line. They won’t allow wine or plastic chairs produced in Judea and Samaria to be sold in Paris or Brussels without a yellow star of Jewish “occupation” opprobrium.

In the warped weltanschauung of the European Union, it is logical to diss Israel – in 20-person-strong ambassadorial mobs up in Jerusalem – while coddling the Palestinians. Old habits, it seems, die hard. European countries have a historic knack for judging Jews, restricting Jews to specific pales of settlement, and labeling them – while lauding their enemies.

Palestinian brutality funded by Britain

Palestinian thugs who beat a leading critic of Mahmoud Abbas’s regime to death were members of a security force trained by the British Army at taxpayer’s expense, a JC investigation has revealed.

Fourteen members of the Palestinian Authority’s Preventive Security Organisation (PSO) were caught on CCTV kidnapping human rights campaigner Nizar Banat in June 2021, in footage obtained in full by the JC.

3.17am: Thugs from the Palestinian Authority’s Preventive Security Organisation arrive at the flat where political activist Nizar Banat has been staying. They break in using a hammer and a crowbar

The aspiring politician was targeted after he highlighted the corruption of the Palestinian leadership on Facebook and other platforms. The footage shows them bundling him into a car and later carrying his partly-clothed body into their security headquarters.

Britain has been training and supporting Abbas’s security services since 2011 at a cost of more than £65 million to the taxpayer, raising serious questions about Whitehall’s judgment.

3.22am: Banat is badly injured from hammer blows and pepper spray. Security men bundle him into the back of a stolen VW Polo with his hands cuffed behind his back. Later an official will claim he ‘deserved to die’

Palestinian activists have accused the UK of turning a blind eye to the systematic use of torture and widespread human rights abuse on the West Bank.

Diala Ayesh, a human rights lawyer and friend of the victim — who has herself been beaten and sexually abused by PA thugs — said:

“You [British] say you support human rights, but when I see the atrocities the PA is creating, I say you must stop paying your money. This isn’t just on my country. It’s on yours.”

By Daled Amos

Ben & Jerry's was in the news again this week, as a federal judge rejected their attempt to prevent their parent company, Unilever, from allowing their ice cream from being sold in Judea and Samaria -- or as Ben & Jerry's prefers to call it: "Occupied Palestinian Territory."

Just a little over a year ago, they formally joined the BDS movement when the company announced they would no longer sell their ice cream in the West Bank.

Just last month, Ben & Jerry's found themselves accused of being hypocrites for claiming it was inconsistent with their values for their ice cream to be sold "on occupied land" while they themselves based their headquarters on tribal Indian land -- according to a letter signed by over a thousand Israeli students and academics affiliated with Students for Justice in America, with the support of Shurat HaDin.

The New York Post covered the story: Israeli students accuse Ben & Jerry's of occupying tribal land:

Israeli students claim that ice cream maker Ben & Jerry’s is “illegally” occupying land in Vermont that once belonged to a Abenaki native American tribe and should practice what it preaches and immediately evacuate the properties.

...“We have concluded that your company’s occupation of the Abenaki lands is illegal and we believe it is wholly inconsistent with the stated values that Ben & Jerry’s purports to maintain. Ironically, in July of the last year you announced that you would discontinue the sale of your products in Israel because you object to the Jewish State allegedly occupying Palestinian territories,” the letter to B&J’s chairperson, Anuradha Mittal said.

This double standard had already been noticed just a few days after Ben & Jerry's original announcement last year, by lawyer Stephen Flatow:

Ever hear of the Abenaki Tribe?

Neither did I, until the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream company this week started accusing Jews of illegally occupying other people’s territory, and I got curious about whose territory Ben & Jerry’s is occupying.

After all, if you’re going to go around calling other people “occupiers,” well, you better not be an “occupier” yourself, right? I mean, wouldn’t that be just the height of hypocrisy?

Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield launched their business empire in 1978 by setting up an ice cream parlor in Burlington, Vermont. Today, the headquarters of their multi-billion-dollar enterprise is located in South Burlington.

It’s a safe bet that neither Ben nor Jerry ever asked permission from the territory’s original inhabitants. Like most white, imperialist, colonialist settlers, they just moved in and did what they wanted, the natives be damned.

