Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, December 18, 2022

Israel haters trying to pressure the US to free people who gave Hamas millions of dollars

Lately, anti-Israel groups like Samidoun, Within Our Lifetime and others have started a campaign to pressure the US to free three prisoners who were convicted of sending millions of dollars to Hamas terrorists in the Holy Land Foundation case:

The lies are egregious. Since many people do not recall the case from the 2000s, here is a refresher on exactly what these people did and why they are in prison.

These are excerpts from a press release from the Department of Justice, May 27, 2009. that described the details of the case:

Today, in federal court in Dallas, U.S. District Judge Jorge A. Solis sentenced the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF) and five of its leaders following their convictions by a federal jury in November 2008 on charges of providing material support to Hamas, a designated foreign terrorist organization.

HLF was incorporated by Shukri Abu Baker, Mohammad El-Mezain, and Ghassan Elashi. Mufid Abdulqader and Abdulrahman Odeh worked as fund raisers. Together, with others, they provided material support to the Hamas movement.

Shukri Abu Baker, 50, of Garland, Texas, was sentenced to a total of 65 years in prison. He was convicted of 10 counts of conspiracy to provide, and the provision of, material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization; 11 counts of conspiracy to provide, and the provision of, funds, goods and services to a Specially Designated Terrorist; 10 counts of conspiracy to commit, and the commission of, money laundering; one count of conspiracy to impede and impair the Internal Revenue Service (IRS); and one count of filing a false tax return.

Ghassan Elashi, 55, of Richardson, Texas, was sentenced to a total of 65 years in prison. He was convicted on the same counts as Abu Baker, and one additional count of filing a false tax return.

Mufid Abdulqader, 49, of Richardson, Texas, was sentenced to a total of 20 years in prison. He was convicted on one count of conspiracy to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization, one count of conspiracy to provide goods, funds, and services to a specially designated terrorist, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering.

The Court reaffirmed the jury’s $12.4 million money judgment against all the defendants, with the exception of El Mezain, who was not convicted of money laundering.

From its inception, HLF existed to support Hamas. Before HLF was designed as a Specially Designated Terrorist by the Treasury Department and shut down in December 2001, it was the largest U.S. Muslim charity. It was based in Richardson, Texas, a Dallas suburb. The "material support statute," as it is commonly referred to, was enacted in 1996 as part of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. That statute recognizes that money is fungible, and that money in the hands of a terrorist organization — even if for so called charitable purposes — supports that organization’s overall terrorist objectives.

The government presented evidence at trial that, as the U.S. began to scrutinize individuals and entities in the U.S. who were raising funds for terrorist groups in the mid-1990s, the HLF intentionally hid its financial support for Hamas behind the guise of charitable donations. HLF and these five defendants provided approximately $12.4 million in support to Hamas and its goal of creating an Islamic Palestinian state by eliminating the State of Israel through violent jihad.

The government’s case included testimony that in the early 1990's, Hamas’ parent organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, planned to establish a network of organizations in the U.S. to spread a militant Islamist message and raise money for Hamas. The government’s case also included testimony about Hamas material found in zakat committees. The defendants sent HLF-raised funds to Hamas-controlled zakat committees and charitable societies in the West Bank and Gaza. Zakat is an Arabic word referring to the religious obligation to give alms.

HLF became the chief fundraising arm for the Palestine Committee in the U.S. created by the Muslim Brotherhood to support Hamas. According to a wiretap of a 1993 Palestine Committee meeting in Philadelphia, former HLF President and CEO Shukri Abu Baker, spoke about playing down their Hamas ties in order to keep raising money in the U.S. Another wiretapped phone call included Abdulrahman Odeh, HLF’s New Jersey representative, referring to a suicide bombing as "a beautiful operation."

The government also presented evidence that several HLF defendants have family members who are Hamas leaders, including Hamas’ political chief, Mousa Abu Marzook, who is married to a cousin of Ghassan Elashi, HLF’s former Chairman of the Board. Ghassan Elashi, who also served as the vice-president of marketing for Infocom Corporation, is currently serving an 80-month sentence following his conviction on several charges related to export violations.

The defendants provided financial support to the families of Hamas martyrs, detainees, and activists knowing and intending that such assistance would support the Hamas terrorist organization. Since 1995, when it first became illegal to provide financial support to Hamas, HLF provided approximately $12.4 million in funding to Hamas through various Hamas-affiliated committees and organizations located in Palestinian-controlled areas and elsewhere.

During trial, the government also presented evidence that HLF was so concerned about investigators uncovering the group’s intentions that they kept a manual entitled "The Foundation’s Policies and Procedures." HLF followed various security procedures outlined in the manual to include hiring a security company to search the HLF for listening devices, ordering defendant Haitham Maghawri, a fugitive, to take training on advanced methods in detecting wiretaps, shredding documents after board meetings, and maintaining incriminating documents in off-site locations.

And now they claim that these Hamas supporters were merely sending money to orphans and widows.

You cannot believe a word that the anti-Israel groups say.

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!

Ben and Jerry's drops lawsuit against Unilever, but Israel haters claim victory anyway. Because lying is what they do.

Electronic Intifada trumpets:

The legal dispute between Ben & Jerry’s and its parent company Unilever has ended in a bit of a fudge.

But as a result, the ice cream maker can say that it is standing by its July 2021 decision to end all business in Israel so as not to be complicit in Israel’s illegal colonization of occupied Palestinian land.

That being the case, the outcome can be seen as a win for supporters of Palestinian rights.

As usually is the case with Israel-haters, they are lying.

When Unilever said that it would sell its Ben & Jerry's business in Israel to an Israeli company back in June, its own Ben & Jerry's subsidiary sued its parent company stop the sale altogether and to not allow anyone to sell ice cream with their name in Israel and the West Bank.

This settlement is a loss for Ben & Jerry's - as the Israeli company says in its press release:

Avi Zinger, issued the following statement in response to the settlement reached today by Unilever and Ben & Jerry’s:

“I am pleased that the litigation between Unilever and the independent Board of Ben & Jerry’s has been resolved. There is no change to the agreement I made with Unilever earlier in the year. I look forward to continuing to produce and sell the great tasting Ben & Jerry’s ice cream under the Hebrew and Arabic trademarks throughout Israel and the West Bank long into the future.”

Zinger's company, American Quality Products Ltd (AQP), can still sell ice cream named Ben and Jerry's in Israel and in the West Bank - and to Palestinians, too. All of which Ben and Jerry's tried to stop.

The only "victory" for Ben and Jerry's, which the haters are loudly bragging about, is that Israel is no longer mentioned in the Ben and Jerry's "Where We Do Business" webpage. They add a paragraph saying,

Unilever has sold trademark rights to the Hebrew and Arabic language versions of the Ben & Jerry’s name to Blue & White Ice-Cream Ltd. No English language trademark of the Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Inc. has been transferred to Blue & White Ice-Cream Ltd. Blue & White Ice-Cream Ltd. is a completely separate and distinct entity from Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Inc. Ben & Jerry’s has no ownership of or economic interest in Blue & White Ice-Cream Ltd.

