Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, April 24, 2023

Jordanian MP's tribe proud of his smuggling arms to Israel

In a story that was originally censored by the Israeli media, a Jordanian MP was arrested in Israel after being caught smuggling a large cache of weapons to the West Bank.

Imad Al-Adwan was caught smuggling 160 handguns and 17 M16 rifles at the Allenby Crossing on the Jordan River on Saturday night.

Adwan's tribe in Jordan issued a statement casting doubt on the charges, but saying that they are proud of his actions.

The statement said that Adwan "has a patriotic and national spirit" who exhibits a "desperate defense of the Palestinian cause." It stressed "our lack of confidence in the Zionist side and its narrative," and yet says "we are all proud of our son and his actions."

The Adwan tribe also called on the Jordanian government to make every possible effort to "restore the member of the Jordanian legislative authority from the hands of the Zionists, as soon as possible," considering that their son "is not a representative of his constituency, but of all Jordanians."

Other Jordanian groups likewise tried to simultaneously call Israeli officials liars while admitting that this kind of action was exactly what Adwan would do.

The National Forum to Support the Resistance and Protect the Homeland in Jordan called for Adwan's immediate release, saying that "despite the lack of information received, which comes from the Zionist occupier only, every Jordanian knows is that Representative Imad Al-Adwan breathes Palestinian concern and identifies with the heroics of the revolutionary Palestinian youth."

For its part, the Jordanian Workers Party is incensed at Israel's breach of protocol for not honoring Adwan's parliamentary immunity. "This procedure should not have taken place in the first place, given that the representative holds a diplomatic passport, and international norms require that his car not be searched, and his arrest is contrary to international norms."

From what I can tell, Adwan does not benefit from diplomatic immunity for any actions done in a private capacity - and presumably the government of Jordan did not want him to smuggle weapons.

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!

How many could have been saved if Israel was reborn in 1938 instead of 1948? (posters)

There are always discussions on how to teach the Holocaust in a way that young people can internalize the horror of what happened. These discussions become more prominent around Yom Hashoah.

At the same time, with the upcoming Yom Ha'atzmaut, Israel haters try to frame Israel as pure evil whose existence is itself a human rights crime and which reduces the security of Jews, not enhances.it.

Last week, pseudo rabbi Brant Rosen said this on Al Jazeera:

I responded with a tweet that received hundreds of Likes:

Here, "Rabbi" Brant Rosen argues on @AJEnglish to @marclamonthill that a military cannot protect Jews, and if Jews want to be safe they should just work in solidarity with other minorities to protect themselves in the Diaspora.

Six million Jews were unavailable for comment.

On Sunday night, I decided to combine these two themes.

I took actual photos of victims of the Holocaust, but I specifically chose photos that non-Jews could identify with. Except for the first, which as taken in the Birkenau camp before that family was murdered, I chose photos without the yellow star, without the emaciated victims. And I colorized them so they would look recent and not like they came from a long ago era.

I then wrote fairly angry posters noting that no one tried to save these Jews from being murdered - but if Israel existed, things might have been different.

I admit, this exercise really affected me as I was doing it. I was too emotionally drained after four posters to continue.

I don't know if others would be as impacted, but perhaps this is a direction that might be useful for teaching both about the Holocaust and the importance of Israel. It won't help for the many real Jew-haters out there (there are plenty of people on Twitter responding that Israel's crimes are worse than Nazi Germany's) but there will always be Jew-haters - the point is to reach normal people.

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!

i24news reported Sunday:

Violence should be discarded and condemned “in all its manifestations” for Jews and Arabs to have a common future as neighbors, Mansour Abbas, arguably the most prominent Arab Israeli lawmaker of the day, told i24NEWS in an exclusive interview.

“We think that this demand is a compulsory for all of us, and we should push the violence in all of its manifestations aside, and we should engage in peace and in construction. We need to treat the wounds of both sides, to translate into the reality the goals of both sides, in order for us to reach a solution that would be acceptable for both sides,” Abbas, chair of the United Arab List faction, said.

Abbas stressed that he regards himself and fellow Arab citizens of Israel as Israelis, and rejected attempts by Palestinian leadership including the Hamas terrorist group to enlist Arab Israelis against Israel on the side of the Palestinians.

This is in response to Hamas trying to drag Israeli Arabs into becoming terrorists as a fifth column.

I agree with very little that Mansour says, but this is a sane statement that reflects reality and not the fantasy of wanting nothing less than the destruction of Israel.

Naturally, major Palestinian factions condemned his words.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - which has extensive ties with "human rights" NGOs - strongly condemned Abbas’s statements, and said they are "treacherous and do not represent our people from near or far, and reveal the suspicious role assigned to him as an obedient tool in the hands of the occupation...he is a traitor to the interests of our people and their national rights.”

Mahmoud Abbas' "moderate" Fatah said his words “essentially affect the historical national rights of our Palestinian people in Palestine,” and described them as “a cheap fit with the Zionist narrative that falsely monopolizes the history of Palestine.... Mansour Abbas crossed the red lines with his positions.”

As of this writing, I have not yet seen any reaction from Hamas or Islamic Jihad, but since Abbas' comments were aimed squarely at them, one can assume that they would be at least as angry as their rival Fatah is.

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!

Contest: Come up with anti-Palestinian chants as offensive as their anti-Zionist/antisemitic chants

During anti-Israel rallies, one hears many quite offensive anti-Israel chants that are really calls to ethnically cleanse (or murder) Jews:

"Long live the intifada"

“From New York to Gaza! Globalize the intifada!”

