Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, September 05, 2023

09/05 Links Pt2: For the OIC, “Human Rights” Is a Tool to Manipulate the West; Musk Fuels White Supremacist ‘Ban the ADL’ Campaign on Social Media

From Ian:

For the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, “Human Rights” Is a Tool to Manipulate the West

Currently consisting of 56 states in addition to the Palestinian Authority, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) began with an effort in 1969 to blame Israel and “Zionists”—falsely—for setting fire to al-Aqsa Mosque. The group, which touts itself as “the collective voice of the Muslim world,” has made a consistent habit of condemning the Jewish state, and to a lesser extent India, for supposed abuses. It also supports boycotts of Israel and sharply condemned Danish caricatures in 2005. One country it has not condemned is China, which is currently seeking to extirpate Islam from its northwestern territory by the most brutal of means. Georgia Gilholy writes:

This week an Organization of Islamic Cooperation delegation visited China. It offered slavish praise and deference to the state responsible for atrocities against millions of mostly Muslim Uighurs, which a British tribunal designated as genocide. . . . In a July 2019 statement, over a dozen OIC member states went so far as to cosign a letter that “commended China’s achievements in the field of human rights.”

The key factor behind the OIC’s double standards is obvious: money. The attempt to decimate and subjugate the Uighurs is an informal component of the “Belt and Road” Initiative. This program is scheduled to pour over $8 billion into a transcontinental “belt” of overland economic corridors. This “belt” and its corresponding maritime “road” will encompass a major chunk of the world’s Muslim-majority nations from Sudan to Indonesia.

Easy cash, however, is just one part of the story. Just as the dictators of Russia, Cuba, and North Korea collaborate with China on the international stage in a bid to normalize authoritarianism at large, administrations across the Muslim world likewise seek to reap the same nefarious rewards.

Cunning employment of moral relativism is at the heart of this arrangement. When engaging with democracies, OIC representatives gleefully employ the language of liberal human rights. When brown-nosing other autocracies and dispensing domestic law, however, these principles are mysteriously absent.

Did the Mufti-Hitler photo row influence Netanyahu’s plan to fire Yad Vashem head?

It is now believed that the Netanyahu government has backed down from its plan to fire Dani Dayan, a political appointee head of Israel’s flagship Holocaust memorial museum at Yad Vashem, after an international outcry. Dani Dayan was the target of criticism from veteran guides when he refused to re-instate a floor-to-ceiling photo of the famous meeting between the Palestinian wartime Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, and Adolph Hitler in 1941, because’ it seeks to harm the Palestinians’ image today’. We do not know if the Mufti-Hitler photo affair was a factor in the government’s intention to dismiss Dayan, but we reproduce a JNS News article by Lyn Julius explaining why the Yad Vashem head’s views on this matter are wrongheaded:

What impact did the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, have on the Nazi enterprise? According to Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem, the Mufti’s role was limited – so marginal in fact that Dayan refused to re-instate a large photo of the Mufti meeting Hitler in November 1941. The floor-to-ceiling photo used to feature at the Museum before it was re-designed in the 1990s. Denying at first that the photo was ever at Yad Vashem, Dayan even told Haaretz: Those who want me to put it up aren’t really interested in the Mufti’s part in the Holocaust, which was limited anyway, but seek to harm the image of the Palestinians today,” he says. “The Mufti was an antisemite. But even if I abhor him, I won’t turn Yad Vashem into a tool serving ends not directly related to the study and memorialization of the Holocaust. Hasbara, to use a term, is an utterly irrelevant consideration that shall not enter our gates.”

It is certainly true that the Mufti was marginal to the ‘final solution’: Benjamin Netanyahu was wrong to remark in 2018 that the Mufti ‘convinced’ Hitler to annihilate the Jews. However, there were instances when the Mufti, who was known to have visited Nazi camps and hobnobbed with Himmler and von Ribbentrop, proved even more extreme than the Nazis. In 1942, a plan to bring ten thousand Jewish children from Poland to Theresienstadt and exchange them for German civilian prisoners was dropped after fierce protests by the Mufti. The children were sent to their deaths. The Mufti’s Muslim SS units in the former Yugoslavia murdered tens of thousands. According to his memoirs, Hitler had given an explicit undertaking to the Mufti at their famous meeting in November 1941 that he would be allowed to solve the Jewish problem. ‘ The Jews are yours,’ Hitler said. The Mufti did had the satisfaction of exterminating the Jews in his sphere of influence – but his alliance with the Nazis was far more ideological than pragmatic.

But it is not the Mufti’s effect on the Nazis which Dayan ignores, but his impact on the Arabs. And here he had a massive effect – and many would argue, still has. Wherever he went in the Arab world, he stirred up trouble against the local Jews. He was a driving force behind the pro-Nazi coup in Iraq leading to the Farhud massacre of hundreds of Jews in Iraq in June 1941 – proof positive that anti-Zionism had spilled over into outright antisemitism. Escaping to Berlin when he was Hitler’s lavishly-funded wartime guest the Mufti and a group of Arab exiles pumped out poisonous propaganda from the short-wave transmitter at Zeesen, fusing anti-Jewish verses from the Qu’ran with modern anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.

Putin: West put ethnic Jew to rule in Ukraine to 'cover glorification of Nazism'

Russian President Vladimir Putin alleged in a television interview on Tuesday, without citing evidence, that Western powers had installed Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish, as president of Ukraine to cover up the glorification of Nazism.

In seeking to justify its invasion of Ukraine, which it calls a "special military operation," Moscow accuses Kyiv's leaders of pursuing a neo-Nazi "genocide" of Ukraine's millions of native Russian-speakers - something Kyiv and its Western allies call a baseless pretext for a war of acquisition.

It was not the first time Putin had tried to associate modern Ukraine's democratically elected government with the mass murder of Ukrainian Jews in World War Two by Nazi German occupiers of Soviet Ukraine and their local collaborators.

Zelensky's Jewish identity
Zelensky, himself a native Russian-speaker who was democratically elected in 2019, has said some of his grandfather’s brothers were killed in the Nazi Holocaust, and has repeatedly rejected Russian accusations that he has supported neo-Nazis in Ukraine.

Putin told Russian television reporter Pavel Zarubin:
“Western curators have put a person at the head of modern Ukraine - an ethnic Jew, with Jewish roots, with Jewish origins. And thus, in my opinion, they seem to be covering up an anti-human essence that is the foundation ... of the modern Ukrainian state," Putin said.

"And this makes the whole situation extremely disgusting, in that an ethnic Jew is covering up the glorification of Nazism and covering up those who led the Holocaust in Ukraine at one time - and this is the extermination of one and a half million people."

In answer to a request for comment, Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said Putin himself was disgusting "when he tries to justify mass crimes against citizens of another country with a monstrous lie."

Egypt now has more restored synagogues than it has Jews.

There are only three Jewish women left in Egypt, the youngest of whom is 70. But Egypt has, in recent years, restored five synagogues to their former glory, with seven or eight more still in disrepair.

