Every month, a Palestinian NGO named MADA issues a report of violations of press freedoms in the territories.
For September, it counted 41 violations by Israel and only 8 by the Palestinian Authority.
But the devil is in the details.
All of the Israeli "violations" were where reporters were at the wrong place at the wrong time (i.e., hit by tear gas canisters) or where they tried to go to areas where the Israeli security forces were operating. They did not name a single case where it was obvious journalist was targeted because he or she was a journalist. (They made that claim for a few cases but didn't back them up.)
With the Palestinian violations, though, the violations of press freedom are not ambiguous at all:
The most prominent of these violations were:
The Center said: “Despite the decrease in the number of Palestinian violations, they occurred as part of the serious attacks on journalists and on the state of media freedoms. Among the most prominent of these violations was the arrest of 3 journalists by the Palestinian security services after they were summoned for investigation, and they were subjected to ill-treatment amounting to torture (Al-Shabah Journalist Jarrah Khalaf was released after 11 days of detention, and journalist Hatem Hamdan was released after spending four days in detention, while freelance journalist Tariq Al-Sarkji is still detained by Preventive Security in the district building in the city of Nablus after his detention was extended on 09/27 for 15 days.”
In addition to the above, the Preventive Security Service summoned the photographer Muhammad Shusha due to a post he published on his Facebook page, and the Military Intelligence summoned the freelance journalist Mujahid Mardaway and subjected him to investigation for hours due to his media work.
Being arrested by police and imprisoned for days or longer? Being summoned because they didn't like a Facebook post?
It sounds like there are no Palestinian press freedoms.
"The phenomenon of arresting journalists at the hands of the Palestinian security services represents a dangerous policy," the Palestinian Journalists' Forum said in a statement on March 15, 2023. The forum called on the PA to "stop its violations against male and female journalists and to release them immediately."
It is a sad truth that, three decades after the inception of the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinians still do not have a free and independent media.
It is another sad truth that Palestinian journalists are being arrested and intimidated by PA security forces for the crime of carrying out their duties. Palestinians who want to practice real journalism are forced to seek work with Israeli and foreign media, where they enjoy far more freedom than in their own media outlets.
An even sadder truth is that most international human rights organizations care nothing about the abuse perpetrated against Palestinian journalists by their own leaders.
Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!
Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.
Jews Mock Palestinian Refugees By Living In Huts This Week
by Ali Latdam, Quds News Network
Ramallah, October 5 - The Zionist atrocities continue apace as the world sits silent, this time amid a spate of Talmudic rituals that take the plight of those driven from their homes during the Nakba and make fun of it: the usurpers, in an annual ritual, spend seven days residing in temporary structures instead of regular homes - a direct affront to the millions of stateless Palestinians still waiting for resolution of their situation.
Apologists for the rapist colonialist imperialist pig Zionists will no doubt attempt to claim that the ritual precedes the Nakba - as if anything Zionist could precede the Nakba! The Nakba is the beginning of it all. Nothing calamitous happened before the Nakba! Before the Nakba, Palestine was forever tranquil, fertile, and Islamic, all the way back into time. Any argument otherwise is an attempt to undermine Palestinian indigeneity, an axiom of ultimate truth.
They will also contend that the "Sukkot" festival has nothing to do with mocking Palestinian refugees, but an honest look at the sources demonstrates otherwise: they "commemorate" when they "left Egypt" and "resided in huts" on the way to "Canaan" - itself proof that they are outsiders, and we are the indigenous Canaanites, whom they want to displace and render homeless.
In case that approach of ours falls flat, remember that we, not they, have always lived here, and we are the original Jews, not those Khazar imposters. Yes, that contradicts the above paragraph, but so what? No one has cared yet. The New York Times, Amnesty International, the United Nations - whichever approach undergirds Palestinian virtue and victimhood while depicting Jewish sovereignty as rapacious genocide, they will endorse. We need not worry about the consistency of our arguments.
And those plants they wave during the festival - who can deny that the date palm frond represents the sword with which they seek to displace us? The citron - its yellow hue showing the cowardly Zionist mentality. The myrtle sprig - its leaves resembling eyes that covet Palestinian land. And the willow bush, mouth-shaped to represent the lies of Jewish historic rights to Palestine. Waved all about, mocking the truth - we know what those Talmudic rituals represent, no matter how many times the enemy points out that no such symbolism appears in the Talmud. We know. We've always known. We know better than the Jews who the Jews are and what the Jews want!
