Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, February 14, 2023

UN accuses Israel a brand new crime - "domicide" - because Israel must be the worst violator of EVERY crime!

The UN's antisemitic Special Rapporteur for Attacking Israel, Francesca Albanese, tweeted this:

The systematic demolition of Palestinian homes, erection of illegal Israeli settlements & systematic denial of building permits for Palestinians amounts to “domicide”. This is nothing but Israel’s attempt to curtail Palestinians’ self-determination & threaten their very existence.

She links to a report from the viciously anti-Israel Human Rights Council which says:

The international community must take action to stop systematic and deliberate housing demolition and sealing, arbitrary displacement and forced evictions of Palestinian people in the occupied West Bank, UN experts* said today.

In the month of January 2023 alone, Israeli authorities reportedly demolished 132 Palestinian structures across 38 communities in the occupied West Bank, including 34 residential and 15 donor-funded structures. This figure represents a 135 percent increase, compared to the same period in 2022, and includes five punitive demolitions.

“The systematic demolition of Palestinian homes, erection of illegal Israeli settlements and systematic denial of building permits for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank amounts to “domicide”.

Here's the interesting part. The word "domicide" was coined last year by Balakrishnan Rajagopal, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing.

In his report he defined the term this way:

“The attacking, bombing and shelling of civilian targets, the razing of entire cities and villages – displacing millions into homelessness – have continued unabated despite the development of modern human rights and humanitarian law,” the UN expert said.
While international law outlaws all forms of arbitrary housing destruction, deportation, displacement and forced eviction, the Special Rapporteur noted an alarming continuity of gross violations of the right to adequate housing in times of conflict.
In a path-breaking report, Rajagopal urged States to recognise “domicide” - the systematic or widespread violation of the right to adequate housing – as an international crime of its own standing.

Rajagopal created the term to describe a much bigger issue than just destroying houses here and there. He's discussing the systematic destruction of entire cities and making thousands of people homeless just to hurt people:

“How many more Aleppos, Saanas and Mariupols must we endure? We must not allow those responsible for such egregious crimes to remain in positions of power. They must face international justice,” Rajagopal said.

This scene in Aleppo is what he means by domicide:

In the 17 or so years I've been reading Palestinian media, I have not once seen an article about a homeless Palestinian in the West Bank.

Those who are building illegal houses in Area C already have houses in Palestinian administered areas. They aren't homeless! They are building these illegal, dangerous shacks in order to grab land from Israel - with European support. It is a purely political move. But they have a place to sleep at night even after Israel demolishes their homes. No one is living in a tent or in a car that I have seen.

This is not at all what Balakrishnan Rajagopal had in mind when he created the term.

Once the UN describes a new crime, the modern antisemites must hijack the term to apply it to Israel, of course, and pretend that Israel's demolishing illegally built houses - which is an obligation under the laws of occupation! - is the worst possible example of this crime.

And, let's face it, saying that Israel is guilty of "domicide" sounds so much more dramatic than "enforcing zoning laws."

By hijacking the issue, the UN's "experts" and Albanese have now cheapened the actual crimes of Syria, Yemen and Russia. Because antisemites insist that Jews are the worst people on Earth.

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!

02/13 Links Pt2: Three thousand five hundred days of thwarted US justice; Turkey thanks Israeli rescue teams for 'solidarity' in earthquake aid

From Ian:

Three thousand five hundred days of thwarted US justice

Jordan's refusal to extradite Ahlam Tamimi to the United States, despite her being responsible for the horrific 2001 bombing of a Jerusalem pizzeria that killed 15 people, including two Americans (one of them our daughter Malka Chana Roth), is a clear breach of the 1995 extradition treaty signed between the two countries.

The US Department of Justice brought charges against Tamimi in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia on July 15, 2013. That's 3,500 days ago as of today.

At the US government's request, those charges were promptly sealed by the court once they were signed off.

They then remained secret - even from the families of the victims of the atrocity, which includes us - for the next four years.

The eventual unsealing came on March 14, 2017, in a media announcement that featured tough language by determined American law enforcement officials.

Astonishngly, just six days later, a Jordanian court handed down a decision declaring the 1995 Jordan/US extradition treaty invalid. As Aljazeera reported, the decision meant Tamimi's extradition to face charges in Washington for her role in the Sbarro bombing was permanently blocked under Jordanian law. It was a contentious finding and one plainly contradicted by facts that we ourselves later discovered by suing the United States government in 2012 under the Freedom of Information Act.

The basis on which Jordan's Court of Cassation - the kingdom's most senior appellate court - relied is not an inherent flaw in the treaty but a flaw created by the Jordanian government itself. It relates to the ratification of the treaty, an essential step in the treaty-making process for both sides.

