Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, February 10, 2023

02/10 Links Pt1: Two killed in Jerusalem terror ramming, including 6-year-old boy; driver shot dead; Israeli Teams Rescue 17 People From Rubble of Turkey Quakes

From Ian:

Two killed in Jerusalem terror ramming, including 6-year-old boy; driver shot dead

A six-year-old boy and a 20-year-old man were killed and at least five others were wounded in a car-ramming terror attack near East Jerusalem’s Ramot neighborhood, police and medics said Friday. One of those wounded was a child in critical condition, the brother of the slain six-year-old.

Graphic footage from the scene showed several people strewn on the ground after a blue Mazda vehicle crashed into a bus stop near the Nebi Samuel site, between Jerusalem and the Palestinian city of Ramallah.

Several bystanders were seen aiming firearms at the car. Police said the driver was shot dead by an officer who was at the scene.

The attacker was identified as Hussein Qaraqa, an Israeli citizen and resident of the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Issawiya. A senior Israeli official said the attacker appears to have been mentally ill, and was released from a psychiatric hospital in northern Israel only days ago.

Police designated the incident as a terror attack, and officers were seen operating in Issawiya shortly after.

The Magen David Adom ambulance service said the boy, 6, was pronounced dead at the scene. He was named as Yaakov Yisrael Fali. Fali was quickly buried Friday afternoon before the start of Shabbat, in accordance with Jewish law.

The second victim was identified as Alter Shlomo Lederman, a 20-year-old yeshiva student who had gotten married two months ago. He and his wife had been on their way to his parents’ home for Shabbat. Lederman was rushed to Shaare Zedek Medical Center in critical condition, where he succumbed to his wounds.

First victim from today’s #Jerusalem car ramming identified as Alter Shlomo Lederman. He was 20-year-old yeshiva student who had gotten married only 2 months ago. He and his wife had been on their way to his parents’ home for Shabbat. Baruch Dayan Emet. pic.twitter.com/wF2m3H8rRu
— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) February 10, 2023

Breaking news from Israel’s capital where a terrorist just rammed a car into a busy bus stop killing 2, including a six year old child, and injuring more.

Absolutely heartbreaking pic.twitter.com/4jNZXLJmMX
— Brooke Goldstein (@GoldsteinBrooke) February 10, 2023

Palestinian media refuses to mention that today's terrorist murdered a six year old. Because that isn't "heroic."

From Times of Israel:

A six-year-old boy and a 20-year-old man were killed and at least five others were wounded in a car-ramming terror attack near East Jerusalem’s Ramot neighborhood, police and medics said Friday. One of those wounded was a child in critical condition.

Graphic footage from the scene showed several people strewn on the ground after a blue Mazda vehicle crashed into a bus stop near the Nebi Samuel site, between Jerusalem and the Palestinian city of Ramallah.

The attacker was identified as Hussein Qaraqa, an Israeli citizen and resident of the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Issawiya.

The six year old victim was named as Yaakov Yisrael Fali.
The second victim was identified as Alter Shlomo Lederman, a 20-year-old yeshiva student who had gotten married two months ago. He and his wife had been on their way to his parents’ home for Shabbat. Lederman was rushed to Shaare Zedek Medical Center in critical condition, where he succumbed to his wounds.

I went through every Palestinian media outlet that I could think of, and not a single one mentioned that the victim was a six year old child. They all just said that he was a "settler."

Because heroes don't kill children, and the murderer was a hero, therefore they cannot report that he murdered a child. The narrative is the important thing.

And, yes, the attack is described as a "heroic operation" in much of Palestinian media.

While they dehumanize Jews, they humanize murderers of Jews. The terrorist is described as a loving father of three, the oldest being 5 years old. Yes, children he chose to leave fatherless are more important than the ones he rammed his car into.

I am willing to bet that if anyone looks into his background, they will find that he had incentive to commit suicide and receive the guaranteed lifetime salary for his family paid for by the PLO. But no reporter will bother asking those questions. The narrative of a desperate Palestinian who has "no choice" but to murder Jews is too important.

The murderer was not an Islamic extremist. He was a leftist, and a fan (at least) of the PFLP group that is linked to so many Palestinian "human rights" organizations.

I have not seen a condemnation of the PFLP as a terrorist organization from any human rights group since the early 2000s.

After the last terror attack in Jerusalem, Human Rights Watch didn't write a word of condemnation until they could first blame Israel for sealing the house of the murderer's family. "Collective punishment" was the theme of their story that mentioned the attack.

Since they prioritize collective punishment as a worse crime than mass murder, I wonder if they would consider a Palestinian ramming his car into random Jews, ostensibly because of Israeli policies, as a case of collective punishment?

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!

An obese Palestinian prisoner with heart disease dies. Palestinians call it murder.

The official Palestinian Wafa news agency reports that "The prisoner Ahmed Badr Abdullah Abu Ali (48 years old) from the city of Yatta, south of Hebron, was killed at dawn today, in Soroka Hospital, as a result of the crime of medical negligence (slow killing)."

Every single time that a prisoner dies from medical conditions, Palestinians blame Israel for his death - no matter if it is cancer or any other incurable disease.

In the case of Abu Ali, the prisoner suffered from obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease.

As far as the charges of medical negligence, a little research finds that they are lies, as usual. Two years ago he started having heart problems and Israel immediately transferred him to Soroka Hospital for a cardiac catheterization. The New Arab reports that he underwent another such procedure last year.

