Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, August 16, 2023

08/16 Links Pt2: The West’s Long Demonization of Israel; Palestine and the Holocaust: What If?; More Unicorns Founded by TAU Graduates than Oxford

From Ian:

The West’s Long Demonization of Israel

The Western media’s reporting on Israel has been equally unfair, if not malevolent. For example, the corporate media regularly report casualty figures from Israeli defensive operations to stop terrorist violence against their civilians. The coverage always suggests that a “disproportionate” number of Palestinian Arabs have died compared to Israeli casualties––with the implication that the latter are needlessly callous and brutal with no regard for Arab lives, while ignoring the difficult conditions of fighting terrorists who willfully target civilians and sacrifice their own people as human shields

But as Alan Dershowitz explained in his 2003 The Case for Israel, the media rarely discriminate between combatant and non-combatant deaths. Reporting on the Second Intifada in September 2000, the media said that through the end of November, 2497 Palestinians had died compared to 874 Israelis. But according to a statistical analysis by the International Policy Institute for Counter Terrorism (www.ict.org.il), 911 Palestinian non-combatants had died compared to 679 Israeli: that is, 27% of Palestinian deaths were non-combatants, whereas 77% of Israeli dead were.

Equally preposterous is the specious excuse that Arab terrorist violence is an understandable reaction to the creation of Israel and its alleged subsequent “ethnic cleansing” of “Palestinians” from their “homeland.” Dershowitz surveys the history of Arab assaults and terrorism against Jews decades before Israel existed––including the massacre of 60 Jewish women, children, and other unarmed civilians in Hebron in 1929; and the chronic cross-border raids that murdered thousands of Jews before 1948, to name just a few. Such violence has continued down to the present, committed by terrorist armed not just with bombs, cars, knives, and guns, but with multiple thousands of missiles.

Dershowitz rightly concludes that even taking into account the rare Jewish terrorist attacks, the conflict is remarkable not for Israeli callous indifference to civilian casualties, but for its restraint in the face of a century of attacks on its people by those willing to hide in ambulances, use mosques for armories, sacrifice their own families, indoctrinate their children in Jew-hatred, and dress up as women in order to kill Jews. Indeed, the specious charge of “genocide” regularly made against Israel more accurately describes the incessant, publicly sanctioned, and celebrated attempts to destroy the Israelis.

A typical example of Israeli restraint is its incursion into Jenin in April 2002 after hundreds of suicide bombings. As Dershowitz points out, Israel did not bomb from the air, thereby killing civilians along with combatants. Rather, infantrymen entered the city on foot, searching house by house for terrorists and bomb-making factories. The cost? Fifty-two Palestinians, many of them combatants, were killed, while 23 Israeli soldiers died––a tally that could have been reduced to zero if Israel had simply bombed from the air, as the Allies did in World War II.

Yet the head of the United Nations Relief Agency at the time, Peter Hansen, a long-time shill for terrorists, characterized this restraint that led to those 23 dead as a “human rights catastrophe that has few parallels in recent history.” To this day, the “Jenin massacre” is a staple of Palestinian propaganda like the “documentary” Jenin, Jenin.

The fact is, as Dershowitz shows in his discussion of the remarkable restrictions Israeli forces operate under, no other nation in history before the post-9/11 wars against terrorism has fought against vicious murderers while operating under similar self-imposed restraints. Yet this willingness to risk its own people to reduce non-combatant deaths is ignored, or worse, in Orwellian Newspeak transformed into “massacres” and “genocide.”

For Biden, like his former boss Barack Obama, along with anti-Semitic members of Congress, to demonize with lies our critical ally is a stain on this country’s honor. It took the “racist” and “fascist” Donald Trump to push back against this sorry tradition of Israel-bashing. He cut off funding to the United Nations Relief Works Agency, a long-time apologist for terrorist violence, and a UN hotbed of anti-Americanism. He moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognized the strategically critical Golan Heights as sovereign Israeli territory, and brokered peace-deals between Israel and several Arab states. The Biden administration undid much of this progress, and the result has been the worst violence in decades.

Palestine and the Holocaust: What If?

In 1903 — 120 years ago, and well before the Nazis existed — a devastating pogrom took place in Kishenev (today Chişinău, Moldava) over two days, during Easter. The pogrom, sparked by the antisemitic libel accusing Jews of using the blood of Christian children for ritual purposes, resulted in 49 Jewish deaths, hundreds injured, and hundreds of women raped. This was not the first nor the last of the pogroms. But it was one of the first of the 20th century, it received worldwide publicity, and it led to the emigration of thousands of Russian Jews, including 40,000 that went to Palestine.

In 1936, as a result of violence between Palestinian Jews and Arabs, instigated by the Arab leadership to force the curtailment of Jewish immigration to Palestine, the British government created the Peel Commission. The Commission’s report, a 400 page document available online, is a remarkably detailed analysis of the situation in Palestine at that time.