For if we allow that Jews can decide what Jews want and what Jewish rituals represent, that opens the door to Jews deciding on their own security and sovereignty, a notion that conflicts with the axiom of Palestinian Islamic supremacy.
But once you begin with the unquestionable premise of Palestinian virtue and Zionist perfidy, the choices are obvious.
Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!
Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.
There is much speculation about the Biden Administration’s brokering of Saudi-Israeli normalization, and for good reason. President Biden has made it clear that he would like to achieve this. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks of his hopes for it. And Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman has publicly said that it is getting closer.
Make no mistake, Saudi normalization with Israel would represent a geopolitical transformation in the Middle East and beyond, especially because of what the Saudis and Americans would be committing to each other – commitments that would bind Saudi security to our own, while also setting boundaries to the Saudi-Chinese relationship.
The Saudi-Chinese commercial relationship will remain significant but would be limited where it crosses into sensitive security areas – not surprisingly in the context of the security relationship that the Saudis want formalized with the United States.
For Israel, normalization with Saudi Arabia has enormous implications for normalizing Israel’s relationship with Muslim-majority countries in the region and internationally. After all, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques would be making peace with Israel.
The putative leader of Sunni Muslims, who make up close to 85% of all Muslims, would be reconciling with Israel, the state of the Jewish people.
It is hard to exaggerate the meaning of that in terms of greatly reducing the religious nature of the historic conflict between Arabs and Jews.
It is also hard to exaggerate the significance of such a breakthrough for what it is likely to do for building coalitions between those countries in the region that are seeking to build modern, resilient societies.
Their prospects for dealing with climate change, pandemics, and disruptive technologies will improve – unlike those failed or failing states that will not manage to cope with increasing food, water, and health security challenges and will offer their people only hopelessness because “resistance” remains their raison d’etre.
Palestinian impact on normalization
So, such a breakthrough is likely to be of enormous significance. Of course, it will not simply happen.
It is being brokered by the Biden administration, and its bilateral parts – defense treaty, access to weapons and nuclear partnership – do have implications for Israel and need to be part of the US-Israel bilateral discussion.
But the Saudis have one other condition for normalizing: Steps must be taken for the benefit of the Palestinians. From the Saudi perspective, when they do this deal, they want to show that others, like Indonesia and Malaysia, will follow their lead.
For that to happen, the Saudis believe, they cannot settle for merely preventing a negative (e.g. no Israeli annexation), like the UAE did. Instead, they must be able to point to the achievement of something positive and meaningful for the Palestinians.
Two pro-Israel NGOs are defending Israel against the United Nation’s latest attack as the world body’s International Court of Justice considers a case which could have serious ramifications for the Jewish state, the groups say.
U.K. Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) and the European Leadership Network (ELNET) submitted a 40-page memorandum to the court on Sept. 29 challenging the “false allegations” made against Israel.
UKLFI CEO Jonathan Turner, the memorandum’s main author, told JNS, “An adverse outcome will encourage violence by Palestinian groups and individuals. It will promote terrorism and it will also promote boycotts, divestment and sanctions targeting Israel.”
A U.N. General Assembly resolution, passed by 87-26 on Dec. 30, 2022, asked the court to issue an advisory opinion on the “legal consequences” of Israel’s “ongoing violation” of “the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination” and “prolonged occupation, settlement and annexation of the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967.”
It also asked the court to judge alleged actions Israel took to alter “the demographic composition, character and status of the Holy City of Jerusalem.”
Israeli officials sharply criticized the resolution at the time, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calling it “disgraceful…The Jewish people is not occupying its land and is not occupying its eternal capital Jerusalem. No U.N. resolution can distort this historical truth.”
The International Court of Justice is one of the six principal organs of the United Nations and is meant to settle disputes between states. Its advisory opinions are often used as sources of international law.
The U.N.’s Palestinian delegation and its supporters want the ICJ to issue a verdict that Israel is occupying Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, areas captured in the 1967 Six-Day War, (even though it left the Gaza Strip in 2005), Turner said, adding, “The verdict won’t be legally binding, but a lot of people will regard it as authoritative and treat as if it were an accurate statement of the law. It will be quite difficult to displace it in anything but the most friendly tribunals.”