This was exactly the situation in June when Unilever sold the trademark rights to AQP/Blue and White.

Ben & Jerry's dropped the lawsuit and gained exactly nothing from it. Unilever changed nothing, AQP changed nothing.

The only people who can call this a "victory" for Ben & Jerry's are people whose interest in truth is nonexistent.

The ironic thing is that, in one sense, this really is a victory for "supporters of Palestinian rights." Because now, Ben & Jerry's can be sold to Palestinian stores in the West Bank, with Arabic labeling, when before it was not available. But people who call themselves "supporters of Palestinian rights" are against that outcome, because the manufacturer is Israeli.

They don't want Palestinians to decide for themselves what kind of ice cream they can buy. They want to make that decision for them. Which shows you how little they care about "Palestinian rights."

(I'm also wondering whether the Unilever agreement with AQP would allow AQP to sell Arabic-labeled B&J ice cream to the UAE, Bahrain or other Arab countries - none of which now can obtain Ben & Jerry's ice cream. It would be truly ironic to see the Ben & Jerry's company protesting an Israeli company selling its Arabic-labeled ice cream to Arab countries - a symbol of peaceful relations - in the name of "social justice.")

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!

12/17 Links: The Palestinian issue is about supremacy, not justice; Discrimination, demonization and delegitimization has no place at the UN; Peace Between Jordan and Israel Unraveling, Report Says

From Ian:

The Palestinian issue is about supremacy, not justice

Palestinian apologists try to explain it away as budding nationalism and anger at the demographic changes, but this happened all over the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)—it was far from confined to the Holy Land. In Iraq, the notorious Farhud in 1941 saw Iraqis kill at least 180 Jews, wound over 2,000 and ransack the homes and properties of thousands. In Egypt, attacks on Jews in Cairo occurred in 1938 and 1945. The racist treatment intensified to a crescendo of violence against Jews as Israel was established—attacks on Jews were the norm, their properties were confiscated, and many were arrested or detained in camps. Around nine hundred thousand Jews were thus forced to migrate and leave most of their property behind. Second-class residents indeed.

Why is this about racism and privilege and not mere discord between nations? First, it was widespread and commonplace throughout the MENA region; there was not a single Arab or Middle Eastern country that didn’t see its Jewish community decimated and abused—in the same way that no state in the American Confederacy treated blacks as nothing but slaves, and less than whites, after the civil war.

Second, the rejection of the right of Jews to self-determination in their ancient homeland is pervasive. The notion of Zionism, the national movement of the Jewish people, is described in the most derogatory terms—colonialism, racism, Apartheid, crimes against humanity. The rejection of the right to be an Israeli or a Zionist is evident in academia, sports (including harassing Israeli journalists in the “safe environment” of the soccer World Cup in Qatar), culture and literature, just for the crime of supporting Jewish self-determination in the Holy Land.

Third, the Palestinians and their supporters are out to redefine history as part of denying Jewish claims to the Holy Land. In the Palestinian version of reality (which was adopted by UNESCO, in a controversy that led the U.S. to exit the agency), only Muslims have a sacred connection to the Temple Mount (known to Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif). Make no mistake about it, this is racist to the core.

Fourth, when the Palestinians rose against the British, they did so after rejecting the idea of a pluralist country with a common parliament for Jews and Arabs. They were not fighting to get more rights—their rights were never compromised—but to return to the “good old system” where Jews “knew their place” and were kept nicely under the boot of the Arabs. Even if one accepts the notion of a local nationalist awakening, one must reject its racist elements against the Jewish minority.

Fifth, the utter rejection of the notion of Jewish indigenousness. Not only were the ties between Jews and their homeland denied, Palestinians and their supporters also deny Jews of Arab descent their hard-earned heritage. They harass Jews for cooking their traditional Middle Eastern foods or singing in Arabic and accuse them of cultural appropriation from the Palestinians, even though these are part of their centuries-old Middle Eastern heritage.

Sixth, Palestinians maintained their privilege through the decades. They are the only refugees that have their own agency, which has received tens of billions of dollars over the years, and their refugee status is permanent and passed on to their descendants. They also have two other dedicated U.N. agencies.

If you do not believe me, you can just look at the signs the Palestinian supporters carry. They do not hide their racist agenda and they yearn openly for the “good old days”—just look at the sign with several maps depicting the shrinking of Palestine, and you will see a pristine map showing 100% ownership of land by Palestinians prior to 1917 (though many signs now remove that map and only show the situation during 1917).

Discrimination, demonization and delegitimization has no place at the UN

The October report speaks of Palestinian property rights, but not Jews’ property rights.

It innocuously references Hamas only as “the de facto authorities in Gaza” – excoriating, simplistically, Israeli armed acquisition of land, but not Hamas’s.

It speaks of land as “integral to the Palestinian identity” – but not to Israelis’ identity.

It reserves suggestion even of possible “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” only for Israel. It speaks of the “mental and physical health,” the “right to… life, liberty and security,” and the “anxiety, fear and humiliation” only of Palestinians, never Jews.

It only speaks of “impunity” over attacks – including supposedly systemic “racist and sexist language” – against Palestinians, never Jews.

It refers only to Israeli, never Palestinian, actions as “collective punishment.” It highlights a series of individual Palestinians expressing grievance against Israel – but never so humanizes any Israelis victimized by Palestinian violence and incitement.

It identifies only Israel as responsible for inhibiting a two-state solution – despite regional jihadists’ doctrinal commitment to Israel’s destruction. And the commission already declared in its very first report that “perpetual occupation” is “the one common issue” underlying the conflict.

Not to be outdone, the October follow-up report prognosticates that “Israel intends the occupation to be permanent.” It fails to mention that Israel had previously withdrawn every single Israeli settlement and soldier from the Gaza Strip, that Israel had offered Palestinians a state on nearly the entirety of the West Bank and Gaza, and that Arabs had forcibly removed prior Jewish inhabitants from eastern Jerusalem and the historic Judea and Samaria some 75 years ago.

One need not endorse every Israeli policy to recognize that this record by the commission does not amount to a serious examination of the Middle East’s realities – and that the three commission members have thoroughly failed to demonstrate equal concern for the basic human rights of Israeli Jews.

Such discrimination, demonization and delegitimization should have no place at the UN. Navi Pillay and her colleagues deserve not sympathy but dismissal.

Peace Between Jordan and Israel Unraveling, Report Says

Israel’s decades-long peace with Jordan is unraveling, a development that threatens to upset a fragile regional stability that is being challenged by countries like Iran, Russia, and China, a think tank report warns.

"Since 2020, if not before then, the Jordanian peace has turned decidedly cold," according to Jonathan Schanzer, a former terrorism finance analyst at the Treasury Department who now works at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. While the relationship has been breaking down behind the scenes for some time, Jordan also began to publicly war with Israel in recent years, by refusing to sign the Abraham Accords peace agreements, attacking incoming prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and threatening to fully abrogate the peace deal it signed with Israel in 1994.

