Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, February 13, 2023

75 years ago: "Kill the Jew!"

From the Palestine Post, February 12, 1948:

Notice the Arabs didn't shout "Kill the Zionist." They shouted "Kill the Jew."

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!

Another child militant, aged 14, appears to have been linked to Fatah (UPDATE: Islamic Jihad)

From CNN:

Israeli forces raided the West Bank city of Jenin on Sunday, killing a 14-year-old boy, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said. Qusai Radwan Waked was shot in the abdomen, the ministry said.

The target of the raid was Jibril Zubeidi, who was detained, Israeli and Palestinian authorities said.

In a joint statement, the Israel Defense Forces, Border Police and Israel Security Agency said that during the raid, “armed individuals fired at the forces who responded back with live fire… Furthermore, suspects hurled explosive devices and rocks at the forces.

“We are aware of the reports regarding a number of armed individuals who got injured during the exchange of fire,” the Israeli statement said.

One Palestinian armed group, the Fatah-linked Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, is calling Waked a "heroic martyr," meaning that he was indeed involved in the battle.

But don't expect UNICEF, Defense for Children International Palestine, Human Rights Watch or Amnesty to investigate this poster to find out if Waked was indeed recruited as a fighter for Fatah.

They don't want to know.

UPDATE: It turns out he was a member of Islamic Jihad, which released this photo (h/t Adin):

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!

02/12 Links: Three Jewish funerals and an Israeli hate-fest; Palestinian terrorism finds generous sponsors in the West to fund genocide

From Ian:

Ruthie Blum: Three Jewish funerals and an Israeli hate-fest

Take, for example, the PLO flags waved by angry activists decrying Israel Defense Forces operations against terrorists in Jenin. And this is while the International Criminal Court – at the behest of the UN General Assembly – is preparing an "advisory opinion" on Israel's supposed "prolonged occupation, settlement and annexation of Palestinian territory."

Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, who spearheaded the UNGA resolution, must be thrilled to see thousands of Israelis condemning their ruling coalition, especially when some protesters are openly promoting his cause. After all, the coffers from which he draws the cash for his "pay for slay" scheme – to keep his people, and those among Israel's Arab citizens who identify with them, spilling Jewish blood – are shrinking.

The money is about to dry up even more, in the wake of a decision by the new Security Cabinet to withhold the taxes and tariffs that Israel collected on behalf of the PA, in the amount that Abbas paid last year to terrorists and their families. No wonder he's in Cairo at a conference with Arab League members, calling for the establishment of a fund to aid Jerusalem's Arab residents through various "projects." It doesn't take a Hamas rocket scientist to figure out what the terrorist-in-a-tie has in mind.

This brings us back to Karaka, the Arab resident of Jerusalem whose evil deed was celebrated in Ramallah and Gaza. His supporters also circulated a cartoon of a Palestinian family about to eat a traditional dish called "maqluba." In its center is Lederman's severed head. "Blessed Friday," the Arabic text reads. "The sweetest Friday. The sweetest Palestinian maqluba."

Though reportedly of "unsound mind" – Karaka was released from a psychiatric hospital in northern Israel mere days before killing Lederman and the two Paley children – his social-media activity indicates where his true heart and soul lay.

Previous Facebook posts included praise for Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Ziad al-Nakhaleh and glorification of the "Lions' Den" terrorists taken out by the IDF. In other words, he was an ideologue whose vehicular assault was not an out-of-the-blue "psychotic episode."

Ditto for the eastern Jerusalem resident who gunned down worshipers at a Neve Yaakov synagogue on Jan. 27 – International Holocaust Remembrance Day – murdering seven and wounding three others. Nor was the near-fatal shooting the next morning of a father and son at the entrance to the City of David National Park by an eastern Jerusalem teen a fluke.

Those antisemitic onslaughts didn't put a halt to the demonstrations either. The protesters in each case did open with a moment of silence for the terror victims, however, to assuage their consciences and preserve the moral high ground they appropriated.

All those who took to the streets in the immediate aftermath of such horrors should be ashamed of themselves. They won't, of course. They're too busy moralizing about the "death of Israeli democracy" to mourn dead Israelis.