The Palestinian Arabs have created a narrative based on a falsehood: that they are the indigenous people of "Palestine." One of the many proofs of this is the olive tree. Olive trees play a major role in Palestinian Arab society and culture. They are a constant presence near any Palestinian Arab home. Thus, the "Palestinian olive tree litmus test" can be used to accurately assess how long a Palestinian Arab has been living in their home or on the plot of land they claim has been in their possession for hundreds of years.
Olive trees are very long-lived. In the Galilee, there are olive trees that are over 1,000 years old. Yet botanists and biologists have told me that the vast majority, if not all, of the olive trees in Judea and Samaria are less than 80-90 years old. If the Palestinian Arabs have populated Judea and Samaria for centuries, why is this the case?
The answer is that, prior to 1948, the vast majority of Arabs in Palestine were foreign workers who migrated to the area seeking employment. They were motivated by the economic opportunities presented by Zionist development of the land.
Seven artworks from the collection of Austrian Jewish cabaret performer Fritz Grünbaum, who died in the Dachau concentration camp, were returned late last month to Grünbaum’s heirs.
The Manhattan district attorney, which arranged the return, believed that the works, by 19th-century Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele, were improperly housed in U.S. museum collections, after having been looted by the Nazis.
...The museums and galleries agreed to release the works “after they were presented with evidence that they were stolen by the Nazis,” according to the Manhattan district attorney.
Not all of the museums involved have returned the artwork in question. Two insist that their acquisition of the pieces is legal and said as much in response to inquiries by JNS. A third museum did not respond.
That would be the Allen Museum at Oberlin College, which currently has possession of Girl with Black Hair by Egon Schiele.
One legal basis for returning the artwork is the Holocaust Expropriated Recovery Act, which eases the restriction on the statute of limitations that exists on recovering pieces of art stolen during WWII.
Another legal basis in this case undercuts the apparent power of attorney that Grünbaum's wife had over the artwork. In a 2019 decision in this ongoing case
The higher court agreed that Mr. Grünbaum had not voluntarily parted with his collection, despite signed documents, including a power of attorney supposedly given to his wife, and that essentially the Nazis had stolen it from him before his imprisonment. “We reject the notion that a person who signs a power of attorney in a death camp can be said to have executed the document voluntarily,” the judges wrote. [emphasis added]
Yet Oberlin College continues to argue it has the legal right to Girl with Black Hair.
There is precedent for Oberlin College returning items wrongfully (but not necessarily illegally) acquired. In 2002, Oberlin College returned a twined root bag that had been taken from the Nez Perce tribe a century before, and even held a symposium celebrating the return:
On April 27, 2002, the Oberlin College Department of Anthropology returned to the Nez Perce Tribe a twined root bag that had been lost in their ethnographic collections for over a hundred years. This bag was collected by Henry Harmon Spalding, missionary to the Nez Perce, in the 1840’s, and is part of the Spalding-Allen Collection that is on display at the Nez Perce National Historic Park in Spalding, Idaho. The symposium consisted of lectures on the history of the collection and the development of flat twined weaving in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as panel discussions on museum collections and repatriation of Native American cultural patrimony. [emphasis added]
Why voluntarily return the bag, which was not illegally acquired, to the Nez Perce yet insist on holding on to artwork requested by the heirs of a man murdered by the Nazis?
William A. Jacobson of Legal Insurrection points out that it could be that behind the scenes Oberlin College could be preparing to return the work to the heirs -- but why allow the issue to turn into what is becoming a public relations nightmare?
In addition to vicious antisemitic posts about Jewish control of the world, Karega also claimed that Jews were responsible for 9/11, the Charlie Hebdo attacks and ISIS. In reaction to the resulting uproar, the college president, Marvin Krislov, blandly responded, that "Oberlin College respects the rights of its faculty, students, staff and alumni to express their personal views." Alan Dershowitz pointed out that the college would not have resorted to such boilerplate if such hateful remarks had targeted Blacks, Muslims or gays.
Karega was eventually fired.