The most recent restoration was the Ibn Ezra Synagogue which re-opened last week. To tourists only, of course.

While Egypt is presiding over these multi-million dollar restorations, Egypt's Muslims are complaining that the government is destroying Islamic historic sites to make way for development projects.

Muslims are seeing not only Jewish but Christian, Roman, Greek, and Pharaonic antiquities being preserved, while laws to preserve Islamic sites are apparently much more onerous. Resentment is being expressed in Arabic news media.

Egyptian media lists three reasons why Egypt's government is spending so much money and time restoring Jewish synagogues and preserving the Jewish cemetery even as a Muslim cemetery is being relocated for development work.

One reason is that the Egyptians want to stay on the good side of the US, and they think (probably because Jews run the world) that restoring synagogue will pay political dividends.

The second is that it is simply to promote tourism. Tourism went down after the last coup, and they want to attract Jews to Cairo..

The third reason is to make President Sisi look moderate to the world and to his own people. This is the sort of no-risk move that makes him look tolerant of a virtually nonexistent minority. And in 2018, Sisi passed a law allowing him to stay in office until 2030, and the optics were bad - he wants to change them

All three of the reasons are using Jews as a means to an end.

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!

Columbia University's Center for Palestine Studies welcomes its newest post doctoral fellow!

Ali H. Musleh will be working on his first book project, To What Abyss Does This Robot Take the Earth? Using his dual background in design and political theory, he focuses on Israel's design, development and deployment of drones, autonomous weapons and artificial intelligence, treating them as technological processes of managing and differentiating forms of life.

Apparently, this book is a version of Musleh's 341-page PhD dissertation, with the same title. Here's the abstract:

How do weapons make the colonial worlds that Palestinians and Jewish-Israelis inhabit? My dissertation attends to this question starting from an experience shared by Palestinians: that the majority of us have never encountered an Israeli settler, whether in uniform or out of uniform, who is not attached to a weapon, be it an assault rifle, a fighter jet, or a tank, etc. Taking this experience as a philosophical provocation, I subject the settler colony to a form of insurgent study exercised everyday by Palestinians that confronts the settler as contingent and transitory human-weapon ensembles. These studies are bodying and worlding. They reveal and unravel the spatialized embodiments, sensations, affective terrains, orientations and regimes of truth that weapons generate as lived world(s) of experience. In doing so, Palestinians exercise a fleshy sociality that constantly puts into question the self-evidence of the settler and the settler state. Thinking with Palestinians and alongside peoples of struggle, my dissertation is a performance in reverse engineering that moves from micrological sites, scenes and bodies of war, to macro formations of sovereignty. My itinerary focuses primarily on encounters with remote and robotic weaponry as technologies of engineering spatial and procedural distance between the settler and weapon. My task has been to show how that distance became the abyssal site from which forms of war, apartheid, and erasure emerge that consign settlers to martial automatisms that materialize and mediate their existence. The result is a work that dissects settler colonialism as a form of life inseparable from weapon power, as I also consider Palestinian rehearsals of decolonial life in the robotic age of war.

This abstract is a combination of gobbledygook, lies, obfuscation and antisemitism.

Gazans indeed don't have much of a chance to see Israelis., settlers or otherwise, since no Israelis live there. But it is really true that West Bank Palestinians never see "settlers" without weapons? The thousands of Palestinians that visit Rami Levy supermarkets shop alongside Israeli civilians. Well over 100,000 Palestinians work in Israel, and tens of thousands more work in settlements - and most "settlers" do not walk around their towns toting assault rifles. Those "settlers" who roam the Temple Mount, where they are seen by thousands more, don't carry weapons. Most Jews at the Mamilla Mall in Jerusalem, where many Palestinians shop, don't carry weapons. His assertion that most Palestinians never see Jews without weapons is a fabrication.

And then there are Israelis who visit Palestinian towns on their own to go shopping or get their cars repaired. Like Shay Silas Nigreker and his son Aviad Nir who went shopping in Huwara and were murdered two weeks ago because they were Israeli Jews. They weren't "attached to weapons," but they were murdered by Palestinian weapons.

So Musleh's "philosophical provocation" that is the very basis of his paper and book is bullshit to begin with. But what thesis advisor has the knowledge or guts to dispute the falsehood that underpins the text?

To Musleh, all Jewish Israelis are "settlers." After all, how would Palestinians know that Israelis in fighter jets or tanks are settlers or not? And in the first sentence he considers all Israeli Arabs to be "Palestinian" which means that when he says "settlers," he really means "Jews" from either side of the Green Line. Further proof from a similar article he wrote in Politics Today, where he said, "Weeks, months, if not years can go by without an inhabitant of Gaza encountering a settler, but they are more likely to encounter a faceless machine in their day to day life."

To Musleh, every Jew is an implant, who has no business living in the land of their forefathers. If that isn't antisemitic, what is?

Beyond that, to Musleh, every Jew in Israel is not a human being. They are hybrids of humans and weapons. They are essentially cyborgs. The entire paper is meant to dehumanize every Jew who lives in the region.

Musleh tries to sound intelligent by using words that either don't exist or in contexts that make no sense. There is no such words as "bodying" and "worlding." And does his treatise on Israeli evil really deal with "micrological sites"?

Musleh himself characterizes the paper not as reflective of objective truth but as "a form of insurgent study" as well as "a performance" in finding links that simply do not exist in real life, which he falsely calls "reverse engineering" to make it sound quasi-scientific.

Another form of antisemitism we see in this abstract is that it accepts libels against Israel that are not at all universally accepted, and that are provably false, as truisms. "Settler colonialism" and "apartheid" are routinely used in academia and much of the media as fact, but they aren't. By pretending that these lies are truth, the paper is nothing more than naked propaganda.

Yet no one in Columbia University is the least bit bothered by these issues. After all, the social sciences are filled with self-serving propagandistic garbage like this, where the "feelings" of the writer are considered more factual than actual facts.

To Columbia, this self-serving propaganda filled with lies and Jew-hatred are a feature, not a bug.

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!

09/05 Links Pt1: The Survival of the PA despite the Failure of the Oslo Accords; UNESCO to vote on Ancient Jericho joining Heritage list as site in Palestine

From Ian:

Biden cares no more than Obama did about the Sword of Damocles hanging over Israel

Enter Jack Lew, at one time Obama’s man and now Biden’s. Lew, currently a visiting professor at Columbia, served as White House Chief of Staff and then Treasury Secretary under Obama. Biden has plucked him from a New York private equity firm to put a gloss on some devilish diplomatic moves to give Iran whatever it wants, hang the Israeli government’s deep anguish. Lew was the obvious pick for the task of hoodwinking Biden’s oldest friend PM Netanyahu.

Back in June of 2015 Obama appointed Lew to sell his pet project, a deal with the devil, to Jewish Americans. “The final deal,” Lew told a Jerusalem Post conference, “will be built around an incredibly robust and intrusive inspections regime on Iran’s nuclear program. This deal will only be finalized if the connective tissue of the agreement meets a tough standard of intense verification and scrutiny.”