The natives, in this case, were the Abenakis, a proud, peaceful group of indigenous tribes who had been living in that part of the country since forever... [emphasis added]

Yet not everyone had ignored the issue of the Abenaki's rightful place on the land. Legal Insurrection notes that just 3 miles from the Ben & Jerry's headquarters in Burlington, Vermont, the University of Vermont features a land acknowledgment on their site that -- unlike Ben & Jerry's -- formally recognizes the history of the Abenaki and their historical connection to the land:

The UVM HESA Program acknowledges that the University of Vermont rests upon the traditional territory of the original inhabitants of this land – the Abenaki people – and the State of Vermont now occupies the lands of the Mahican and Pennacook tribes. We acknowledge that Indigenous Peoples were forced to leave Vermont during the 1600’s, and eastern tribes were displaced by colonial expansion.

The university goes on to note records indicating that in addition to efforts to force them off their land, during the early 20th century, the Abenaki were also subjected to forced pregnancy terminations and more than 3,400 of them were sterilized. They faced attempts to physically reduce their numbers, the kind of physical threats that Jews too have faced in their history.

As Jeff Benay testified in 2010, during testimony for recognition of the Abenaki by the state of Vermont:

As noted by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, “The Vermont Eugenics Survey of 1925 and the sterilization law of 1931, which were intended to anglicize the state’s population, identified the Abenaki as undesirable – along with Catholics, such as French Canadians, Irish, and Italians; Jews, the poor; the mentally ill; and criminals.”

Interestingly, Benay notes that while the tribe was recognized by the state governor in 1976, it was rescinded the following year by the next governor.

The reason?

The new governor said that he could not give recognition to a “sovereign nation within a sovereign state” -- a problem that Jews are very familiar with over the centuries, having been told that they could not be fully accepted because they constituted "a people within a people."

Another parallel between the Abenaki and Jews is the attempt to rob each of their history. One of the hurdles placed in the way of the Abenaki was meeting the Federal definition of "tribe" before they could be recognized as indigenous. According to the Federal government, they had to prove that they were an autonomous and existing entity since colonial times -- a test that the Abenaki could not pass to the government's satisfaction.

As Abenaki activist Fred Wiseman put it:

They said the Abenakis were genetic, political, and cultural fakes.

How often have we seen antisemitic attacks accusing Jews of something similar -- of being descended from Khazars or of having no historical and cultural connection to the land Israel?

Apparently, during the American Revolution, the Abenaki retreated north into Quebec, to the extent that 2 centuries later they “were indistinguishable from the general population in Vermont.” In other words, their skin color was white. Not only could they not be visibly identifiable as Indians, they also hid their Indian identity from the Census Bureau.

Again, a point of comparison:

It’s happened before. In 15th Century Spain, Jews converted to avoid getting burned at the stake, lived outwardly Christian lives, but secretly observed Jewish rituals at home.

Wiseman sums up the situation that the Abenaki face:

Whatever happens, the Abenaki will once again be defined by others. Indians don’t have the right to self-identify. We have to be recognized by white people.

This again is a situation that Jews are very familiar with, where others get to define what can be considered antisemitism, antisemites lecture us about what Zionism is and international agencies assume the authority to give our cultural heritage away to others.

Ultimately, what ties the Abenaki and Jews together is that they are both indigenous peoples, born in their respective lands with historical and cultural ties to it.

And both have struggled to return to their land and have their connection to it recognized.

In this, the Jews have been extraordinarily successful after thousands of years. And that is a problem for some.

According to the UNHCR Resettlement Handbook:

Indigenous groups are descendants of the peoples who inhabited land or territory prior to colonization or the establishment of state borders. They often have strong attachment to their ancestral lands and natural resources, an attribute that can distinguish them from other minority groups. They may also have distinct social, economic and political systems, languages, cultures and beliefs. Their right to self-determination has frequently been impeded by subsequent migration of other ethnic groups into the territory where they reside.

Indigeneity is defined, in part, in the context of colonization. That may be helpful to the Abenaki, but in the case of the re-establishment of Israel, enemies of the Jewish State accuse Jews of being the colonists. Yet the distinct social, political, language, culture and belief systems of the Palestinian Arabs originate in Arabia -- and are not indigenous to Judea.

But because the definition of indigeneity is made in the context of being a victim of colonialism, the history of the Arab invasion and conquest of the land is forgotten and they are held up as the native population in the face of the return of Jews to their home.

The world is just not ready for indigenous populations that successfully re-establish their home.

Ben & Jerry's can glibly explain to an interviewer the rightness of their refusing to sell their ice cream in Judea and Samaria, but when challenged as to why they sell their ice cream to areas in the US where there are problems with human rights issues -- the 2 men are totally dumbfounded:

It seems likely that Ben & Jerry's will not be recognizing the indigenous rights of either the Abenaki nor of Jews in the near future.

