Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, July 16, 2023

Another large set of Palestinians who proudly trace their ancestry from elsewhere

This video segment from VOA News describes how many Gazans trace their roots to Kurdistan.

Of course, we knew this. There are plenty of Palestinians with the last name "el-Kurd" or "el-Kurdi," and many prominent Palestinian families proudly trace their roots to Arabia or Syria or Morocco or Turkey and everywhere else.

Here is my latest list of Palestinian surnames and where they appear to have originated:

Abbas	Iraq
Abdil-Masih (Beit Sahour)	Turkey
Abid	Sudan
Abu Aita (Beit Sahour)	Turkey
Abu Ghosh	Europe/11th century
Abu Sitta	Egypt
Abu-Kishk	Egypt
Adwan	Arabia
Afghani	Afghanistan
Ajami	Iran
Al Hafi	Iraq
Alami	Morocco
Alami	Morocco
Alawi	Syria
Al-Hayik (Beit Sahour)	Turkey
Arafat	Syria
Araj	Morocco
Aramsha	Egypt
Arashi	Egypt
Ashrawi	Yemen
Awwad	Egypt
Ayyubi	Kurdistan
Azd, Azad	Yemen
Badra	Egypt
Baghdadi	Iraq
Banna	Egypt
Bannoura	Egypt
Bardawil	Egypt
Barghouti	Yemen (may be Jewish)
Bushnak	Bosnia
Chehayber	Turkey
Dajani	Arabia via Spain
Darjani	Arabia
Djazair	Algeria
Doghmush	Turkey
Erekat	Jordan
Fakiki	Morocco
Faranji	France
Faruqi	Iraq
Fayumi	Egypt
Filali	Morocco
Gharub	Egypt
Ghassan	Lebanon
Haddadin	Yemen
Halabi	Syria
Hamis	Bahrain
Hammouda	Transjordan
Hannouneh (Beit Sahour)	Turkey
Hashlamun	Kurdistan
Hathat	Kurdistan
Hijazi	Arabia
Hindi	India
Hourani	Syria
Husseini	Arabia
Ibrahim (Beit Sahour)	Turkey
Iraki	Iraq
Issa	Arrived in 1820s to Haifa, not sure from where
Jabari	Iraq
Jazir	Algiers
Kafisha	Kurdistan
Kanaan	Syria
Khair	Egypt
Khairi	Morocco
Khalil	Arabia
Khamadan	Yemen
Khamati	Syria
Khamis	Bahrain
Khazen	Lebanon
Khoury (Beit Sahour)	Turkey
Kukali	Syria
Kurdi	Kurdistan
Lubnani	Lebanon
Mahdi	Morocco
Makhamra	Jewish
Marashda	Egypt
Masa'ad	Egypt
Masarwa	Egypt
Maslouhi	Morocco
Masri	Egypt
Matar	Kuwait
Mattar	Yemen
Metzarwah	Egypt
Mughrabi, Moghrabi	Morocco
Murad	Albania/Yemen
Muwaqat	Morocco
Muzaffar	Morocco
Nablusi	Named after Nablus - but that was named in the 7th century
Nammari	Spain
Nashashibi	Kurdish/Turkoman/Syria
Nusseibeh	Arrived 7th Century
Omaya	Arabia
Othman	Turkey
Qudwa	Syria
Qurashi	Arabia
Qutob	Morocco
Ridwan	Ottoman
Rishmawi (Beit Sahour)	Turkey
Sa'ad	Egypt
Salibas	Greece
Samahadna	Sudan (maybe)
Saud / Saudi	Arabia
Shaalan	Egypt
Shakirat	Egypt
Shami	Syria
Shamis	Syria
Shashani	Chechnya
Shawish	Arabia
Sidawi	Lebanon
Sous (Beit Sahour)	Turkey
Sultan	Turkey
Surani	Lebanon
Taamari	Arabia
Tachriti	Iraq
Tamimi	Yemen/Egypt/Arabia
Tarabin	Mecca oe Egypt
Tarabulsi	Lebanon
Tartir	Egypt
Tawil	Egypt
Tayib	Morocco
Tijani	Morocco
Tikriti	Iraq
Touqan	Northern Arabia or Syria
Turki	Turkey
Ubayyidi	Sudan
Uthman	Turkey
Yacoub (Beit Sahour)	Turkey
Yamani	Yemen
Zabidat	Egypt
Zaghab	Morocco
Zarqawi	Jordan
Zaza	Kurdistan
Zeitawi	Morocco
Zoabi	Iraq
Zubeidi	Iraq

(h/t Tomer Ilan)

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!