At least Israel can't be accused of starving him.

The Palestinian Prisoner Society counts 24 prisoners with cancer today. And every single case is blamed on Israel.

I guess the Jews have figured out how to cure cancer and they are not sharing this information with the world in order to slowly kill a tiny percentage of Palestinian prisoners.

Makes sense when you are steeped in antisemitism.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Yesterday, the UN hosted an event on Globalizing Efforts to Combat Antisemitism. Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff gave the keynote, and prominent names in the field of antisemitism studies spoke.

One of the speakers was Ted Deutch, chief executive officer of the American Jewish Committee, who highlighted a survey that the AJC will release next week.

He noted some of the findings:

63% of them do not know that 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.

Nearly half cannot name a single concentration camp or death camp.

Eleven percent of American Millennials and Gen Zs said Jews caused the Holocaust.

These seem to be identical to the survey done in 2020 by the Claims Conference, so I assume that the numbers came from there. (In that survey, 20% of young New York State residents believed that Jews were responsible for their own genocide!)

But Deutch added that the AJC survey found a dramatic increase in the number of American Jews who feel less secure than they did a year ago, and an increase in the number of US Jews who have changed their behavior to avoid going to places where they believe that their Jewishness could cause a problem for them.

Deutch noted how easily antisemitism is spread on social media and urged social media companies to enforce their own policies.

Here are the highlights of his comments.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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02/09 Links Pt2: Howard Jacobson: Jews in their own words… so long as they don’t say ‘Israel’; The Taylor Force Act: Fighting Pay-For-Slay; Antisemitism at Harvard

From Ian:

Howard Jacobson: Jews in their own words… so long as they don’t say ‘Israel’

In the stage play and the television documentary, Freedland and Baddiel allowed themselves to be distracted by the question of whether or not an English Jew bears responsibility for Israel’s heinous misdeeds.

There’s a right and a wrong way of answering that. “We are not our brother’s keeper” is the wrong way. “He is not even our brother” is worse still. Insist your innocence of someone else’s heinous misdeeds and all you do is concede the heinousness.

To deny affinity with Israel is to deny affinity with Jewish history. The marauding, child-murdering colonialists of anti-Zionist propaganda (see Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children) are the same hated Jews of 2,000 years ago: separatists, thieves and blood-suckers, long before there was an Israeli soldier patrolling the West Bank.

The same calumnies and caricatures proliferate, only this time the Z-word stands in for the J-word.

Whoever would engage with the double-think of antisemitism today cannot be indifferent to the creeping menace of this shape-shifting. Israel is where antisemitism has migrated. But heigh-ho, “Israel-Shmisrael”. Israeli Jews don’t count.

One cannot accuse Jonathan Freedland of indifference to Israel. For years now, his Guardian column has extolled the country’s achievements while scrupulously criticising “the occupation”.

But is his scrupulousness — as, for example, in the matter of just what words Jews. In Their Own Words speak — too one-sided? Does it lack the tragic dimension of Amos Oz’s vision of Israel’s relations with Palestinians as a catastrophic collision of two rights (latterly two wrongs), and does it leave too much of the old calumny standing?

For all their differences — Freedland the formidably acute and considered thinker, Baddiel the no less formidable polemicist — their views on Israel converge in the old discomfort. Israel just won’t give them the Jew they want.

Israel’s disobligingness, when it comes to the feelings of the diaspora Jew, is long-standing. We have all lost friends to Zionism. But to take the fight to antisemitism means confronting it where it thinks it has the strongest case. There’s no point running a good race only to fall in sight of the finishing line.

Hezekiah’s Mistake

Fast forward to the 21st century, and the relevance of ancient lessons of statecraft in the Levant, whether drawn from the Bible or from Assyrian and Babylonian annals, yet remains constant. To be sure, Israel today is no longer the weak biblical statelet it once was. While structural vulnerabilities of size and geography remain, Israel today is a middle power, a technological leader that fields an advanced military with powerful capabilities. It has defeated every attempt made by hostile neighbors to inflict defeat and destruction upon it. More to the point, Israel chose wisely in the contest of great powers during the Cold War, and has helped amplify and project U.S. power, particularly in the eastern Mediterranean.

Yet despite the enduring strength of the U.S. as a global superpower and local patron, Israel’s strategic environment has changed in critical ways over the last decade. And save for a brief interregnum, which coincided with the first two years of the Biden administration, Benjamin Netanyahu has been at the helm, navigating Israel through this new terrain.

During this decade, Israel saw some long-standing threats sharpen, namely the threat from Iran, and security challenges on Israel’s borders become more acute. Israel’s strategic environment changed radically with the return of the Russian military to the region, ensconced in the same theater of operations as Iran on Israel’s northern border. While Russia is a shadow of its Cold War self, it is still a formidable nuclear power. But Russia, in itself, has not been Netanyahu’s toughest challenge. The Israeli leader’s biggest problem, rather, has been in managing relations with his superpower patron.

The prevailing Democratic Party narrative tells a different story, of course. That narrative holds that Netanyahu committed a cardinal sin—a variant of King Hezekiah’s offense—by leading a rebellion against his American suzerain. In the Democrats’ telling, Netanyahu came to Congress at the invitation of the Republican Party and colluded with them to challenge a sitting Democratic president. In so doing, he factionalized Israel’s position in the U.S., turning it into a “political football,” or a Republican equity.