Here was the perfect case of Orwellian speak. The reality was that Obama had agreed to put Iran’s ‘military facilities’ off limits to IAEA inspectors, and to delay inspection of nuclear sites until such time as cleans ups or cover ups could be finished. Not good enough? Obama allowed, in good faith, Iran to submit the soil samples required by IAEA inspectors. All of these fine details his Jewish liaison man Lew forgot to tell. He did however tell that “we are not operating on an assumption that Iran will act in good faith.” Word for word that is the assumption on which Obama was operating. He himself alluded to trusting Iran in an interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg.

“There are deep strains of anti-Semitism in the core regime,” Obama conceded, “but they also are interested in maintaining power.” It left even Obama fan Goldberg wide-eyed. “It’s my belief,” he told the President, “that it is difficult to negotiate with parties that are captive to a conspiratorial anti-Semitic worldview; not because they hold offensive views, but because they hold ridiculous views… I don’t believe that the regime can be counted on to be entirely rational.”

Of course the regime was all too rational. It saw the treaty that wasn’t a treaty for what it really was: its green light to cheat all the way to the Bomb.

No denying he’s very brilliant, Jack Lew. One can trace much of the evil in modern history to brilliancy. America’s Covid Tsar Anthony Fauci is only the latest mass destroyer of life and livelihoods. “What we are doing,” Lew said, “is to effectively guarantee that Iran never obtains a nuclear weapon. Making sure Iran never gets a nuclear weapon is a national security priority of the highest order.” To which ZOA's Mort Klein accurately elucidated, "Never" actually meant ten years. Klein also recalled that Lew boasted at the same Conference that his boss had done more than anyone on behalf of Israel’s security.

Without doubt the brag marked the epitome of Jack Lew’s efficacious lying.

Fact is, the deal Lew’s boss cobbled together was more a swap than a deal of give and take. Obama swapped the blood of Jews for a reptilian ally. The sordid game began with the vilest act. President Obama’s fixers stopped Argentine’s wheels of justice turning – in the literal sense of the term. The law was taking its long course when Obama told it to stop. His pet project deal came first. A monumental investigation into the AMIA bombing had made Alberto Nisman, a government prosecutor, a Jew, into a world celebrity. By 2006 Nisman had managed to indict seven members of Iran’s government, one a former President and Foreign Minister.

Then he did one better. Nisman secured international arrest warrants for five of the seven Iranian suspects, thus locking them into Iran. The resolute Nisman had compiled a docket a million-pages thick, in addition to a secret 300- page docket against Argentine President de Kirschner and her cronies. They had invented Tehran’s innocence in order “to pursue commercial, political and geopolitical interests.” So a vixen and four international terrorists exchanged barrels of oil for sacks of grain, topping the deal with Jewish blood by the barrel.

At this point Biden’s boss – and Jack Lews’ – came into the despicable picture. Western diplomatic sources disclosed that the Obama Administration had twisted Argentine arms to end the investigation of Tehran’s complicity in the AMIA attack.

It was to be the reward for sitting at the Obama gambling table, to go through the motions of signing his signature deal. Obama’s fixers met with Argentine officials on different occasions. As the source close to Argentine leaders explained:

“One of the first demands by Iran to the Obama administration was that Argentine be pressed to drop arrest warrants,” said a source close to Argentine leaders. “Within months, the meeting was followed up with a higher level one where Argentine leaders were asked to lay off. They eventually complied.”

Biden Nominates Leader of Pro-China Think Tank as Ambassador to Israel

President Joe Biden on Tuesday announced former Treasury secretary Jack Lew as his nominee for ambassador to Israel, the White House said in a statement.

Lew is chairman of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, which advocates closer ties between the United States and China. The group has hosted senior CCP officials, and as head of the group Lew met in Beijing with China's foreign minister. One intelligence analyst described the group as "consistently soft on China."

Lew, if confirmed by the U.S. Senate, will face a complicated political situation, as Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushes through a judicial overhaul opposed by the Biden administration.

He would succeed Ambassador Tom Nides in the post.

In addition to Treasury secretary, Lew served under former president Barack Obama as White House chief of staff and deputy secretary of state for management and resources.

Lew was director of the Office of Management and Budget, a position in President Bill Clinton's Cabinet, from 1998 to 2001. In both the Democratic Clinton and Obama administrations, Lew served on the National Security Council.

David Singer: King Abdullah and Abbas reject Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine

Jordan’s King Abdullah and PLO chairman Mahmoud Abbas have broken their 15 months long silence by finally rejecting the Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine solution - first published in Saudi Arabia on 8 June 2022 – that shredded the failed two-state solution pursued by Saudi Arabia and the Arab League since 2002 (Arab Peace Initiative).

The Arab Peace Initiative called for a sovereign independent Palestinian State to be created between Israel and Jordan in all of Judea and Samaria ('West Bank') and Gaza - with East Jerusalem as its capital - for the first time in recorded history

The Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine solution (HKOPS) called for the merger of Jordan, Gaza and part of Judea and Samaria ('West Bank') into one new territorial entity with Amman as its capital – mirroring a model that existed between 1950 and 1967 – when Transjordan and Judea and Samaria were merged and renamed “Jordan” – after 10000 Jews living in Judea and Samaria had been forcibly expelled in the 1948 War of Independence.

The Final Statement issued by the Egyptian-Jordanian-Palestinian Summit in El Alamein on 14 August leaves no room for doubt that King Abdullah and Mahmoud Abbas – supported by Egypt’s President - Abdel Fattah El-Sisi – are united in rejecting the Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine solution:

“The leaders emphasized that resolving the Palestinian issue and achieving just and comprehensive peace is a strategic choice, a regional and international necessity, and a matter of international peace and security. They stressed that the only way to achieve this peace is by implementing the relevant United Nations and Security Council resolutions, to enable the Palestinian people with their inalienable rights, to end the Israeli occupation, and to embody the independent and sovereign State of Palestine with East Jerusalem as its capital, in order to achieve the two-state solution based on the rules of international law, the agreed terms of reference, and the Arab peace initiative.”

These three leaders have chosen to prolong - not end - the conflict between Arabs and Jews started in 1897 that still remains unresolved today.

In stressing “that the only way to achieve this peace is by implementing the relevant United Nations and Security Council resolutions …and the Arab peace initiative” – Abdullah and Abbas have chosen to continue backing the UN Security Council attempting to implement Resolution 2334 – passed on 23 December 2016 as the defeated Obama-Biden Administration was vacating the White House and did not veto that resolution.

One of the consequences of the Arab honor/shame culture is the zero-sum mentality. If one party is honored, then their rival is considered shamed, even if there is nothing in reality that shames the other party.

This is illustrated by the statement issued today by the PFLP terror group.

The PFLP announced that "the opening of a headquarters for the Zionist embassy in the Bahraini capital, Manama, represents a state of increasing decline of the Bahraini regime" and hat continued normalization between Israel and Bahrain is "an integral part of the aggression against our people."