The United States says the treaty was ratified by Jordan. Even if that's wrong (and the evidence shows it's plainly not), Jordan has had more than a quarter century to fix it - to ratify in accordance with whatever legal requirements its judges say have to be observed. The fix could be done this afternoon. Or tomorrow.

Given the importance of the US-Jordan relationship and the grave nature of the crime for which Tamimi is charged, the US Congress ought to take action to press Jordan so that the fugitive is brought to American justice. In fact, it should have done this years ago but did not.

For its part, Jordan has failed to take any steps to rectify this situation, despite the obvious harm it causes to the victims and their families. The United States has repeatedly called on Jordan to fulfill its obligations under the treaty. But Jordan continues to flout its obligations with impunity right up until today.

Eyes On Islam: An Interview with Middle East Scholar Daniel Pipes

Daniel Pipes is an acclaimed authority in the realm of Middle East scholarship. With a Ph.D. from Harvard University, Pipes taught at universities around the country and served as an official in the U.S. Departments of State and Defense. The author of 16 books, his biweekly column is published in The Washington Times and other publications.

Pipes is perhaps most recognized for founding and operating the prestigious Middle East Forum. The MEF is an independent non-profit organization dedicated to promoting American interests in the Middle East. It includes Campus Watch, which exposes biases in Middle East Studies in American universities, and The Legal Project, which protects against predatory lawsuits filed by Islamists as well as combating free-speech restrictions.

I spoke with Dr. Pipes about the topics he specializes in: the role of Islam in public life, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and U.S. foreign policy. His views confirm his reputation as a fearless and sometimes controversial figure with the courage to express uncomfortable truths.

The peace agreements demonstrated that the Palestinian issue was not the problem. You have advocated for what you call the Israel Victory Project relating to Israel’s relationship with the Palestinian Arabs. Can you describe what it is and what kind of support it has garnered both within Israel and without?
Our efforts in the U.S. Congress were fairly effective. In 2017-2018, we had a caucus of, at its peak, 35 members in the House. We have since abandoned that and focused on Israel, the Knesset, and many other institutions. We are finding that there is a broad sympathy for the idea, which is a quite radical idea. Many people have spoken about the need to impress on the Palestinian Arabs that Israel is there and its government can’t be defeated. Israel Victory takes it a step further and says that not only do the Palestinian Arabs have to understand that Israel won’t be defeated, but the Palestinian Arabs need to be defeated. That’s going further than anyone else does.

How would you define defeat?
Very simply — defeat is imposing your will on your enemy. Whatever that might be. In this case, it would be accepting that Israel is there and permanent. My research suggests that through the past century about 20% of Palestinians have accepted that. Arabs played a very important role, especially in the pre-independence period, when they sold land, intelligence, and arms and provided all sorts of assistance to Jews. The rest are in denial, and the goal has to be to increase that [20%] to 40-60%.

How do you do that?
That is the challenge. First you have to make it your goal, which the Israeli government has not. Take Gaza. The current goal there is just to keep things quiet. My argument is that the Israeli security establishment — the IDF, intelligence services, police, and other services — just want quiet. They want no rockets or missiles coming out of Gaza and that’s acceptable to them. I’m saying it’s not. My argument is that there are three dangers: One is violence, be they missiles or knife attacks or anything else.

The second is, once again, the U.S. and European governments queuing up to have a peace process, which I call the war process and which is counterproductive. The third and, perhaps, most important, is the virulent hostility towards Israel around the world — on the left, among Muslims, from the far right, among various assorted dictators, and among certain Christian elements. No country has such hostility towards it [like] Israel has. So far that hasn’t had that much impact. Israel is flourishing, and so Israelis tend to shrug it off. I’m saying don’t be so cavalier.

How Art Museums Distort Jewish Culture, and Downplay Anti-Semitism

In recent years, art museums have grown increasing concerned with a variety of questions that might be characterized as “woke.” Are the works of artists of different races and ethnicities displayed in galleries? Are black as well as white subjects represented in paintings? Museums have taken such steps in response as making sure to mention the role of the Netherlands in the trans-Atlantic slave trade in an exhibit on 17th-century Dutch paintings. Yet, observes Menachem Wecker, none of these sensitivities seem to apply to Jews. Thus works by Philip Guston are censored or guarded by trigger warnings, while no mention is made of the fact that Guston was Jewish, or that he might have been responding to anti-Semitism with his work.