The problem with this version is that, unlike Hezekiah, Netanyahu didn’t pick a fight with the empire. The empire picked a fight with him, and with the country he leads.

Barack Obama entered the White House with a clear vision for how he wanted to reposition the U.S. in the Middle East. He envisioned creating a “new equilibrium”—that is, rearranging the balance of power—in the region by realigning the U.S. away from the states that the American global power had traditionally included in its alliance system, and toward Iran. Such were Obama’s declared aims, in order to achieve a goal that he called “balance.” That is, to move the U.S. closer to an expansionist regional middle power that’s been in conflict with Israel, and whose explicit objective is the Jewish state’s destruction.

After decades of operating under a set of rules in a mutually beneficial arrangement with the global superpower, Israel woke up to find that the new emperor had changed his mind, and decided that he would now empower Israel’s enemy and partner with it in multiple theaters throughout the region. In fact, Russia’s return to the Levant, and the expansion of Iran’s entrenchment there, emerged not as a result of a confrontation with the U.S., but rather with its acquiescence and protection. It must be stressed that while the motives for these actions may be open to interpretation or debate, it is simply a fact that they happened. Realigning the U.S. away from Israel and toward Iran is what Obama decided to do, and he did it.

(I can't believe no one has done this before!)

Gilligan's Island, the enormously popular TV series of the 1960s, was created by Sherwood Schwartz, a Jew born in Passaic, NJ in 1916. Schwartz, who also created The Brady Bunch, became a writer in part because of antisemitism.

He intended to go to medical school but the quota system in place limiting the number of Jews stopped him from being accepted. A friend suggested he change his last name to Black (the translation of Schwartz) and pretend to be a Unitarian to get into med school. Schwartz's response: “I said, ‘Look, I’m Jewish. I’m not ashamed of that. My name is Schwartz and I’m not ashamed of that. I’m not going to be changing anything to get into medical school.’ So as a result I didn’t get into medical school.”

Schwartz thought that his chances of being accepted might be better if he got a second degree, so he went to stay with his older brother Al in California to attend USC, where he got a masters in biological science. At the time, Al was a writer for Bob Hope, so Sherwood submitted a few jokes to the comedy legend - and was hired with a seven year writing contract.

He went on from there to write for comedy series like the Ozzie and Harriet radio show in the 1950s. But all the while, he was developing his own show.

Schwartz described the concept in an interview:

“I thought I had a great idea. And it’s still a great idea. It’s people. Here’s a serious show. It’s serious in that Arabs and Jews have to learn to live together for they’re stuck together. North Koreans and South Koreans, they have to learn. If you don’t learn, you’ll all die. So there’s this philosophic basis — this is not an afterthought, this is in the show. When the show first came on the air I got with regularity bachelor’s degree, master’s degree thesis from people in the theatrical area explaining what’s the basis for Gilligan’s Island. Like I didn’t know. It was carefully thought out, these seven people. That took me like a year to figure out who should be on the island. And it was all with a view towards the respect that people have to learn for each other because nobody is the same as anybody else. ....That’s what the show is about, people learning to live together.”

While the show did not have any overt Jewish themes, it did have two Jewish actresses.

Tina Louise, who played the bombshell actress Ginger, was Jewish, born Tatiana Josivovna Chernova Blacker in New York City in 1934. Her husband Les Crane (Stein) was also Jewish.

Natalie Schafer, who played Mrs. "Lovey" Howell, was also Jewish. She was born in 1900, and was actually twelve years older than Jim Backus, who played her husband.

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!

02/09 Links Pt1: ICJ sets deadline for submissions on Israel’s ‘occupation’ of biblical heartland; UK Home Sec. vows to crack down on Islamist threat to Jews after damning Prevent report

From Ian:

MEMRI: Lebanese Writer: President Assad Destroyed Syria In The Civil War, Which Was A Greater Disaster Than The Palestinian Nakba, And Left Syria Unable To Deal With The Earthquake

In an article titled "Syria and the Ongoing Disaster" in the London-based Qatari daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi, French-Lebanese academic and journalist Gilbert Achcar notes that the number of Syrian victims in the recent earthquake is especially large, and this is because Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad destroyed the country in the civil war that has been ongoing since 2012, leaving it unable to cope with a disaster like an earthquake. The Syrian civil war, he adds, was a greater disaster than the Palestinian Nakba, because the number of people who were killed in it and in the oppression that accompanied it is ten times greater. He notes further that the Syrian refugees living in parts of Turkey affected by the quake were packed into buildings constructed hastily and in violation of earthquake regulations, which contributed to the high death toll.

The following are translated excerpts from Achcar's article.[1]
"If what happened in Palestine before the founding of the state of Israel can be described as a nakba [catastrophe], then what happened in Syria, especially since the start of the civil war there in 2012, can [certainly] be called a calamity. It is one of the two largest calamities in contemporary Arab history, and it is much greater than the Palestinian Nakba, if you count the number of victims. The number of people killed by the war and the oppression in Syria in the last 11 years is about ten times greater than the number of Palestinians killed by Zionism since it first invaded Palestine. And the number of Syrians who have fled from the country and those who are displaced within its borders is equal to the number of Palestinians [now] living in their homeland and in the diaspora [combined]. The only calamity in our region similar in its magnitude to the Syrian one is the calamity that has been unfolding in Iraq since Saddam Hussein seized power there and embroiled [the country] in his stupid wars. This was followed by the American occupation, the arrival of ISIS and everything that happened later.