But what stands out in connection to Oberlin College's current failure to return artwork stolen by the Nazis during the Holocaust is the apparent attitude toward the Holocaust on campus.
In an op-ed in The Washington Post in 2016, David Bernstein wrote The Holocaust as ‘white on white crime’ and other signs of intellectual decayIn it, Bernstein described a Facebook post by an Oberlin alumna about her experience there. Her post described how some of her experiences showed how the view of Jews as "white" and "privileged" extended to the Holocaust as well. She wrote about
o "The multiple times the Holocaust was referred to as “white on white crime” by my POC peers and hip white Jewish peers..."
o "That time a Jewish person made a comment on fb saying “the only reason people care about the Holocaust is because it happened to white people” and got tons of likes from white and POC friends alike..."
o "When I overheard someone say “Islamophobia is like the anti-Semitism of our time” as if anti semitism is over/ started and ended with the Holocaust/ has been replaced by anti-muslim racism"
o "How inevitably during discussions about the establishment of Israel, people would say “the Jews decided to make Palestinians suffer for the crimes the Germans committed against them” while failing to understand that Zionism is way older than the Holocaust as is the need and the yearning for a Jewish homeland."
o "Generally antisemitic ideas floating around such as Jews are milking the Holocaust for their own gain// everything is as bad as the Holocaust except for the actual Holocaust which wasnt as bad as people say it was// Jews only care about themselves"
Oberlin president Marvin Krislov has boasted about:
our community's shared values. They set Oberlin apart from other institutions of higher education. When confronted by bias, our community turned our shared values into meaningful, positive action.
That is exactly what Oberlin did when it returned that bag to the Nez Perce Tribe.
And that is exactly what Oberlin has the opportunity to do now. What is it waiting for?
Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!
Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.
Ahmad Salama is a Jordanian political journalist who has worked as an adviser to Jordanian Prince Hassan and who currently is an advisor to Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa of Bahrain.
When I first saw the occupation soldiers entering Biddya [a west Bank village] in 1967... I am always worried and afraid for Amman, so I do not write a about this matter, for fear of the Jews.
We were able to recognize, at one time, that Jewish thought has no limits in its ambition. ...We are talking about people who do not have a common history [with each other] and they live on a single idea: Power.
The Jew has sought throughout history to tame the Palestinian to accept the Jew’s superiority over him, and people must be aware of the seriousness of the situation. We are facing a project that has not yet been completed, and from here I fear for Amman.
In one of his essays, he takes pains to say that he specifically does not refer to "Zionists" or "Hebrews" in his writings, but deliberately talks about Jews because he wants to be crystal clear as to what he is referring to when he says Jew - all Jews, even anti-Zionists, even converts. He also claimed that Jews are inflicting a "Holocaust" on Palestinians, and compared Israel keeping the bodies of dead terrorists in refrigerators in a morgue to Nazis burning Jewish bodies.
This is an advisor to a Bahraini prince.
Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!
Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.
On Wednesday evening, the Zionist occupation forces transformed the city of Jerusalem into a military barracks, coinciding with the launch of settler marches to celebrate "Sukkot," which is organized annually by extremist religious groups in the occupied city of Jerusalem in a provocative way for the Palestinian citizens of the land.
We see similar language all the time when Arab media discusses Jews visiting the Temple Mount "under the protection of heavily armed Israeli police."
And why does Israel have to take such extreme measures to protect their citizens?
Because Palestinian terror leaders have been threatening every Jew in Jerusalem with "armed resistance"!
Let's zoom out a little more:
During Oslo, the PLO signed agreements that Jews would have free access to their holy places.
Then, in 2000, they stopped all Jews from going to the Temple Mount, breaking their agreement.
A few years later, Israel decided that Jews actually have religious rights on their holiest spot, and allowed Jews to visit with heavy protection.
Similarly, Joseph's Tomb in Nablus should have been freely open to Jews under Oslo, and visitors should be protected by Palestinian police. Instead, Israel is forced to protect pilgrims using armored buses and lots of soldiers.
And the Palestinians complain about how heavy the security presence is.
A little context explains a lot.
Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!
Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.
This is Part 10 of a 10-part series exposing the underreported joint European and Palestinian program to bypass international law and establish a de facto Palestinian state on Israeli land.