Schanzer’s findings, published in a report last week, indicate the United States could be faced with a looming crisis in the Middle East that threatens to upset nearly 30 years of stability between the two former enemies. The fracture between Israel and Jordan could also empower American enemies like Russia, China, and Iran, which are all working in tandem to erode U.S. influence in the region.

"All of this should come as unwelcome news to the United States and to America’s Middle East allies. In anticipation of intensifying great power competition with China, and perhaps to a lesser extent Russia, it is crucial for Washington to project unity among allies in the Middle East," the report says. "This is especially the case amidst the continued havoc that the Islamic Republic of Iran is exporting across the region."

Other Middle East analysts agree that Jordan’s ties with Israel have become increasingly strained in recent years, particularly due to the stagnant peace process with the Palestinians.

"Israel perceives the creation of a Palestinian state to be a security threat, while King Abdullah [Jordan’s leader] sees frustrated Palestinians dismayed by lack of progress toward a Palestinian state as an even bigger security threat to his own hold on power," said Jim Phillips, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. "The king seeks to appease Palestinians, who make up roughly half of Jordan’s population, because he faces additional challenges from Islamists who also demonize Israel."

Schanzer’s findings are likely to distress Jordanian officials, who have cultivated deep ties in Washington, D.C., since the Arab nation announced its peace with Israel in 1994. In many ways, Schanzer told the Washington Free Beacon, this latest analysis shatters long-standing taboos about Jordan’s fracturing peace with Israel that many in the U.S. foreign policy community have tried to ignore.

"I have observed a real reticence in this town to criticize Jordan in recent years," Schanzer said. "Many believe Amman is both too valuable and too weak to challenge. I refuse to be bound by those constraints. I support Jordan. But I think it can do better."

12/16 Links P2: Liberals, Progressives, Wokeness and Israel; Smearing Israel from the Ivory Tower; US Congressman Slams FBI Hate Crimes Data As Bipartisan Criticism Grows

From Ian:

Liberals, Progressives, Wokeness and Israel

Putting all this together, what the JILV survey powerfully documents is a troubling phenomenon that has pervaded the larger American political system today: namely political sorting. In its most basic form, political sorting, which is often confused with polarization, is a fairly new phenomenon and is where ideological and attitudinal positions no longer vary but are expected to align to particular liberal or conservative attitudes. The result today is that Democrats are more uniformly left-leaning and Republicans are more uniformly right-leaning than they were decades ago. Both the left and the right promote packages of ideas and attitudes that must be adopted wholesale if one is not to fall into disfavor. Today, dissent and divergence become almost impossible if one is to avoid adverse social consequences and possibly real professional ramifications as well. And for macro-political development, as Democrats are more habitually liberal and Republicans become more conservative, compromise and bipartisanship becomes harder to achieve. This is exactly what is happening with respect to Israel and ideology and represents an existential threat to the Jewish community and American support for Israel as well.

The recent uproar at Berkeley Law School is a case in point. Nine student groups at the law school banded together to amend their bylaws so as to exclude any Zionist speaker from ever speaking at the law school. That Women of Berkeley Law, the Asian Pacific American Law Students Association and the Law Students of African Descent felt compelled to join forces with the Middle Eastern and North African Law Students Association in this endeavor, illustrates how powerful this ideological sorting can be. Under the guise of intersectional solidarity, groups that have nothing to do with the Middle East conflict institute a litmus test that permanently excludes the vast majority of Jews who believe Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state. To be part of the community of the good is to expel people with improper beliefs.

More specifically, to understand sorting what is critical to understand is that the electorate has not changed significantly in the aggregate as generations have aged in and out, but voters have sorted. Consider that in the 1990s there were many pro-choice and pro-immigration Republicans and pro-gun Democrats. These variations have disappeared with issues all lining up on the left or right such that if you are a Democrat, you have to believe and promote a particular agenda wholesale and thus one can predict an individual’s political positions based on partisanship alone. Thus, the United States is experiencing increased partisan polarization now even though Independents have grown as a share of the electorate while the number of partisans has shrunk

Turning to the JILV survey itself, support for Israel has become part of the larger political sort of the American public. Today, vast majorities of Republicans support Israel, while Democratic backing is much lower. To be on the left these days means that one cannot support Israel and be ideologically pure; backing Israel is a conservative value and that line cannot be crossed in the ideologically sorted world of today. Thus, it is also the case that those who score lower on the woke scale are appreciably more aligned with Israel than those who are highly woke. Attitudes toward Israel are now part of the liberal or conservative packages that partisans must uniformly adopt, constituting a new norm in American politics evident in the data here. As Abrams and Wertheimer pointed out, sorting has become so deep that it has influenced views and sharply divided Americans on ideas as varied as the nuclear family, the structure-enabling philanthropy and, of course, the police and justice systems.

Moreover, views toward religion, tradition and history have become part of the story now. To be liberal today means real disdain for people of faith and their rights to religious liberty including support for Israel, while conservatives take the exact opposite approach. As Zaid Jilani has written with respect to race, the vision of the now sorted left is one where, “America isn’t a land of opportunity. It’s barely changed since the days of Jim Crow. Whites, universally privileged, maintain an iron grip on American society, while nonwhites are little more than virtuous victims cast adrift on a plank in an ocean of white supremacy.” The emergent narrative and anti-racist policy positions are now stories, “where whites are the villains and minorities are the victims” making “honest discussion of why homicide is the leading cause of death for young Black men … off limits” for instance. The JILV data show the exact same trend with respect to Israel; support for Israel, even with its faults and complex narratives, is simply on the wrong side of the story and cannot be supported if you are on the liberal side of things.

Given the growth of woke culture and the inexorable sorting process in American political life, friends of Israel must ask themselves some tough questions: Should they continue to focus attention on progressives with deeply held woke commitments who seem to be sorting themselves out of support for Israel, or seek to strengthen support among those who don’t share those ideological commitments and are more inclined to support Israel? To what extent should friends of Israel continue to focus efforts on making Israel’s case in the public realm, and to what extent should they join forces with others in opposing the ideology that gives rise to the growing antipathy toward the Jewish state?

Now is a good time to rethink the mainstream Jewish posture in American politics.

Ungrateful France’s ‘national narrative’ ignores the Jews

France has had Jews for over 2,000 years, and their contributions to the economy, politics, culture and science cannot be denied. But the journalist and blogger Veronique Chemla notes that Judaism and the Jews are virtually absent from the “national narrative” in school curricula and textbooks as well as in exhibitions in French museums. This post is an extract from a talk she gave about this blindspot to the Tsedek Lodge of B’nai B’rith France. She also discussed the issue in her interview with André Barmoha on Radio Chalom Nitsan on 13 December 2022.

Revolutionary, Republican, secular France fought the influence of Catholicism. The state remains embarrassed by the history of religions and by the Jews whom she nevertheless emancipated. France also feared fragmenting the nation by isolating the Jews, while not daring to seem to exclude them. The revolutionary Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre had affirmed: “We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation, and grant everything to the Jews as individuals” – a phrase that still inspires French diplomacy. But even as individuals, the ungrateful homeland ignores them in its national narrative.