"We do not present these figures to downplay the Palestinian tragedy, which involves a homeland that was usurped, but in order to highlight the horrific magnitude of the Syrian tragedy. What makes this tragedy worse is that [Syria] is now subjected to five different occupations: the Zionist occupation of the Golan, which has been ongoing since 1967, and the Iranian, Turkish, Russian and American occupations, which began in the recent decade and still continue. And now disaster has once again befallen the Syrian people, since the epicenter of the biggest earthquake to strike Turkey since 1939 was in the city of Gaziantep, which is more or less the capital of the Syrian refugees in Turkey. Moreover, the first quake that struck the region in the small hours of Monday morning [February 6, 2023] also affected a large part of northwest Syria, with Aleppo at its center and Idlib to the west of it.

"Obviously is was Turkey itself, and the Turks and Kurds who live in the area where the quake occurred, that were most affected by it. But the Syrian areas are much weaker in the face of the disaster than the Turkish ones, since some of them are [under the control] of a state that is much better at killing and destroying than at helping to clear the rubble, while others are not [controlled by] any state at all and are even outside the operation zone of most international aid organizations. Furthermore, the Syrian refugees living in southwest Turkey were crowded into many ramshackle buildings which collapsed in a horrific manner, since –due to greed [of contractors] wishing to increase their profits – they were built in violation of the regulations [for construction] in earthquake-prone areas. This means that the number of Syrians earthquake victims, which will surely reach tens of thousands, will be disproportionately high, compared to their share of the population.

ICJ sets deadline for submissions on Israel’s ‘occupation’ of biblical heartland

The International Court of Justice announced on Wednesday a July 25 deadline for state bodies and organizations to submit documents pertaining to Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria.

The U.N. General Assembly in late December approved a resolution, at the behest of the Palestinian Authority, calling on the ICJ to “render urgently an advisory opinion” on what it called Israel’s “prolonged occupation, settlement and annexation of Palestinian territory.”

The ICJ said in a statement that it has set “July 25, 2023, as the time list within which written statements on the questions may be presented to the court and October 25, 2023, as the time limit within which states and organizations, having presented written statements, may submit written comments on the written statements made by either states or organizations.”

The ICJ confirmed in late January that it had received the U.N.’s formal request to weigh in on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, without indicating that it was launching a probe.

In response to the U.N. resolution, the Israeli Security Cabinet decided, among other measures, to withhold taxes and tariffs collected on behalf of the P.A., in an amount equal to that which Ramallah paid to terrorists and their families in 2022 under its “pay-for-slay” policy.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has since signed an order doubling that amount.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the U.N. move as “disgraceful.”

“Just like the hundreds of distorted U.N. General Assembly resolutions against Israel over the years, this disgraceful resolution will not obligate the government of Israel. The Jewish people is not occupying its land and is not occupying its eternal capital Jerusalem. No U.N. resolution can distort this historical truth,” he said.

Why does the US ignore Hamas? - opinion

MUCH, PERHAPS the major part, of Palestinian opinion shares the view that Israel is illegally occupying Palestinian land. The Hamas and PLO charters and the Fatah constitution are at one on the ultimate objective of removing Israel and gaining control of the whole of what was Mandatory Palestine, and indeed on the need to take up arms in support of it. It is in the tactics to achieve their common aim that the two main Palestinian parties diverge.

Hamas believes that the only effective way to achieve the desired outcome is through continual conflict and terror. Any pause in the battle must be temporary and provide a tactical advantage. The Fatah-dominated PA, however, continues to follow the tactical path set by Yasser Arafat.

At the Oslo Accords peace discussions in 1993 and 1995, Arafat – on the record as rock solid in his determination to overthrow Israel eventually – decided to woo world opinion by overtly supporting the two-state solution. Paying lip service to a two-state solution would be an exercise in public relations, a stepping-stone to the real objective.

Hamas will have none of it and the disagreement is so basic that it has ensured that Hamas and Fatah have remained at each other’s throats for decades. All attempts at reconciliation have proved fruitless.

Following Arafat’s death, the PA and its new leader Mahmoud Abbas made a determined effort to convince world opinion that it supported the idea of establishing a sovereign Palestine within the boundaries that existed before the Six Day War in 1967 – that is, in the West Bank, eastern Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. But pressing for a Palestinian state within those boundaries inevitably meant acknowledging that a sovereign Israel would exist outside them.

This is the pill that Hamas and like-minded rejectionists find impossible to swallow, even though the failure of the PA to sign up to any of the increasingly generous deals subsequently tabled demonstrated what a sham the ploy was.

None of this is secret, so how is it that the US administration, together with a vast swath of world opinion, knowing that at least half of the Palestinian people would never subscribe to a two-state solution, continue to advocate for it? Indeed the Palestinian leadership is perfectly well aware that anyone signing such a deal, endorsing Israel’s right to exist on “their” land, would be denounced as a traitor to the Palestinian cause and would certainly be putting his life in jeopardy.

It is also odd that so little thought has been given to what sort of two-state solution could ever be signed in current circumstances. Since Hamas would never participate or be a signatory, Gaza would be excluded from the arrangement. What sort of sovereign Palestine would it be, shorn of nearly half the Palestinian population?