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On Thursday, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini gave a statement to the UN Security Council saying, as the agency has said every year for decades, that it is in existential danger.

There is plenty UNRWA can do to cut costs, though.

For example, it can close nearly all of its operations in Jordan, with some 2 million so-called refugees. The vast majority of them are Jordanian citizens, and UNRWA has never explained why it is needed to provide services like schooling and free medical care to people who are full citizens of Jordan, and who are not refugees by any definition. Why should Palestinian children in Jordan attend different schools from other Jordanians? Why should they get free housing in "camps" when they have the same opportunities as other Jordanians?

The UNRWA recipients who live in the West Bank and Gaza are not refugees either - after all, they live in the areas of British Mandate Palestine. To call the descendants of those who left from the pre-1967 borders of Israel "refugees" is insane, but it is even crazier to consider them "internally displaced persons" after 73 years. They are citizens of "The State of Palestine." They have passports recognized by most countries. They should be taken care of by their own governments of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas; there is no reason for UNRWA to exist there.

Lazzarini touched upon how UNRWA's Lebanon "refugees" are emigrating to Europe. What he didn't mention is that most of the "registered refugees" have already left, but UNRWA still counts them as people they are helping. UNRWA claims to be helping 479,000 "refugees" in Lebanon, when the actual number is 300,000 less. Hundreds of thousands of UNRWA "registered refugees" live in Europe or the US but UNRWA still claims them as their own. This would be considered a scandal for any other publicly funded institution.

Also left unsaid is why the UN is responsible for the education, housing and medical care of Palestinians - but no other groups. They spout slogans to justify their existence like "Education is a right" - but why does the world have to pay for that right for Palestinians and not for suffering people anywhere else?

Lazzarini did mention the people like me who point out these issues and topics that he avoids answering. "Coordinated campaigns to delegitimize UNRWA with a view to erode the rights of Palestine refugees are increasing in frequency and in maliciousness," he told the Security Council. I didn't know that the many critics of UNRWA throughout the decades were part of a "coordinated campaign." This is Elders of Zion-level conspiracy thinking.

Lazzarini also said, "Shifting geopolitical priorities, shifting regional dynamics, and the emergence of new humanitarian crises have deprioritized the Israeli- Palestinian conflict." In plain English, this means that even though the world has much bigger problems and crises to deal with, it must prioritize Palestinians above all of them - because if they were given the priority commensurate with their actual importance, the UNRWA budget would plummet.

And that is the key issue. UNRWA's existence implies that Palestinian "refugees" are more important, more desperate, needier, poorer, and hungrier than any other refugees and any current victims of war. By any objective measure, they are in better shape than the citizens of many poor countries. The vast majority do not meet the definition of "refugee" in the Refugee Convention.

UNRWA was created to be a temporary agency. Lazzarini's appeal is to ensure that it remains permanent, and that it continues to grow unimpeded, forever.

It is up to the world that created UNRWA to create a plan to phase it out.

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Abbas declares a state of emergency for Covid, which hasn't been a problem at all. No one questions him.

From the official Palestinian Wafa news agency:

President Mahmoud Abbas today declared a 30-day state of emergency in Palestine to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

The state of emergency was first declared in March 2020 after the discovery of the first cases of coronavirus in the Palestinian territories.

The state of emergency gives the government the power to act in any way it deems necessary to combat the pandemic.

I have not seen any articles about a new wave of Covid-19 in the West Bank. There has been a slight uptick in the last couple of weeks, but the rate is way below Israel's. At its recent peak there have been two deaths a week.

As far as I can tell, he is not automatically extending an old state of emergency every 30 days. According to Xinhua:

The state of emergency was first declared in March 2020 after the discovery of the first coronavirus cases in the Palestinian territories. It was last extended or re-declared in January this year, local media reported.

Under the state of emergency, the government is empowered to take any step it deems necessary to fight the pandemic.

I cannot find a single Palestinian news site that questioned this announcement. They just parroted it. They didn't even elaborate on it, showing a rise in cases or in deaths.

And on Mahmoud Abbas' Facebook page, the announcement was greeted with Soviet-style unanimous praise for his great insight and wisdom:

If there was a free press, people would be asking questions why Abbas just added emergency powers on top of his already dictatorial powers over the executive, judicial and legislative branches of Palestinian government.

World leaders and media still treat the Palestinian president and his government as if they are rational leaders. If anyone would read their own media and government websites for a couple of weeks with a critical eye, the levels of dysfunction would be obvious. And there is something very rotten about this "state of emergency."