In 1936, the population of Palestine consisted of 400,000 Jews and 900,000 Arabs. The Commission judged that the gulf between the two populations was too wide to bridge, and recommended that Palestine be partitioned into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jewish state, constituting only 17 percent of Palestine, would include a coastal strip from Rehovot and Tel Aviv northwards, as well as the Galilee. The Arab state would make up 75 percent of the total; the remaining 8 percent, mainly Jerusalem and surrounding areas, would continue to be governed by Britain.

Prior to World War I, the Near East was under the thumb of the Ottoman Turks and there were no independent Arab states. The Turkish defeat by the British liberated about one million square miles of Arab land. The Peel partition plan would have allocated about 0.2 % to the Jews.

But this was too much for the Arabs in Palestine. They rejected the proposed partition outright. The Arab leadership boycotted the Commission’s deliberations, although they did participate in the final sessions. The partition plan was discussed and debated at the 20th World Zionist Congress and reluctantly accepted. According to “A History of Zionism,” 1972, Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion argued in favor of accepting the plan, with reservations.

But the British were not willing force the Palestinian Arabs to acquiesce, and the Peel Commission Partition Plan was quietly shelved. Britain imposed a severe limit on Jewish immigration at a time of greatest Jewish desperation

How many Jewish lives might have been saved if a small Jewish state existed in 1937? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? Would such an influx have had a negative effect on the Arab demographic in Palestine as a whole?

This would have been the right thing to do. Instead, Palestinian opposition to a small Jewish state likely helped ensure that countless Jews could not escape the horrors of the Holocaust.

Is The Foreign Press Too Easy On Israel?

Bibi And The “Easy” Foreign Press
Since coming back to power on December 29, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has given 22 interviews to the foreign press and only four to Israeli media outlets, including the English language Jerusalem Post.

The explanation given by his media adviser Topaz Luk is “The American media lets you speak. You start a sentence and finish it.”

Netanyahu’s critics, on the other hand, accuse him of speaking to the foreign press to bypass the Israeli media.

“By giving interviews about domestic issues overseas, Netanyahu can often get away with inaccuracies, and sometimes even alternative facts, Haaretz diplomatic reporter Jonathan Lis wrote.

In a podcast last week, former Netanyahu spokesman Aviv Bushinsky said “It’s the easiest for Netanyahu in foreign media because they don’t ask tough questions.”

Veteran Yediot Aharonot diplomatic correspondent Itamar Eichner went further, writing that “[Netanyahu’s] interviews on international outlets allow him to avoid hard questions primarily because the interviewers often lack knowledge of Israeli law and familiarity with recent events, and they have little interest in questions about matters critical to Israelis such as the rising cost of living.”

HonestReporting stays out of politics. We don’t defend or justify policies or decisions of the current Israeli government – or any government. Not even its media strategy.

But our expertise with coverage of Israel by the foreign media enables us to analyze those claims with perspective.

So Is The Foreign Media Making It Easy On Bibi?
Most of the international journalists who’ve interviewed the prime minister are knowledgeable about Israel and cannot be manipulated. He gave interviews to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Jake Tapper, NBC’s Raf Sanchez and Bloomberg’s Francine Lacqua, none of whom made it easy on him.

Netanyahu was also interviewed by Fox’s Mark Levin, who praised him and Israel throughout the interview, mocked the prime minister’s critics and was not tough at all. Why Does It Matter?

Perception matters. Nowhere is that more true than for Israel and Israeli leaders. When the foreign press so often spins a narrative about Israel that is blatantly dishonest, its leaders should be allowed to respond by making Israel’s case.

The foreign press is far from easy on Israel, and that is why the media monitoring of HonestReporting is so critical for Israel’s future.

So long as events in Israel continue to have an outsized impact on international media, the world’s top journalists should be engaging with and holding those Israeli leaders accountable. And, HonestReporting will be there every step of the way to hold the international media accountable.

The world is in an uproar because Bradley Cooper wore a prosthetic nose to look more like Leonard Bernstein in “Maestro,” a film Cooper co-wrote and produced. They say he wore “Jewface” and that doing so mirrors classic antisemitic stereotypes. Also, they say, his own nose was sufficiently large that it was unnecessary to make it bigger—that the prosthesis is exaggeratedly large—larger than Bernstein’s. There’s more—and we’ll get to that—but to summarize: the general consensus is that the wearing of the wannabe-Jewish shnoz by Bradley Cooper is antisemitic, if not by intention, then by effect. Are they right, or was he just doing what actors have always done, and using prosthetics to “dress the part?”

Perhaps we should begin with prosthetics. Is it common for actors to wear prosthetics to play a part? And is it sometimes inappropriate for them to do so?

Ask google and you will be shown the photos of several contemporary actors, right off the bat, and not wearing the prosthetics in question.

You might also find the article with the blaring clickbait title, 40 Actors Made Unrecognizable in Prosthetic Makeup: From Emma Thompson to Jessica Chastain (Photos). (One can almost hear the exclamation points.)