In short, world opinion has never faced up to the uncomfortable truth that in order to achieve a genuine two-state solution, the Hamas organization must first be disempowered. That is clearly not a task that Washington is minded to undertake.

Every country is proud to help earthquake victims. Only Israel is vilified.

Romanian media are reporting that a team from Romania rescued a family from under the rubble in Turkey.

Chinese media are proud that a Chinese team rescued a pregnant woman.

The UK government issued a press release about the large team they sent to Turkey.

Algerian officials are proud of their rescue team.

So are Palestinians.

UAE media are similarly reporting on their own teams who have rescued people in Syria.

It is natural to be proud that your own people are helping others. Even local media in Los Angeles are showing pride that rescue dogs being sent by the US were trained in Ventura County.

Yet when Israel sends a massive number of experienced experts to set up a field hospital, and shows pride in helping save ten people so far, some people bristle.

Palestinian media have had multiple articles that say that Israel's rescue efforts are only for PR purposes, and they are not interested in saving any Muslim lives.

"Rabbi" David Mivasair calls it "cynical propaganda." Someone named Dan Easterman gleefully tweeted and defended, "Every time there is an earthquake or humanitarian disaster, Israel immediately tries to exploit the tragedy to gain political capital and improve it’s [sic] international image. The cynicism makes me sick."

This has been a theme for previous rescue missions, where "critics" even accused Israel of using the rescuers as cover for doing crimes in the disaster zone.

It is yet another case where Israel acts like every other country on Earth - and people single it out as being immoral.

Yes, this is the definition of antisemitism.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Poll: Palestinians think their suffering is unique in world history, and this justifies terror

In December, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research and Tel Aviv University carried out a joint opinion survey of Palestinians and Israelis, asking them similar questions to compare their opinions.

These joint polls have been happening for years, and they are very valuable in comparing both sides' opinions of the peace process or a two state solution.

There were two questions asked, though, which were not well thought out. The responses are far more significant than they appear at first blush.

The pair of questions were prefaced with, "To what extent do you disagree or agree with the following statements regarding the experiences of Jews /Palestinians generally?" with the wording of "Jews" given to Israelis and "Palestinians" to Palestinian Arabs.

The first statement was, "I believe that the suffering of Palestinians/Jews is unique throughout the human history."

This question implies an equivalence between the Jewish people who have existed for over 3500 years and a Palestinian people who have existed as a self-defined people for, at the very most, a century. If the question was meant to show equivalence, it should have used "Israelis" instead of "Jews."

The answers:

More Palestinians than Israeli Jews think that their suffering is unique throughout human history! Given that Jewish history includes centuries of pogroms, Crusades, expulsions, forced conversions, massacres and a Holocaust, this Palestinian mindset is astonishing both in its unparalleled hubris and in its ignorance of world history.

It is impossible to make peace with people who are so detached from reality, and so wedded to the myth that their victimhood trumps all others since the dawn of time.

The next statement: "Since Palestinians/Jews are the victims of ongoing suffering, it is their moral right to do anything in order to survive."

The answers:

It is a poorly written statement for comparison purposes, because each side is likely to interpret it differently.

The statement did not define the parameters of "anything." Almost certainly, if the question had the words "including genocide" or "including blowing up babies" the percentage of Israeli Jews who agreed would have shrunk significantly.

I'm not so certain if the same could be said about Palestinians. After all, they are taught that killing Israeli Jewish civilians is not only moral, but a legal right of "resistance" under international law, and they overwhelmingly support terror attacks against innocent Jews while the number of Israelis who support murdering Palestinian civilians is quite small.

The Israeli Jews almost certainly didn't have an expansive interpretation of what "anything" means. The Palestinians almost certainly did. Even so, far more Palestinians - nine out of ten! - say that anything is justified for their cause.

This poll shows a Palestinian people who are unhinged from both reality and morality.

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!

American Bar Association caves to modern antisemites, condemns an "antisemitism" that could mean anything

The American Bar Association proposed a Resolution 514 condemning antisemitism that referred to the widely accepted IHRA working definition.

Israel haters immediately attacked.

More than 40 organizations, both those that are explicitly anti-Israel and "progressive" organizations, joined a campaign claiming that the IHRA Working Definition chills free speech. "Any embrace of the IHRA definition by the ABA would legitimize and encourage this undermining of core democratic rights," they say, without explaining exactly how.

The National Lawyers Guild said, falsely, that "the IHRA definition would provide a tool to stigmatize and suppress lawyers, legal advocates and law students from expressing political criticism of Israel or advocacy for Palestinian human rights." Of course, they cannot point to any wording in the IHRA definition that would do anything like that.

Human Rights Watch wrote a similar letter.

The main point that these critics make is that the IHRA definition has supposedly been used to suppress free speech. They cannot point to where the definition actually does that, because it doesn't mandate anything: the definition is filled with caveats that in the end only provide guidance. If the IHRA Working Definition is being misused, then these organizations should fight the misuse, not the definition. The fact that they don't tells you all you need to know.

Moreover, the ABA resolution explicitly said that nothing in the resolution is intended to diminish or infringe upon the Bill of Rights or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, so even if their lies about IHRA were true, the text wouldn't allow it to be misused that way.