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08/25 Links Pt2: The Mass Appeal of ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ Persists; Anti-Israel journalists cover up the Palestinians’ murder of numerous Americans

From Ian:

Anti-Israel journalists cover up the Palestinians’ murder of numerous Americans

Who are the primary victims of the bloodlust supposedly uncovered by The Intercept and Le Monde?

One is Rachel Corrie, a young woman originally from Olympia, Washington who died in 2003. The other is Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian journalist who obtained U.S. citizenship through relatives in New Jersey. She was fatally wounded by gunfire in May.

But Israel did not dispatch agents to Washington and New Jersey to kill these two women. Nor did Israelis conspire to harm them at all.

Corrie was killed after journeying to the Gaza Strip as an anti-Israel activist. She was hit by an Israeli bulldozer that was demolishing structures near the Egyptian border. It was doing so as part of an effort to stop the smuggling of weapons to Palestinian jihadists who explicitly seek Israel’s destruction. Corrie was affiliated with the International Solidarity Movement, a self-declared “non-violent” Palestinian-led group that endorses “legitimate armed struggle”—that is, terrorism—against Israel. According to an ISM witness’s own account, Corrie approached the military bulldozer, climbed onto it, fell off and was then dragged by its shovel, which caused mortal injuries.

Akleh was killed in Jenin in Judea/Samaria. An Al Jazeera correspondent, she was there to cover an Israeli counterterrorism raid that followed a wave of gruesome Palestinian attacks that murdered 19 people across Israel. When Israeli security forces attempted to apprehend Palestinian suspects, a fierce gun battle erupted and Akleh was fatally wounded. Al Jazeera, a Qatari state-owned network whose funders do not recognize Israel, asserted immediately that “Israeli occupation forces assassinated” Akleh while she was “covering their brutality.” However, there was no proof that the bullet came from the Israelis’ position, let alone that Akleh’s death was intentional. Palestinian leaders refused to share physical evidence with Israel or conduct a joint investigation.

Of course, neither the actions nor the personal politics of Rachel Corrie or Shireen Abu Akleh dispel the tragedy of their deaths. But to suggest that their demise indicates calculated, systemic Israeli malice towards Americans is absurd. On the contrary, Israel has every reason to prevent such deaths, as it knows very well that they will be exploited to maim Israel politically. Israel expressed sadness over Corrie’s demise and left the questions surrounding Abu Akleh’s death to be answered by a full investigation.

What Speri and Filiu ignore is as significant as their wild accusations. Put simply, they engage in the wholesale omission of American victims of brutal and deliberate Palestinian violence.

Over the three decades since Israel gave the Palestinians autonomy, which eventually included a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, some 60 Americans have lost their lives to Palestinian terrorism. Here are some of their names:
Koby Mandell, 13, was stoned to death.
Malki Roth, 15, was killed in a suicide bombing in a pizzeria.
Nachshon Wachsman, 19, was taken hostage and then shot dead.
Naftali Fraenkel, 16, was kidnapped while hitchhiking and killed.
Hannah Rogen, 92, died in a bombing of a Passover seder.
Rabbi Moshe Twersky, 59, was killed in a hacking and shooting attack on a synagogue.
Marla Bennett, 24, died in a bombing of a Hebrew University cafeteria. I was a student there at the time.
Kristine Luken, 44, a Christian, was bound and fatally stabbed during a hike.
Hallel Yaffa Ariel, 13, was stabbed to death in her own bed.
Chaya Zissel Braun died in a car-ramming attack. She was just three months old.

During the time these atrocities took place, the Palestinians received more than $6.3 billion in U.S. aid. Yet Palestinian leaders continue to be implicated in endemic, shocking glorification of violence, and they officially dispense payments to those found guilty of terrorism.

Each victim of these attacks had a past, a stolen future and a grieving family left behind.

Will The Intercept and Le Monde speak their names? Or do their lives—and the Palestinian atrocities that took them—not matter?

No less than governments, journalists must be held accountable. Truth isn’t pursued with one eye closed.

You can't fight antisemitism while ignoring its supporters on the Left

Jews face threats from numerous directions. Unfortunately, viewers may be left with the impression that the far Right is dangerous, the far Left makes unpleasant comments, and any other threats are vague. For the sake of American Jews’ safety, though, a comprehensive threat overview is necessary.

Viewers saw a picture from the Tree of Life synagogue, where 11 Jews were massacred in October 2018, and watched the shooter from the April 2019 Poway Chabad attack play piano — both of those men identified with the far Right. However, that’s not always the case.