Has Bahrain turned anti-Palestinian? I don't see any evidence of it. But to Palestinians, if Israel gains something, then they lose - by definition.

It is a very childish way of looking at the world but it is accepted as normal, at least for Palestinians and most Arabs.

A great part of the profound changes happening in the Gulf, and the reason that the Abraham Accords are so important, is that they represent a sea change in the old zero-sum mentality, and towards a win/win culture in the UAE and Bahrain. There is no contradiction between having relations with Israel and supporting Palestinian nationalism, unless you look at everything as zero-sum - or if you view a Palestinian state not as a goal but as a means to destroy Israel.

The PFLP goes on "warn of the dangers of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia embarking on normalization with the Zionist entity, especially since there are channels that have been opened in the sports and media fields, in addition to opening Saudi airspace for the passage of Zionist planes, which paves the way for the possibility of announcing full normalization with this entity. This would represent a major stab wound to the Palestinian cause."

If Israel wins, Palestinians lose - and vice versa. Which partially explains the celebrations and glee that accompany terror attacks that kill Jews. To Palestinians, any dead Jew is a loss for Israel and therefore a gain for Palestinians.

It is a sick mindset. And not enough people are fighting against it. Which is another reason why the Abraham Accords is so important - it introduces a different way of thinking into the Arab world, one that is attractive both because it is more optimistic but also because it is true.

It is worth mentioning that while the West generally adheres to a win/win mentality, socialists like the PFLP and those in the "progressive" Left indeed do believe in a zero-sum game - that the world has a fixed amount of resources and if the rich gain, the rest of the world inevitably loses. Simplistic and ultimately wrong zero-sum thinking is something that the far Right and far Left have in common.

It cannot be a coincidence that the main fans of zero sum thinking also happen to hate Jews. I don't know whether that is a cause or an effect, probably both, but eradicating the zero sum mentality is perhaps the best and most comprehensive way to combat 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!

An ironic fatwa: Muslims can curse Jews but not "Israel"

Recently, a new website has been indexed on Google News, called Sinai Arabia.

It is not a very professional site and it really doesn't cover news, rather items of interest to the Arab Muslim reader.

I cannot tell what country it comes from. My best guess is Egypt.

A lot of its stories are about Jews, many of them antisemitic but written in a matter of fact way rather than with rancor. So it will discuss things like how the final battle between Muslims and Jews will happen, or how the Rothschild family controls 80% of the world's wealth.

Today, it describes Islamic law on cursing of Jews and Israel. And according to this article, it is perfectly allowed for a Muslim to curse Jews, but not to curse Israel!

Cursing Jews (or Christians) is allowed since they are unbelievers. Allah cursed the Jews in the Quran because of their disobedience to Allah and their supposed attacks on and hatred of prophets.

But Israel may not be cursed - because it was the name of Jacob, who is a revered prophet, and one may not curse the name of a prophet even if it is also the name of a hated Jewish state!

If this article is accurate, then from the perspective of cursing, the Muslim attitude is that it really is antisemitism, not "anti-Zionism." And by any religious yardstick, hating Jews is the reason for hating Israel - not the other way around.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the Houthi slogan says "Curse the Jews" but only "Death to Israel."

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!

One of the Hamas terrorists arrested by Israeli forces in Jenin on Monday was Abdallah Hassan Muhammad Zubah. He is known to be one of the major forces behind the nascent West Bank rocket firing attempts.

There have been several attempts to fire rockets over the past few months into Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. They've so far either misfired or landed away from the Jewish targets.

The luck won't hold out forever. The genie is out of the bottle and Hamas and other terror groups have plenty of experience building rockets which they are anxious to transfer to the West Bank.

As unacceptable as it is to have large arsenals of rockets in Gaza (and Lebanon) aimed at Jewish communities, in some ways rockets in the West Bank would be worse. Their targets are often very close by, and unlike with Hamas or Hezbollah, Israel has no government to pressure to stop the rockets from being fired - just as with in the West Bank can easily get M16s, they will soon be able to put together crude rockets.

Right now, Israeli forces can arrive on the scene of a terror attack within minutes in Judea and Samaria. It can pro-actively stop rocket launchers being setup if it has proper intelligence. But if Israel would unilaterally withdraw from areas of those territories, each incident becomes an invasion.

This is reason by itself that unilateral withdrawals, or a Palestinian state even on provisional borders, is a supremely bad idea.

But the rocket fire will come, sooner rather than later. Jewish communities will be threatened. The same "primitive" rockets with a two-mile range that reach Sderot from Gaza can also reach the suburbs of Netanya from Tulkarm.

Not enough people are considering the dangers of West Bank rockets - and the media won't care until they kill someone. If even then.

Now is the time that Israel needs to pro-actively let the media and world leaders know that any rocket that injures or kills an Israeli will prompt a massive response that can cause unpredictable results. The PA needs to be pressured by its international friends to step up its presence in the "refugee camps" and other areas it has effectively ceded to Hamas and Islamic Jihad groups.

Because otherwise, as always, the world will be fixated on the "disproportionate" response more than the rockets themselves.

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!

09/04 Links Pt2: Nazi and Soviet Conspiracy Themes in the Palestinian Discourse; How Intra-Communal Eritrean Violence Was Used To Malign Israel

From Ian:

Irwin Cotler: ‘I have a dream’: Martin Luther King's words are more relevant than ever

We all stood amid this brotherhood of humanity, rapt with attention as King told of his dream of an America in which his four little children would not be judged “by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”.

King spoke of the American Constitution as a promissory note. In his uniquely melodious and spiritual voice, he spoke movingly. Even 60 years later, Martin Luther King’s voice still resonates within me today.

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’”

King’s message was a universal one of common cause wherever we may be – of the struggle against racism, against hate, against injustice – and the struggle for human rights, for human dignity, respect, and recognition.

Indeed, Martin Luther King Jr. ought to be seen as the metaphor and the message of this struggle of his recognition that we are all one human family; that we have all been created in the image of God, and that this is the foundation of equality; that respect for the inherent dignity of the human being requires respect for the equal dignity and equal worth of all persons; that this is what human brotherhood is all about; that the struggle for human rights and human dignity, for equality and respect, are (in the most profound and existential sense) the struggle for ourselves. For in what we say – or more importantly, in what we do – we make a statement about ourselves as people.

On this 60th anniversary, let us recall, then, that Martin Luther King Jr. – like Nelson Mandela, who later invoked him – was the embodiment and expression of the long march towards freedom, of the great struggles of the 20th and 21st centuries for equality, for human dignity, for social justice and for the brotherhood of man.

King was the architect of the politics of inclusion, equality, respect, and recognition – not only for Black Americans; not only for America, but for all of humanity. As he expressed in his “Letter from a Birmingham jail,” also 60 years ago, in 1963 we must affirm and act upon.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

May this clarion call to action inspire us as we continue to strive toward realizing King’s vision in the next 60 years and beyond.