"There is only one solution - intifada revolution"

"Hey hey, ho ho, Zionists have got to go"

“With fire and blood, we’ll liberate Palestine.” (Arabic)

"Itbach al-Yahud." - "Slaughter the Jews." (Arabic)

"Khaybar, Khaybar Al Yahud,"- “Watch Out Jews, Remember Khaybar, the Army of Mohammed is returning" (in Arabic)

"From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free"

“Resistance is justified! When people are occupied!”

“We don’t want two states! We want ’48!”

No one seems to get too excited about these, or they tend to justify them.

So this contest is to find chants that are equally offensive to Palestinians.

For example, "Nakba! Nakba! Long live the Nakba!" (and insisting that we mean the original meaning of the term, not how it is used today.)

The reason is to point out the double standard - genocidal slogans that are accepted as normal nowadays when used against Israel would be obviously offensive when used against those who want to destroy Israel. I am not calling for actually using these slogans in pro-Israel rallies!

I am looking for clever rhymed slogans that would be good for mindless chant-and-repeat purposes and that call for the humiliation or ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. (Notice how even saying that out is obviously offensive, while the equivalent against Jews is shrugged off as culturally acceptable or reasonable slogans.)

Put your best chants in the comments. Bonus points for historic accuracy and catchy rhymes.

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!

04/23 Links: Jordanian MP arrested by Israel on suspicion of smuggling weapons; No, Israel Did Not Rig the 2016 Election; UK Labour suspends Diane Abbott after letter claiming Jews do not suffer racism

From Ian:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Issues of Concern

Hamas is an enemy [of Israel], but it is a much weaker enemy than Iran, which is determined to go ahead and develop nuclear weapons with the sole objective of destroying Israel... Hamas is extreme in its ideology, which is radical Islam. They have absolutely no desire to resolve this conflict with Israel in the ways that Western leaders hope and expect -- which is settling the conflict by accepting what we have been calling a two-part state for a very long time. That is not the objective of Hamas. The objective of Hamas is to destroy the State of Israel.

The Palestinians are unfortunate to have, on the one hand, a leader who is corrupt and really does not care very much about average Palestinians and may even want the conflict to continue so that he can continue to cash in on international handouts from the EU, America and others; then on the other hand, there is Hamas. This terrorist deadly group, also does not care about Palestinian lives. That is where the problem lies.... Both Hamas and the PA are deeply cynical: if they wished to increase the well-being of the average Palestinian, they would pursue peace.... One has to ask if peace with Israel is in their interest....

Hamas is an enemy, but it is a much weaker enemy than Iran, which is determined to go ahead and develop a nuclear weapon with the sole objective of destroying Israel.

In terms of foreign policy, it is important to realize that the threat of radical Islam, it may have faded away from the desks of policy-makers in the United States...but it has not gone away.... If anybody is paying attention, Islamists remain a force to be reckoned with in Africa: think of Somalia, the Sahel (Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger), the Lake Chad Basin (Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, Niger), Mozambique, and Egypt.

No, Israel Did Not Rig the 2016 Election

Israel has been a bugaboo for Bamford since his second book on the NSA, Body of Secrets, published in 2001. The Israeli attack on the USS Liberty in 1967 during the Six-Day War featured prominently. Bamford is convinced the attack was intentional; he exuberantly discounts the evidence, including the official American report, that it was accidental.

In the last 20 years, he has made it crystal clear that he sees the American system as systemically rigged in Israel's advantage, where senior U.S. officials routinely deceive and lie to protect the Jewish state—the not-too-subtle suggestion that such actions arise from Jewish economic and political clout, especially within the Democratic Party.

In Spyfail, Bamford is obsessed with Jewish influence. "Approximately two hundred thousand expat Americans in Israel, about the population of Fort Wayne, Indiana, would nevertheless play an important role in the very narrow 2016 U.S. presidential election," he tells us. It's not clear whether Bamford thinks this army of pro-Trumpers had a telling effect on the presidential election primarily by organizing in Israel and raising money from non-Americans, which is illegal, or by going to America and campaigning and collecting cash there or deploying nefarious Israeli covert-action methods (there are a number of ex-Mossad officers always doing malevolent things against Uncle Sam); it seems to be all three.

In Bamford's breathless rendition of history, "throughout the summer and into the fall of 2016, Israel massively and illegally interfered in the U.S. presidential election. A top agent of Netanyahu was secretly offering intelligence and other covert assistance to Trump to get him elected; foreign cash in untold amounts was being pumped into Republican Party coffers, while Israelis, foreigners with no connection to the United States, were heavily involved in the U.S. presidential campaign. All with virtually no oversight or scrutiny by the FBI or the U.S. media." In other words, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, not to mention all the other hungry online news outfits, missed the greatest espionage-influence operation in the history of the United States. Or as Bamford puts it in one of his calmer moments: "While the American media and political system fixated on Putin and his armies of cyber warriors, trolls, and bots, what was largely missed in 2016 was that Israel had developed a great deal of experience in secretly manipulating elections around the world."

When reading Bamford, while unwinding his interconnected stories of dastardly intrigue, one thought repeatedly crossed my mind: He doesn't get out much in Washington.

The Washington press corps is often lazy, even the best journalists love to be fed stories, TV news has become mind-numbing and herd-like, the FBI has a decades-long track-record of unimpressive counterespionage, and congressmen are too often proof that men and women of little talent and intelligence can do well in America. But really, would any sentient individual remotely familiar with the capital's army of lib-left national security and foreign affairs reporters and columnists believe they wouldn't have tenaciously gone after a story of such Israeli malevolence? In a heartbeat, journalists at National Public Radio would have reduced the number of stories about transgenderism, racial exclusion, and police brutality to make room for this one.