Palestinian terrorism finds generous sponsors in the West to fund genocide - opinion

Jerusalem saw its streets turn bloody once more in late January as Islamist militants targeted a synagogue. A litany of attacks, each more obscene and terrifying than the next, have since rocked the Jewish State. Keen to make an impression on both Israel and the Diaspora, terrorists elected International Holocaust Remembrance Day to make their move, marking what many have already labeled the Third Intifada.

The opening shot to a new campaign of violence and hate, the attack on Jerusalem’s synagogue was not a desperate cry by a beleaguered people to proclaim their national independence and freedom, but rather the affirmation that terror, while claiming its cause to be holy, cares little for the sanctity of life. To play still to the notion that terrorism has a rationale when slammed up against the State of Israel is, in my mind, an act of genocide.

Radicals care little for the aspirations of the people they claim to want to liberate – in this case Palestinians. What they seek is the complete and total annihilation of a people, in that they believe such an act to be a divine command – the expression of a faith they have hijacked and twisted to their bigotry.

Palestine Ambassador to the UK Husam Zomlot’s refusal to condemn January’s terror attack, an attack carried out by a 15-year-old Palestinian boy and which claimed seven lives, speaks volumes. The mindset is decidedly one of unaccountability and deflection. To witness a Palestinian official, the head of the Palestinian mission to the UK no less, to so casually and unabashedly argue that blame lies with Israel, is a testament to how successful terror propagandists have been in dehumanizing Israelis and Jews alike.

Palestinians need not destroy Israel to exist, let alone assert their identity. As for peace – it will not be extracted through intimidation and murder. And to those who continue to clamor that Israel had it coming, that it was Israel’s actions that pushed Palestinians to be radicalized, I have little to say other than “I pity you.”

But enough on that.

January’s attack against a synagogue in Jerusalem, the deadliest in recent years, raises some serious questions – well beyond the obvious matter of ideological indoctrination and national security.

While the motives for the attack are rather self-evident, little, if anything has been said on the economics of terror and in particular, the mechanics used by extremists to help them, not just to thrive, but also to build outposts – thus enabling their many legions to drown out the voices of those who reject radicalism’s tenets with their furious cries.

Terror does not exist in an ideological vacuum, it requires resources – perpetual war and oppression are demanding mistresses indeed. For decades, various Palestinian organizations and so-called charities have benefited from the largesses of our Western governments and wealthy sponsors, all in the name of peace and development of course. In reality, they are sponsoring hate and violence.

“Ludicrous,” you say? May I suggest you stick around, even if only for a little while.

Here's a story you won't read anywhere else - because it does not fit the Narrative.

There is a problem with Palestinian workers in Israel. In order to find and get jobs, they often resort to (Arab) brokers who take advantage of them, take a cut of their salary and treat the workers as subcontractors which means that they do not get basic employment benefits and protections.

Israel doesn't have to combat this. But it does.

Israel offers "job search" permits - allowing Palestinians to go to Israel to find jobs, not just to go to work.

I had never heard of that, but Palestinian media is mentioning that Israel increased the number of visits that job seekers can take to Israel from 15 to 20 without getting s new permit.

Israel issues permits to Palestinians who are residents of the West Bank, have no security impediments, and are either married aged 22 years or over, or single, aged 27 or over.

This sounds almost foolhardy. Obviously the people with permits are checked as they cross the checkpoint, but you know terror groups are trying to take advantage of this. And while Israel would be fully within its rights to block any such job seeking by non-Israelis, it still allows them in - even as ten Israelis have already been murdered in terror attacks this year.

This story completely contradicts everything you ever read about how Israel treats Palestinian Arabs in the media and in human rights reports. I am not sure that this has ever been published in English before, anywhere.

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!

More reasons the "apartheid" libel is utterly false and antisemitic (infographic)

Last week, Human Rights Watch's "Senior EU Advocate," Claudio Francavilla, wrote an op-ed in the EU Observer:

The recent spike in deadly attacks and repression in the occupied West Bank should surprise no one. Last year, Israeli forces killed more Palestinians than in any other year since 2005, when the UN began systematically recording fatalities: 151, including 35 children. A little over a month, a new year and another Netanyahu-led government, the situation is only getting worse.

Already, we see the bias - and indeed hatred - that animates so-called "human rights experts" who are effectively, if not explicitly, antisemitic.

Yes, there were more Palestinian fatalities in the West Bank (although not Gaza) last year since the Second Intifada. But Francavilla pointedly leaves out three crucial facts - facts that are missing in virtually all left-wing analyses and articles.