Wecker produces numerous examples of museums downplaying anti-Semitic portrayals of Jews in artworks, while often failing to identify such artists as Chaim Soutine as Jews—even when Jewish themes figure prominently in their art. Nor do Catholics fare much better, with anti-Catholic pieces like the now-notorious 1987 Piss Christ receiving ample contextualization intended to downplay controversy, whereas “when there’s no controversy, museums insert controversy.”

A couple of memes on double standards

These have been doing OK on Twitter.

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!

Traditional antisemitic attitudes getting mainstreamed

The latest AJC report on antisemitism in America has an interesting datapoint.

There were a number of questions asked of both Jews and the general American public about antisemitism, and for most of them, the responses were very similar. For example:

Amazingly, a higher percentage of the American public (90%) feels that the statement "ISrael has no right to exist" is antisemitic than Jews! (87%)

Where they diverge is concerning, though.

34% of the American public is not familiar with classic antisemitic tropes, and therefore they don't see the problem with a statement like "Jews control the media."

The next question is even more concerning - both about the general American response and the Jewish response:

58% of Americans and even 41% of Jews don't see comparing Covid mandates to the Holocaust as antisemitic - somehow, apparently, conflating mandatory wearing of the yellow star, as bad as that is, with gas chambers.

A lot of people are very uneducated.And the ignorance that results can help bring about the next wave 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!

02/13 Links Pt1: Europe's Proxy War against Israel; When Terrorism Pays in Cash; Ukraine should back Israel for fighting Iran-backed Palestinian terror

From Ian:

By Maintaining Palestinians' Permanent Refugee Status, the UN Has Perpetuated Violence

Despite the work being done to promote peaceful solutions in the Middle East through the Abraham Accords, the UN appears to insist on keeping Israel's very existence in question and ensuring Palestinians remain as permanent refugees. The UN established the only permanent refugee organization in the world, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

Millions of refugees poured out of Syria during the civil war, but no dedicated UN agency was founded for them. There are no international campaigns or significant Syrian refugee movements on university campuses calling for their return, because most have acclimatized to their new homes - as refugees generally do. Of all the refugees past and present, the Palestinians are the only ones who have their own permanent exhibit near the UN General Assembly.

After the Arab world went to war against the newly founded State of Israel in 1948, instead of absorbing the refugees into their host countries, UNRWA deliberately kept them in refugee camps. From a human rights point of view, that is completely unfair to the millions of children who have had their futures stolen from them by the UN and their host countries which refuse them citizenship.

Before 1948, the area was ruled by the British for a short time and by the Ottomans for 400 years before that. There was never a state of Palestine. This generation of Palestinians wants to lay claim to Jerusalem, but the holy city was never Palestinian. The way back to peace is for the UN and its agencies like UNRWA to stop deceiving the Palestinian people by suggesting that Israel is a temporary political entity. It's not going anywhere.

Europe's Proxy War against Israel

What is even more painful and humiliating for the Palestinians, is that EU officials who regularly visit the Gaza Strip intentionally ignore the suffering of the Palestinians living under Hamas.

On February 2, fifteen EU Heads of Mission visited the Gaza Strip without saying a single word about any of the victims of Hamas's crimes and human rights violations.

Notably, the EU did not state that it is Hamas, whose wealthy leaders live comfortable lives in Qatar, Turkey and other countries, that is mainly responsible for the bad "humanitarian situation" in the Gaza Strip.

Instead of working to strengthen the economy after it violently seized the Gaza Strip in 2007, Hamas has since been investing the millions of dollars it receives in building tunnels, and manufacturing and smuggling weapons to attack Israel.

Hamas, in addition to its disproportionately large military budget, also diverts aid money from Europe and the US to fund its military ventures.

When Hamas threatens that Israel will "pay the price," the Iranian-backed group is actually saying it will continue to murder Jews for daring to enforce the law against those who violate the law.

The EU show of solidarity with the residents of Khan al-Ahmar not only emboldens Hamas, it also incentivizes Palestinians to pursue their illegal attempts to seize territory that, in the Oslo Accords, they had agreed did not belong to them, as well as to continue launching terrorist attacks against Israel.

Recently, a confidential document composed by the EU mission in east Jerusalem revealed that Brussels is actively working with the Palestinians to take over all of Area C by building scores of other illegal "facts on the ground." By doing so, the EU has disqualified itself from playing the role of an honest broker in any future peace process between the Palestinians and Israel.

What right does any European official have to tell Israel that it is not permitted to enforce the law against illegal squatters? Would any European official tolerate it if, for example, an Israeli government official told the authorities in Paris or Madrid that they are not entitled to take action against those who break the law in their cities?

The actions of the EU finally expose its deep hostility toward Israel in Europe's proxy war against the Jewish state, as well as its undisguised bias in favor of the Palestinians.