07/16 Links: Settlers are not an obstacle to peace; Hamas is the Palestinian Wagner Group; Fatah tried to help terrorists escape after today’s terror attack

From Ian:

Herzog to fly to Washington for White House visit, Congress speech

In the speech, the president plans to emphasize the importance of “expanding the circle of regional peace” between Israel and Arab states, and “the essential need to fight against the hatred and terrorism that Iran is spreading while it pursues nuclear weapons.”

Herzog also said that, in all of his meetings, he will talk about the “internal challenges and opportunities facing Israeli society.”

The president will travel from Washington to New York City to meet with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, New York Governor Kathy Hochul, and New York Mayor Eric Adams.

The local Jewish Federation will host an event at which Herzog will meet young leaders, which he said reflects his “actions to build bridges between Israel and Diaspora Jewry.”

Herzog invited Leah Goldin to accompany him on the trip. Goldin is the mother of Lt. Hadar Goldin, who was killed in battle with Hamas during Operation Protective Edge. The terrorist group has held her son’s body captive since 2014.

Ahead of the trip, Netanyahu told Herzog last Thursday that Israel has two redlines.

“Israel will not agree to an American return to the dangerous nuclear deal with Iran and will act with every means it has to stop Iran from attaining a nuclear weapon,” a source close to Netanyahu said.

In addition, “Israel will not agree to a ‘no surprises’ policy when it comes to Iran.”

Settlers are not an obstacle to peace - opinion

An honest look at what is holding up peace between the Palestinians and Israelis is clear. Palestinian refusal to negotiate sincerely and their support of terrorism, are holding up peace. If Palestinians would cease all terror attacks and enter earnest negotiations with Israel, a peace deal could be reached. It is Palestinian intransigence that has been the obstacle to peace.

I find the notion that I can’t live in Judea and Samaria, the historic heartland of the Jewish people, simply because I am a Jew, abhorrent. Recently, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was interviewed by Sky News who pushed him on my community and those like it being an obstacle to peace.

He responded, “What you’re saying is that if a Jew buys property on private land and wants to live in areas next to Palestinians that is a criminal action and we must sanitize the area [of Jews], we have to make it ethnically cleansed.

“If I said to you Jews cannot buy land anywhere in the world, in London, or Paris, you would be outraged. But if a Jew buys private land in a disputed territory whose political future has not been determined yet, Jews should not live there because it obstructs the peace?

“Why do a million Arabs sit in Israel as citizens of Israel, live in Israel, and we don’t say that’s not possible, but the idea that Jews should live next to Palestinians, that obviates the peace? That conception is the danger to peace. The idea that the presence of Jews on their ancestral homeland, which has been their homeland for 3,000 years, that Jews should not live there, that it should be Judenrein?”

I AM proud of where I live. I have followed my ancestors back to the land that was promised to the Jewish people and where they lived for thousands of years. I am inspired by the Zionist pioneers that came before me and I follow their example. I dedicate hours of every single day to developing my town and my nation and there isn’t a foreign notion or nation that will impede our growth.

I also pray for peace three times every single day and I look forward to the day when I can live peacefully with my Palestinian neighbors. I am ready for peace, but it will only happen when the Palestinians sincerely want to end the conflict with Israel.

If Palestinians want to continue using my home and town as a pretext to justify their intransigence and support of terror, that is their mistake, and they will suffer the consequences. My neighbors and I will keep building and developing our towns – and we will create new ones. Time is on our side; the longer Palestinians delay making peace with Israel the more they will lose.

My vision of a peaceful Israel, with Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs, living side by side, is too strong to be ruined by cynical or shortsighted people. I will keep praying and dreaming of peace, and I am confident that I will live to see the day peace is reached in our land.