The international community continues to conspire against the reality of Israel’s existence by testing the limits of its sovereignty and threatening the Jewish right to self-determination.
Palestinian-Arab society — among the most anti-Semitic in the world (long before Jewish settlements were part of the picture) — in which government-run television, media, textbooks and mosques encourage violence against Jews, praise Hitler, characterize Jews as “apes and pigs,” and deny the Holocaust, use Jewish “settlements” as a smokescreen to distract from the real agenda based on a single belief held for centuries: Jews do not belong.
Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, who can hardly be accused of being pro-Israel, understood this upon visiting the region in 2000, writing, “To think that the Palestinians are only enraged about settlements is also fatuous nonsense. Talk to the 15-year-olds. Their grievance is not just with Israeli settlements, but with Israel. Most Palestinians simply do not accept that the Jews have any authentic right to be here.”
The progressive international public has fervently bought into the red herring of Jewish settlements while hypocritically remaining silent with regard to settlement activity in Western Sahara, Northern Cyprus, Ceuta and Melilla, Tibet, and the Falkland Islands.
Talking heads are infatuated with reporting on Jewish population growth, but consistently fail to differentiate between natural growth through births and marriages and new housing through active expansion. And in conflating these two, they are overlooking that, in point of fact, Jewish settlement activity has actually been decreasing. All new construction approvals in the Jewish sector are within existing municipal lines, and no territorial expansion to speak of has been approved for Jewish settlement in decades.
The establishment media and cultural apparatus conveniently ignore the history of these Jewish settlers, many of whom are indigenous to the region but whose parents or grandparents were forcibly expelled in 1948 when Jordan seized power.
Instead of acknowledging them as descendants of refugees merely returning home, pundits, politicians and protesters self-righteously invoke the Fourth Geneva Convention, disregarding its lack of application to Israeli settlers, who have never been coerced into moving or been forcibly relocated to the West Bank.
A major Scandinavian book fair is facing accusations of “structural antisemitism” for its 2023 program, which focused on Jewish culture, but — according to some — sidelined Israel and Zionism.
The incident sparked renewed debate in the country on the definition of antisemitism, and the place of Israel in Jewish identity around the world.
The Gothenburg Book Fair 2023, the largest cultural event in Scandinavia with over 80,000 attendees each year, ran from last Thursday through Sunday in Sweden’s second-largest city. The program was organized in partnership with Judisk kultur i Sverige, or Jewish Culture in Sweden, a leading cultural institution in the country.
Jewish culture was a main theme of the event, with the official program featuring extensive coverage of the Jewish Diaspora, the Holocaust, antisemitism and Yiddish culture.
But Israel’s ambassador to Sweden, Ziv Nevo Kulman, alleged that the Jewish state was systematically excluded from the event.
“When we heard about the theme, we thought ‘How nice,'” Nevo Kulman told The Times of Israel. “There will be a lot of countries there, and it could be a nice way to introduce many Israelis to them.”
Nevo Kulman said that the organizers rejected multiple proposals from the embassy regarding seminars, effectively boycotting the Jewish state.
“They hinted to us, and it was told to us through indirect channels, that they don’t want propaganda from Israel’s government at the fair. That is a form of antisemitism,” Nevo Kulman charged.
“They work with many embassies of many Western countries, but they don’t want any connection with us.”
Jewish communal leaders in the Netherlands are facing tough questions after inviting to the country’s annual Kristallnacht commemoration a government minister who sent millions of euros to a terror-linked Palestinian nonprofit.
Dutch Finance Minister Sigrid Kaag, who previously served as the European country’s minister for foreign affairs and development cooperation, admitted to parliament in 2020 that her ministry had paid part of the salaries of two terrorists involved in the murder of an Israeli teenager.
Rina Shnerb, 17, was killed, and her father and brother seriously wounded, in an August 2019 bombing near the Samaria community of Dolev.
The terrorists implicated in the attack, Samer Arbid and Abdul Razeq Farraj, were employed by the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC), which has close ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terror group.
Ignoring multiple warnings from Israeli watchdog groups, Kaag, who is married to Anis al-Qaq, a former Palestinian Authority deputy minister and PLO ambassador, continued to support the UAWC, contributing some 11.7 million euros (nearly $12.3 million) between 2017 and 2020.