They are lying when they say that their opposition to the definition is based on human rights and free speech concerns. The only problem they have with it is that it notes that singling out Israel as uniquely evil far out of proportion to its supposed crimes is antisemitic. And they want to have the right to do exactly that.

Their objections are based on their hate of the Jewish state, not their interest in Palestinian human rights or in fighting antisemitism.

The original draft resolution also included an attached 17 page report on antisemitism that went through a history of antisemitism in Europe and in the US. It mentioned Natan Sharansky's "3-D" test for antisemitism as well as further references to the IHRA and US State Department definitions of antisemitism.

In the end, the ABA removed everything that could be considered a definition, including virtually the entire report, and left the eviscerated resolution to condemn something that could mean anything:

Without a definition, this is entirely meaningless. Some Israel haters define antisemitism as hating Arabs. Others define Zionism as antisemitism. There is nothing in this resolution that contradicts those bizarre definitions.

The resolution doesn't even mention Jews - only a single reference to improving security at "Jewish institutions and organizations." It mentions "houses of worship," not synagogues.

Right now, the resolution is about as meaningful as a resolution saying that puppies are cute. It is a checkbox - now the ABA can say they oppose antisemitism (whatever that is)! Mazel tov!

Because of the modern antisemites who use obsessive, conspiracy-theory driven hate of Israel as a proxy for the age old obsessive, conspiracy-theory driven hate of Jews, the ABA believes that it passed a resolution that didn't upset anyone.

Well, this Jew is upset.

The Jews who publicly identify as Jews, those who wear identifiably Jewish clothing, those who publicly support the Jewish state or speak Hebrew in public or who stand proud in their Zionism - they are the biggest targets and victims of antisemitism today.

This resolution doesn't give a damn about them.

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!

02/08 Links Pt2: HRW and Antisemitism: Sins of Commission and Omission; Jewish Dems defend Ilhan Omar following removal from House committee; Roger Waters: The Leni Riefenstahl of rock and roll

From Ian:

NGO Monitor: HRW and Antisemitism: Sins of Commission and Omission

Summary
In 2003, Human Rights Watch (HRW) committed to “bring problems of anti-Semitism into the overall human rights discourse.” However, for the past 20 years, HRW has taken the opposite direction by failing to contribute meaningfully to ending hatred of and attacks against Jewish people. Indeed, as shown in a systematic review of HRW’s output since 2003, HRW has consistently opposed and obstructed meaningful initiatives to combat antisemitism. In fact, the most significant item on this issue was HRW’s 2023 letter to the American Bar Association, calling for the rejection of a resolution on antisemitism that endorsed the international-consensus IHRA Working Definition. And as this brief report demonstrates, HRW officials – including long-time leader Ken Roth – have made numerous antisemitic comments and shared antisemitic content on social media.

HRW policy of obstruction has come during a period of marked increase in antisemitic attacks around the world – and especially in the United States – reflecting HRW’s total lack of credibility. The 2003 commitment is exposed as empty words.

Ignoring antisemitic crimes
NGO Monitor reviewed HRW publications from 2003-2022. During that time, we identified only 12 cursory instances where HRW discussed antisemitism and antisemitic events per se, without joining them with other issues such as Islamophobia and other forms of racism. This total excludes passing mentions of antisemitic incidents; HRW statements and activities opposing the IHRA working definition and similar responses to antisemitic activity and speech (almost always without suggesting meaningful concrete alternatives); and HRW denying that antisemitic activity and speech is, in fact, antisemitic.

Eight Ways of Looking at Israel

‘And None Shall Make Them Afraid: Eight Stories of the Modern State of Israel‘ by Rick Richman will be available on Feb 12, 2023.

Israel, like the Jewish people, is both incredibly complex and simple. Everyone thinks that they know the story, but no one really does. The complexity and simplicity of a story that happened in the lifetime of many still living today is what obligates Rick Richman to break down the story of the rebirth of a biblical nation into eight smaller stories of key figures in that drama.

In the parable of the elephant, a group of blind men grope around the beast. Each finds a body part that seems to resemble something else, a snake, a wall, a rope. But this metaphor is true of Israel which represents a unity and also many things that are complex in and of themselves.

Eight ways of looking at Israel is at once too many and too few, but Rick Richman’s book delivers a satisfying survey of a few human beings who account for the complexity and conflicts of advocating for a Jewish State.

And None Shall Make Them Afraid: Eight Stories of the Modern State of Israel is made up of both contrasting and complementary portraits. History introduces a sense of distance from the urgent conflicts that go into the founding of any nation. The Founding Fathers have receded into a single unity although at times some were willing to fight each other to the death. Not enough history has passed that the figures in this book, Weizmann and Jabotinsky, Golda Meir and Ben Hecht, can sit comfortably together. Richman, a lifelong pro-Israel activist and journalist, begins with Herzl and concludes with Ron Dermer who served as ambassador under Netanyahu.

But what Richman is after isn’t a founding story so much as it’s a story of what people found in the cause. There are plenty of stories of what individuals did for Israel, And None Shall Make Them Afraid is in many ways more the story of how advocating for a Jewish State changed the lives of some disparate figures: a couple of journalists from different countries, Ben Hecht, a Hollywood screenwriter, Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president and a biochemist, Golda Meir, a Milwaukee librarian and Ron Dermer, a kid from Miami studying philosophy.