The first is that the vast majority of the Palestinians killed were members of armed groups and/or actively involved in hostilities at the time they were killed. Once this is realized, the entire calculus is turned on its head - Israeli forces aren't killing Palestinians but defending themselves and Israelis against Palestinian militants.

The second is that the Israeli actions were a response to the increase of Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians. The latest terror spree started in March 2022, and Israeli incursions into the West Bank were to stop them.

The third is that armed militias such as the "Lion's Den" were allowed to form over the past 18 months. Their members - many of whom are also members of the ruling Fatah party - publicly strut through the streets of Jenin and Nablus under the noses of the Palestinian Authority that is obligated under existing agreements to combat them.

Cause and effect are ignored by Human Rights Watch, in its zeal to paint the Jewish state as evil - and as "apartheid:"

The government has also responded to Palestinian attacks on Israelis with collective punishment, a war crime in the occupied territory, including razing attackers' family homes.

It is an amazing sentence. He doesn't refer to Palestinian attacks on Jews as war crimes or even as collective punishment. Israel's response to terror, meant to end such attacks, are the only "war crimes" HRW's Francavilla is interested in addressing.

These abusive and discriminatory practices by Israeli authorities are not new: they further a policy to maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians and take place in the context of systematic oppression of Palestinians, which collectively amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.

This conclusion, reached by Human Rights Watch and other international, Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups, legal and UN experts — among many others — should make it impossible for the EU to continue to pretend that the repression of Palestinians is a temporary phenomenon best addressed in the context of the "peace process."

Earlier today I created an infographic to show the deception used by the three major so-called human rights organizations in creating new definitions of apartheid specifically to give Israel, and only Israel, that label.

B'Tselem, Al Haq and the UN, don't bother to use any legal definition of apartheid and simply make the assertion of Israeli apartheid with no proof. HRW and Amnesty - as well as the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard - try to shoehorn the definitions of apartheid in international law to fit to Israel by selectively taking texts from other documents out of context.

The latter groups base their arguments on the assumption that Israel's treatment of Palestinians who are not citizens of Israel differently from Jews are based on a national ethos of discrimination against Palestinians.

We've shown how the papers issued by HRW and Amnesty lie about the facts. To make their basic argument stick, that Israel discriminates against Palestinians based on "national origin," they must prove that Israel discriminates against Arab Israelis as well. To do that, they must egregiously lie.

HRW falsely claims Israeli Arabs do not have the same voting rights as Jews do and that Israeli Arabs cannot move beyond the Green Line, only Jews.

Amnesty falsely claims that not forcing Arab Israelis to join the army is evidence of discrimination (what about Haredi Jews?), and that Israel's raising the threshold of votes needed for small parties to enter Knesset discriminates against Arab parties (when in fact all of the parties who failed to reach the threshold in 2021 were Jewish parties.)

B'Tselem and HRW use as "proof" of apartheid the fact that Palestinian Arabs cannot travel freely in Israel while Israeli Jew can travel to parts of the West Bank. But Israeli Arabs and even non-Israeli Arab residents of Jerusalem have far greater freedom of movement than Israeli Jews do - they can go literally anywhere from the river to the sea, while Jews cannot enter areas A and B of the West Bank, and are severely restricted from the Temple Mount.

If that is your definition of apartheid, then it is apartheid against Jews!

Even beyond that, if you define Israel's policies as based on "national origin" and not citizenship, then you start to go down a bizarre slippery slope that ends in antisemitism.

Israel defines itself as the Jewish state. Its existence is based on the concept that Jews need a single place to live, in their ancestral homeland, where they will not suffer any discrimination whatsoever. Where there is no penalty for following Jewish law in observing the Jewish Sabbath and holidays. where Jews do not suffer discrimination on where they can raise their families. Where Jews can flee persecution to safety without having to remain stateless. This is not "Jewish supremacy" - this is Jewish survival. It is an oasis where Jews can freely be Jews in a way that they simply cannot be in any other country on Earth.

The "human rights groups" are claiming that the entire concept of a Jewish state and a place where Jews can walk freely without fear is wrong and "apartheid." That is antisemitism.