In the above photo dump piece, it’s easy to understand why the actors needed prosthetics for their film work. Mostly they were playing fantastical or mythical creatures, or even monsters, going all the way back to Boris Karloff in Frankenstein.

But then there was Tilda Swinton in Suspira (2018) as the 82-year-old male psychoanalyst Dr. Josef Klemperer.

Why? Why did they need a woman to play a man. Couldn't they find a man to play the part? Was she wearing "manface?" I am, of course, making fun of anyone who would say this. The transformation of Swinton into the male Klemperer is astonishing, stunning. You would never know this is a woman playing a man. It's nothing like the outmoded practice of blackface.

You need prosthetics to play monsters, mythical creatures, or the opposite sex. But did Cooper really need to put on a nose to play Lenny Bernstein? Bernstein didn’t have THAT big a nose. And Cooper’s nose isn’t really that goyish.

Contrast and compare.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by ❣️BRADLEY COOPER❣️ (@misterblueeyes12)

In a side by side comparison, it's hard to see the difference.

This isn't about making a non-Jewish actor look more like Leonard Bernstein; it's about making a non-Jewish actor look more like a Jewish stereotype. https://t.co/WrYWuweosW pic.twitter.com/WxspPtHktj
— Joel S. (@jh_swanson) August 15, 2023

So, on the one hand, there’s not that much difference between the nose of the goy Bradley Cooper, and the nose of the Jew Lenny Bernstein.

On the other hand, Cooper perhaps does a disservice to the Jewish people. The wearing of the nose to some seems like a caricature of the Jewish people. Some seem to think that the nose, in fact, is right out of the pages of Der Stürmer with its depictions of Jews as ugly creatures with hooked noses. Those who protest against Cooper’s prosthesis don’t think this is an image we should be reinforcing in viewers’ minds. Especially in a time of rising antisemitism. Especially since Cooper’s own nose probably sufficed.

That is likely the reason Jewish socialite Lizzy Savetsky, who is active on Instagram on behalf of her people and the one Jewish State, said she felt triggered by the prosthesis and unpacked her feelings for us.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Elizabeth Savetsky (@lizzysavetsky)

Some say Bradley Cooper didn't need the nose, he needed to do the work. He lacked talent, so he used a prop. For those in this camp, it’s not good enough to say that the prosthesis is a professional tool of the trade. Because from this point of view, Cooper isn't acting like a professional.

Actor, writer, and producer Tracy-Ann Oberman, suggested as much when she wrote on Instagram:

If Bradley Cooper green lights your film to play the Jewish composer Bernstein and you want him over a Jewish A-Lister who can equally play that role - then let Bradley Cooper’s acting be so magnificent and truthful that the character of Bernstein shines through what he already looks like.

If he needs to wear a prosthetic nose then that is, to me and many others, the equivalent of Black-Face or Yellow-Face.

For “Golda,” on the other hand, a prosthesis was definitely indicated, no matter who played her on the big screen, Jewish or not. Golda Meir, whatever you thought of her politics, had a prominent and hawkish nose, for her a mark of distinction. So when Helen Mirren put on a prosthetic nose for the role, there was not too much hubbub over that, only that she was a goy playing a Yid. They accused the actress of “Jewface,” a play on the “blackface” of once upon a time in which white actors wore exaggerated stage makeup to portray and parody black people.

I was sad to read about this when the murmurs began. I was flattered to have Helen Mirren play such an important and historic Jewish figure, because I admire Mirren’s work. Should I now be expected to protest her performance because of her faith?

(no dogs and Jews allowed)

Then again, isn’t acting all about playing someone else? Jonathan Tobin thinks so (emphasis added):

The idea that only members of a minority group can portray the Jewish people has in recent years taken on the aspect of an unwritten law of the entertainment industry.

The whole point of acting is people pretending to be someone other than themselves.

Tobin takes us through the history, how once white actors played Indians and Asians, and how ridiculous they seemed. Today that just doesn’t happen. And that is all to the good. As Tobin says, “That has saved us from some embarrassing examples of whites engaging in ethnic stereotypes to overcompensate for the difference between their own backgrounds and those of their characters.”

Here is where things get tricky, because Jews are not all one color and many do not have features stereotypically associated with Jews, such as the unusual proboscis of Golda. So why is it that only a Jew can play a Jew? Smells a LOT like bigotry. Tobin blames it on identity politics [emphasis added]:

[Those] reasonable complaints have now brought us to a situation where identity politics has run amuck. While we are spared the spectacle of a white person using makeup to appear brown or black, the unwritten rules of Hollywood now tell us that no one but a transgender actor can play someone, regardless of race, who claims that identity. That’s something actor Scarlett Johansson, who has pretended to be all sorts of types of persons, including superheroes and ethnicities far removed from her own Jewish background, learned when she had to give up a transgender role after a storm on Twitter.