The silliness of Bamford's conjectures when he rises above his granular storytelling reveal a journalist disconnected from Washington, horrified by U.S. politics, and not particularly well-versed in foreign affairs. Hyperbole and alarmism intertwine, most often about Israel's sinister intentions. Bamford sees, for example, Bibi Netanyahu's opposition to Barack Obama's nuclear deal with Iran in a novel light. "In so doing, Israel, for its own benefit, was deliberately putting Americans at risk of becoming involved in a nuclear war." I've read these pages repeatedly and I can't tell who would have exchanged nuclear missiles if Jerusalem had been successful in preventing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the executive agreement in 2018; nothing atomic has so far blown up.

Jordanian MP arrested by Israel on suspicion of smuggling weapons - report

Israel police have reportedly arrested a Jordanian member of parliament at the Allenby crossing on suspicion of trying to smuggle gold and weapons, the Jordanian "Al-Mamlaka" channel reported on Sunday, citing the Jordanian Foreign Ministry.

The customs officers, who are not supposed to inspect the member of parliament, reportedly received intelligence information regarding the minister, who the Jordanian Ministry identified as MP Imad Adwan and carried out an inspection as a result.

During the inspection, they reportedly uncovered evidence of an attempt to smuggle 100 kg of gold, 12 long weapons, 12 ZIG pistols and 167 Glock pistols into Israel.

Jordanian MP Khalil Atieh called on the Israeli authorities to release him "immediately," Maariv has reported.

The validity of the report has yet to be confirmed or denied by Israeli officials.

Kids posing for Eid photos with masked Hamas terrorists

Here are photos of Gazan kids posing for photos with masked Hamas terrorists for Eid al-Fitr.

And some lucky kids in Jenin get to play with real weapons!

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!

Haaretz has an exclusive: One of their reporters, Hagar Shezaf, managed to visit Joseph's Tomb along with Jewish pilgrims last November.

It is unclear why it took five months to write this report. Perhaps to make the religious pilgrims look as racist as possible while the residents of Nablus are hapless victims.

The headline is, "A Nighttime Trip to Joseph’s Tomb, Where Jewish Prayer Means a Military Raid" with the subhead, "Bus passengers coming from Jerusalem were greeted with empty streets in Nablus – but that’s how it always is when Jewish worshippers visit Joseph’s Tomb in the West Bank city, where the Israeli army forces Palestinians to put their lives on hold "

The military operation that was necessary to provide security for this “field trip” (or “entrance” as they are called) was impossible to see through the bus’ windows. The passengers couldn’t see the hundreds of Israeli soldiers deployed around Nablus, the entire streets that were placed under curfew and the Palestinians living there. But they may have gotten a whiff of the residents’ protest – mainly from the smell of burning tires.

Seven Palestinians were killed last year during such “entrances,” though this hadn’t disturbed the sleep of the passengers. From their viewpoint, the sterile road they were on, as if traveling through a ghost town, was simply routine.

Hate for the Jewish worshipers permeates the piece:

“Welcome to the Lion’s Den, pun intended,” Rivka jokes, referring to the local militia group that has regularly clashed with Israeli security forces in the city. There was applause and singing: “Thanks to Joseph the righteous, Ephraim and Menashe.” A few passengers quietly added: “May [the Arabs’] village burn.”

Yes, there are Jewish extremists who curse Arabs. But one almost has to read between the lines to understand that the Nablus militants aren't just cursing the Jews - they are trying to murder them.

The reporter does indeed bury this mention:

The Oslo Accords recognized Joseph’s Tomb as a holy site for Jews and stated that its protection and that of its visitors would rest with the Palestinian police – but that Israeli security would also be allowed within it.

Yet this is the most important fact. Under existing agreements, Jews should have free access to Joseph's Tomb. The Palestinians want to kill them instead, and in the past, they have. those very Palestinian policemen who are supposed to protect Jewish visitors killed Ben-Yosef Livna in 2011, and there are regular gunshots aimed at the Jewish worshipers.

While the words of the Jewish pilgrims are parsed to find evidence of their racism, Palestinians who are interviewed are not subject to any skepticism whatsoever:

The tomb is located in an eastern neighborhood of Nablus, near the Balata refugee camp. A school is located on the street leading to the tomb, and there are shops in the vicinity. However, when worshippers visit the tomb, the shops close early – some two hours before the visitors arrive.

“By 8 P.M., we start taking in our merchandise and get ready to close. The young people begin burning tires and erect barriers such as stone and iron,” one 24-year-old neighborhood resident told Salma a-Deb’i, a researcher for the Israeli anti-occupation human rights organization B’Tselem.

The article notes that the buses normally arrive at 11 PM - specifically to minimize any disruption to the lives of the residents. How many shops are open at 11 PM?

As this snippet shows, the problem is not the visitors - it is the Palestinian terrorists who are determined to stop Jews from peacefully visiting. The IDF must protect the visitors from the terrorists. But to Haaretz, Palestinian terror is a given, and the "militant youth" cannot be held responsible for disrupting the lives of the residents of Nablus by erecting makeshift roadblocks and shooting towards the buses.

There are two choices: Protect a Jewish holy spot, or surrender to the demands of Palestinian terrorists who demand that the site be Jew-free.

Haaretz says that Palestinian demands trump Jewish ties to our sacred spaces. To Haaretz, the most violent Palestinian armed thug should have veto power over anything Jews do, Oslo or no Oslo.

So by that logic, Jews should never visit the Temple Mount, or Tomb of the Patriarchs, or indeed any Jewish holy place that was also claimed by Muslims many centuries later - which is all of them.

It may be a strange concept, but the people responsible for violence are the people who engage in violence, not those who defend the would-be victims.

If the Palestinians weren't by and large antisemitic, there would be no issue of Jews visiting Joseph's Tomb.

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!

By their own success criteria, BDS has been a massive failure

The website for the BDS Movement has a FAQ section that asks, "What has the BDS movement achieved so far?"