Beyond that, they claim that Israel is discriminating against Palestinians based on their "national origin." But they cannot point to any laws that favor Jews (primarily the Law of Return) that specifically discriminate against Palestinians as opposed to the entire world minus a tiny minority. As with jus sanguinis laws in other countries, these laws favor those of the same national origin versus everyone else; there is no discrimination against any specific group.

If that is apartheid, then most countries with jus sanguinis nationality laws are also guilty of apartheid.

But only the Jewish state is given that label.

Moreover, this also means that, according to these "human rights groups," even Jews whose families lived in Palestine for hundreds of years (or indeed since the days of the Second Temple) do not have a Palestinian "national origin." If they did, then Israel should be discriminating against them as well! Yet Palestinians who moved to the region as late as 1947 from Syria or Egypt do have a "national origin" of - Palestine!

What can you possibly call that except 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!

Palestinians don't merely support murdering Jews - some make jokes about it

A third victim of the Friday car ramming attack in Jerusalem has died - Asher Menahem Paley, the 8 year old brother of the other child victim, Yaakov Yisrael Paley.

Arab media continues to report that all the victims are "settlers" without mentioning that two of the three murdered people are children.

This is the same media that trumpets Palestinian militants under 18 - of which at least five have been killed this year while attacking Israelis - as "children."

I cannot find a single Palestinian on social media who condemns killing Jewish children. Not one.

And, yes, Palestinians celebrated the attack on Friday. They handed out sweets.

But the sickest thing I've seen was this cartoon - widely shared in social media but not condemned by anyone I've seen - showing a happy Palestinian family dining on the severed head of the other victim of the attack, 20-year old newlywed Alter Shlomo Lederman.

This image blurs out the face of the victim. I am posting it to prove my point about
a culture that would produce such an image.

This was published on the Facebook page of the Palestine Times news site.

The grandmother in the cartoon is saying, "The best Friday and the best mansaf" - mansaf being the Levantine dish associated, quite literally, with hating Jews.

And, again, there are no dissenting voices. No Facebook responses saying that this is disgusting. Nothing.

Silence is acceptance, and Palestinians not only seem to accept such vile Jew-hatred - they celebrate it, they revel in it, they have made it a fundamental part of their identity.

Do you disagree? Fine. Prove me wrong. Find me Palestinians, in Arabic, willing to publicly condemn these outrageous displays of celebration and Jew-hatred. Find me one Palestinian - or even BDSer- who is willing to stand up and say, "I don't like Israelis, but this is going too far."

I've been looking for these Palestinians on Arabic websites who abhor antisemitism and do not support murdering Jewish children for many years, and I haven't found them. But I am more than willing to post about the exceptions.

The challenge is out there.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

02/11 Links: Jerusalem attack: 8-year-old dies day after brother killed, father in serious condition; IDF saves 19 from rubble, treats around 180 victims of Turkey earthquake

From Ian:

Jerusalem attack: 8-year-old dies day after brother killed, father in serious condition

Two children and a young man were killed and four others were injured in a terrorist ramming attack near the Ramot neighborhood of Jerusalem on Friday afternoon.

The terrorist, identified as Hossein Karaka, a 31-year-old resident of the Isawiya neighborhood of east Jerusalem, rammed into a bus stop at the entrance to the Ramot neighborhood.

An off-duty police officer and other officers who arrived at the scene quickly after the attack shot the terrorist.

A Facebook account reportedly belonging to the terrorist featured a series of posts in recent months glorifying Hezbollah and Palestinian terrorists, including a post calling the terrorist who conducted a shooting attack at the Shuafat checkpoint last year a "hero."

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided shortly after the attack to seal and demolish Karaka's home, expressing his condolences to the families of the victims.

"I conducted a security situation assessment and ordered security forces reinforced, arrests made and to act immediately to seal the terrorist's house and demolish it. Our answer to terrorism is to strike it with all our might and deepen our grip on our country even more."

Caroline Glick: It’s not about democracy

What’s happening in Israel is not what it seems. The left, in all its component parts, is not fighting against an effort by the government and the Knesset to destroy Israel’s democracy.

We know this for three reasons.

First, the leaders of the fight against judicial reform, who claim that if Justice Minister Yariv Levin’s judicial reform package now making its way through the legislative process in the Knesset passes, Israeli democracy will die, know that this isn’t true.