Tobin hints at the way Netflix insistently pushes anachronistic fare on its paying audience, training us to think it is okay to have a “black Anne Boleyn or the ahistorical foolishness in which, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, British King George III’s wife Charlotte is portrayed as a person of color in Netflix fare like ‘Bridgerton’ is treated as not merely reasonable but necessary.”

It’s all a game, asserts Tobin:

That Jews should be playing this game is both appalling and slightly ridiculous. Indeed, the Jew who screamed the loudest about a previous “Jew face” controversy—comedian Sarah Silverman, who complained about the casting of the non-Jewish Kathryn Hahn to play Jewish comedian Joan Rivers—is a member of the cast of Cooper’s maestro film in which she plays Bernstein’s sister.

Going back to Tobin's point about the olden days of whites playing ethnic minorities, now we have non-Jews playing Jews. According to some, that's not the real problem, the problem is the ratio. From 'Oppenheimer,' 'Golda,' 'Maestro': Will the Real Jewish Actors Please Stand Up?:

A flurry of mainstream films released this year pivot on Jewish historical figures who impacted the world in ways impossible to ignore: Robert Oppenheimer, the subject of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster Oppenheimer, is known to history as the “father of the atomic bomb.” Leonard Bernstein, played by Bradley Cooper in Netflix’s Maestro, which Cooper will also direct, is considered one of the 20th century’s most influential composers. And Golda Meir, played by Helen Mirren in Guy Nattiv’s Golda, served as Israel’s first — and, to date, only — female prime minister, shepherding the fledgling nation through the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
All of these individuals were Jewish. In their cinematic counterparts, none of them are played by Jews.
“The problem right now is the ratio,” says Jewish actor-writer Jonah Platt, who starred in Wicked on Broadway as well as Showtime’s Uncoupled, and will appear in upcoming Universal film The List.

“If we found ourselves in a place, eventually, of more balance, it would be a lot more palatable,” says Platt of the dearth of Jewish actors cast in Jewish roles. “But right now, we're at, like, zero. All of the major giant Jewish parts are played by non-Jews. We have this inherited fear that people are going to say all these nasty things about us if they think we're too powerful or think we're controlling things. We’re so afraid of these very old, ubiquitous and harmful tropes that we abandon our own identity, we don’t take up the space we have earned, we hide from our successes. Instead, we continue to totally hold back, to pull back and give ourselves less representation than we give to everybody else, out of fear.”

Perhaps the most ironic twist to this story is the fact that member of the tribe, Brokeback Mountain actor Jake Gyllenhaal lost the bid for the film to Cooper:

Actor and producer Jake Gyllenhaal, who has Jewish heritage, previously spoke of his disappointment upon losing a bid for the rights to a Bernstein film to Cooper, admitting he had been yearning to play “one of the most preeminent Jewish artists in America” for almost two decades..

“No one likes to admit this, but, we got beat at our own game,” he told Deadline in 2021.

“That’s basically what happened. There’s really nothing more to say about it than that. There’s always another project. Sticking your neck out, hoping to get to tell the stories you love and that have been in your heart for a very long time is something to be proud of.”

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!

Very good news from the US Department of the Treasury:

Today, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated Lebanon-based Green Without Borders and its leader. Green Without Borders is a Lebanon-based organization that has provided support to and cover for Hizballah’s operations in southern Lebanon along the “Blue Line” between Lebanon and Israel over the last decade while publicly operating under the guise of environmental activism.

“The United States rejects Hizballah’s cynical efforts to cloak its destabilizing terrorist activities with false environmentalism,” said Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Brian E. Nelson. “We will continue to support the many Lebanese civil society groups protecting Lebanon’s unique and sensitive natural environment while also relentlessly pursuing Hizballah and their support networks.”

OFAC is designating Green Without Borders and its leader, Zuhair Subhi Nahla, pursuant to Executive Order (E.O.) 13224, as amended, which targets terrorists, terrorist organizations, leaders and officials of terrorist groups, and those providing support to terrorists or acts of terrorism.

Israel and others have been complaining about Green Without Borders for years. The Washington Institute issued a paper on the group, where they noted that GWB has bragged about being part of the "resistance:"

Green Without Borders registered as a Lebanese environmental nonprofit on June 30, 2013. According to its blog, the group’s mission includes planting trees, cleaning forested areas, establishing public parks, running nurseries, and locating and fighting forest fires, especially in Shia-dominated areas in southern Lebanon and the Beqa Valley. However, through cooperation with the Lebanese Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of the Environment, municipal organizations, and other Hezbollah entities— especially Jihad al-Binaa—the organization also seeks to aid the “southern Green resistance.” In 2017, Hajj Zuhair Nahle, president of GWB, told Lebanon’s Daily Star that “we do not hide this [affiliation with Hezbollah]. All our brochures include this and in all our media campaigns...we write, ‘The trees are the shade of the resistance.’” Nahle emphasized that despite the group’s environmental intentions, tree planting also has a strategic national security dimension, serving as “a veil on the eyes of the enemy in addition to a wall behind which the resistance fighters protect themselves.” The article described Nahle as gleeful that the organization is a “thorn in Israel’s side.”