Golda’s grit and Nixon’s ambivalence

Alexander Haig, Nixon’s chief of staff, reported in his memoir Inner Circles, Nixon’s sense of urgency in coming to Israel’s aid. Nixon summoned both Kissinger and James Schlesinger (a Jewish convert to Christianity), Secretary of Defense, to a White House meeting assessing the pace of the much needed airlift requested by Golda. Nixon asked Kissinger for an exact account of Israel’s military needs. Kissinger began reading from an itemized list. “Double it,” ordered Nixon. “Now get the hell out of here and get the job done.”

In another such meeting, Nixon informed about bureaucratic disagreements in the Pentagon over types of delivery planes, shouted at Kissinger “(expletive) it, use every one we have. Tell them to send everything that can fly.”

Though Nixon was in the throes of fighting the Watergate charges, in June, 1974, two months before he resigned his presidency, he became the first incumbent president to visit Israel. In his expansive airport tribute (no doubt with Golda in mind) Nixon said, “the respect and the admiration we have for the people of this nation, their courage, their tenacity, their firmness in the face of very great odds… makes us proud to stand with Israel.”

In sum, this president haunted by the specter of disloyal American Jews, had little to gain and much to lose by the bold steps he took in Israel’s defense less than a year earlier. None of this courage and defiance of the US State Department is documented in the biopic Golda.

In the absence of the astonishing 567 missions flown by the US air force, Israel might not have survived. Already in his second term (regardless of Watergate), Nixon knew that Republicans were not going to win over the largely liberal Jewish vote. Nixon’s unconventional airlift subsequently spurred an Arab oil embargo sharply raising gasoline prices.

Dismissing the advice of Kissinger, his Jewish adviser, Nixon risked a war with the Soviet Union to save Israel. According to Stephen E. Ambrose, Nixon’s biographer, he “knew that his enemies would never give him credit for saving Israel. He did it anyway.”

A proud Nixon boasted, “Christ, if it weren’t for me, there wouldn’t be any Israel. They know that in Israel. Golda knows that, even though they may not know it over here.”

Nazi and Soviet Conspiracy Themes in the Palestinian Discourse: Policy Lessons for Israel

Since its founding in 1994, the Palestinian Authority, an internationally recognized pre-state authority, has advanced antisemitic themes to fuel its decades-old political warfare campaign to isolate, destabilize, and subvert the State of Israel. The PA’s antisemitic discourse, rooted in Nazi and Soviet-era conspiracy theories, has resulted in violence against Israelis and diaspora Jews. Ironically, both Israel and the international community have largely overlooked this flagrant violation of the Oslo Accords between Israel and the PA: to desist from incitement to terror and violence.1 This essay documents nearly 30 years of Palestinian Authority antisemitic rhetoric in its media, social networks, official government statements, and educational system. This essay will also assess Israel’s willful blindness to these violations and offer a prescription and remedy through Israeli policy that will hold the PA to account and reform.

Since its inception in 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Palestinian Authority’s source organization, has perpetuated Nazi and Soviet antisemitic tropes and conspiracy libels that characterize Israelis and Jews as racially inferior, devious, conniving, and imperialistic.2 Palestinian Arabs’ hatred of Jews has a long history. The first Palestinian Arab political leader, “Grand Mufti” Haj Amin Al-Husseini, was closely aligned with the Nazi regime and even called for the Reichstag to bomb Tel Aviv. He accused the pre-state yishuv of desecrating the al-Aqsa mosque, depicting Jewish worshippers as “evil marauders,” statements that ignited bloody anti-Jewish riots in the 1920s and 1930s.3 The PA lodges the exact charges, claiming “al-Aqsa is in danger” from “settlers storming al-Aqsa”4 – to depict peaceful Jewish visitors to the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site.

Husseini’s widely distributed sermons of the 1930s incited and spread Jew-hatred across the broader Middle East.5 His speeches on a German-based radio service in Arabic blamed Jews for World War II.6 Historian Jeffrey Herf writes, “The fusion of antisemitism with anti-Zionism was the key ideological weapon of the Nazi regime in its efforts to win support from Arabs and Muslims in North Africa and the Middle East.”7

The Mufti’s widely distributed “Proclamation to the Muslim World” rallied Muslim opposition to the Zionist project:
Since the earliest days of their history, the Jews have been an oppressed people, and there must be a good reason for that. As far back as the Egyptian pharaohs, energetic oppressive measures had to be taken against the Jews…. The Jews hate Muhammad and Islam…. The battle … began when Muhammad fled from Mecca to Medina…. The Jews have been the bitterest enemies of Islam and continue to try to destroy it. They know only hypocrisy and guile. Hold together, fight for Islamic thought, fight for your religion and your existence! Do not rest until your land is free of the Jews.

Both the Fatah-led PA and its rival Islamist Hamas have perpetuated a tradition of anti-Jewish declarations, blood libel discourse, and calls to jihad against Jews based on dar al-Islam,9 blaming Jews for wars10 as a justification for killing or harming them.11 Referencing Islamic writings, Islamic clerics and spokespeople such as Raafat Alayan, the Palestinian Authority’s Jerusalem spokesman, consider Jews to be “sons of apes and pigs.”12 Palestinian officials have invoked accusations reminiscent of the medieval “blood libel” against Jews. Palestinian politician Hanan Ashrawi retweeted a medieval-themed claim that Israelis purposely drowned an Arab boy from Beit Hanina in east Jerusalem, after he slipped into a flooded area.13 In 2016, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas told a European Commission assembly that Israeli rabbis told their followers to poison Arab wells, a claim that he retracted after Israeli and international condemnation.14 Abbas also falsely claimed that Adolf Hitler facilitated the immigration of Jews to Israel by reaching a deal with the Anglo-Palestine Bank (now Bank Leumi) under which Jews who moved to the British Mandate of Palestine could transfer their assets to the bank, a claim also made in his dissertation.15

Izabella Tabarovsky: "Soviet Antizionism and Contemporary Left Antisemitism" https://t.co/hgeRbTBZml
— Daniel Sadan (@RealDanSadan) September 3, 2023

The Iranian Tasnim News Agency reports:

The leader of the Islamic Al-Wafa Movement in Bahrain, Mr. Murtada Al-Sindi, affirmed that no one can guarantee the safety and stability of the Zionist entity in Bahrain.

On the implications and objectives of the visit of the Zionist entity's foreign minister, Eli Cohen, to Bahrain, the leader of the Islamic Al-Wafa Movement in Bahrain, Mr. Mortada Al-Sindi, said in a statement to the correspondent of Tasnim News Agency that the government chose its position in the struggle of the axes, and the people of Bahrain also determined their position, the government chose to be with the Zionists and a tail of Israel, while the people of Bahrain chose to be with the axis of resistance and the Palestinian cause.

Regarding the possibility of a popular resistance to the Zionist presence in Bahrain, he said, the natural reaction to the presence of the usurping entity in Bahrain is resistance and rejection, and the people of Bahrain are jealous and religious people, and all segments of Bahraini society and all sects of society have expressed their rejection of the Zionist presence, but no one guarantees that it [civil disobedience alone] will continue ...Matters are subject to escalation and may be manifested in resistance movements and factions to confront the bastard presence of the usurping Zionist entity of the holy land of Palestine.