In a past address to the Kohelet Forum, opposition leader Yair Lapid set out a position on judicial activism completely aligned with Levin’s package. Indeed, Lapid’s remarks laid the foundations of the current reform.

In that speech, Lapid said, “I have opposed, and I still oppose, judicial activism of the sort introduced by [former Supreme Court President and the father of Israel’s judicial revolution] Justice Aharon Barak. I don’t think it is right that everything is justiciable. I don’t think it is right for the Supreme Court to change fundamental things in accordance with what it refers to as the judgment of ‘the reasonable person.’ That’s an amorphous and completely subjective definition that the Knesset never introduced to the legal code. It’s not right in my mind that the separation of powers, the sacrosanct foundation of the democratic method, should be breached by one branch of government placing itself above the others.”

Lapid is not alone. Nearly every prominent member of the opposition has made similar statements over the past several years. One of the most incendiary leaders of the protests against judicial reform is former defense minister and IDF chief of General Staff Moshe Ya’alon. Having lost his bid for reelection to the Knesset, Ya’alon restyled himself as a vigilante protest leader. At a press conference this week Ya’alon said the legal reform package will transform Israel “from a democracy into a dictatorship.” He called the Netanyahu government “criminal and illegal.”

Ya’alon called for a general strike and declared that “the thought of the State of Israel as a fascist, racist, messianic and corrupt state” is keeping people up at night.

But in a speech in 2009, when he first entered politics, Ya’alon sang a different tune. Back then Ya’alon railed against the very forces he now claims to represent. “The media here is biased,” he began.

02/10 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: How Britain has failed to prevent Islamist extremism and to protect Jews; The Massacre That Never Was; The dark side of Roger Waters

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: How Britain has failed to prevent Islamist extremism and to protect Jews

While events in Israel continue to attract disproportionate and distorted global attention, Islamic extremism remains a threat inside Western society. It’s accompanied by the parallel failure of the West even to face up honestly to the true nature of this problem, let alone deal with it adequately.

This week, a review was published in Britain of the government’s anti-extremism program, Prevent. This was set up in the wake of the 2007 Islamist terrorist atrocity in London, when more than 50 people were murdered and hundreds more injured in a series of four bomb attacks.

While the Prevent program itself is obviously particular to Britain, the findings of the independent review, commissioned by the Home Office and headed by the writer William Shawcross, should also strike discomfiting chords in America and among Jewish Diaspora communities in the West.

The message it hammers home is that the government has failed to protect the country in general, and the Jewish community in particular, from Islamism, or Islamic extremism and supremacism.

Shawcross found that Islamist ideology had been “misinterpreted, misunderstood or even overlooked” by officials through a combination of ignorance and terror of being damned as “Islamophobic.”

This failure had produced the perverse result that some organizations in receipt of government funding to fight extremism had actually been promoting antisemitism. Even more astonishingly, the founding chairman of the Muslim police officers’ association, who had worked with government departments on counter-terrorism, shared content which called for the destruction of Israel and described Jews as “filth.”

The program’s officials also applied a troubling double standard. While 80% of counter-terrorism dealt with Islamism and a mere 10% with extreme right-wing threats, only 22% of cases referred to in Prevent involved Islamist extremism.

The officials chose to focus instead on what they decided was far-right extremism. However, they defined this so broadly that it included center-right or “mildly controversial” discourse unrelated to terrorism or radicalisation.

At the same time, they narrowed their definition of Islamist extremism so that they failed to recognize the all-important continuum between non-violent Islamist narratives and terrorist networks.

Melanie Phillips: Westminster Holocaust memorial is a tragic betrayal of the dead

It’s groundhog day all over again for the long-planned Holocaust memorial and learning centre in Westminster’s Victoria Tower Gardens.

This huge, Brutalist construction would destroy a quiet green oasis valued by local residents. Last July, the Court of Appeal upheld a ruling that the structure was prohibited by a 1900 Act of Parliament, passed to protect the park from such developments.

Yet now the government — which previously overrode Westminster council’s objections — has declared it will legislate to cancel out that 1900 law.

It will thus ride roughshod over a historic legal protection for the local community. Is this really a desirable context for a project supposedly devoted to memory and law as a defence against oppressive and arbitrary power?

There are more fundamental objections to the memorial’s supposed message.