The very top achievement is listed as:

BDS was a major factor behind the 46% drop in foreign direct investment in Israel in 2014, according to a UN report.

How have direct investments in Israel done since then?

If BDS is taking credit for the 46% drop in direct investment in 2014 then the 255% increase since then must be viewed as a huge BDS failure.

Also, the UN report did not say what BDS claims. It quoted a Newsweek article which in turn quoted a YNet article where one of the authors of the report said:

"We believe that what led to the drop in investment in Israel are Operation Protective Edge and the boycotts Israel is facing," Dr. Roni Manos of the College of Management and one of the authors of the report's summary told Ynet. According to her, these are only conjectures that can explain the sharp decline, but there is another reason. "In the past there were large transactions such as Waze and ISCAR Metalworking which boosted investment, but over the past year there were not enough such deals.

So BDS is not only trying to hide the statistics since 2014 that disprove its "victory," it even lied about the reason for the 2014 anomalous decline itself.

The BDS Movement FAQ goes on:

A Rand Corporation study predicts BDS could reduce Israel’s GDP “by 1 to 2 percent” annually over the next 10 years.

That Rand study says, "Historical evidence from other countries suggests that financial and trade sanctions associated with boycott, divestment, and sanctions could reduce GDP by 1 to 2 percent. "

In other words, it was a wild guess for the purposes of making economic forecasts based on various scenarios, not a prediction for Israel.

Rand wrote that in 2015. How has Israel's GDP done since then?

Israel's GDP increased from $314 billion in 2014 to $488 billion in 2021, an increase of 55% and an average increase of nearly 8% a year.

It doesn't appear that BDS has hurt the Israeli economy at all. On the contrary, Israel has thrived and BDS has not affected it in the least.

By the Israel-haters' own standards, on their own FAQ today, BDS has failed.

Now, I have said that economic damage is not really BDS' aim - demonization of Israel is. By that criterion, they have been successful. But part of that success is because they have been lying about Israel to the world and too many people are believing them.

Here we see that they lie repeatedly to make themselves look successful, when by any economic criteria they have been an abject failure.

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!

04/22 Links: Paris court hands Canadian life term in absentia for 1980 synagogue blast; s trial to start, Pittsburgh Jews find renewed purpose in mourning synagogue attack

From Ian:

Seth Frantzman: Israel at 75: How the Jewish state compares to other countries

In 1851, 75 years after the US Declaration of Independence, a crowd gathered in the shadow of the US Capitol. They had come to lay a cornerstone for the expansion of the building. An architect had been chosen by president Millard Fillmore. Thomas U. Walter, a Philadelphia architect, was chosen. A cornerstone would be laid to mark the beginning of construction of the new part of the building, at the northeast corner of the House wing.

This would be an extension of the building first begun in 1793. Supposedly, the same trowel that president George Washington had used back in the day, was used in 1851 to mark the occasion.

Several men who had served in the Revolutionary War were in attendance. They must have been only teens in the war. That might not have been so rare; Andrew Jackson had served in the war as a kid. He’d been president in the 1830s and died in 1845. This was only a few years later.

America must have seemed at peace in those days. A year before a crisis in the country had been averted by a major legislative compromise.

California, recently acquired from Mexico by the war of 1846-48, wanted to join the US as a new state. It did not want to have slavery, and this created a dispute among the states that had slavery and those that did not. A compromise enabled California to join and called to abolish the slave trade in Washington, DC. But the deal also strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act, which required slaves to be returned from free states to the South. The compromisers were hailed as having averted some kind of civil war. So in 1851, when the Capitol was being extended, all seemed well. But in fact they had only postponed the inevitable; a civil war between the states was coming, and it would arrive by the end of the decade.

In Israel the country recently experienced mass protests over the government’s attempt to overhaul the judiciary. There were rumors that the recent protests could lead to a real national crisis and civil conflict. The defense minister warned of the fissures growing in society.

Now it appears that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has climbed down temporarily from the judicial reform. This may lead to a compromise, but as the lessons in the US show, we must be wary of a compromise that only puts off worse to come. On the other hand, we should acknowledge that 75 years after Israel’s founding in 1948, the country is incredibly secure and powerful compared to what has befallen many other countries in their first 75 years.

House group introduces bipartisan bill honoring 75-year US-Israeli partnership

Four House members introduced a bill recognizing the longtime partnership between the United States and Israel in promoting peace in the Middle East.

Reps. Brad Schneider (D-Ill.), Ann Wagner (R-Mo.), Michael McCaul (R-Texas) and Kathy Manning (D-N.C.)—who are Abraham Accords Caucus leaders—co-sponsored the bill. “Every time we work with Israel, both of our countries are better off for it, including with the transformational Abraham Accords,” stated McCaul.

Wagner added that Israel is one of the closest allies and friends of the United States.

“We are committed to strengthening that vital bond,” she said.

“For 75 years, the United States and Israel have built an extraordinary and enduring alliance based on our shared interests and fundamental values” added Manning. “Israel is our most important, most reliable and only democratic ally in the region.”

Remembrance Day: How can Israel eradicate terror? - opinion

DO YOU remember the circus act where a juggler is balancing numerous plates on sticks? The plates are all spinning, and the juggler rushes from one plate to another to keep them spinning so they don’t all crash to the ground. That pretty much describes our current situation: We are indeed a strong country, but we live in a very fragile environment with lots of plates spinning.

We are surrounded by hostile neighbors and must keep them at bay, all the while seeking alliances with our more friendly neighbors. We must cultivate relationships with nations in the West, whose support we need, while at the same time retaining our independence and our national pride. We have to satisfy the secular, the religious, the Sephardim, the Ashkenazim, the wealthy and the poor. We have to keep salaries high, and the cost of living low. We must be everywhere, all at once.