Lex Fridman Podcast: Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace

TRANSCRIPT: https://lexfridman.com/benjamin-netanyahu-transcript/

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
2:35 - Hate
8:15 - Judicial reform and protests
16:51 - AI
26:53 - Competition
33:34 - Power and corruption
40:45 - Peace
55:18 - War in Ukraine
59:15 - Abraham Accords
1:03:15 - History
1:08:02 - Survival

UNRWA media advisor Adnan Abu Hasna warned of the possibility of UNRWA being forced to stop services in September with its budget projected to run out by that time. It wouldn't be able to pay salaries or other expenses.

UNRWA has a financial deficit this year of about $200 million.

Abu Hasna noted that the support provided to UNRWA by Arab nations was $200 million in 2018, but it has evaporated to only $20 million dollars last year, a 90 percent reduction.

I counted about $50 million in pledges from Arab countries last year, so I'm not sure if they simply didn't pay their pledges or these are pledges for 2023 payments.

Either way, the amount of aid to UNRWA from the Arab states is ridiculously low compared to the amount that the West provides - Canada itself gives $20 million a year, and individual EU states gives tens of millions on top of the $100 million from the EU itself.

Apparently, appealing to Arab pride to increase their donations is not effective.

Why, exactly, does the West provide so much more for Palestinian "refugees" than the Arab world. especially the wealthy Gulf countries? And why don't the Palestinians themselves make a bigger deal over being shortchanged by their supposed "brethren?"

If the Arab world itself doesn't care about their own, why should the West?

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 reports that Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, condemned Israel as a "racist state" on Saturday.

During the Netroots Nation conference, at one point Rep. Jan Schakowsky was introduced. She is one of the highest ranking Jewish members of Congress and a strident critic of Israel.

She was roundly booed and protesters started chanting anti-Israel slogans as soon as she was mentioned.

Schakowsky tried to tell the protesters that she is on their side, but they drowned her out, and she briefly considered walking off the stage. But then Jayapal stood up and silenced the protesters by saying, "As somebody who’s been in the streets and participated in a lot of demonstrations, I want you to know that we have been fighting to make it clear that Israel is a racist state." She added that there were nefarious forces trying to silence them, and Schakowsky is not one of them.

Meaning, she is one of the good Jews.

The incident starts around 1:06:00 in this video.

Schakowsky, who almost certainly disagrees that Israel is a racist state, remained silent so as not to anger the mob even more.

The mob sets the agenda for the "progressives."

The wording is telling. Jayapal isn't arguing that Israel is a "racist state." She didn't bring a single fact to support the statement. She is telling the crowd that the progressive Democrat goal is to spread the word that Israel is a racist state, and that she agrees with the protesters - protesters who waited until a Jewish member of Congress was going to speak before interrupting, an hour into the conference.

Facts don't matter - propaganda is the goal. If the Israel haters can find some context-less facts that seem to support that narrative, great, and any counter-evidence is summarily dismissed and ignored. That is the entire content of the Amnesty and HRW "apartheid" reports. The accusation is the important thing, not the facts. And the accusation is seen as an important part of the progressive story.

The accusation itself is absurd. Unlike apartheid-era South Africa, and despite the lies of some NGOs, there are no Israeli laws that discriminate against Arabs or Muslims. On the contrary, equal rights are explciit in many Israeli laws. If equal rights for all is enshrined in the law in hundreds of ways, then clearly Israel is not a racist state. (I gave an example last week of Israel's law against desecrating religious objects, which does not single out Jewish religious objects but applies equally to attacks on all religions.)

Israel does discriminate against non-citizens. So does every other nation on the planet. But only Israel is accused of "racism" or "apartheid" for prioritizing its own citizens over non-citizens, especially non-citizens who are attempting to destroy the State.

The only bigot in this conversation is Pramila Jayapal, who is singling out the world's only Jewish state as being intolerant when it its laws are more tolerant of its Muslim minority than much of Western Europe's are. Not to mention the constitutions of nearly every Arab nation being explicitly discriminatory against non-Muslims and non-Arabs.

There was another accusation of racism against Israel this weekend, and unlike Jayapal, this one pretends to have facts on its side.