Other factors were a pro-European France which denied the “Jewish and Christian roots of Europe” (Jacques Chirac), choosing instead multiculturalism, cultural relativism, atonement. History was perceived through an anachronististic moral lens – the Rights of Man, “political correctness”, making France feel guilty for slavery or colonization. The Crémieux decree was hidden from view while Eurabia ( an European-Arab alliance – ed) was rejected. French Jews are caught between, on the one hand, “pedagogues’ who “deconstruct” history, and, on the other hand, “political correctness”, the disintegration of the nation, European political “elites”, the claims of the “racialized” – Eurabia in different guises.

Jewish historians – Jules Isaac, co-author of school textbooks during the first half of the 20th century, and Marc Bloch – may have felt awkward writing about their co-religionists.

Most important of all, generations of historians, whose studies have skirted around Jews and Judaism, have produced a vicious circle of ignorance, bias and misunderstandings of Jewishness, Judaism and Jews.

Smearing Israel from the Ivory Tower

Israel, a tiny country the size of New Jersey, is the only state in the Middle East that substantially recognizes individual rights, such as legal equality for men and women, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and the freedom to engage in same-sex relationships. Compared to its neighbors—Islamic dictatorships that trample rights and violently oppress their populations—Israel is an oasis of enlightenment and liberty. Yet many American and European professors increasingly show support for anti-Israel movements and tyrannical regimes that aim to erase Israel from the map.

Iran is among the most brutal. According to the U.S. State Department, “The Islamic regime in Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terror,” and the “regime elites squander the people’s resources and opportunities, while suppressing freedom and basic human rights.”1 As of this writing, for more than a month Iranian “security forces” have been violently cracking down on widespread protests, which sprang up after the regime’s so-called morality police reportedly killed a young woman for not wearing a hijab correctly.2

Iranian leaders call for “death to Israel,” “death to England,” and “death to America.”3 They fund terrorist groups that wreak havoc in countries neighboring Israel, forming a “ring of fire” around it with the goal of annihilating the tiny democratic republic.4

Yet according to the academic watchdog group Canary Mission, which documents people and groups promoting hatred of the United States and Israel, more than eight hundred professors on North American campuses participate, to varying degrees, in efforts to undermine Israel. So do many in Europe. Among the most vocal anti-Israel professors are David Miller, recently fired from the University of Bristol; Amin Husain at New York University (NYU); and Marc Lamont Hill at Temple University. They are working to erode Israel’s stability, credibility, and security. This despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that Israel is a vital partner and strategic ally of the West.

Miller, previously a tenured professor who served as chair of Bristol’s sociology department, has spent years maligning Israel by advancing conspiracy theories in the classroom and via articles, social media, a website, and a talk show. In his quest to delegitimize the country—which he calls “a violent, racist foreign regime engaged in ethnic cleansing”—he has claimed, for instance, that British Jewish students are “being used as political pawns.”5 Without evidence, he accuses these students of being “constitutionally bound to promoting Israel and campaigns to silence critics of Zionism or the State of Israel on British campuses.”6 To achieve his goal, Miller advocates prohibiting pro-Israel groups from exercising their right to assemble, saying, for example, that Israel “depends for its lifeblood on the transnational Zionist movement. To dismantle the regime, every single Zionist organisation, the world over, needs to be ended. Every. Single. One.”7 (Zionism is the belief in and support of a Jewish homeland.)8

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!

12/16 Links P1: Al Arabiya: The Netanyahu Doctrine: An in-depth regional policy interview; Israel, Jordan, PA: Who violated Temple Mount status quo?

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The survivor: Benjamin Netanyahu on securing the future of Israel and the Western alliance

On Nov. 1, Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party won Israel's general elections, likely returning Netanyahu to the post of prime minister for the third nonconsecutive time. He is already Israel's longest-serving premier, having spent over a decade in office before his ouster in 2021. He spent his year in the opposition, in part writing his autobiography, Bibi: My Story. In an exclusive interview with the Washington Examiner, Netanyahu talked about his life and career and what comes next for Israel and the wider world. The following has been condensed for clarity.

WASHINGTON EXAMINER MAGAZINE: Prime minister, a big part of what I learned from your autobiography is the background to how you formed your worldview, how you see the world ideologically, philosophically. And the chapters that really bring that to life are the chapters where you talk about your father, Benzion Netanyahu. Most people know him as a celebrated historian, but he was also an important Zionist activist, and he worked with Vladimir Jabotinsky, the great Zionist leader. And the crux of that seems to be your approach toward convincing the public of the justice of Israel's cause and rallying support for Israel and the Jewish people and the strategy to do that.

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: Well, you're right that my father was a disciple of Jabotinsky from an early age. In 1939, he goes to London, and he says to Jabotinsky, "You have the right idea trying to influence British public opinion and British policy, but you're simply in the wrong place." And Jabotinsky asked him, "Why? Where should I be?" And my father said, "You should be in America because America's going to be the dominant world power. And if you want to influence British policy, influence American policy." And Jabotinsky was convinced by that. And he just packed his whole delegation that was in London and moved to the United States, took my father with him, and shortly after they came there, Jabotinsky died. My father was named executive director of the New Zionist Organization of America shortly afterward, the one that Jabotinsky had headed. And now he was left without the great leader — what to do? Well, my father fell back on a principle that Jabotinsky had enunciated in an article years before in which he talked about the theory of public pressure. And he said if you want to influence a democracy, in this case the great democracy of the United States, you have to first influence public opinion. And the only way you can influence public opinion is by appealing to justice. My father added [the need to] also influence the leaders. The way you appeal to leaders is through appealing to their national interest.

My father did something that Jewish leaders simply did not do in those days. He went to the Republicans. After he got the Republican National Convention to adopt a platform supporting a Jewish state, a few months later, the Democratic National Convention under Roosevelt adopted a similar platform. So in many ways, my father was the progenitor of the bipartisan American support for Israel. And that, I think, has been the mainstay of my policy, too.

WEX: The other major influence in the book is your brother Yonatan, the commander of Operation Thunderbolt, the rescue at Entebbe, Uganda, where terrorists had taken a hijacked Air France plane in 1976. He was killed in the operation tragically, and after that, you founded the Jonathan Institute, you became an expert in terrorism, and eventually went into public service. But when Yoni was alive, he said you would end up here. He said you would be prime minister of Israel, and you weren't really sure what he saw. And so now I'm wondering if you could answer that question. What have you learned about yourself and the state of Israel that Yoni already knew?

NETANYAHU: You know, Seth, I have no idea.

Because I was shocked by this because we were very close as brothers and we served in the same unit, which my younger brother joined, too, so we were three brothers in this tiny unit. … This friend [of Yoni's] came to me or approached me nearly half a century later: "You know, Yoni said at that time that you one day would be the leader of Israel, the prime minister of Israel," and I said, "Are you sure? That doesn't make sense because he never said that to me." And he said, "Well, he saw in you things you didn't see in yourself." And it's true, I didn't have an idea or even a notion that I would one day enter politics, let alone become the prime minister of Israel, let alone the longest-serving prime minister of Israel. I never had an inkling of that.