There was no mention of the Black Hebrew Israelite influence on the attackers who killed Jews in Jersey City, New Jersey, or Monsey, New York, in 2019. While the January 2022 Colleyville, Texas, synagogue attack was spotlighted and the deputy director of the FBI mentioned the hostage-taker's interest in freeing a convicted al Qaeda terrorist, his Islamist ideology was not made explicit. There was no discussion of the attacks on New York’s visible Jews or increased anti-Zionist attacks on Jews walking to a pro-Israel rally or eating sushi in May 2021.

The special did rightly reference the trope of Jews as disease vectors, pointing to Orthodox Jews being blamed for spreading COVID-19 in 2020. This narrative was irresponsibly furthered by New York City’s mayor, who tweeted about breaking up a Jewish funeral and locked playgrounds in Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods, while New York’s governor appeared to lie to Jewish leaders about gathering limits and blasted an Orthodox Jewish community over a wedding. However, this wasn’t new. New York’s Orthodox Jews were also blamed for measles in 2019.

The special also zoomed in on social media’s fueling of antisemitism. However, a cited investigation focused overwhelmingly on user reports of far-right antisemitism, which were almost entirely ignored. Reality is undoubtedly uglier.

Bash's comment that "experts across the board caution antisemitism is growing on the Left, but it is not equivalent to hate from the Right” was unhelpful. Antisemitism is a problem on the Left. Debating whether the far Right or the far Left is “worse” is a waste of time — both pose dangers to American Jews. Given how heavily featured the far Right was, though, it’s worth remembering that America's society already stigmatizes the far Right, but the far Left is culturally embedded. Further, given how many Jews live in Blue America, most Jews in the United States are more likely to encounter problems from the far Left.

Finally, education was offered as an antidote to antisemitism. Yet, there were no specifics for those interested in learning more. This was a missed opportunity. Beyond offering a list of organizations fighting antisemitism on campus and in the country at large and a reading list, viewers should have been directed to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition of antisemitism. If well-intentioned people can’t recognize antisemitism, there’s no way they can help combat it.

Rest Of Mideast Kind Of Jealous Ben-Gvir Wants To Send Only Palestinians To Europe (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Rest Of Mideast Kind Of Jealous Ben-Gvir Wants To Send Only Palestinians To Europe

Itamar ben-Gvir Amman, August 25 - A controversial, discriminatory proposal by a far-right Israeli lawmaker piqued interest in the wider region this week, and caused many to wonder why only disloyal Arabs living under Israeli rule would get deported to an area with one of the highest standards of living in the world, while the rest of the Middle East's population remains under oppressive control of corrupt dictatorships.

Otzma Yehudit Party Chairman Itamar Ben-Gvir continued his career of provocative, ultranationalist rhetoric in the leadup to November parliamentary elections, with a repeated promise to voters last week that he will make the party's joining any government conditional on passage of a law mandating expulsion to Europe of any non-Jews in Israel and the territories it controls who act against the principle of Israel as the nation-state of the Jews. Ben-Gvir's proposal makes no such demand regarding Jewish Israelis who engage in anti-Arab violence, prompting familiar accusations of racism against him. In the wider region, however, the response has featured a more circumspect, even envious, tone, with many in Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and elsewhere wondering why they must suffer where they are simply because Israel lacks the means and authority to deport them to Europe.

"Palestinians get all the luck," lamented a Damascus resident. "Not only do millions of them get refugee status in perpetuity - which refugees from no other conflict ever got - they have an easy one-way ticket to Europe. My family has to risk lives and give up everything we own just to arrange for smugglers to try to get us to Europe, and even then it's hazardous and success isn't guaranteed. It just isn't fair."

The nuances of Ben-Gvir's attitude and its subtle departure from that of his late mentor, Rabbi Meir Kahane - who advocated wholesale removal of hostile Arabs, and not merely of those who engaged in violence or worked against Israel's Jewish character - make little difference to the envious Arabs of surrounding states and territories, observers note. "The way Zionism is depicted in general Arab media leaves no room for such distinctions," explained Tarin Fethr, an analyst with Al Jazeera. "In the crudely-crafted Arab narrative of the last century, all Zionists want to dispossess and probably exterminate Arabs. It's the specifics of the current brouhaha that intrigue most of us. We'd kill - I mean, I guess many of us do kill - to get moved to Europe for doing things we'd want to do anyway. Goddamn Palestinians. Not only do they get the most international aid per capita; now they get to ditch this godforsaken desert while we wallow in the same political and social pit as ever."