The official Palestinian Wafa news agency reports in its English-language site:

The Israeli national water company Mekorot has reduced the daily amount of water supply to the provinces of Hebron and Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank by about 6,000 cups per day, today said the Palestinian Water Authority (PWA), which described the move as ‘racist’.

PWA said the move deprives the people of their right to obtain sufficient amounts of water, especially in light of the sharp rise in temperatures.

“There are no technical reasons behind this reduction,” PWA said, adding that “no faults were detected in the supplying source, but rather it [the move] comes as a discriminatory measure that adds to the racist policies practiced by the occupation authorities.”

I could find no news stories about this in Hebrew media, so I have no idea if it is true. But let's pretend that it is, and Israel reduced the amount of water to the governorates of Hebron and Bethlehem by 6,000 cups every day. (The word "cups" is consistent in English and Arabic; in fact the word is "kub" in Arabic.)

Given that there are about 900,000 people in those two governorates, that comes out to about one third of a teaspoon of water per person per day. If the "6,000 cups" story is even remotely true, no one would notice. Which is why the accusation is almost certainly false - why would Israel reduce the amount of water by such a minuscule amount?

As with Jayapal, the accusation of "racism" is what drives the story, not any facts. Facts are the enemy of these modern antisemites, which is why they try so hard to drown out the facts with a false, slanderous narrative.

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!

Study: Antisemitism is associated with conspiracy thinking, authoritarianism and desire to overturn the social order

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.., made headlines this weekend when he seemed to claim that COVID-19 could have been genetically engineered to target certain populations, and then mentioned there have been studies that suggested that Chinese people and Ashkenazic Jews are less susceptible to the virus.

"COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese," the Democratic presidential candidate said in a video that the New York Post published.

There is indeed such a study, from 2020, which he gets slightly wrong. The two groups that the study claimed were less likely to be susceptible to COVID-19, based on an analysis of two specific genes, were Ashkenazic Jews and the Amish. Latino, South and East Asian, and Finnish people were less susceptible than other groups as well.

Kennedy later clarified, saying he “never, ever suggested that the COVID-19 virus was targeted to spare Jews. I do not believe and never implied that the ethnic effect was deliberately engineered.”

Obviously, a large number (and percentage) of Ashkenazic Jews died of COVID-19, so the study did not predict anything accurately.

But the cat is out of the bag, and conspiracy theorists now have more ammunition to attack Jews.

And they are the most likely people to be antisemitic to begin with.

A new study published in Nature shows that antisemitism is not so much associated with the political Right or Left as it is with extremist thinking and conspiracy theories.

The researchers checked the association between antisemitic attitudes and likelihood to believe in other theories. For example, they found a high correlation between antisemites that those who believed in totalitarianism:

•To bring about great changes for the benefit of mankind often requires cruelty and even ruthlessness.
•Soft and idealistic people can never be the doers of great events.
•Almost any unfairness or brutality may have to be justified when some great purpose is being carried out.
•The unhappiness of a few people simply doesn’t matter when it is a question of a step forward for the majority of the people.
•Sometimes when a new society is in its early stages, the masses have to be ruled with an iron hand for their own good

Similarly, antisemitic attitudes were correlated with belief in conspiracy theories, such as:

•The government permits or perpetrates acts of terrorism on its own soil, disguising its involvement.
•The power held by heads of state is second to that of small unknown groups who really control world politics
.•A small secret group of people is responsible for making all major world decisions such as going to war.
•Secret organizations communicate with extraterrestrials, but keep this fact from the public
•The spread of certain viruses and/or diseases is the result of the deliberate, concealed efforts of some organisations.
•Technology with mind-control capacities is used on people without their knowledge.

And they are also associated with support for authoritarianism, both associated with the Right:

•What our country needs most is discipline, with everyone following our leaders in unity.

•An ideal society requires some groups to be on top and others to be on the bottom.
•Some groups of people are simply inferior to other groups

And the Left::

•Rich people should be forced to give up virtually all of their wealth.
•Most investment bankers need to be thrown in prison.
•Political violence can be constructive when it serves the cause of social justice.