I didn't talk politics at all with my teammates. But I talked politics and history with [Yoni]. And for some reason, he thought that I would lead Israel one day. I haven't the faintest idea, and at first, I didn't believe this person when he said that. And he said, "Well, my wife was there, too, and she heard him, too." … So, the answer to your question is I don't know how he could see that. I saw things in him, and I thought, actually, that he could be that leader. And for some reason, he thought that I would be that leader. And it's impossible for me to ask him that obviously.

Al Arabiya: The Netanyahu Doctrine: An in-depth regional policy interview

Benjamin Netanyahu is preparing to become the Prime Minister of Israel for the third time. He has until December 21 to form a government before taking office.

In a wide-ranging interview with a group of print and television journalists at Al Arabiya, Mr. Netanyahu discussed Israel’s relations with Arab states, the US alliance structure in the Middle East, unrest in Iran, Israel’s new hard-right government, the future of the US-brokered maritime border agreement with Lebanon, and the Russia-Ukraine war.

Mr. Netanyahu reiterated the paramount importance of normalization with Saudi Arabia, which would be a “quantum leap” toward ending the Arab-Israeli conflict that “would change our region in ways that are unimaginable.” Saudi officials have consistently maintained that no normalization can happen without a Palestinian state.

Mr. Netanyahu indicated a willingness to explore a wide variety of peace options behind closed doors, stating “I believe in open covenants, secretly arrived at or discretely arrived at.”

Responding to questions about how the racist tenor of remarks by some of his coalition partners might affect relations with Arab states, Mr. Netanyahu stated that “The other parties are joining me, I’m not joining them.”

Mr. Netanyahu said that he would not repudiate the US-brokered maritime agreement with Lebanon, but denied that it was a peace agreement, adding that he saw “an enormous difference between the solid agreements between like-minded states and the so-called agreements with Iran and its proxies that are usually violated even before they're signed.”

The transcript of the interview as it appears below has been lightly edited for clarity, including the removal of repeated phrases and clauses, without altering the meaning of anyone’s remarks.

Mohammed Khalid Alyahya

Netanyahu gives wide-ranging interview to Saudi media outlet

Netanyahu: "I don't tell the Americans about every operation in Iran - for fear that it will leak to the American media and lead to the cancellation of the operation"#IranRevoIution #opiran #MahsaAmini

pic.twitter.com/xQgq4RK6AJ
— Emily Schrader - ????? ?????? ????? ????? (@emilykschrader) December 16, 2022

Caroline Glick: Ayman Odeh and coalitions of hate

On Dec. 9, MK Ayman Odeh met in New York with U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres. The meeting was arranged by the PLO’s mission to the U.N. Odeh heads the Hadash Party and is a co-leader of the five-member Joint Arab List Knesset faction, along with MK Ahmed Tibi. During the course of their meeting, Odeh reportedly delivered a petition to the U.N. Human Rights Council.

In his petition, Odeh requested that the council condemn Israel for failing to adequately fight the rising levels of violent crime in the Israeli Arab community. While the text of Odeh’s petition has yet to be made public, its underlying purpose is obvious. Odeh’s purpose was to delegitimize Israel by proclaiming it both incapable and unworthy of asserting its sovereignty over its Arab citizens.

Odeh’s meeting demonstrated that the elected representatives of Israel’s Arab community believe that it is reasonable and desirable to make common cause with Israel’s enemies and to delegitimize Israel’s very right to exist. The PLO mission at the U.N. is waging an all-out diplomatic war against Odeh’s country with just that end in mind. Earlier this month, the PLO mission led the successful passage of a General Assembly resolution that declared Israel’s founding a “catastrophe.”

The U.N. Human Rights Council to which Odeh directed his petition is a cesspool of antisemitism. Criminalizing the Jewish state and denying basic human rights to Israeli Jews are top priorities for the body, which has made condemning Israel an automatic agenda item at all its meetings.

Not for the first time, this week the Council’s Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, was exposed as a rabid anti-Jewish bigot with the revelation of hideously antisemitic remarks she made in the past. Last week, Albanese participated in a conference in Gaza attended by senior terror masters from Hamas and Islamic Jihad. There—again, not for the first time—Albanese justified Palestinian terrorism against Israel.

Albanese is far from the only Council official with a long record of violently antisemitic pronouncements and positions. To the contrary, her hatred for Jews is a dominant position at the Human Rights Council.

In defending his meeting with Guterres, Odeh insisted that “[Israel’s U.N. Ambassador Gilad] Erdan doesn’t represent us. We will represent ourselves.”

Odeh isn’t the first Arab parliamentarian to turn to the U.N. and other international institutions in an effort to undermine Israel’s right to exist. In 2018, the PLO mission arranged for his party members Aida Touma-Sliman and Yousef Jabareen to meet with senior U.N. officials. The purpose of their meeting was to advance the antisemitic narrative—now rampant in the U.N.—that Israel is an apartheid state. The irony that they spread the libel despite the fact that their very membership in the Knesset proves its utter falsehood obviously escaped them.

This morning, some 70,000 Muslims are reported to have visited the Temple Mount - a much higher number than a normal Friday, when between 40,000 and 50,000 typically come during winter months.

Thousands more visited the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, spilling into the streets.

Why so many?

Because of Chanukah!

All week, there have been calls in Arabic media for Muslims to visit the Al Aqsa Mosque en masse because Jewish groups are asking Jews to visit the Mount on Chanukah, since the miracle of the oil happened there.

Which means that tens of thousands of Muslims came not because they wanted to worship there, but in order to express Jew-hatred ahead of Chanukah. If it wasn't for a Jewish holiday, they wouldn't be there.

The preacher at the mosque, Sheikh Muhammad Hussein, said, "We categorically reject any violation of Al-Aqsa Mosque and its sanctity by the occupation, its aides, settlers and groups."

For these Muslims, worship is a form of antisemitism.

As usual, even though record (non-Ramadan) numbers of Arabs are visiting the Mount, every article about the crowd emphasizes how Israel tried to stop them from coming, and that they somehow prevailed.

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!

Francesca Albanese's "Jewish lobby" Facebook post also includes a blood libel (UPDATE)

There has been a lot of coverage of UNHRC Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese's antisemitic posts on social media, including one post where she said, "America and Europe, one of them subjugated by the Jewish lobby, and the other by the sense of guilt about the Holocaust, remain on the sidelines and continue to condemn the oppressed — the Palestinians — who defend themselves with the only means they have."

But in that same post, Albanese also engaged in a blood libel - falsely accusing Israel of killing a baby.

She wrote (translated):

Meanwhile, Gaza needs help, medicine, food, water. Everything we can give is a small but essential help to save more innocent lives. Like that of little Shayman, who after being born by her dying mother due to bombings, was rescued and kept in an incubator by medical staff in Gaza. The miracle of his life went off when Israel bombed Gaza’s only power supply source, and the Shayman’s incubator stopped working.