He added that the violations and crimes committed by the Zionist entity against our brothers and loved ones in occupied Palestine turn into lava in the chests of our people, and this lava may erupt at any moment and turn into a movement of resistance to the Zionist presence in Bahrain, and no one can guarantee the Zionist entity's safety and stability in Bahrain. .

This is a threat of violence on Bahraini soil. But there is a little element of deniability, claiming that any such violence would be from regular Bahraini citizens who are fed up, not organized by Al Sindi's superiors in Iran.

Israel and Bahrain agreed to improve their trade ties today.

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Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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Learning from antisemitism 200 years ago

As my readers know, I like to look at old newspapers and see how stories from the past illuminate the present.

The Kent and Essex Mercury of September 9, 1823, has a story about how an antisemite falsely accused a Jewish pencil manufacturer of not having a license to trade in the products, but a manufacturer did not need a license. The antisemite took the Jew to court where he lost.

But there are multiple layers of antisemitism. One is the explicit antisemitism of those who look to blame Jews for any and everything they don't like. The others are more subtle.

The newspaper article, ostensibly on the side of justice, goes out if its way to depict the Jew with a stereotypical accent. (Newspapers in the 19th century regularly did this for all minorities, especially Black people.) The message is clear: we don't discriminate, but the Jews aren't really full citizens.

Similarly, Samuel Moss Solomon apparently needed the help of a kind gentile friend to vouch for him. It is implied that the judge might not have been so sympathetic if Solomon had defended himself to court.

Is this any different than the New York Times nowadays painting religious Jews as the "other" who do not fit into their respected society, where assimilated Jews are seemingly fully accepted but people whose idea of morality and priorities differs from that of the "good" Jews? Or how non-Jews defending Israel are somehow considered to be a bit more trustworthy as to their arguments compared to those of Jews, whose arguments are considered suspect from the start because they are indeed Jewish?

Antisemitism changes with circumstances, but deep down, it remains the same.

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09/04 Links Pt1: How does a Palestinian child become a terrorist?; PA building neighborhood on Joshua’s Altar site; Why Iranians Don't Hate Israel

From Ian:

The Holocaust and Iran’s nuclear program

On August 16, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken released a video address commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Bialystok Ghetto uprising. Blinken’s late stepfather, Samuel Pisar, participated in the revolt, which was one of the most significant acts of Jewish resistance against Nazi Germans.

The statement by a somber-looking Blinken referenced Jewish acts of “bravery” while also disclosing plans by the Biden administration to secure $1 million for establishing a “virtual tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau so that more people who can’t visit can experience the indelible impact of seeing the site.”

Efforts by Blinken and US President Joe Biden to invest in Holocaust education are laudable endeavors aimed at preserving the memory of the Shoah. Yet undergirding Blinken’s words was the administration’s announcement, less than a week earlier, that the US would unfreeze $6 billion of Iranian funds, previously held in South Korea, along with five Iranian prisoners – in exchange for five US hostages.

That Biden has spent his time in office courting an Islamic regime intent on “wiping out Israel” while also promoting a new Holocaust project is not surprising. For years, many on the Left have defaulted to a horrifying time in Jewish history and appropriated the Holocaust as a tool for Jewish placation – while simultaneously advancing policies that imperil the lives of Jews living today.

The corresponding announcements from earlier this summer proceed along a predictable pattern beginning under former US president Jimmy Carter of using the Holocaust as a foil for reorienting geopolitical dynamics against Israel. Comparisons are often made between the 39th president and America’s current leader, whose failures in foreign policy have led to America’s weakening influence abroad.

Writing in National Affairs, noted scholar Prof. Ruth Wisse details how it was officials within the Carter administration who initially pitched the idea of establishing a National Holocaust Museum when relations between president Carter and the broader Jewish community were at an all-time low. Wisse notes how Carter went public with his support for the plan after upsetting US Jewish leaders by approving the sale of F-15 fighter planes to Saudi Arabia and endorsing the creation of a Palestinian state.

Like Carter, Biden calculates references to remembering the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust around accelerating diplomatic maneuvers that risk destroying six million more. The president has made reviving the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), a cornerstone of his foreign policy agenda. Most disturbing are reports citing that the recent $6 billion deal represents only a sliver of the approximately $20 billion Iran will receive in a new “mini-deal” involving its nuclear program.

The Escalation of Palestinian Terrorism

The month of August saw continued escalation of terror in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and Israel. The Hamas leadership (Saleh al-Arouri from Beirut and Hamas leaders from Gaza) continues to encourage Palestinian terrorism in the West Bank and to develop the terrorist infrastructure, including explosives laboratories and weapons smuggling (also with Iranian and Hezbollah assistance), and focus on the development of the terrorist infrastructure in southern Lebanon (with the coordination and assistance of Iran and Hezbollah). At the same time, the Palestinian Authority, which since the end of Operation Home and Garden in Jenin has begun to act with greater determination both in the Jenin region, but mainly in Nablus, Tulkarm, Qalqilya, and Ramallah, has been drawn into clashes with Palestinian youths and is seen on the Palestinian street as “collaborating with the Israeli occupation".

The scope of IDF activity in the Palestinian cities, the number of Palestinian detainees and casualties, and the massive intelligence effort are all growing. Yet alongside many impressive operations to foil terrorist activity and infrastructures, the scope of Palestinian terrorism has expanded, and continues to take a toll on Israeli citizens in the West Bank and in Israel. These trends point to the development of the terrorist system engulfing Israel since March 2022, and even more so since May 2022 with the start of Operation Break the Wave. What was mistakenly conceived as a terrorist wave did not break, and quickly developed into an expanding terror system that rests on a psychological infrastructure grounded in the consciousness of the armed struggle planted in the hearts of the young Palestinians – seared in them is the consciousness of intifada.

Alongside these, and as if influenced by the weak governance of the Palestinian Authority, Israeli governance regarding Jewish violence against Palestinians has also weakened. Worse still, this violence has in part been met by politicians who instead of denouncing it, choose to explain it, justify it, and censure IDF commanders and the head of the Israel Security Agency. Although the Palestinians do not need any justification to resort terror against Jews – they have enough reasons of their own, which we have already discussed – the policy of Israeli containment, or alternatively, the lack of the required determination and the political support needed for the required determination, add fuel to the growing fire of terrorism.

Israel is already beyond the “moment of truth.” The comfort zone that Israel has to date granted the Hamas leadership in the Gaza Strip and beyond is exacting an intolerable toll. Although Hamas is not the only generator of the terrorist system confronting Israel, it is certainly a significant and central element in driving and expanding this terrorist system. I believe Israel is required to take a significant military move that severely damages Hamas’s military infrastructure in the Gaza Strip. The military infrastructure is the source of Hamas's political power, and without it, Hamas will be greatly weakened. At the same time, there is no real or long-term validity to a military campaign in the Gaza Strip without a political goal and a broader and more significant political context, which the military campaign is supposed to serve. The context lies in the need to stabilize the Palestinian Authority and strengthen it in a way that allows its integration into the normalization process with Saudi Arabia and the design of the regional architecture.