Richman wanted to tell the story of the interconnection between “Zionism and Americanism from 1895 to the present” in his collection of essays and of the eight central figures in its narrative, four are Americans, one a Brit and still another spent a good deal of time in the UK. “I believe in England,” he quotes Jabotinsky as saying, “just as I believed in England twenty years ago.”

Boycotts: A First Amendment History

Abstract
Over the past decade, more than half of U.S. states have enacted laws that prohibit recipients of public contracts and state investment from boycotting the State of Israel. These so-called “anti-BDS laws” have triggered a debate over whether the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause includes a “right to boycott.” This Essay is the first to take up that question thoroughly from a historical standpoint. Examining the boycott’s constitutional status from before the Founding to the present era, we find that state actors have consistently treated the boycott as economic conduct subject to governmental control, and not as expression presumptively immune from state interference. Before the Founding, the colonists mandated a strict boycott of Britain, which local governmental bodies enforced through trial proceedings and economic punishments. At common law, courts used the doctrine of conspiracy to enjoin “unjustified” boycotts and hold liable their perpetrators. And in the modern era, state and federal officials have consistently compelled participation in the boycotts they approved (like those of apartheid-era South Africa and modern-day Russia), while prohibiting participation in the ones they opposed (like that of Israel).

The Essay concludes that modern anti-boycott laws not only fit within, but improve upon, this constitutional tradition. As the Supreme Court’s 1982 decision in NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware illustrates, the common law approach risks violating the First Amendment if the doctrine is applied to restrict not only the act of boycotting or refusing to deal, but also the expressive activities that accompany such politically-motivated refusals. Modern anti-boycott laws avoid that problem by surgically targeting the act of boycotting, while leaving regulated entities free to say whatever they please. From the standpoint of history, these laws reflect First Amendment progress, not decay.

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!

Palestinians trying to hijack the earthquake

The Palestinian Information Center seems upset that the world is paying so much attention to the earthquake in Turkey and Syria and not to them.

So they wrote an article that not only accuses Israel of "aid-washing" but also claims that the damage in Gaza wars was just as bad, if not worse, than the horrific scenes we are seeing in the quake zones.

The painful scenes of the earthquake victims under the rubble, their loud cries asking for help and rescue, and the pictures of the injured children stuck under the rubble, brought back to mind the images of the successive wars on the Gaza Strip, where the occupation planes destroy homes and residential towers on the heads of their owners.

It goes on to say that the destruction of Gaza was the same, and who could even imagine that Israel is really interested in saving lives? It is all just "hasbara."

Ibrahim Al-Madhoun said that the Zionist occupation is trying to whiten its black image after committing many crimes, and is taking advantage of the earthquake catastrophe and international sympathy with Turkey and Syria, and wants to appear with a fake face, by playing a humanitarian role that does not suit its criminal nature.

Al-Madhoun stressed that the image that the occupation is trying to appear as a relief and savior for the victims of the earthquake will not convince the Arab peoples and the free people of the world.

Al-Madhoun called for the need to focus on the real image of the occupation, expose its criminality, warn the world, international institutions, and countries against being deceived by the occupation, exposing its crimes, and remembering what happened and is happening, of crimes committed by the occupation on an ongoing basis.

The irony is that while the Israelis are proud of their fast response teams and their setting up an entire field hospital in Turkey, the Palestinians are spending more time on the publicity campaigns promoting their own aid than the aid itself. They created a "Palestine is With You" campaign and logo:

Notice that the center of the logo is the Dome of the Rock - meaning that even this campaign to supposedly help thousands of victims is really designed to ensure the centrality of the Palestinian cause.

I don't think there are any new logos of the Israeli efforts for helping the victims.

As usual, the Palestinian accusations against Israel is projection of what they are doing - trying to leverage a disaster into making Palestinians look good.

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!

02/08 Links Pt1: Netanyahu hails ‘highest order’ aid mission in quake-struck Turkey; What drives the left to incite civil war?; There Is No Such Thing As Palestinian Refugee Camps. It's a SCAM!

From Ian:

Netanyahu hails ‘highest order’ aid mission in quake-struck Turkey

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday commended the work of the IDF search and rescue delegation in earthquake-stricken Turkey, which has saved four people from collapsed buildings since starting its work the previous day.

“You are representing the mission with the most experience on the international level. You have much experience, which has proven itself. You are carrying out a humanitarian mission of the highest order and are bringing much honor to us and the State of Israel and are showing Israel’s true face to the world,” Netanyahu told Col. (res.) Golan Vach of the IDF Home Front Command, the head of the delegation, in a phone call.

“Please convey my greetings to all members of the mission. Do what you can to save lives and be careful,” he added.

Vach said that the emergency response team was currently engaged in efforts to save two additional people from the rubble.

“We are trying to make every effort to save lives. Time-wise, this has been the most successful day that our missions have ever had thanks to the fact that you succeeded in getting us here very quickly,” he told the prime minister.

A separate Israel Defense Forces delegation arrived in Turkey on Wednesday morning to set up a field hospital in the wake of the massive earthquakes this week that have so far claimed the lives of more than 11,000 people there and in neighboring Syria.

How did a seismologist predict the Turkey earthquake 3 days earlier?

A Dutch expert published a tweet on his Twitter account three days before the earthquake in Turkey on Monday, predicting that a powerful earthquake would happen imminently in Turkey.