But if and when the spinning plates start to fall, the frenzied juggler can do little to save them. And that is our situation; the plates are crashing all around us. The world’s leading economists, in Israel and abroad, declare that the proposed judicial reform will have disastrous consequences, as indicated by the lowering of our credit rating this week. Interest rates rise as the value of the shekel plummets, and hi-tech companies – a major source of our collective wealth – seek safer shores to house their products and invest their funds.

Meanwhile, our relations with other countries, both near and far, are fast eroding. We have caused rifts between ourselves and the US, Britain and the EU; Jordan is upset at the ill-conceived statements foolishly made about them; Saudi Arabia has turned away from reconciliation with us and moved closer to Iran; Turkey’s President Erdogan is again demonizing us after a short lull; and even our newest friends, the Emiratis, are thinking twice about doing business with us. All the while, the terror groups within and outside Israel gather together to plot our demise, God forbid.

Most threatening of all, of course, is the unprecedented sense of disunity and distrust of government that today permeates every corner of the land. And it shows no sign whatsoever of easing.

The ancient (some would say modern!) Chinese were ruled by all-powerful emperors, who had absolute control of the country and everyone in it. But there was an unwritten yet unbreakable covenant that held fast: If the basic needs of the people – their security, their safety, their ability to provide food and shelter for their family – were not met, then the emperor was deposed by the masses (and generally executed).

Similarly, even in democratic countries, if the needs of the people are not satisfied, if push truly comes to shove, the people will persevere, and change will inevitably be made, for survival trumps even democracy.

As we face yet another Remembrance Day for the Fallen of Israel’s Wars and Victims of Terrorism and mourn the 24,068 fallen soldiers and 4,216 victims of terror, we must pledge to honor these holy neshamot (souls). We must act so that their deaths were not in vain, doing everything in our power to eradicate terrorism and its adherents. We must project to the world our vitality and unique character. Most of all, we must diligently seek compromise and conciliation with one another, placing the nation and its citizens above any individual person or party.

Then let each one of us pray to the Almighty for peace and prosperity in our wonderful, Old-New Land and State of Israel. Am Yisrael chai!

04/21 Links Pt2: Don't 'All Lives Matter' the Holocaust; Lawsuits are key to fighting antisemitism; Yom Ha’atzmaut echoes in ‘The Mandalorian’

From Ian:

Don't 'All Lives Matter' the Holocaust - opinion

IT IS a basic human instinct to seek ways to connect events that appear, on the surface, to be similar to one another. But to do so when it comes to collective memory is to risk diminishing the uniqueness of each group’s experience.

In 2022, the White House issued a well-intentioned but poorly-worded statement about Holocaust remembrance that recalled “the six million Jews who were systematically and ruthlessly murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators,” as well as “the millions of Roma, Sinti, Slavs, disabled persons, LGBTQ+ individuals, and political dissidents who were killed during the Shoah.”

This past Tuesday night, after I tweeted about Yom Hashoah, a South African Twitter user with a timeline full of antisemitic tweets responded with a screenshot of the Wikipedia entry for “Holocaust victims.” On that page is a table that lists 12 different groups defined by the crowdsourced encyclopedia as victims of the Holocaust.

They include Soviet POWs (2.8-3.3 million), Freemasons (80,000-200,000), and Spanish Republicans (3,500), alongside Jews. Taken together, the 11 non-Jewish groups vastly outnumber the six million Jews noted on the page – which is, of course, exactly the point. My Twitter interlocutor’s message was clear: the Jews weren’t even the primary victims of the Holocaust, so they should really stop harping on about it.

This needs to be said: the Holocaust, the Shoah, was the mass murder of Jews. That the Nazis also murdered millions of other people – whom they viewed as racially inferior, sexually deviant, politically incompatible or simply undesirable – is a series of horrors of stunning magnitude that took place in parallel to, not as part of, the Holocaust.

The Holocaust was an event without parallel in human history and the Nazi drive to murder Jews was singular and obsessive. The entirety of the Nazi state was dedicated to the erasure of the Jewish people from the face of the earth. The German nation – a highly advanced society at the pinnacle of cultural, scientific and intellectual achievement – was fed a steady diet of poisonous propaganda meant to dehumanize Jews and condition their non-Jewish neighbors to support, facilitate and participate in their murder.

The murder itself was mechanized and methodical, carried out on an industrial scale and with staggering precision. Even toward the end of the war, as supplies dwindled and German commanders clamored for materiel to enable them to make a last stand, Nazi leaders continued to dedicate enormous resources to rounding up, transporting and murdering as many Jews as they possibly could.

That combination of factors, coupled with the millennia of pervasive antisemitism that led to them, set the Holocaust apart from both concurrent atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis and other acts of mass murder that have taken place throughout history. There had been nothing like the Holocaust before it happened and there has been nothing like it since.

But the Jews are far from alone; every group that has experienced collective trauma is entitled to the uniqueness of its pain. The Armenian genocide, the Rwandan genocide, the Darfur genocide, the Yazidi genocide, and every other genocide in modern history has had its own unique characteristics and constitutes a unique source of pain for the people it sought to destroy. Similarly, every act of mass murder perpetrated by the Nazis against any of the groups they despised should be understood in its own unique context and remembered as such.

Phyllis Chesler: Lawsuits are key to fighting antisemitism

For the last 20 years, many of us have been documenting the overwhelming rise of hostility on American campuses towards Israel, Jewish students and professors who do not toe the party line.

The hostility seems to be based on the extraordinary effectiveness of long-term propaganda online, in mass media, at the United Nations, among NGOs, in textbooks about anti-racism (which do not include Muslim Jew-hatred), in countless campus-wide spectacles such as Israel Apartheid Week and BDS campaigns, biased curriculum, textbooks on prejudice (which do not include Jew-hatred in general), well-funded anti-Israel speakers and extraordinarily vulgar and vicious rhetoric against Israel and Jewish students from both activists and professors.