•Books that contain racism or racial language should be censored.
•I should have the right not to be exposed to views I find offensive.

While both the Right and the Left attack each other as antisemites, they usually remain blind to the antisemitism that is on their own side. And too many on their own sides want to see an authoritarian government that supports their viewpoints - and violently represses others.

Which indicates that antisemites are often some of the worst people on Earth. And those who find antisemites on their own political side should be in the forefront of denouncing them, not accommodating them.

Incidentally, the introduction to the study cited quite a few studies that showed a strong correlation between Judeoiphobic antisemitism and anti-Zionist antisemitism. And the people who would self-describe as anti-Zionists were just as likely to believe in the other noxious theories listed here as those who espouse the "old" antisemitism.

(h/t Irene)

our country needs most is discipline, with everyone following our leaders in unity.

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!

07/15 Links: Netanyahu admitted to hospital for dehydration; RFK Jr. says COVID may have been ‘ethnically targeted’ to spare Jews; Activist backs off Sweden Torah burning

From Ian:

Hospitalized for Apparent Dehydration, Netanyahu Says He ‘Feels Very Good’

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Saturday he felt “very well” after being hospitalized for dizziness, with his office saying the 73-year-old leader had likely been dehydrated. The Israeli leader will, however, stay in hospital overnight for continued medical supervision.

Netanyahu was rushed to Sheba medical center in the afternoon, his office said, noting he was in “good condition and undergoing medical evaluations.”

Later his office said Netanyahu had on Friday spent time in the scorching heat of the Sea of Galilee, in Israel’s north.

“Today, he felt slightly dizzy, and at the advice of his personal physician, Dr Zvi Berkowitz, was taken to Sheba’s emergency department,” another statement said.

“The initial examinations showed normal findings,” it added. “The initial evaluation is dehydration.”

In a video recording released several hours later, Netanyahu said he spent time on the lake with his wife “in the sun, without a hat, without water.”

“Not a good idea,” Netanyahu said, noting however that he was now feeling better.

“I feel very well,” he said, imploring Israelis to “spend less time in the sun” and “drink more water” in the wake of the heatwave scorching the country.

Netanyahu was hospitalized over Shabbat, apparently for dehydration. He says here that he was at the Sea of Galilee without a hat or water, "not a good idea." He says he feels well and appreciates the concern. pic.twitter.com/vQuJHyojo3
— Lahav Harkov (@LahavHarkov) July 15, 2023

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu admitted to hospital

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has check himself into a hospital after reportedly losing consciousness at his home

JPost Editorial: Burning sacred books is unacceptable, whether it be the Torah, Bible, or Quran -

Sweden, that Nordic bastion of liberal democracy, appears to be in the throes of a spate of sacred book burnings.

Two weeks ago, during the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, two men stood outside a Stockholm mosque, tore pages out of a Quran, and set them on fire – after receiving a permit from local police to do so.

The desecration of the Muslim holy book triggered furious protests across the Muslim world: a mob stormed the Swedish embassy in Baghdad, several Muslim countries summoned their resident Swedish ambassadors, and various Muslim leaders issued statements slamming Sweden for permitting the incident.

Leaders of other faith groups, including the Swedish Jewish community, also issued condemnations of the Quran burning, and Israel’s President Isaac Herzog decried the act.

“I was horrified when I heard the recent news from Sweden, about the desecration of a Quran, holy to the believers of Islam,” Herzog said last Sunday. “One cannot and one should not remain silent in the face of this… These acts are diametrically opposed to all the values of partnership between faiths for which we as a people and a country yearn, and we must all stand against this wherever it should arise.”

The Quran burning set off a series of requests for permits to publicly burn other sacred books. Then, this past week, Swedish authorities approved a request to burn a Torah and a Christian Bible outside the Israeli embassy on Shabbat.

Activist backs off Sweden Torah burning: Trying to draw attention to Quran desecration

A Muslim activist who had received permission to burn a Torah and a Bible outside the Israeli embassy in Sweden on Saturday said he was backing off from the move, adding that he only wanted to draw attention to the recent burning of the Quran in the country.