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The eagle-eyed Waqf confiscate "Talmudic objects" being "smuggled" to the Temple Mount

Ma'an reports:

The guards of Al-Aqsa Mosque confronted today, Thursday, a settler who stormed Al-Aqsa, along with a candlestick and biblical artifacts.

The settler was among a group of tourists who stormed the mosque through the Mughrabi Gate, and the guards were able to seize him and prevent him from taking pictures in Al-Aqsa.

Here the guard shows off the contraband:

Good to know that the Waqf is protecting Muslims from these terrible weapons.

A reminder: In 2017, two Israeli guards in the Old City were murdered with guns that had been stored on the Temple Mount. So Muslims can bring guns but Jews (or, more likely, Christians) cannot bring a Kabbalistic "sh'viti" diagram meant for meditation.

(h/t Eliyahu who pointed out that Christian tourists buy seven branched menorahs)

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08/25 Links Pt1: Will Anyone Punish Iran for Its Murderous Campaign?; How the Truth about the Palestinians Is Silenced; Palestinian Textbooks Rife with Holocaust Denial

From Ian:

International Crisis Group: Realigning European Policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

European policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict appears increasingly out of tune with the reality on the ground. A better approach would entail Europe abandoning its permissive approach vis-a-vis the PA leadership and taking steps to check the Palestinian Authority's authoritarian drift, while pushing for conditions that would allow for Palestinian democratic political renewal.

In April 2021, PA President Mahmoud Abbas cancelled what would have been the first Palestinian general elections in 15 years, thus ending any immediate hope of rejuvenating Palestinian leadership.

Europe could hold the PA accountable for its repression, conditioning budget support for the justice and interior ministries, for example, on benchmarks. It could redirect some funds earmarked for the interior ministry to Palestinian civil society, especially human rights watchdogs. It could more decisively put its weight behind Palestinian legislative elections.

Behind closed doors, many European officials admit that the hope for Palestinian statehood is an illusion. While continuing humanitarian and development aid to Palestinians at a level that has declined steadily since 2015, Europe has moved from efforts to build a Palestinian state to attempts at managing an ever-worsening "status quo."

Some European diplomats on the ground want a change of approach involving greater pressure on Israel. However, European leaders balk at the price of revising their bilateral relationship with Israel, especially at a time when the U.S. itself is barely engaged and influential Arab capitals are normalizing ties with Israel.

For powerful EU states like France and Germany, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict's importance pales in comparison to the war in Ukraine and the larger standoff with Russia, which they and others view as existential questions for the continent's security. They see the situation with the Palestinians as contained and not a priority.

How the Truth about the Palestinians Is Silenced

In all areas of Palestinian control, whether under Hamas or the Palestinian Authority, free speech does not exist. Journalists, officials, teachers, doctors, academics, and farmers are all forced to give the same narrative. A Palestinian who dared to speak against their leadership would be threatened, jailed, or tortured. This is the sad reality for millions of Palestinians.

This greatly affects the quality of news that British readers and viewers get from their media regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For many British journalists, a misfire by a terror organization which killed Palestinian children is not a story for them. A few explained to me that their fixers in Gaza would face dangerous consequences if they reported these facts. I can understand their fear of putting a colleague in danger of losing his livelihood or even his life.

British readers who are not exposed to Israeli media know nothing about how their news is being made, or about the terror of the Islamic Jihad and Hamas, or the system of intimidation and violent silencing of journalists. This blindspot over coverage of Palestinian violence is not only denying people from knowing the truth, but it also contributes to blocking any path forward to improving the lives of Israelis and Palestinians and bringing this conflict to an end.

Palestinian Textbooks Rife with Holocaust Denial

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas claimed in his doctorate that the Holocaust was nothing more than a "fantastic lie." The textbooks distributed to over a million students in the West Bank are rife with antisemitism, including Holocaust denial. Under Abbas' directive, the Palestinian Education Ministry implemented a comprehensive curriculum reform, with the content in school textbooks becoming significantly more radical compared to previous years.

The reworked educational material now includes calls to Jihad, violence, and incitement against Israel and Jews. Additionally, previous attempts to reach peace with Israel, such as the Oslo Accords, have been deliberately omitted from the new textbooks. The Holocaust was completely omitted from the history books that teach about World War II.

The 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists is presented as an example of a legitimate Palestinian struggle. Dalal Mughrabi, who led the attack on an Israeli bus in 1978 that ended with the murder of 38 Israelis - including 13 children - is idolized as a role model in a 5th grade textbook.