I cannot find any mention of any child dying from an incubator losing power in 2014.

Human Rights Watch wrote about the effects of Israel's (unintentional) bombing of Gaza's power plant fuel supply after Albanese's post. Here is everything it said about how the power plant going offline affected hospitals in Gaza:

The shutdown of the Gaza Power Plant ...caused hospitals, already straining to handle the surge of war casualties, to increase their reliance on precarious generators.

Mahmoud Daher, head of the Gaza office of the UN World Health Organization, said that hospitals have been given priority for scarce electricity, with Shifa, the territory’s largest hospital, getting the most, at 16 hours a day. If the fuel required to run generators were to run out, or a generator to fail, a hospital could lose power.

An official at al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City told Human Rights Watch on August 7 that because of electricity interruptions:

We use a large generator for six to eight hours per day, then have to rely on three smaller ones, because the large one cannot be run full-time. If the large one goes, we don’t know how we would repair it, because of the lack of spare parts. It powers the oxygen station, the hospital’s two elevators, and the air conditioners – this amounts to 80 percent of the hospital’s total electricity consumption. When we use the smaller generators, they can only power one elevator, and none of the air conditioners, which makes it difficult for staff to work long hours in the August heat, and dangerous for patients.

If the power outages had shut down incubators, HRW would have mentioned it. If anyone died as a result of such power outages, HRW would have made that the headline. So would have every media outlet.

Albanese's story about "Shayman" and his "dying mother" is a lie. It never happened. It is a blood libel.

Not only that, her relating that story that was not mentioned in any mainstream media proves that Albanese reads and trusts the most fringe, anti-Israel and antisemitic Arab media, and believes even the most outrageous lies about Jews and Israelis implicitly.

So this pattern holds: Francesca Albanese is an antisemite.

UPDATE: GnasherJew found the story that I couldn't find. There was a baby on a respirator, not an incubator. Other news stories say the doctors were watching her closely, and it seems unlikely to me that the oxygen wouldn't be a top priority for generators in a hospital.

The six-day-old baby was born by emergency Caesarean section Friday after doctors at Deir al-Balah hospital in central Gaza managed to save her from the womb of her mother, who died when an Israeli tank shell hit her home.

The mother, 23-year-old Shayma al-Sheikh Qanan, had been eight months pregnant, and the baby was named after her.

But the baby was deprived of oxygen between her mother’s death and doctors being able to operate, which meant she had to be hooked up to a respirator at the maternity ward in Khan Yunis hospital in southern Gaza.

“The baby suffered an oxygen deficiency in the womb after her mother’s heart stopped,” Dr Abdel Karem al-Bawab, head of the maternity ward at Nasser hospital, told AFP Thursday.

“This deficiency caused the baby to asphyxiate unexpectedly, rendering her brain dead,” he said of the tragedy, which occurred Wednesday.

“The ongoing electricity shortages played a role because her oxygen tubes did not work properly and we had to resuscitate her more than once manually.”

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!

EU High Representative/Vice-President Josep Borrell spoke at the 24th EU-NGO Forum on Human Rights on Wednesday.

Most of his speech properly listed the worst human rights issues facing the world nowadays:

- The COVID-19 pandemic is estimated to have resulted in 6 million deaths.

- Thousands of people imprisoned in Belarus for protests.

- Over a thousand killed in Myanmar and 4,500 more in jail for protesting.

- Between 600,000 and 800,000 people dead in Ethiopia from famine and cutting off basic services.

- Afghanistan's oppression against women, the Taliban saying they were going to erase women from society.

- Russia trying to systematically destroy Ukraine, with millions of lives at risk this winter.

- Iran's killing hundreds of protestors and repressing women.

- China's persecution of a million Uyghurs.

And then after listing all of these huge and very real human rights catastrophes, Borrel just had to imply that one of the worst was Israel:

That is why we are setting today a new Global Observatory on the Fight against Impunity....and we are going to allocate €20 million for that.

This Observatory will gather information and build knowledge about genocide, about crimes against humanity and other serious human rights violations. They are there. I have not mentioned Palestine, for example. But what is happening in Palestine – I am sorry, I have to say, although I know that it will bring me a lot of criticism. But yes, we have to remember what is happening in Palestine. During this year, more than 100 Palestinian people have been killed by the Israeli security forces. I do not deny that there are security issues. I think, and I issued a lot of statements condemning and expressing our strong concern about the high level of violence in the occupied territories in the West Bank.

As anyone who does a modicum of research would know, the vast majority - over 90% - of the Palestinians killed this year were terrorists, while actively attacking.

The vast majority of Jews killed in terror attacks this year were civilians, which is what started Israel going on the offensive.

But he doesn't mention them.

Borrell has the nerve to equate the deaths from crossfire of a handful of Palestinians with the events in Myanmar, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Iran, China and Ethiopia? He feels he must single out Israel as a major human rights violator? And that is the only example he mentions after saying that this new organization will research "genocide, about crimes against humanity and other serious human rights violations" - implying that Israel is guilty of the worst human rights abuses, after listing all the others.

Mentioning "Palestine" in the same speech as these other issues, and in the same paragraph as the new Observatory, changes it from what could have been am announcement of a good initiative, a chance to look at human rights objectively, into what sounds like just another political organization that will attack Israel while doing nothing more than lip service to real human rights abuses.

Nearly 1100 people were killed by police in the US so far in 2022. Why didn't Borrell mention that? Because it isn't in the same ballpark as the mass atrocities of the other countries.

Neither is Israel.

But Borrell just couldn't resist making it sound like Israel is in the top tier of human right abusers.

Which makes one wonder, was the rest of his speech as unreliable as this part was?

(h/t Irene)

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!

12/15 Links Pt2: Herzog: Comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa is a ‘blood libel’; Melanie Phillips: How the White House attempt to counter Jew-hatred undermines itself

From Ian:

Herzog: Comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa is a ‘blood libel’

Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Thursday slammed as a “blood libel” comparisons of the Jewish state’s policies towards the Palestinians to South African apartheid.

“The comparison between the State of Israel and the apartheid regime is not a legitimate criticism—it is a blood libel,” Herzog said in a video address to the World Zionist Organization’s annual conference in Tel Aviv.

“It is a dangerous and intensifying terrorism, since the legitimacy of the State of Israel and the justification of its existence is directly related to its ability to protect itself and hence they are trying to undermine this ability,” he added.

Herzog also described the BDS movement as a “brutal campaign” spearheaded by organizations “spreading lies and false facts and seeking to build a long-term policy that will undermine the existence of the state.”

He continued: “Let’s make no mistake, this is not a peace-seeking campaign, it is a campaign promoting hatred and incitement.”

For his part, WZO chairman Yaakov Hagoel warned of a resurgence in antisemitism, which he called a “malignant cancer” that required “major medical surgery to remove… at its roots.”