How does a Palestinian child become a terrorist?

An Israeli man was stabbed and wounded in Jerusalem last week. His crime: waiting for a train while Jewish. The Palestinian Arab stabber was captured. He’s 14 years old.

How does a 14-year-old go from playing ball and doing homework to concealing a large knife in his book bag, traveling to a site where defenseless Jews are quietly waiting for a train, and then stabbing them?

The terrorist lives in Beit Hanina, an Arab neighborhood on the edge of Jerusalem. That’s within Israeli territory, but it’s just 11 kilometers from the Palestinian Authority capital of Ramallah – in other words, within broadcast range of PA Television and PA Radio.

So, this young terrorist grew up in a home where the atmosphere likely was steeped in PA TV and radio programs glorifying violence against Jews, portraying Israelis as evil monsters, and promising heavenly rewards for “martyrs” who are killed while murdering Israeli Jews.

Of course, it’s not just television and radio that influence a child’s upbringing. Parents play a major role. We don’t yet know anything about this particular stabber’s parents. But we do know that again and again, the parents of Palestinian Arab terrorists have declared their support for their children’s murderous actions.

In a memorable appearance in the PA news media a few years back, the father of 16-year-old Murad Adais declared, “I am proud of my son.”

The occasion for this burst of parental pride was not an impressive report card or doing his chores without having to be asked. No, what Murad did to bring honor to the Adais family was that he broke into the home of a young Israeli Jewish mother of six and brutally stabbed her to death.

Not long after that, the official Facebook page of the Fatah movement (the ruling faction of the PA) posted a large photo of the mother of the late Muhammed Shamasneh. She was smiling broadly and making a “V” sign with her right hand. The caption under the photo read: “How great you are, O mother of the Martyr.” Shamasneh, 22, was a Palestinian terrorist who stabbed three Jews near the Jerusalem central bus station.

From Times of Israel:

The Israeli military arrested three members of the Hamas terror group during a raid in the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank on Monday morning, marking the first overt entry of forces to the camp since a major operation was carried out in the area two months ago.

In a joint statement, the Israel Defense Forces, Shin Bet security agency, and Border Police said troops entered the camp and nabbed Abdullah Hassan Mohammed Sobeh, Ward Sharim, and Mus’ab Ja’aydah.

The IDF said troops opened fire at the wanted gunmen as they attempted to flee a building when the forces arrived. One of the armed Palestinians shot in the leg and seriously wounded, and was taken by helicopter to Rambam Hospital in Haifa.

An assault rifle belonging to one of the wanted Palestinians was seized, the IDF said.

The IDF said troops also responded with live fire against Palestinian gunmen who opened fire at forces in the area, and Palestinian rioters hurling stones.

A local wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group said its gunmen opened fire at Israeli forces on the outskirts of the camp.

The Palestinian Authority health ministry said four people were lightly wounded by Israeli fire in the area and taken to nearby hospitals.

No Israeli soldiers were wounded in the operation.

The IDF did injured the captured terrorists, and transported them by helicopter to a hospital.

Imagine the difficulty of such an operation.

The goal, as always, is to arrest terrorists - not to kill them. The IDF knows that it will be attacked from all directions in a crowded camp that is filled with booby-traps, IEDs and angry youth with stones, firebombs and automatic weapons.

And in the end, no one was killed on either side. The terrorists were captured alive.

This must have involved many, many hours of planning, intelligence and practice.

But this result is always what the IDF wants to see. It doesn't want to kill people, but when under fire, soldiers must return fire towards the source. Nearly every person killed in the past two years were involved in fighting or members of terror groups. For urban warfare, this is incredible, and military experts know this.

But the media ignores all of that. "Human rights groups" insist on perfection in a war zone and that the IDF use peacetime, law enforcement standards when the enemy is often a heavily armed military group. As much as they can, Israel tries to live up to those standards, and it showed that today, even if it is not at all clear that the more flexible laws of armed conflict wouldn't apply to Jenin today.

The world is so obsessed with demonizing Israel that it ignores how unique it is for an army to have so few civilian casualties in urban war zones.

Try to find stories where US or British troops entered a crowded town and extracted wanted men under constant fire without killing anyone. If it has ever happened, it is incredibly rare. Yet the IDF strives to do that each and every time - and its success today proves that.

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Hebrew, Yiddish, antisemitism and the New York Times

The New York Times has an op-ed by Ilan Stavans about the resilience of Yiddish, supposedly by an expert in the field. It includes some antisemitic tropes, oversimplifications, self-contradictions, outright falsehoods and ultimately reflects anti-Zionist politics more than it represents the state of Yiddish today.

For a language without a physical address that has come frighteningly close to extinction, Yiddish’s will to live seems inexhaustible. The lesson is simple and straightforward: Survival is an act of stubbornness.

Yiddish has been experiencing something of a revival. Online courses mean that anyone from Buenos Aires to Melbourne might learn to speak it. There are new translations of long-forgotten works and literary classics. A Broadway staging of “Fiddler on the Roof” was performed in Yiddish. And streaming platforms like Netflix have released series, including “Shtisel,” “Unorthodox” and “Rough Diamonds,” fully or partially in Yiddish.

Before World War II, approximately 13 million Jews, both secular and religious, spoke Yiddish. Today it is estimated that there are about a quarter of a million speakers in the United States, about the same number in Israel and roughly another 100,000 in the rest of the world. Nowadays the vast majority of those who speak the language are ultra-Orthodox. They aren’t multilingual, as secular Yiddish speakers always were.

Here is the problem with this article in a nutshell: it is written from the perspective of the relatively tiny number of secular Yiddish speakers today, and it all but ignores the real use of the language among religious Jews, which is the core of how the language is used - and more importantly, how it is evolving.

The Yiddish of the secular Jew today is an adaptation of the Yiddish of the heyday of socialist secular Yiddish newspapers in America in the early 20th century. But the vast majority of Yiddish speakers today use it in their everyday speech and as such the language continues to evolve as needed to accommodate modern life. The religious Jews speaking Yiddish are the ones who are not only keeping it alive but they are the ones who are the ones who change it. As a result, Yiddish speakers who learn the language in university courses in the US have a difficult time understanding the many dialects of Yiddish spoken in Boro Park, Mea Shearim or Bnei Brak, which includes healthy amounts of modern English or Hebrew just as local Yiddish dialects have always assimilated elements of the majority population's language.

To the secular Jew studying Yiddish, the language is a romantic throwback to the good old days of unionization of sweatshops in the Lower East Side. To the actual speakers of the language today, it is what is used in everyday life. That is where the dynamism of the language comes from - but the current class of secular Yiddishists tend to be anti-religious, and it shows.

Here are two religious Yiddish magazines published today. This is where the "interesant" things are happening to the language, not in academia or with today's secular Yiddish speakers.