The man, identified as Ahmad Alush, 32, had received permission from Swedish authorities to perform the act, drawing widespread condemnation and protest from Israel and Jewish groups, among others.

But Alush arrived outside the Israeli diplomatic mission on Saturday clutching only a copy of the Quran and said it was never his intention to burn Jewish or Christian holy books, only to protest the recent burning of the Quran.

“It is against the Quran to burn and I will not burn. No one should do that,” Alush, who is of Syrian origin, told reporters gathered at the scene.

“This is a response to the people who burn the Quran. I want to show that freedom of expression has limits that must be taken into account,” he added.

“I want to show that we have to respect each other, we live in the same society. If I burn the Torah, another the Bible, another the Quran, there will be war here. What I wanted to show is that it’s not right to do it.”

Swedish public broadcaster SVT said Alush threw a lighter in his hand to the ground and said he didn’t need it.

Local police on Friday said they had approved an application from an individual in his 30s to hold a rally outside Israel’s embassy in Stockholm on Saturday, where a Jewish Torah and Christian Bible would be burned.

Relieved that the burning of a Torah book did not take place today. I thank everyone in Sweden, Israel and around the world, including Muslim and Christian leaders for their messages of support and solidarity.
The danger of desecrating holy books has not yet passed. A way must be… pic.twitter.com/2JrIBNVCIN
— Ziv Nevo Kulman ???? (@zivnk) July 15, 2023

07/14 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: The real crisis in the west; BDS proponents suffer third consecutive loss in court; Friedman Finally Stumbles onto a Not-Totally-Bad Idea

From Ian:

Interview With Alex Ryvchin, Author of “The Seven Deadly Myths”

Over the years, many books have been written about antisemitism from different perspectives. How is your book different?

Many books have addressed the ‘why’ of antisemitism. Why are the Jews so hated? Why have such things been inflicted on them? Why do they continue to be targeted? This book will go some way to explaining the ‘why’ but my central interest is the ‘how’? How does antisemitism function in practice? How is it transmitted around the world and from generation to generation?

This question of ‘how’ led me to the seven deadly myths. It is through this complex and well-honed mythology that antisemitism thrives. As Isaac Herzog said in reference to my book: By shifting emphasis from the ‘why’ of this puzzling and dangerous phenomenon to the ‘how’ of the mechanics of its transmission, Ryvchin points to the possibility of actually confronting and diffusing it.

You mention in your book that it could be used in the classroom. There is discussion about Holocaust education — and how it has failed, both in making people knowledgeable and in changing attitudes. What do you think are some of the causes for this and how would your book and a curriculum based on it overcome these problems?

Holocaust education is vital and I support it entirely. Within the study of the Holocaust we learn not only about the process by which the European Jews were destroyed, we observe everything of which man is capable of – sadism, cruelty, heroism, strength, apathy and cowardice. But in terms of understanding the hatred of the Jews, the Holocaust answers few questions. In fact, it raises these questions to fever pitch and leaves them unresolved. This is why despite so many admirable endeavors in Holocaust commemoration and education, antisemitism has continued to rise.

Trying to understand antisemitism through the Holocaust is also highly problematic as it positions antisemitism as a historical event and not something in the here and now. It would be like trying to teach anti-Black racism and ending the story with the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation. It also falsely positions it as solely a product of race science, fascism and totalitarianism which completely ignores its political and religious sources and manifestations.

This has all contributed to the extremely limited and poor understanding of antisemitism in society, despite it being the most lethal and persistent hatred. This is why it is essential to teach antisemitism itself, what it looks like, how it is expressed, what it continues to do to our communities and wider society.

Why do you think antisemitism persists even after the Holocaust — why wasn’t the world “scared straight” by the murder of 6 million Jews?

Because antisemitism was too ingrained. Antisemitism was soaked into the world’s consciousness through centuries of lies, mythology and propaganda. It emanated from religious sources, nationalist heroes and popular culture. Even the horror of the Holocaust and the most devastating war in history could not dislodge it.