Melanie Phillips: How the White House attempt to counter Jew-hatred undermines itself

Then there’s Hady Amr, who was recently made deputy assistant secretary of state for “Israel-Palestine” in order to promote the Palestinian Arab cause. One year after the 9/11 attacks, Amr wrote about his work as the national coordinator of the anti-Israel Middle East Justice Network: “I was inspired by the Palestinian intifada,” the murderous terror campaign against Israelis from 1987 to 1993.

Or how about Maher Bitar, the senior director of intelligence at the National Security Council, who spent years promoting the boycott of Israel and was on the executive board of the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Students for Justice in Palestine, which hounds Jewish students on campus and disseminates antisemitic propaganda.

Then there’s Reema Odin, deputy director of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs, who justified Palestinian suicide bombings of Israelis in 2002—when hundreds of Israelis were being blown up in buses and pizza parlors during the second intifada—as “the last resort of a desperate people.”

And let’s not overlook Uzra Zeya, the under-secretary for civilian security, democracy and human rights. As Alana Goodman reported in the Washington Free Beacon last year, during Zeya’s time working for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs she compiled research for a book arguing that “the Israel lobby has subverted the American political process to take control of U.S. Middle East policy” by establishing a secret network of “dirty money” PACs that allegedly bribe and extort congressional candidates into taking pro-Israel positions.

In a section entitled “Jewish Power in the Formulation of U.S. Middle East Policy,” the book claimed that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee gave American Jews secret marching orders on how to vote and which candidates to support financially.

It further argued that “non-Jewish Americans increasingly perceive their Jewish fellow citizens as members of a single-issue voting bloc which, at best, divides its loyalties between an increasingly exploitative Israel and an increasingly exploited United States.”

“The more strident lobbyists for Israel must also accept a major share of the blame for whatever changes have taken place in American public perceptions of the loyalties of America’s Jews,” it continued. “The inevitable public perception is that such ardent supporters of Israel have no real interest in making the United States a better place for all of its citizens, but only in making Israel a more secure and prosperous place for Jews.”

In other words, the book blamed Jews for antisemitism.

The chances of the new White House group calling out the bigotry of all these officials are clearly zero.

The likelihood is that this new strategy will as ever pin antisemitism on the “far-right” while ignoring it where it is most ubiquitous and powerful: In black and Muslim communities, the Democratic party—and the Biden administration.

The White House statement said the new strategy will “raise understanding about antisemitism and the threat it poses to the Jewish community and all Americans.” It would seem that the White House itself needs someone to teach it just what antisemitism is.

Benjamin Netanyahu: The Biggest Lie in the Palestine vs. Israel Debate - Jordan B Peterson

Benjamin Netanyahu was recently reelected as Prime Minister of Israel, having previously served in the office from 1996–1999 and 2009–2021. From 1967–1972 he served as a soldier and commander in Sayeret Matkal, an elite special forces unit of the Israeli Defense Forces. A graduate of MIT, he served as Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations from 1984–1988, before being elected to the Israeli parliament as a member of the Likud party in 1988. He has published five previous books on terrorism and Israel’s quest for peace and security. He lives in Jerusalem with his wife, Sara. In his newest book "Bibi: My Story" the newly reelected prime minister of Israel tells the story of his family, the story of his people, his path to leadership, and his unceasing commitment to defending his country and securing its future.

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!

Suicidal Palestinians Given Bomb Vests (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

suicidal Nablus, December 15 - Public health authorities in both the Gaza Strip and the self-rule areas of the West Bank have launched a streamlined process to address a troubling increase in the number of citizens who have expressed a desire to kill themselves, according to the Ministry of Health: give them an explosive device and send them marching toward Israelis.

Sources within the ministry - divided between the two territories since a 2007 civil war confined Fatah to the inland areas and gave Hamas control of Gaza on the Mediterranean coast - described parallel but similar initiatives directing mental health professionals and mandated reporters such as caregivers and teachers to inform ministry authorities when in the course of their work they encounter someone contemplating suicide. The referred Palestinians will then undergo a brief evaluation to determine to what degree they have resolved to off themselves, and those judged to have firm enough resolve will receive a "suicide vest" packed with nails and military-grade explosives, plus instructions to detonate themselves among as many Jews as possible.

Ministry officials acknowledged some incomplete elements of the program. "We still face important obstacles," stated Mustafa Massiqr of the Hamas-run version of the ministry. "We have, fortunately or unfortunately, a plentiful supply of depressed people under our aegis. A good quantity of that is by design, since Palestinian misery is the only international diplomatic currency we have. But there's the sticky matter of the border fence and robust Zionist security measures, including some way they've developed of defeating our cross-border tunnels. But once we work out that wrinkle, it'll be lights out."

His Fatah counterpart in Ramallah made analogous observations. "The security barrier that basically ended the Second Intifada hasn't gone away," observed Ahaf Tuqill. "Getting the right people through into Jewish cities, or even just getting close enough to a checkpoint to blow up near a soldier - it's not as easy as it might seem. But personnel isn't the problem; COVID and the irredeemable corruption of Palestinian government have produced enough of a supply of the suicidally depressed. Throw in the people with other things of which they're ashamed, such as homosexual tendencies, or things that can make them subject to blackmail, such as unauthorized contact with the opposite sex - there's no shortage of Palestinians looking to cement themselves in the popular consciousness as heroes, to avoid public discussion of their shame-inducing behavior."

"We also have to figure out the framing to make it all Israel's fault," he added, "but the media are always accommodating in that regard."

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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12/15 Links Pt1: Europe is waking up and seeing NGO corruption; Francesca Albanese: Special Rapporteur to Demonize Israel; Irish UNIFIL peacekeeper killed by gunfire in Lebanon

From Ian:

Seth Frantzman: Why Qatar’s involvement in EU scandal may impact Middle East

This kind of bargaining, using money to get influence, appears to have now brought Qatar into scandal in Europe. But Doha has seen this happen before with controversy over the World Cup and also other controversies in the US, and it has generally sailed on without much effect on its overall relations.

The EU scandal seems to reveal that Qatar targeted members of the European Parliament from southern Europe and also people who are involved in human-rights and other left-leaning causes. This means that someone decided that the best people to target in influence peddling were left-leaning voices, those connected to socialist or other similar parties.

But why would these voices be open to dealing with Qatar, a state that openly suppresses gay rights and is authoritarian? This is one of the perplexing aspects of how Doha has portrayed itself over the last two decades, via media such as Al Jazeera, as being different than it is.

Even though Qatar is an authoritarian monarchy that not only backs far-right extremists in the Middle East, but also theocracy and suppresses workers’ rights, it is able to sell itself to left-leaning voices in the West through a complex blend of preying on Orientalist ideas and pretending that its suppression of rights is merely its “culture.”

Once Doha has pretended that its authoritarianism and support for extremists is “culture,” then it claims that any critique of its policies is “Islamophobia.” This tends to buy quiet from critics and also enables its influence to continue.