Palestinian students also learn that Jews are racists who control the world's money, media and politics. The Jews are characterized as liars and corrupt, and as "enemies of Islam." Some textbooks speak openly of the genocide that is waiting for Jews at the end of days.

Bret Stephens: Will Anyone Punish Iran for Its Murderous Campaign?

The Islamic Republic of Iran did not take responsibility for the August 12 murder attempt on author Salman Rushdie in New York. But Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's 1989 fatwa against him remains in effect. In 2007, Rushdie reported that every Feb. 14 he receives a "sort of Valentine's card" from Iran recalling its promise to kill him.

On Aug. 10, the Justice Department unveiled criminal charges against Shahram Poursafi, a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, for trying to orchestrate an assassination attempt against former national security adviser John Bolton. It was reported the same day that Iran had put out a $1 million bounty for the murder of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

The Islamic Republic has been carrying out a campaign of assassination, kidnapping and intimidation of its critics from its earliest days. Those who argue that Iran was merely responding for wrongs done to it - the 2020 assassination of Maj.-Gen. Qassim Suleimani of the Revolutionary Guards, for instance - have cause and effect backward. Suleimani was targeted after a career spent killing hundreds of Americans, according to the Pentagon.

What signal does it send to Tehran that we will do nothing to punish it, and will continue to negotiate with it, even as it seeks to murder Americans on our own soil, including former senior officials?

Moreover, what do Iran's murderous tentacles reveal about the character of the regime? Advocates of a deal can tell themselves that it will have safeguards to verify compliance. But Iran has found ways to cheat, and the lifting of sanctions will provide it with a financial bonanza that it will immediately put to destructive use.

Today, the PFLP announced it joins the Palestinian Authority in opposition to the Israeli plan to allow Palestinians to travel internationally through the Ramon Airport.

One of its reasons it gave:

The passage of Palestinian citizens through this airport is aimed at striking the communicative and emotional depth with our brotherly people in Jordan, and its goal is also to provide support for the Zionist economy, and to confirm the apartheid policy practiced by the enemy against our people.

You see? Giving Palestinians more options in how to travel, and allowing them to travel from an Israeli airport sitting next to Israeli passengers, is apartheid!

Palestinians on social media have been showing intense interest in using Ramon Airport. They are not at all convinced by the arguments against it given by the Palestinian Authority and other leaders.

One online poll shows 66% were looking forward to traveling via Ramon, while only 29% said that they were against it because of "normalization."

Ramallah Live compared the cost for West Bankers to travel through Jordan with Ramon, and found that the Jordanian fees were triple the cost of Ramon - 180 shekels to 60. This did not include the fees on returning, paying VIP fees the Allenby Bridge to reduce the number of hours of waiting.

On August 16, the Palestinian minister of transportation said, "We will consider imposing procedures and sanctions against travelers through Ramon Airport, and we urge all Palestinians not to use this airport because it does not represent a Palestinian sovereignty."

The Palestinian response on Facebook has been withering, with many pointing out that he personally has a VIP pass to travel through Ben Gurion Airport - why is that not violate Palestinian sovereignty?

There are nearly 10,000 comments like these:

Yes, I swear to God, we hate you
We wish to hear a statement that will benefit the people!!!
With the honor of your sister, shut up and beat yourself up
Spit on you and your authority
You are all illegitimate and your origin is not known, bastards
I swear to God that penalties and procedures must be against the officials who left the people to humiliate on the crossings. I am with the citizen who travels from anywhere to preserve his dignity.

Others point out the awful conditions and humiliation at the Jordanian crossings, asking how travel through Jordan helps "Palestinian sovereignty."

And there is another group of Palestinians who demand to be able to use Ramon Airport: Gazans!

The current plan is to only open it for West Bank Palestinians, but it is closer to Gaza and Gazans would jump at the chance to use that airport rather than try to make it to Cairo, which is very difficult. Some are demanding the right to use Ramon, and given that Israel already vets many of them to work in Israel, this would seem to be a possibility. Commenters there point out the humiliation they go through to even have a chance to travel to Egypt, the ability to fly out of Ramon would be a dream for Gazans. If for no other reason than PR, Israel should consider allowing those who pass security checks to use that airport as well.

Ramon Airport continues to expose the pure hypocrisy of Palestinian and Arab leaders who, for decades, have made decisions for Palestinians and pretend that these decisions are for their own good. In the end, they are only for the good of the self-appointed leaders, and Palestinians suffer.

Israel is treating Palestinians with more respect than their own leaders do, and despite all the anti-Israel propaganda, the people know this very well.