In addition, GWB has built lookout stations on the border - 27 in the past year alone - and has interfered with UNIFIL forces in Lebanon.

Yet even though GWB brags to Arab media that it is part of the "resistance," it tells Western media the opposite. My favorite comes from this AP article earlier this year:

“We are not an arm for anyone,” the head of Green Without Borders, Zouher Nahli, told The Associated Press. “We as an environmental association work for all the people and we are not politicized.” He spoke at the Bassam Tabaja Nature Reserve, named for a Hezbollah fighter killed in Syria in 2014, where the NGO has planted hundreds of trees.

The US got this one right, if a bit belatedly.

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!

08/16 Links Pt1: Biden Admin Knew Palestinian Aid Would Boost Hamas. Did It Anyway; Biden's bad Iran deal and dire Israeli concerns; Rob Malley teaching at Princeton

From Ian:

Australia's government has taken an anti-Israel stance

THIS IS THE first Australian government in nearly 50 years that has been dominated by the left wing of the Australian Labor party. While it has generally striven, with overall success, to present itself as centrist and responsible, the party’s Left does expect some wins from its new control over the party.

Two of the main causes of the left-wing, judging by motions that have come up at the party’s various state conferences, have been questioning Australia’s AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine deal with the US and UK, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, also a preoccupation for some on the Right, particularly in Australia’s largest state New South Wales.

The government continues to support the AUKUS deal negotiated by the previous Liberal government. Labor’s National Conference, which occurs every three years, will be held from August 17 to 19. The government seems determined to avoid any controversies at the conference, especially regarding AUKUS. For several months, there had been speculation that it might do a trade-off with the Left’s power brokers to give further ground on Israel in exchange for consensus on AUKUS, or even just for quiet on the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

Now it appears the government has preempted the conference with this latest decision. Of course, it remains to be seen whether this will hold off the Left and their allies from further hostile moves regarding Israel. Many are likely to now argue that, given the government has – in their view correctly – identified the proper legal status of the land and settlements, recognizing “Palestine” as a state would be the obvious moral next step.

When the Jerusalem decision was announced last year, the Israeli government’s reaction was appropriately strong. This time, however, while the Australian Jewish community has been overwhelmingly vocal in its disapproval, little has been reported from official Israeli sources.

The Palestinian Authority, on the other hand, reacted quickly, with Australian newspapers reporting on August 10 that the Palestinian Authority’s Foreign Ministry had released a statement welcoming this “significant and important development” and calling on the Australian government to now “recognize the State of Palestine without delay or hesitation” thus reflecting “the position of the Labor party and its members.”

Accordingly, we sincerely hope Israel’s government is seriously considering making public its undoubted reservations regarding Australia’s actions, aiming to discourage the Australian government from taking further counter-productive steps, such as recognizing “Palestine.”

Biden Admin Raised Concerns Palestinian Aid Would Boost Hamas. It Went Ahead With Aid Anyway.

The Biden administration pushed through plans to distribute hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer aid to the Palestinians despite internal assessments that those plans could boost the Iran-backed terrorist group Hamas, according to internal documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

State Department officials in 2021 outlined the concerns in private communications, asking the Treasury Department to exempt them from laws that bar the U.S. government from injecting taxpayer aid into territories controlled by Palestinian terror groups. The Biden administration needed this authorization in order to move forward with its plans to unfreeze more than $360 million in U.S. funds for the Palestinian Authority that were cut off during the Trump administration due to the authority's support for terrorists.

"We assess there is a high risk Hamas could potentially derive indirect, unintentional benefit from U.S. assistance to Gaza. There is less but still some risk U.S. assistance would benefit other designated groups," the State Department wrote in a draft sanctions exemption request circulated internally in March 2021, shortly after Biden took office. "Notwithstanding this risk, State believes it is in our national security interest to provide assistance in the West Bank and Gaza to support the foreign policy objectives."

The documents—obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the watchdog group Protect the Public’s Trust—show the Biden administration was privately worried its efforts to restart Palestinian aid could benefit Hamas and other terror factions operating in the Gaza Strip. As officials publicly provided assurances to Congress and the press that this aid would be doled out "consistent with U.S. law," the State Department was scrambling to secure a sanctions exemption that would let it skirt anti-terrorism laws.

The State Department claimed it needed broad authorities to conduct work in the West Bank and Gaza Strip "that would otherwise be prohibited by the Global Terrorist Sanctions Regulations and the Foreign Terrorist Organization Sanctions Regulations," according to a draft version of the request.

"Such authorization would enable activities, including assistance activities, that are critical to support the administration's efforts to advance prosperity, security, and freedom for both Israelis and Palestinians and to advance and preserve the prospects of a negotiated solution in which Israel lives in peace and security alongside a viable Palestinian state," according to the draft request.