Although the Nazis murdered many types of people in the Holocaust, their principal driver was the intention to wipe the Jews alone off the face of the Earth. Yet much Holocaust memorialising denies the unique characteristics of antisemitism and the genocide of the Jews.

A graphic example was provided by the UK Online Commemoration for Holocaust Memorial Day last month. Its 23 sections referred to “genocides” in Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia and Darfur, to “the Nazi persecution of gay people” and to “people being persecuted simply because they were Ordinary People who belonged to a particular group”.

But there was no mention of the genocide of the Jews other than two fleeting references in personal messages from Michael Gove and Sir Keir Starmer. The chief executive and chair of trustees of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust didn’t mention it, urging reflection instead on “the Holocaust, the Nazi persecution of other groups and more recent genocides”.

We need a better definition of antisemitism

To my mind, there are four main ways that the IHRA definition, which suffers from being poorly written and imprecise in key places, could be improved. To begin with, there’s the opening sentence: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.” This is far too vague and quite confusing for the uninitiated, particularly when the primary audience is studying the definition for its practical usage. More accurate and efficient would be a declarative formulation, for example: “Antisemitism is the negative, hostile or hateful perception of the Jewish people as a collective, expressed through a range of rhetorical, violent and discriminatory measures targeting Jews, or those perceived to be Jews, as well as their property and their communal institutions.”

Then there’s the proverbial elephant in the room: the complete absence of the word “Zionism” from the definition. This omission undermines the contention that contemporary anti-Zionism is a specific form of antisemitism that shares many of the same fixations over Jewish wealth and influence as do its other forms. It also dilutes the historic centrality of the Zionist movement over the last century as a focus for Jewish identity and as an instrument for the rejuvenation of the Jews in the wake of the Holocaust. Hence, the sentence in the definition that identifies as antisemitic “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g. by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” might be rewritten to say, “Depicting Zionism, the Jewish national movement, as inherently racist and the State of Israel as an illegitimate entity.”

An additional sentence on anti-Judaism needs to be added, perhaps by acknowledging as antisemitic those efforts to prevent, in my suggested wording, “Jewish communities from observing their most sacred religious practices, such as consuming kosher food and circumcising male infants at the age of eight days, through legislative or other measures.”

Finally, the trend in many countries in eastern and western Europe to appropriate the Jewish victims of the Holocaust—as part of a wider attempt to stress the sufferings of non-Jews under Nazi occupation—should also become part of the definition’s purview. To preserve the historical integrity of the Holocaust, a new clause in the definition might read, “Out of all the victim groups persecuted by the Nazi regime, Jews were held up as the ultimate enemy of humanity, in whose destruction the collusion of non-Jewish populations under Nazi occupation was often encouraged and in many cases received.”

These small but important fixes would make the IHRA definition a much more comprehensive and persuasive text. The counter-argument that the definition is already in its final version, and that amending it would be overly cumbersome, given the number of parties that have already signed up to it, will merely allow the antisemites to stay one step ahead of those whose job it is to combat them.

I’m also acutely aware that the IHRA definition has been attacked by those who resent its identification of antisemitism with anti-Zionism, and I can understand how such a hostile environment might create anxieties about amending the definition among its supporters. Again, though, I don’t find that argument very convincing. If anything, attempts to create an alternative to the definition like the so-called “Jerusalem Declaration” should animate our own intellectual efforts in its defense, to the point that we are willing to make revisions to it when warranted. Otherwise, history will run away from us.

Salim Al-Batayneh, a former member of Jordan's parliament and a critic of the government, wrote an op-ed saying that Israel plans to expand to take over Jordan.

"Jordan is at the heart and depth of the Israeli targeting," he says, pointing out that before the first partition of Palestine in 1921, the Jews wanted to include parts of Transjordan in the Jewish state.

After 1967, according to Al Batayneh, Israel's expansionist plans only increased. He quotes a supposed article by an Israeli in the Times of London saying, "When the Jews gain full control over Aqaba and the Gulf, we will be able to attack the Hijaz and destroy the superstitious holy places in Mecca and Medina."

Sounds legit!

He also repeats the lie that Yasir Arafat said at the UN in 1990, claiming that the Israeli 10-agorot coin includes a map of Greater Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates.

The former politician soberly warns in the end of the article, "Israel has a long-awaited satanic program, and now is the time it will implement it."

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!

02/10 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?

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Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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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.

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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.

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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!