He even attached an aerial photograph and marked the area where the disaster would happen.

Dutch seismologist Frank Hoogerbeets, who works for the Solar System Geometry Survey (SSGS) in the Netherlands, predicted the earthquake in Turkey on February 3.

The prediction
On his Twitter account, the Dutch researcher wrote: "Sooner or later there will be a magnitude 7.5 earthquake in this region (South-Central Turkey, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon)."

The SSGS describes itself on Twitter as a research institute for monitoring geometry between celestial bodies related to seismic activity.

After Hooogerbeets' prediction went viral, he reacted to the earthquake and said: "As I stated earlier, sooner or later this would happen in this region, similar to the years 115 and 526. These earthquakes are always preceded by critical planetary geometry, as we had on 4-5 February."

After multiple aftershocks in the days after the earthquake were felt throughout the larger region, Hoogerbeets gave his explanation for the aftershocks: "The large earthquakes in Central Turkey have caused a significant change in stress distribution throughout the region, with seismic activity down to Palestine as a result. Clearly, the region is resettling."

Second minor earthquake in less than a day rattles Israel; no injuries or damage

A second minor temblor in less than a day rattled Israel on Wednesday amid fears the country could face a major earthquake like the deadly quakes that have killed more than 11,000 people in nearby Turkey and Syria.

The IDF Home Front Command said the quake measured 3.3 on the Richter scale and was centered in central Israel. No injuries or damage were immediately reported, but residents across the country reported feeling tremors.

It followed a 3.5-magnitude tremor on Tuesday night that was centered around 15 kilometers (9 miles) southeast of the settlement city of Ariel in the West Bank.

The Home Front Command said that warning sirens were not sounded for either quake because the tremors posed no danger to residents.

The warning system put in place last year in cooperation with the Geological Survey of Israel can issue an alert to citizens with sirens, similar to those used in rocket attacks, within seven seconds of a quake that measures more than 4.5 on the Richter scale.

The effectiveness of the system was captured on live TV with the Kan public broadcaster interviewing the head of the Geological Survey of Israel when sirens blared in the institute’s headquarters signaling an incoming earthquake.

The EU is fighting disinformation. But not anti-Israel disinformation.

Yesterday, EU High Representative/Vice-President Josep Borrell spoke at the EEAS Conference on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference about the dangers of Russian disinformation campaigns:

Russia is using information manipulation and interference as a crucial instrument of this war. This war is not only [about] using explosives, bombs, bullets, killing people. It is about the mind of the people. It is about how to conquer the spirit, the intelligence, the understanding of the people.

It is not new. It started with the [COVID-19] pandemic. When the pandemic came, we started speaking about “the battle of narratives”. This is a sentence as important as “the Geopolitical Europe”. The battle of narratives started with the pandemic at the latest.

And, today, that is clear: this war is not only conducted on the battlefield by the soldiers. It is also waged in the information space, trying to win the hearts and minds of people.

...This is a major threat for the liberal democracies, which are based on information. Democracy is a system that is based on the information that people have, because they made their choices – their political choices – according to their own perceptions and information that they receive about what is happening in the rest of the world.

If the information is toxic, democracy cannot work. If information is manipulated, people don’t have a clear idea of what is going on. So, their choices are biased, and the information is the oil of the engine of democracy. We have to take care of the quality of information because is the sap, the blood, the oil, the thing that makes democracy work.

The EU created an "EU vs. DisInfo" organization, with at least 16 full time staff, all to fight disinformation. Yet it begins and ends with Russian disinformation.

What about anti-Israel disinformation? Where is the EU on that?

The EUvsDisInfo report released yesterday shows a great graphic of how Russians are manipulating information. But it doesn't mention that anti-Israel forces use exactly the same methods.

Pallywood manipulation of photos and videos? Check. Overwhelming social media with anti-Israel memes? Check. Changing the context to not allow pro-Israel voices to make a point? Triple check. Using diplomatic methods to attack Israel? Not only the PA but many of its allies, check.

But does the EU even notice anti-Israel propaganda techniques? No, they agree with their messages. And when they agree, they don't think they are being manipulated. For example, when Defence for Children Palestine says that Israel killed a child earlier this week, they won't bother to check whether the "child" was a member of a terror group. (Yes, there are some that are too extreme for the EU, so they can pretend that they are discriminating between truth and lies.)

Anti-Israel lies - that Jews visiting the holiest Jewish space are a threat to peace, that illegal Palestinian outposts in Area C are legal while legal Jewish towns are illegal, that Palestinian NGOs have no terror links, that Israel is attacking civilians, that Palestinian attacks are all in response to Israeli "crimes" and wouldn't happen if they weren't "provoked" - those lies are accepted by both official EU bodies and their media, and therefore the public.

The fact that they happen to align perfectly with traditional European antisemitism is just a coincidence, I'm sure.

The fight against disinformation assumes that there is an objective truth. I agree. Yet the progressive crowd emphasizes that there is no truth, that narratives are the only acceptable form of reporting, and only certain narratives are acceptable. The EU vs. DisInfo site seems to state that there is objective truth when it comes to Russia, but it doesn't seem to have an issue when its own intelligentsia seems to embrace a post-truth worldview where narratives rule - especially when it comes to Israel. It would be interesting if they use their own methodology against the "progressive" narratives.

But they won't.

(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!