The previously unknown draft request adds credibility to warnings from Republicans at the time that aid would bolster terror groups. In April 2021, 18 Republicans led by Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) sent a letter to the administration calling for Palestinian aid to be halted until measures could be put in place to prevent it from benefiting terrorists.

Barry Shaw: Biden's bad Iran deal and dire Israeli concerns

The Biden Administration must be told clearly that, for Israel, the Iran problem is not a can to be kicked down the road until 2025.

By the end of 2024, and certainly by the Spring of 2025 when a new President will be in the White House, Iran will be a nuclear threshold state and the money gifted to them by the Biden Administration, would have made this possible.

It would also have strengthened its regional military grip by funding and arming its Islamic proxies, including Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who are armed to the teeth with ever more sophisticated Iranian weaponry across the northern, southern, and eastern borders of Israel, as well as among the Palestinian population in towns and villages occupied by the Palestinian Authority.

The fact that this deal was a sidebar deal and has zero relevance to Tehran’s advance to a nuclear weapon was confirmed by Ali Vaez, the Iran Director to the International Crisis Group who said, “Nothing of this deal is aimed at reaching a groundbreaking agreement.”

It could, however, result in it being a “groundbreaking” agreement for Israel in the most catastrophic meaning of the word groundbreaking.

Israel has nothing against innocent hostages being released from Tehran prisons, but not if the price of this blackmail deal risks a regional war that would be more devastating than that between Putin and Zelensky.

The way to confront hostage taking is by confronting and sanctioning Iran at the United National Security Council and by instigating a prosecution at the international Criminal Court against Iran’s President Raisi who should have been brought there years ago for his role as the head of the 1988 Death Commission in which he executed tens of thousands of his own people. The world, certainly the region, is paying for this lapse of judgment.

Now we have the new bad unofficial Biden deal.

Israel cannot be seen as a tacit participant of this terrible deal by maintaining a diplomatic or public silence. It must speak out against the very real dangers this insidious side deal imposes on Israel.

The region expects to see more decisive measures taken by the US Administration against Iran. Anything else looks like yet another Iranian victory, a weakening of America, and a growing existential threat to Israel and the region.

The Caroline Glick Show: How the US 6 billion dollar ransom is green-lighting the next Iran Deal

Is the Biden administration secretly taking steps to solidify the next deal with Iran?

To talk about the latest developments in Iran, Caroline’s guest on the Caroline Glick Show this week is Richard Goldberg, a senior fellow at the Washington, DC-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Goldberg was the point person in the National Security Council on Iran’s nuclear program during the Trump administration.

They discuss
- several steps such as easing of sanctions that have been taken by the Biden administration to move an agreement forward
- The subterfuge at the heart of the administration’s efforts to shield its nuclear appeasement from Congress
- What Congress can do to fight back

Every year, the Tomb of the Patriarchs is open exclusively to Jews for ten days and open exclusively to Muslims for ten days. The shrine is split between the two groups all the other days of the year.

The schedule is publicized well ahead of time (although the Muslim days may move by a day depending on when the new month is declared.) There are no surprises. The Waqf and Israeli side cooperate with each other; when one of the exclusive days comes up the other side puts away their prayer objects.

But in the Palestinian media, every time a Jewish day comes along, they try to incite violence and hatred.

The Palestine Information Center published this morning:

The Zionist occupation authorities closed, this morning, Wednesday, the Ibrahimi Mosque in the city of Hebron, in the southern occupied West Bank, until ten o'clock in the evening today; under the pretext of Jewish holidays.

The director of the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, Ghassan Al-Rajabi, said in press statements that the occupation authorities closed the mosque from ten o’clock yesterday, Tuesday, until ten o’clock today, and prevented the call to prayer and worshipers from entering the mosque.

He believes that this closure is a crime against the Ibrahimi Mosque and a flagrant violation of it, stressing: “The mosque is a purely Islamic endowment, and the Jews have no right to it.”

Let's look at that last sentence.

When the Palestinian Muslims deny that the Temple Mount was ever the site of the Temples, they are obviously lying, but that lie is the justification for their insistence that Jews have no right to visit the holiest Jewish site.

But they cannot deny that the "Ibrahimi Mosque" is the burial place of the Biblical patriarchs and matriarchs - because they believe it too. They cannot deny that the three (or four) couples buried there are the ancestors of the Jewish people, while only one of them is an ancestor to the Arab people.

So when the director of the mosque at the site says "The mosque is a purely Islamic endowment, and the Jews have no right to it," he is denying that Jews have even a historical or emotional right to visit the burial place of their own ancestors. Somehow the Muslim claim to the burial place of Jacob, who at best is just a prophet to them, is exclusive, while the Jewish claim to their own ancestors' burial place is meaningless.

It is impossible to interpret that statement as anything other than official antisemitism.