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Islamic Jihad is holding a large rally today to celebrate its great victory in the Gaza fighting earlier this month. Here's a video featuring victory music and children with the same kinds of rockets that killed many of their friends:

There's only one problem: Islamic Jihad lost. Badly.

Their military leaders were killed. They didn't convince Hamas to join the fighting. Most Gazans didn't support the fighting, which they understood correctly to be risking Gaza lives only for Islamic Jihad's glory. The prisoners that they claimed Israel would release are still in custody.

Islamic Jihad cannot credibly point to a single accomplishment.

But they don't have to. They just declare victory! And the worse you lose, the louder you claim to have won.

We see a similar dynamic with the recent examples of Arabs withdrawing from sports competitions, or even purposefully losing matches, when they would otherwise be competing with Israelis.

Forfeiting a match is about as far from victory as possible. Quitting instead of competing is the most cowardly thing imaginable. But look how this columnist in Al-Binaa spins it:

There are resistance heroes who did not carry a rifle, did not fire a bullet, and did not undergo military courses, who were able to defeat the arrogant Zionist entity with all its techniques, tools, military arsenals...Youths in sport defeated the Zionist enemy by refusing to confront its representatives, so they became lions and resistance heroes. They may have lost medals , but they won the medal of the nation that crowned them fighters and liberators. With their blows, they brought down the legitimacy of the occupying Zionist entity of Palestine.

No, they just lost.

There is a simple reason for this bizarre twisting of total defeat into massive victory: the Arab honor/shame culture.

Losing is shameful. Losing to weak, dhimmi Jews is unforgivable. Living with this shame is unbearable. Better to fool yourself and claim you won, and try to confidently convince everyone else of your "victory."

There is a secondary benefit of declaring victory after a loss. It is difficult to recruit people to your cause when you are viewed as a loser, but Gaza terror groups never admit defeat. On the contrary, their media is filled with stories about how inevitable and total their ultimate victory over the Jews will be.

As long as Palestinians and their supporters twist reality, and refuse to learn from their mistakes that they deny ever making, Israel has little to worry about.

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Hamas-affiliated website Al Resalah features this video.

It shows a very sad Gaza child. He is crying. He is inconsolable. The music is dramatic. What happened to this poor child?

Was his brother killed by the Israelis? Was his father jailed? Is he starving?

Then, the camera pans to what he is crying about....

His large, wall mounted color TV is showing that Manchester United defeated his favorite Liverpool team, and its star Mohamed Salah, 2-1.

Life is so cruel for Gaza kids.

Notice how easy it is to create Pallywood-style propaganda with nothing more than a mobile phone. This is no less absurd than hundreds of similar videos and photos of Gaza children who are prompted to act for the cameras to tug at Western heartstrings.

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08/24 Links Pt2: A defeat for Ben & Jerry's, and all of BDS; PragerU: Is Israel An Apartheid State?; Pot & Kettle: Roger Waters Lashing Out at West’s Banning Russians

From Ian:

A defeat for Ben & Jerry's, and all of BDS

Even when the Arab boycott stronghold was breached in the 1990s, the tools continued to be used by our enemies – now by left-wing organizations and Western countries – which were enthusiastic about embracing the anti-Zionist vision and isolating Israel with fervor that would have put the Nazi campaigns to shame.

For the Left, the outline was clear: to bring an anti-Israel atmosphere into every sphere of life, to ostracize the Jewish state and prepare the ground for the expansion of sanctions against it, all the way to government and international institutions.

Israel was targeted from all directions, and yet, it did nothing. The peak of the wave occurred around the turn of the century, which is no coincidence. The Oslo Accords and the disengagement policies only reinforced the boycott movement. A little bit more effort, the activists believed, and Israel will break.

And they spared no effort: Israeli scientists were excluded from international conferences and projects, international companies cut ties with Israeli tenders, and talks of boycotting corporations and banks that dared invest in Israel became common knowledge.

The trend began to change when Israel and its allies – Jewish communities in the Diaspora, first and foremost – stopped turning the other cheek and began to retaliate against our enemies.

We are beginning to see the fruits of their efforts with the Ben & Jerry affair, a victory that would have been impossible without continuous efforts to spread the truth: that boycotting Israel is antisemitic, and as such, is intolerable and unacceptable.

And yet, the fight is not over. There are still battles against the boycott movement to be fought, but the ice cream precedent is sweeter than ever. Our bravery brought us a victory.

PragerU: Is Israel An Apartheid State?

Does Israel discriminate against Arabs? Is it today's version of apartheid South Africa? Olga Meshoe, herself a South African whose family experienced apartheid, settles the question once and for all.