The writer dismisses the "ultra-Orthodox" (itself a demeaning term) as not being multilingual as the secular Yiddish speakers were. Where does he get that from? How many American haredi or chassidic Jews do not speak English? How many Israeli chassidim cannot speak Hebrew? They might not be as fluent in their national languages as they are in Yiddish, but the vast majority can speak and understand more than one language; they couldn't survive in society otherwise. This is just one example of how Stavans subtly disparages the people who are the ones that really keep the language alive - not as a museum piece but as a living language.

It’s worth noting that Yiddish has been maligned by gentiles and Jews alike. Antisemites considered it the parlance of vermin, while the rabbinical elite deemed it unworthy of serious Talmudic discussion.

Really? The "rabbinical elite" were anti-Yiddish? What planet does he live on? Yiddish was the lingua franca of all the major European yeshivas, even after they were transplanted to America or Israel after the Holocaust. The roshei Yeshiva (yeshiva heads) from Europe gave their lessons in Yiddish as long as their students understood it, well into the 1960s and 1970s. Today's American "yeshivish" language includes biblical Hebrew, Aramaic and plenty of Yiddish along with English. And some of the "yeshivish" Yiddish has become part of modern Israeli Hebrew - such as "shkoyach" meaning "good job, itself a Yiddishization of a Hebrew term.

But the article really descends into modern antisemitism/anti-Zionism here:

Another enemy of Yiddish was Zionism. In the late 19th century, as the hope for a Jewish state found its ground, it was portrayed as jargon spoken by the diaspora — the language of homelessness, without a true national voice. To combat this deficit, Hebrew needed to be revived. Soon the myth sprung of the Hebrew pioneer, in sharp contrast with the large-nosed, hunchbacked Jew that Zionists themselves vilified.

Hebrew, which officially became the national language of the state of Israel in 1948, is spoken by about nine million people around the world. For some, the language symbolizes far-right Israeli militarism.

So according to Stavans, Zionists are antisemites who regard diaspora Jews the same way that neo-Nazis do, while modern Hebrew is the language of oppression.

This is a sick slander.

In fact, the people who initially embraced Hebrew as a modern language outside the religious context, and who rejected Yiddish, were the exact type of people that have embraced Yiddish today: the anti-religious, supposedly enlightened Jews.

Before Eliezer Ben Yehuda revived Hebrew as a modern language in Israel, there were lots of Hebrew language secular newspapers in eastern Europe. They were created by the Maskilim, the self-described "enlightened" ones, who considered Yiddish vulgar and common and tried to make Hebrew a secular language. Here's a list from the National Library of Israel of the Hebrew periodicals in their collection that existed before 1885, nearly all of them from Eastern Europe and nearly all of them secular:

And the first cover of one famous Haskalah newspaper from 1860, trying to attract the Yiddish speaking public to Hebrew:

These secular European Jews abandoned Hebrew for Yiddish at the same time that Zionists embraced and modernized Hebrew, around the 1890s. As described by the American Israelite in a requiem for Hebrew secular literature in 1906:

And while the current secular Yiddishists are often anti-Israel, the Israeli government is doing more to preserve Yiddish than they are, having created a National Authority on Yiddish Culture in 1996.

Another point about at least some of the secular Jews in Israel at the turn of the 20th century. Many of them opposed the idea of Hebrew being the official language of a Jewish state, and instead lobbied for the official language to be - German.

In contrast, Yiddish represents exile — a longing for home.

This is the problem of the modern, anti-Zionist Yiddishists in a nutshell. Stavans cannot even understand how this sentence is self-contradictory. Exile is by definition being away from home. To people like Stavans, Yiddish is Jewishness - but it is as transient as symbol of Jewishness as cuisine or dance. Yiddish is something that should be studied and remembered. but it is a tiny slice of the richness of Judaism throughout the millennia and throughout the world.

In Israel, the choice to standardize Hebrew as the language of the state was partially prompted, and later vindicated, by the Mizrahi Jews in the land who did not know Yiddish and who eventually became the majority. The only thing that Jews throughout the world have in common is Hebrew, not Yiddish.

The history of Yiddish among secular Jews is much more complex and ambivalent than is described here. This article promotes a myth of secular Jews having always used Yiddish as their preferred language when in fact they used it for political purposes - as they continue to do today. It is the despised religious Jews who keep the language relevant, alive and vibrant today, while the author of this article keeps Yiddish in a romanticized amber of a century ago.

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!

It's happening again:

A delegation of top American officials is slated to travel to Riyadh this week to meet with Saudi counterparts in order to discuss a potential normalization agreement between the Gulf kingdom and Israel, a US official and a Palestinian official told The Times of Israel on Sunday.

The visit by White House Middle East czar Brett McGurk and Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf will come just over a month after US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan visited Saudi Arabia with the same objective, pointing to Washington’s continued determination to broker an elusive deal. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken also visited Riyadh on the same mission in June.

McGurk and Leaf’s visit will overlap with that of a Palestinian delegation led by Palestine Liberation Organization executive committee secretary-general Hussein al-Sheikh, who will be in Riyadh to discuss what Ramallah is hoping to obtain from a Saudi-Israeli normalization deal, the two officials said.

So the US is speaking to Saudi Arabia about conditions on Israel to accept a normalization deal.

The US is speaking to Palestinians about conditions on Israel to accept a normalization deal.

The Palestinians are speaking to the Saudis about conditions on Israel to accept a normalization deal.

Everyone is speaking to each other - about Israel, but not to Israel.

Are there backchannels from Israel to Saudi Arabia? Probably. Is the Israeli government in charge of these backchannels?

We have no idea.

But we do know that the Biden administration and the Palestinians are not keen to negotiate with Netanyahu, so my guess is that some Israeli peacenik organization is leading the backchannel negotiations with the intent to manipulate the Israeli government, not to appease it, about what strings would be attached to the deal.

Maybe I'm being a bit too sensitive after reading the Gidi Grinstein book I reviewed on Sunday and how a backchannel was used by the Israeli Left, the US and Palestinians to collude to bring down Netanyahu in his first term, but the impression I am getting is that a purpose of these negotiations may include finding a way to make the current coalition government fall, something that would being a sigh of relief to the Americans, the Palestinians and not a small number of Israelis.

Holding these meetings in Saudi Arabia is a convenient way to exclude Israeli officials who cannot officially travel to the kingdom. But all other negotiations between Israel and its erstwhile peace partners took place in neutral territory - Europe or the US.

Excluding Israel from these talks seems to be a way to marginalize the Jewish state and put it on its back foot when the offer is revealed - a deal that, it appears, will be all but imposed on Israel rather than one that Israel has a say in. If Israel refuses an offer backed by the US, Saudis and tacitly Palestinians it will look like an intransigent player who only pretends to want peace. If Israel accepts a bad deal, the government probably will fall.

It feels like deja vu.,

Most Israelis and Zionists would love to see Saudi normalization, myself included. Every new revelation makes me wonder if the price would be too high - especially when the major benefits of peace are already effectively there.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!