The Israeli side always tries to respect the rights of all religions. The Palestinian side expresses nothing but contempt for Jewish rights. And the world is more sympathetic towards the side that is institutionally antisemitic.

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!

For at least 13 years, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights issues a monthly report called "State of the Gaza Strip Border Crossings."

For the past few years, the report has been between five and ten pages long. The report goes into detail of Israeli restrictions on travel and trade to and from Gaza. It describes how many medical cases are approved and denied, how many truckloads of goods are imported, and how Israel continues to restrict certain dual use items.

It is filled with invective. The latest report for June 2023, begins like most of them have:

The Israeli occupation authorities continue to impose an illegal and inhuman closure on the Gaza Strip for 16 consecutive years, inflecting negative repercussions on the humanitarian conditions of the Gaza Strip population. The Israeli occupation authorities also isolate more than 2.3 million Palestinians from the outside world through its control over the Gaza Strip’s crossing, by restricting the movement of goods and individuals from and into the Gaza Strip.

We are told that Israel only allowed 42,006 Palestinians to exit the Gaza Strip and 55,689 entered via the Erez Crossing, many of them day laborers.

There are pages of these statistics leavened with how the Israelis are making Gazan lives awful with these restrictions.

But what about Egypt's crossing with Gaza at Rafah?

At the very end of the six page report is a single paragraph:

Movement at Rafah Border Crossing

According to the Crossing and Borders Authority in Gaza, in June, 12,995 persons traveled from the Gaza Strip via Rafah Crossing while 17,405 persons returned to the Strip. Moreover, the Egyptian authorities denied travel of 214 persons. Travelers returning to the Gaza Strip via Rafah Crossing suffer from prolonged, recurrent, and unjustified searches.

How many of them were medical? What were the reasons given for the denials? Why are the numbers of Gazans allowed to go to Egypt so much fewer than those allowed to go to Israel? What are the restrictions on Gazans once they enter Egypt? Are Egypt's more draconian restrictions of travel "illegal and inhuman?"

Clearly, PCHR knows more about what goes on at Rafah than they are publishing, because they know that Egypt is treating Gazans with little respect. They know about Egypt's permit system and how Hamas prioritizes its own members to be able to travel while ordinary Gazans who try to travel to Egypt and beyond cannot plan their trips because of the arbitrary nature and last minute changes of these permits.

PCHR knows all this - but it doesn't report these facts in its monthly reports that are supposedly about all the border crossings with Gaza. It barely mentions anything negative about Egypt, instead concentrating on Israel, which allows three times the number of travelers that Egypt does.

If PCHR is a human rights group, then it shouldn't matter whether it is Israel or Egypt restricting travel. The report should be equally critical and expansive describing both of them. Israel has no control over the Raha crossing, only Egypt and Hamas. But if PCHR is really a PFLP-dominated anti-Israel propaganda organization that pretends to care about human rights, then it would act exactly as it does - only emphasizing what Israel does and virtually ignoring what Egypt does.

This is a microcosm of how little "human rights" groups care about Palestinians. When they are oppressed by their fellow Arabs, these organizations will only report the minimum they can get away with. after all, their funding is directly proportional with the amount of anti-Israel reporting they do.

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!

On Sunday, an attack at a Shia Muslim shrine in the Iranian city of Shiraz left one dead.

The official IRNA news agency said a gunman attempted to enter the Shah Cheragh mausoleum and then started shooting visitors.

So who is to blame? The same people who have been scapegoated for others' crimes for millenia!

Tuesday, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards revealed new details about the terrorist attack on the shrine of Shah Cheragh in the city of Shiraz, southern Iran, accusing Israel of being linked to the perpetrator of the attack .

Yadullah Bu Ali, commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ Fajr Fares Corps, said in a statement, “The attacker was operating within the framework of a network operating in several countries,” adding that “this network is undoubtedly linked to the Zionist entity and was stationed in Shiraz a month ago to make the necessary arrangements.”

What do you call it when people automatically blame Jews for everything bad that happens? There must be a word for it....

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

08/15 Links Pt2: The Sbarro bombing mastermind is still free. Put her back in jail; New York’s New Untouchables; There is no such thing as an Israeli ‘settler’ in the West Bank

From Ian:

The Sbarro bombing mastermind is still free. Put her back in jail

Whenever Tamimi’s name was mentioned in the media in reference to prisoner swaps, the Justice Ministry assured the Roth family that there were no plans to release her. Over the years, however, it became clear to the Roth family that the woman who orchestrated their daughter’s murder would not stay in prison for long.

In October 2011, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced his plan to release 1,027 terrorists in a prisoner exchange for Gilad Schalit, an Israeli soldier held captive by Hamas for about five years. Despite the years of reassurance, the worst had come true for the Roth family: Ahlam Tamimi was one of the terrorists to be released.