How does one dismantle Big Lies that are believed to be living truth? How does one open minds—if not hearts—when reason no longer prevails and “free speech” is expressed by shouting, rioting, overwhelming the platform and trying to hold speakers hostage, when chaos is utilized to eliminate opposing ideas?

One way is by bringing lawsuits that demand an end to such sub-par education and that the documented humiliation, harassment and persecution of Jewish students and professors be remedied.

I reviewed ten such lawsuits brought from 2018-2023 by the American Center for Law and Justice (City University of New York, 2022); the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law (University of Southern California, 2020, the University of Vermont, 2021 and SUNY New Paltz, 2022), StandWithUs (University of California Los Angeles, 2020, Hunter College (CUNY), 2021 and George Washington University, 2023), student Sasha Westrick (Temple University, 2022), the law firm Winston & Strawn, LLP and the Lawfare Project (San Francisco State University, 2018) and private attorneys Joel Siegel and Neal M. Sher (New York University, 2019).

The grounds for the lawsuits were diverse: Students being expelled or refused membership in student groups based on their pro-Israel and/or Zionist viewpoints. Exclusion from campus events. Social media posts that read “all Zionists [need] to die,” leading to the closure of the campus Jewish center. Physical injuries to Jewish students and desecration of Jewish centers. Professors and students espousing, cheering and clapping for pro-Palestinian views that falsely label Israel a “white supremacist” nation that engages in “ethnic cleansing.” Hijacking a Zoom class background by posting Palestinian flags. The vandalism of a Jewish student’s campaign posters.

Yom Ha’atzmaut echoes in ‘The Mandalorian’

Eagle-eyed fans of the Disney series “The Mandalorian” and television writers have noted several instances when the show (the third season ended on April 19), which develops characters similar to those in “Star Wars,” recalls Jewish content.

The series is a production of Golem Creations that recalls the Jewish folklore figure associated with 16th-century Rabbi Judah Loew, Prague’s Maharal. Its producer and lead writer, Jon Favreau, is Jewish.

The Mandalorian warrior culture, whose most “Orthodox” members never remove their visor-helmets, evoke kippot and head coverings that many married, observant Jewish women wear. The more “liberal” Mandalorians only don their headgear in battle, just as many Jews only cover their heads in synagogue and ritual contexts.

Others have noted what JNS observed in the show, too—that the Mandalorian mantra “This is the way” could be a translation of the Hebrew halachah; that a character Bo-Katan Kryze’s given name is Hebrew for “come small”; and that her father, a Mandalorian Duke, is named Adonai (one of God’s Hebrew names). And that Mandalorians have a despised profession as bounty hunters, as Jews throughout history served as money-lenders.

The tribal leader, The Armorer, has the show’s protagonist, bounty hunter Din “Mando” Djarin, repent for uncovering his face by bathing in Mandalore’s “living waters,” which recalls Jewish mikveh practices. And when Mando saves a child named Grogu—fans call him Baby Yoda—from scientists who want to experiment upon him, others, too, have noted parallels to Josef Mengele and Nazis.

The eighth and final episode of the show’s third season is the culmination of the Mandalorian reclamation of its homeland after years of exile. That plot development happens, coincidentally, days before Israel’s Independence Day, Yom Ha’atzmaut, and the prior episode, where the Mandalorians undertook the reclamation, transpired on Passover.

The show is not literally Jewish, but readers of Jewish scripture will be reminded of Moses bringing the Israelites to the Promised Land after crossing the Sinai Desert in the Mandalorian “Wandering Jews,” who have sought to find their way home after dispersing across the galaxy.

The Mandalorthodox

Beyond the lore, there is plenty of specific language — presumably written by Favreau — with deep, and specific, Jewish resonances.

Early in the show’s run, Michal Schick was struck by the “use of the phrase ‘this is the way’ in connection with the lifestyle-observance of keeping the helmet on. This obviously recalls halacha” — which can be translated as the Way as well as the Law.

And then there was the division between Djarin’s sect of Mandalorians and less observant Mandalorians, who took their helmets off.

Schick, a Stern College graduate who is a writer for the Netflix animated series “The Dragon Prince,” will be hosting a panel on YouTube on Sunday, April 23, at 7 p.m., called “Mandalorthodox: Jewish History and Modern Practice in the Mandalorian.”

You can expect to hear about how after taking off his helmet, the Mandalorian had to immerse in “living waters” to atone — a clear parallel to the Jewish mikveh practice.

And you can hear about the thematic relevance of the verses from Exodus that were revealed when a tablet with “Mandalorian” writing that appeared in a recent episode was decoded.

“I suppose this is just supposed to be an Easter egg, not sure why they would put a Bible verse in Star Wars, but here it is,” wrote the Reddit user who first decoded it — and clearly hadn’t gotten the memo that this is the Jewish Star Wars show. Nor the memo that, as per National Jewish Book Award winner and former Star Trek showrunner Michael Chabon, when we find such Jewish tidbits hidden in space drama, we don’t call them Easter eggs (goyish!). Refer to them properly, and perhaps reverently, as afikomen.

Cartoons for the weekend

Three cartoons in the three styles I do.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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Let's look at some anti-Israel lies: US aid to Israel

The US Campaign for Palestinian Rights has created a website that pretends to calculate how much your community would benefit if the US stopped funding Israel.

It is a useful example to show just how much these guys lie.

They write:

Every year, the U.S. government writes Israel a blank check for at least $3.8 billion to fund Israel’s violence against the Palestinian people. The Israeli military then uses your tax dollars to kill Palestinian people, destroy their homes, and steal their native land, in violation of U.S. laws.