By obsessing about Israel and ignoring the crimes of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, the EU is doing a massive disservice to the two million Palestinians living there. The EU's actions always seem more about hating Israel than helping the Palestinians.

If the Europeans truly cared at all about the Palestinians, they would raise the roof about the crimes committed by Hamas against the residents of the Gaza Strip. And they would be calling out their cohorts in the Palestinian Authority for abusive governance, corruption, embezzlement of public funds, and especially the Palestinian crackdown on human rights activists and journalists, who are trying to tell the EU, the international community and the so-called human rights groups about the brutal conditions under which their leaders keep forcing them to live.

When Terrorism Pays in Cash

Murder can be an all-too profitable endeavor for Palestinian terrorists. Despite pretensions to being a normal governmental organization, the Palestinian Authority doles out hundreds of millions of dollars to terrorists and their families. As Israel stares down another wave of terrorist violence, we cannot lose sight of the factors that fuel this escalation. The PA's continued incentives to commit heinous crimes should not be ignored.

Ramallah keeps its prisoners and "martyrs" highly satisfied. The PA grants an allowance of as much as $3,500 a month to those held in Israel's prisons for having murdered Jews. The allocation becomes a lifetime entitlement if the prison sentence runs more than five years. The PA celebrates the work of its "martyrs" by paying an allowance of around $500 a month to the family of a deceased terrorist. This comes on top of an initial lump-sum payment of $1,700. These are eye-popping amounts on the West Bank, where the annual GDP per capita sits at around $3,000. Terrorism can be a more lucrative profession than being a doctor or the head of a small business!

Notwithstanding the criticism the "pay-for-slay" program has drawn—and regular Palestinian promises of reform—the PA continues to cut hefty checks to those responsible for the most recent massacres of Jews. Khairi Alqam, who last week shot seven dead at a Jerusalem synagogue before he was neutralized, has secured his passage to heaven and his family's ascent into the Palestinian upper class. He carried out his attack on International Holocaust Remembrance Day and took the lives of several children. The adolescent who opened fire on two random passersby the next day near Jerusalem's City of David was taken alive—he will draw a monthly salary for the duration of his prison term. Those payments can add up: just ask Karim and Maher Younes, the murderers of Avraham Bromberg. The cousins, who were recently released, have received $1.2 million since the beginning of their incarceration in 1983. Surely, they will live out their golden years in great comfort.

The PA's subsidies for terror are a moral outrage, spurring further violence and rewarding fanatics. The PA has attempted to defend the indefensible, claiming that Hamas would step in to provide the funds were the PA to ever turn off the tap. But this excuse is weak tea; funding murder is always wrong, no matter the reason. Nothing could do more to showcase the PA's moral degeneracy and inaptitude as a partner for peace.

"Israeli prisons are training schools for resistance"

Earlier this year, Israel transferred some 70 prisoners to a new prison where they were isolated from each other, causing bitter complaints by Palestinian "prisoner rights" groups.

We may now have a reason why.

Earlier this month, Israel released Ahmed Abu Jazar after he finished a 19 year prison sentence. He is a member of Islamic Jihad, which is celebrating his release.

And the terror group notes that his arrest was not only on the charge of being a member, but also for participating in multiple terror attacks. His original sentence was extended when he tried to smuggle mobile phones into the prison.

In an interview with the Al Quds Brigades site, Abu Jazar says that Israeli prisons are training schools for terror: He said "the heroic prisoners were able to transform their detention centers into militant and revolutionary schools that contribute to raising the pace of their belonging and devotion to their people and their national cause, despite the deprivation, harassment and attacks they are subjected to."

Electronic Intifada had a fawning article about him when his sentence was extended in September, pretending that he was arrested for no legitimate reason and implying that he was practically a child. It also noted that he received a master's degree while in the inhumane Israeli prisons.

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!

Dashcam footage of car ramming attack on Friday

Muhammad Shehada is one of the most vocal defenders of Palestinian terror under the pretense of "human rights." He is the Chief of Communication for the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor and is a columnist for the Forward, also having written for Haaretz, Vice and Newsweek.

He angrily denounced anyone who claimed that the car ramming attack on Friday that killed three, including two children, and critically injured others (including their father), saying that there was no evidence that the attack was deliberate.

Somehow, it is a sheer coincidence that Palestinians happen to lose control of cars near crowds of Jews. And equally strange that they celebrate those accidents and canonize the poor people who all have faulty brakes due to the "occupation."

Dashcam footage has been released showing the attack. The blue car speeding to the left of the dashcam veers over two lanes to hit the bus stop.

There will always be apologists for terror. But why does the mainstream media keep giving them a platform for their vile hate?

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!

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.