The nature of Tamimi’s discharge was akin to twisting the knife and reopening wounds to the families of the Sbarro victims. Tamimi was taken to a private meeting with Khaled Mashaal, former leader of the Hamas terror organization. She was then put on a VIP flight to Jordan and was received as a hero and a model of Palestinian resistance. Today, Tamimi lives in a middle-class neighborhood and is a television presenter on a Hamas-affiliated Jordanian TV channel.

Several weeks following Tamimi’s return to Jordan, the US Department of Justice intervened, since a federal statute mandates that the United States pursue any terrorist accountable for the murder of an American citizen on foreign soil. Today, Tamimi is one of 24 terrorists on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. Jordan has refused to comply with its 1995 Extradition Treaty with the US.

Although the US had charged Tamimi under the law in 2013 (and sealed those charges for four years), the Jordanian courts ruled that Tamimi would not be handed over to the FBI because “the treaty was invalid.” Arnold Roth responds, “This is a fabrication: the treaty is invalid because Jordan made it invalid.”

The Roth family has been campaigning and lobbying US officials since 2017, demanding justice for their daughter. Yet, according to Arnold, the US is making no attempts at making this happen while “Israel is playing a quiet role in encouraging the Americans not to press Jordan or put them in a position where they are pressured to hand over Tamimi.”

Time and again, the Roth family has been told that this case is a “priority” for the American government, yet “officials” also claim that handing over Tamimi would destabilize Jordan and the entire Middle East. Arnold points out that in the past, Jordan has extradited terrorists charged by the United States.

It has been 10 years since the charges against Tamimi were filed, and Jordan is no closer to handing her over than it was from day one. Tamimi is roaming as a free woman, without needing to hide or live in secret. As Israelis, we accept that terrorism is a reality, but we cannot accept when politicians, judges and other leaders let a terrorist walk away without paying for her crimes.

Israel has already failed the Roth family; we cannot allow the US to do so as well. We, especially Israeli Americans, are morally obligated to use our voices and demand that Ahlam Tamimi is back where she belongs: behind bars.

New York’s New Untouchables

More then ten years ago, then-New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg boasted of his unique courage in confronting his city’s Ḥaredim in a regulatory fight over circumcision, asking rhetorically, “Who wants to have 10,000 guys in black hats outside your office, screaming?” Avi Schick sees this as the beginning of a trend whereby state and local politicians don’t simply endorse policies to which Orthodox Jews object, but deliberately choose policies aimed at interfering with their religious practices:

In October 2020, just as the harshest pandemic restrictions were being eased, Governor Cuomo created gerrymandered districts covering Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods where houses of worship were subject to severe limitations on attendance. Churches in those zones were also affected, but the governor openly declared that his target was “these ultra-Orthodox communities, who are also very politically powerful.”

Only Orthodox Jews are targeted for harsh treatment and simultaneously described as (too) politically powerful. The message is that they deserve what they get.

Most recently, New York and its most powerful media institution have unleashed dangerous rules and rhetoric aimed at religious schooling. Yeshivas have been educating students in New York for more than 120 years, and the laws governing private schools have been on the books even longer. That history signifies deep satisfaction with the yeshiva system, but it is dismissed because, as the New York Times wrote, those “who might have taken action have instead accommodated a ḥasidic voting bloc.”

I don’t believe that New York’s mayors and governors are anti-Semites. But the New York we inhabit at the moment reflects the convergence of the nanny state and the secular state. There is little deference to individual or parental autonomy, and even less respect for religious activity. The result is government limitations on circumcision, prayer, and religious education.

There is no such thing as an Israeli ‘settler’ in the West Bank

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a settler is, “a person who arrives, especially from another country, to a new place in order to live there and use the land.” A settlement, according to vocabulary.com, is, “a colony or any small community of people.”

However, these definitions take on negative connotations when it pertains to Israel and Israelis. Even Israeli media have headlines such as, “Settlers arrested after deadly clash in Palestinian village.”

Various biblical texts refer to Israel as a “land flowing with milk and honey.” This description is in stark contrast to Mark Twain’s observations in 1867 that Israel (then called Palestine) was a desolate and barren country in both people and vegetation.

It was only after the start of the aliyah movement in the late 1800s, when many Jews joined their fellow Jews who had maintained a continuous presence in the Jewish homeland, did the land begin to bloom again with people and agriculture. The phrase “a land flowing with milk and honey” can be applied both in reality and metaphorically.

Jews meet the UN definition of indigenous people. Therefore, they are not “settlers,” and the places they live are not “settlements.” Which raises the rhetorical question: Why are there “Arab villages” but “Jewish settlements?”

Why are Jews settlers if they are indigenous people?
One unfortunate reason is a mistranslation of the Hebrew word Yishuv. The root of this word is shuv, to return. According to Wikipedia, the term Yishuv came into use in the 1880s to denote the body of Jewish residents in the Land of Israel, and became the word to describe the Jewish population of Israel prior to the establishment of the modern State in 1948.

The Hebrew word Yishuv translates to “community” in the form of towns, population, inhabitants, neighborhoods, villages, etc.