How many lies are here?

#1. There is no blank check. Every dollar is earmarked and audited.

#2. None of the money goes towards "violence against the Palestinian people." Unless you consider all Palestinian people to be terrorists; perhaps USCPR does.

#3. None of the money is earmarked for offensive operations against Palestinians altogether.

#4. It is the native land of the Jewish people.

#5. Nearly all of the $3.8 billion goes towards missile defense, joint research projects, F-35 fighter jets, in-air refueling tanks for planes, energy and water conservation research, joint homeland security programs, and above all loan guarantees (which Israel hasn't used for 18 years.) The claim that the full amount is used to attack Palestinians is a ludicrous lie.

Beyond that, the USCPR tries to make $3.8 billion sound like a huge amount. However, it is 0.06% of the federal budget. There is plenty of waste in the US budget - but these modern antisemitic liars want you to focus on Israel alone. The US gets a great deal back for its investments in Israel (missile technology and improvements in the F-35, for example.)

The US gives well over $5.5 billion annually to Arab nations: Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon. That's a lot more than $3.8 billion. Where are the websites that count how much those cost the US taxpayer?

Here is some further deception:

How much of this annual $3.8 billion in military funding do people in your city pay through federal tax dollars? What community needs could be funded instead? Find out below on our interactive map.

See all those rows of things that Kalamazoo's portion of the $3.8 billion could pay for? Each line costs $3.8 billion, not the total. If you buy the respirator masks, there is no money left for public housing. Get the teachers and say bye bye to healthcare. It is a hugely deceptive infographic.

But that barely covers how deceptive. If the US government should suddenly receive a windfall of $3.8 billion, you know what they would do if they were responsible at all? They would use it to make a microscopic 0.02% dent in the national debt! It would never go to teachers!

This entire website is meant to pretend to use real numbers but it is all an appeal to emotions and prejudice. These people don't give a damn about the US taxpayer. And they know that no one will look at their numbers and see how wildly inaccurate their information is.

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!

04/21 Links Pt1: Melanie Phillips: Israel’s protests are now crossing sacred red lines; Italian lawmaker calls for dismissal of UN envoy accused of antisemitism

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: The ruling class must regain its senses

President Joe Biden has shown through his policies and statements on Iran, the Palestinians, Jerusalem, progressive anti-Semitism and a host of other issues of strategic importance to Israel that his Middle East policies are predicated on ideological positions that are hostile to Israel’s core national and strategic interests. Under normal circumstances, Biden’s hostile posture would place him in an uncomfortable position vis-à-vis the overwhelming majority of American Jews who are pro-Israel.

But with the likes of Lapid, Barak, Olmert, Ya’alon and their many partners demonizing the government and calling for American Jews, Democrat and Republican lawmakers and the Biden administration to boycott the government, Biden’s effective declaration of Netanyahu persona non grata last month went over with barely a word of protest among American Jewish leaders. He was applauded by Israeli leaders.

In this week’s “Caroline Glick Show,” Tony Badran from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies explained that Iran’s decision to escalate its aggression against Israel in recent weeks is predicated in part on Biden’s declared shunning of Netanyahu. Biden’s statement was interpreted by Iran as an invitation to attack Israel at will.

Likewise, in recent weeks, the Iranian regime-controlled media have given banner headlines to statements by retired IDF commanders like Barak and Ya’alon and politicians like Lapid declaring that Israel is doomed. And rather than join Netanyahu when he warns Iran not to believe the propaganda, Lapid, Barak, Ya’alon and their elitist comrades blame Netanyahu for failing to protect the country from the forces their insurrection has emboldened.

This week, the son of the former Shah of Iran Reza Pahlavi made a historic visit to Israel. He participated in the official Yom Hashoah ceremony at Yad Vashem. He visited the Western Wall. He went to a desalination plant and spoke of the assistance Israel can offer a post-ayatollah Iran that will seek to repair the environmental devastation the regime has inflicted on the land.

Rather than praise Netanyahu and Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel who hosted Pahlavi, leftist commentators attacked them and Pahlavi. Former ambassador Daniel (“Danny”) Shek panned Pahlavi and Netanyahu for hosting him. In an interview on i24 News, Shek said the son of the former monarch “is not a force to be reckoned with” and that “Israel has nothing to gain from him.” Parroting Iranian regime propaganda, Shek insisted that no one in Iran supports Pahlavi.

Maariv columnist Yossi Melman attacked the government even more forcefully calling it “stupid” for hosting Pahlavi and inviting him to attend the Yad Vashem ceremony. Parroting the pro-Iran anti-Israel lobby in Washington, Melman wrote, “It’s counter-productive to topple the terrible regime.”

Why? Because.

Other members in good standing of the Clinton’s “pro-peace” Ashkenazi, sabra, Likud-bashing club joined the chorus of elitists standing with the Iranian regime and pillorying Netanyahu for hosting Pahlavi and Pahlavi for not hating Israel and Netanyahu.

With our ruling class in full revolt, Israel’s most important institutions—first and foremost, the IDF—are reeling. Our ability to defend ourselves on the battlefield and in diplomatic circles is constrained as never before. With our elites declaring our government illegitimate, and lobbying American Jews and politicians to boycott our leaders and reject the morality of the public that voted them into office, the government must fight against our enemies, against anti-Semitism, against BDS campaigns and anti-Israel propaganda machines with both hands tied behind its back, its mouth gagged while hopping on one foot. This situation is unsustainable.

As we approach Remembrance Day for Fallen IDF Soldiers and our 75th Independence Day next week, we must find a way to restore sanity and a sense of common destiny to our national life. We don’t have a spare country. Our ruling class needs to return to its senses and remember this obvious fact.