As is often forgotten, Jews continued to be massacred in Europe even after liberation from Nazi occupation. To give one example, the Polish Peasants Party passed a resolution in 1946 thanking Hitler for destroying the Jews and calling for the expulsion of any survivors. Forty-two Jewish survivors were clubbed to death in Kielce, Poland. One of the heroes of the Sobibor Camp Uprising was murdered by nationalists after escaping a camp which had virtually no survivors. So of course, today, when the Holocaust is considered ancient history to many, the same myths and conspiracy theories that made it possible, are resurgent.

Mark Regev: Israel's first ally: The forgotten Paris-Jerusalem alliance

IF THE UK, US, and USSR had no desire to become Israel’s military ally, it was not too long before Paris filled the vacuum. And while France was not one of World War II’s “Big Three” allied victors, for Israel it was the next best thing.

The French were defeated in May-June 1940 and Paris remained occupied by the Nazis until August 1944. Nonetheless, France emerged from the war with an enhanced international status that included an occupation zone in Germany and a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

Like all good international partnerships, the Franco-Israel alliance of the 1950s was founded on common interests and shared values.

The period’s French leadership espoused the ethos of the wartime Résistance and embraced the Jews as Nazism’s ultimate victims.

This affinity was further strengthened by the series of left-of-center governments during France’s Fourth Republic (1946-58), which shared a socialist fellowship with Israel’s like-minded ruling Mapai (Labor) party.

In parallel, Paris was a magnet for Israeli writers, painters, sculptors, and musicians, who gravitated toward the French capital for inspiration.

Augmenting the cultural and ideological affinity was solid realpolitik. From November 1954, France was conducting an increasingly bloody counterinsurgency against nationalist rebels in Algeria.

Inspired by the Viet Minh’s May 1954 victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam, the pro-independence Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) launched an armed revolt against French rule.

But unlike Vietnam, Paris saw Algeria not as a foreign colony, but as an integral part of France, a claim buttressed by the presence of some one million European settlers – the pieds-noirs.

The Algerian revolution received vigorous ideological, diplomatic, and military backing from Cairo, with Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser championing the expulsion of all European colonialists from the greater Arab homeland.

Israel, the enemy of France’s enemy, thus became Paris’s best friend.

Melanie Phillips: The real crisis in the west

Over the past six months, the mass protests in Israel over judicial reform have elicited loud cries in the West that Israel is "in crisis." In its eagerness to identify such crises, however, the West looks everywhere but in the right direction.

Three years ago, French President Emmanuel Macron said, "Islam is a religion that is in crisis all over the world today."

In a video interview conducted in 2022, which has now gone viral following the latest riots in France, Mohammad Tawhidi, an Australian Shiite cleric and Islamic reformist, pointed out that, in general, the Muslim world is doing rather well. The crisis is in the West.

While the extremists of the Muslim Brotherhood cannot operate in Muslim countries like Bahrain and Oman, said Tawhidi, they are operating in Britain, France, Canada, and Washington, DC.

The West imported the "garbage" promoted by jihadis whom Muslim countries were attempting to neutralize, he said. By allowing in this "filth" and even amplifying or glorifying it, the West had made its bed and must now lie in it.

This grim assessment was amply borne out by the riots in France. The violence broke out after a 17-year-old Muslim boy with a criminal background who was wanted by police was shot dead by a police officer during a traffic stop.

This triggered rioting on an unprecedented scale. For five days, Muslim youths torched large numbers of buildings and vehicles. Jewish businesses and institutions were targeted, including kosher restaurants and food shops. Terrified Jews barricaded themselves into their homes as rioters screamed: "Death to the police," "Death to France" and "Death to the Jews!"

Order was restored only when the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic drug barons called the youths off the streets.

People can see that the French president is no longer in control of his own country and that the scale of Muslim population increase means that France is losing the battle to remain recognizably France. Similar demographic trends are changing the face of other European countries such as Germany, Sweden, Belgium, Italy, Spain and the U.K.

With indigenous Europeans failing to have enough children to reach replacement rate, there are fears that within a few decades, European civilization will be lost.

Islamist extremists are banned from operating in Saudi Arabia and the UAE but they are legally registered and have bank accounts in Europe and the USA. pic.twitter.com/dSAJsX2K29
— Imam of Peace (@Imamofpeace) September 10, 2022