On the one hand, accusations that Qatar was involved in another corruption scandal are not unique. Many countries try to exploit Western democracy through media influence-peddling and corruption. For instance, for many years, countries sought to influence Washington’s foreign policy by plowing money into think tanks in and around DC. Then those countries would get the think tanks to hire former government officials and get the officials to help lobby for them. This would be passed off as merely “policy” discussions, but the discussions would always have an agenda.

For instance, when it came to Qatar, the goal would be to get think tanks to critique other Gulf states but never critique Qatar. This kind of lobbying isn’t always corruption, because sometimes it can be done openly. A country can plow money into a think tank, or it can have its supporters do this for it. It can also register its lobbyists.

NGO Monitor: Europe is waking up and seeing NGO corruption

What would've happened if they checked?

Had the EU officials checked (i.e., NGO due diligence), the officials and Brussels-based journalists, who also completely missed this story, would have found that the Sekunjalo Development Foundation (SDF) is based in South Africa, and has considerable baggage, including reports of Qatari funding. SDF is the “philanthropic division” of the powerful Sekunjalo Group’s investments and business deals, and related involvement should have raised numerous red flags in Brussels.

Among other entanglements, the group has worked with the Gupta family, which has been deeply implicated in the corruption cases against former South African president Jacob Zuma. And as the owner of Independent Newspapers & Media SA, Sekunjalo was accused of agreeing to Chinese censorship demands on reporting the mass internment of ethnic Uighurs. China is reportedly involved in numerous business arrangements with the South African firm.

ALL OF this information was readily available to the European officials involved with the NGO Fight Impunity, had they bothered to examine the details.

In contrast, as long as NGOs and their funder-enablers view “civil society” as a religion, complete with a halo effect protecting these groups and the funding process from critical analysis, the doors to corruption and abuse will continue to be wide open.

Perhaps this high-level scandal in the EU will finally result in a fundamental and overdue policy change, including regarding the wholesale funding of the small network of Palestinian and Israeli political NGOs, some of which are linked to terror groups. This change should begin with opening up the documents and meeting protocols in which NGO funding is decided, allowing for analysis of possible insider influence and corruption in the grant-making process involving tens of millions of euros.

In parallel, Europe needs to create mechanisms for NGO oversight, ending the free pass that allows these groups to exert political influence without accountability.

Like other major crises, the EU’s corruption scandal linking Qatar funding and the NGO facade is also an opportunity for repairing broken and dysfunctional mechanisms. The “weaponization of NGOs” is not limited to autocratic regimes far from Europe.

German ambassador to Israel praises anti-Israel NGO

In a series of tweets, Germany’s ambassador to Israel, Steffen Seibert, and its envoy to Ramallah, Oliver Owcza, lauded the anti-Israel NGO Ir Amim in comments regarding their tour with the group on Tuesday.

According to a 2021 report by the Jerusalem-based NGO Monitor, Ir Amim slammed Israel’s security barrier while “omit[ing] the context of Palestinian terror attacks and Israeli national security concerns.”

NGO Monitor noted that Ir Amim argues that the security barrier “extracts neighborhoods from the city [Jerusalem] with the goal of reducing the portion of Palestinians” and that the “barrier’s demographic rationale therefore outweighs its security rationale.”

“Ir Amim frequently accuses Israel of attempting to ‘Judaize’ Jerusalem and promotes the Palestinian narrative on the city, including claims that ‘government powers are being handed over to the settler organizations’ and archeological digs have become an important ‘tool in the fight for control’ over Jerusalem,” NGO Monitor said.

Berlin’s ambassador wrote on Twitter on Tuesday: “Accompanying @GerRepRamallah Oliver Owcza on an insightful tour with @IrArmin’s Judith Oppenheimer to focal points like [the eastern Jerusalem neighborhoods of] Silwan & Givat Hamatos.”

UN Human Rights Council claims to have a Code of Conduct -- and Francesca Albanese claims to follow it. They are both lying. (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

Francesca Albanese, the "UN Special Rapporteur Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territory Occupied Since 1967" observes the strictest standards of objectivity and impartiality.

We know this because Albanese tells us so herself on her Twitter account:

And this makes sense.

After all, that august body -- the UN Human Rights Council -- has a code of conduct that says explicitly that mandate-holders are expected to:

Uphold the highest standards of efficiency, competence and integrity, meaning, in particular, though not exclusively, probity, impartiality, equity, honesty and good faith; [emphasis added]

Going a step further, just take a look at Albanese's actual job application for the position of Special Rapporteur, helpfully dug up by Times of Israel (whose article is the basis of this post)

Case closed.

So what are we supposed to do when she herself openly admits that contrary to what she wrote on her application form, Albanese actually does hold prejudiced views:

10/ On her application, Albanese denied holding “any views or opinions that could prejudice the manner in which [she'd] discharge the mandate.”

Yet last year she said the opposite: that her “deeply held personal views” on the Palestinian issue “could compromise my objectivity.” pic.twitter.com/pseqLOYkoE
— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) April 1, 2022

So, what are these prejudiced views that Albanese now admits to having before applying to be UN Special Rapporteur?

In 2014, Albanese posted to her Facebook account, decrying the ~~"Israel Lobby"~~ "Jewish Lobby":

America and Europe, one of them subjugated by the Jewish lobby, and the other by the sense of guilt about the Holocaust, remain on the sidelines and continue to condemn the oppressed — the Palestinians — who defend themselves with the only means they have (deranged missiles), instead of making Israel face its international law responsibilities

In another post in 2014, Albanese wrote to the BBC that

The Israeli lobby is clearly inside your veins and system and you will be remembered to have been on the big brother's side of this orwellian nightmare caused once again by Israel's greed. [emphasis added]

She hid that last post after Times of Israel asked her about it.

Just last year, Albanese attacked both Jewish and Israel lobbies

It’s not so much the Jewish lobbies that influence the policies of European and North American states towards Israel. Rather it is the existence of pro-Israeli political-economic lobbies in France, England, Germany, Italy and the United States that defend the international business of security and arms sales to allow better explain the silence of Western governments during the last war in Gaza (as in the previous ones). [emphasis added]

Also, Albanese is a big fan of Hamas:

All this preceded her claiming on her application that she held no prejudices that would hamper her in fulfilling her position.

Clearly, Albanese was less than truthful when she denied her prejudice -- and she clearly is not abiding by the strictest levels of objectivity and impartiality.

This, of course, makes her the ideal Special Rapporteur for the UN.

And her lack of objectivity combined with her support for Hamas terrorists who murder innocent civilians has led her to claim that Israel has no legal claim to self-defense:

Israel cannot claim self-defense while illegally occupying and while directing an act of aggression against another country,” she said. “Those who have the right to self-defense are the Palestinians."

Here is the video:

On another occasion, she said:

There is a right to oppose this occupation....The occupier cannot say he is defending himself

We can expect Albanese to push these ideas -- that terrorist attacks on civilians are lawful and that Israel does not have the right to defend itself from terrorist attacks -- during her term as Special Rapporteur.

After all, as we have already seen, objectivity and impartiality will not stop Albanese from pushing her personal agenda.

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!