Melanie Phillips: Israel’s protests are now crossing sacred red lines

Israel’s three-month-old protest movement, which has repeatedly brought tens of thousands into the streets, is now crossing an increasing number of red lines.

There are serious anxieties that protests will disrupt next week’s Remembrance Day for Fallen Soldiers and Independence Day ceremonies.

At a Holocaust Remembrance Day synagogue service this week, anti-government participants forced Likud MK Boaz Bismuth to leave after they shouted at him to get out and started to become physically violent.

The leader of the opposition, Yair Lapid, announced that because the government had “divided society,” he would boycott the traditional torch-lighting ceremony that ends Memorial Day and opens Independence Day.

It was hitherto unthinkable that Israelis could desecrate those three sacred days. It was similarly unthinkable for soldiers of the IDF to refuse to serve their country, as did a group of elite Air Force pilots in protest against the government.

Even the memory of the Shoah is being traduced. On an El Al flight from Tel Aviv to New York on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the pilot announced, “Things like [the] Holocaust are potentially carried [out] in a dictatorship, and we are fighting in Israel to remain a democratic country.”

On the same day, in another obscene equivalence, a ceremony at the Mateh Asher Regional Council displayed pictures from the Holocaust alongside photographs from the protests.

It should be apparent to rational observers that this has gone way beyond the issue of judicial reform. That particular agenda is now all but dead in the water. The government has retreated. Yet the protests are not only continuing but are becoming increasingly disturbing.

This is because judicial reform is a flashpoint for profound divisions that have previously escaped attention but have now erupted.

Arabic media is reporting:

The Moroccan singer, Fatima Zahraa Al-Arousi, caused anger among activists, after she performed a concert in Israel.

Activists shared footage of Fatima Al-Zahraa Al-Arousi's performance, which was organized by the Moroccan Liaison Office in Tel Aviv, on the occasion of the Mimouna festival held by Jews of Moroccan origin at the end of Passover.

It seems that Al-Arousi was expecting the angry reaction, so she did not previously announce the event through her accounts on social networking sites.

However, the Moroccan artist lost thousands of followers from her fans after the footage circulated of her concert in Israel .

Here's the short clip being circulated:

So did she lose her fan base?

Her detractors are circulating this graphic:

According to this, Al-Arousi lost abut 11,000 followers in the three days after the news broke, and based on that, about 60,000 followers until today.

It sounds like a lot, but it is only 3% of her fan base. And her Instagram has a bunch of people criticizing her but really not that many, considering how many followers she has, and many defending her as well. Other social media is decidedly mixed, with plenty of people saying that Morocco and Israel have a peace treaty and she can do whatever she wants. Also, the critics don't have the usual kind of vitriol one usually associates with anything to do with Israel.

It looks like the people who she lost were not her biggest fans anyway. More importantly, the reactions I'm seeing are far saner that the crazed reactions one sees in Arab countries like Algeria, Egypt and Jordan. Usually by now the artists would be accused of being complicit in mass murder or something.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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There are thousands of Palestinians still living in Iraq with essentially no rights. They have been attacked, and many killed, by Iraqis since 2003. They are not recognized in Iraq as a refugee group. Other Arab countries refuse to allow them to immigrate.

The Safa news agency interviewed Baghdad-based journalist Hassan Al-Khaled who said that there are some 6,000 Palestinians in Iraq, 70% of whom live below the poverty line. He aid that there is no joy this Eid al-Fitr for them.

In 1948, many Palestinians were forced by Iraqi forces to join them and fight against Israel. After their defeat, they were allowed to go to Iraq, where they were treated decently. That all changed after the 2003 fall of Saddam Hussein, who had given them huge privileges.

In 2020, UNHCR dropped their rent subsidies for the Palestinian families, throwing them into an even deeper crisis.

Al-Khaled complained about the lack of relief associations or organizations that help Palestinians in Iraq, saying, "If there are any, the amount assistance they provide to the refugees is not enough for everyone."

Think about that. There are hundreds of NGOs in the Palestinian territories, and hundreds more that claim to aid Palestinians worldwide - and this journalist is not aware of a single NGO that provides aid to Palestinians in Iraq.

Meanwhile, Arab countries refuse to allow them to enter, even as hundreds of thousands of other refugees from Iraq have been allowed in. They use Israel as an excuse to keep Palestinians in misery in Iraq. HRW wrote in 2006:

The PLO and the Arab League have rejected in principle and actively discouraged in practice local integration or third-country resettlement of Palestinian refugees. Their view is that local integration or resettlement would negate the right to return of the resettled refugees. The Arab countries hosting large Palestinian refugee populations point to Israel's legal obligation to permit the refugees' return to justify their refusal to integrate the Palestinian refugees and afford them rights equal to their own citizens.

Jordan and Syria have (with some exceptions) refused entry to Palestinians who attempt to flee Iraq, in violation of the international legal prohibition against refoulement. When these two countries made temporary exceptions to their policies of refusal, they conditioned admission of Palestinian refugees on their confinement to camps, for example al-Ruwaishid camp in Jordan in 2003, and al-Hol camp in Syria in 2006. Because of the widely observed policy against resettlement of Palestinian refugees, these camp residents have already waited longer than other refugees fleeing Iraq, such as the Iranian Kurds, for access to third-country resettlement.

Just as with Lebanon, when Palestinians are brutally mistreated by an Arab nation, all of the "pro-Palestinian activists" are suddenly silent. The reason is because they are not pro-Palestinian at all, but anti-Israel. And using Israel as an excuse to actively keep Palestinians in misery - policies that are meant to hurt Palestinians because doing so might indirectly, one day, help weaken Israel - proves that this "anti-Israel" attitude is really 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!