Adding insult to injury, Kaag was caught in a lie when she claimed in an interview that the Dutch ambassador had visited the mourning family. In fact, the ambassador never contacted the Shnerbs, and while it eventually terminated its relationship with the UAWC, The Hague has yet to issue an official apology.
"Battle Scene," Folio from a Zafarnama (Book of Victories) of Sharaf al-Din 'Ali Yazdi
Jews aren’t really Jews, according to PA President Mahmoud
Abbas, but Khazars, a nomadic Turkic people. These “Khazar Jews” Abbas claims,
have no connection to the Land of Israel, just an invented history and a false
narrative of religious rights to the Land of Israel. This, of course, is an
inversion of the truth. In reality, it is the “Palestinians” who are an
invented people with an invented history, and an invented religious right to Jewish
territory. By now there is a large body of definitive proof that the Jews are
not descended from the Khazars, but those who hate Israel are not interested in
either proof or truth.
The purpose of the Khazar myth is to delegitimize all Jewish
claims to Israeli territory while spreading the lie that the land in question
belongs to others. It’s an if/then proposition. If Jews are Khazars, they have
no legitimate claims to Jewish land, which makes them thieves. Except that the Jews
are not Khazars. They are Jews. And for thousands of years, Jews have been overwhelmingly
endogamous—they marry each other. Abbas says otherwise, because it serves his
interests, the main interest being taking land away from the Jews.
Abbas stands truth on its head. The land, he asserts, doesn’t
belong to those Khazar Jews, but to his constituents—if you can call them that,
when there hasn’t been an election since Abbas assumed office in 2005. Muwaffaq Matar, Fatah Revolutionary
Council member and regular columnist for official PA daily Al-Hayat
Al-Jadida, reported on remarks made by Abbas to “various Palestinian intellectuals,”
in a 2021 meeting (emphasis added):
[At the meeting he held, PA] President [Mahmoud Abbas] debunked the Zionist fairy tale, which some call the Jewish Israeli narrative…
The president spoke about the 9th century pagan Tatar-Khazar kingdom, which was established in the Caspian Sea area. It underwent attacks and suffered from wars, and therefore its king sought advice to be saved from this situation. His friend, a Jewish man, advised him to convert. The kingdom followed in his footsteps, and it also converted. It remained like this until the 11th century when the kingdom finally collapsed, and [its residents] scattered in neighboring states. These are the Ashkenazis, who were not originally Jews but rather converted.
But this is a lie, as borne out by science. Jews are endogamous:
they marry each other (or did until modern times). A study on Ashkenazi hereditary diseases published in
2022, speaks of historically endogamous marriage practices in Judaism in
general, and how marrying within the tribe impacted Ashkenazi Jewry in
particular:
Judaism is a shared religious and cultural identity, with
endogamous marriage practices and distinctive diasporic histories of
communities worldwide, particularly a Levantine origin and complex history of
migrations over the last ∼2.5 millennia. Present-day
Ashkenazim are descendants of medieval Jewish populations with histories
primarily in northern and eastern Europe. As a result, they carry distinctive
ancestries, and Jewish and non-Jewish medieval individuals living in the same
regions would likely show characteristic patterns of genetic variation.
Hereditary disorders in Ashkenazi Jewish populations have
been the focus of considerable medical research, with genetic screening
now commonplace to mitigate risks. Their prevalence is generally attributed to
strong genetic drift during Ashkenazi population bottlenecks, coupled with
high endogamy, although other processes such as heterozygote advantage
have been proposed.
Candidate population bottlenecks include the phase of
dispersion following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, the
formation of Ashkenazi communities in northern Europe during the medieval
period, antisemitic persecution arising from the Crusades, unfounded reprisals
for the Black Death, and the movement from western and central Europe to
eastern Europe that preceded rapid population growth from the 15th to 18th
centuries.
Representation of a massacre of the Jews in 1349 Antiquitates Flandriae (Royal Library of Belgium manuscript, 1376/77)
As we see, the Jews are no Khazars, they married within; but
no matter, because Abbas has a useful idiot Jew to lend him credibility. More
from the Muwaffaq Matar report:
As proof, the president brought the book ‘The Thirteenth
Tribe: The Khazar Empire [and its Heritage]’ by Jewish-Hungarian author and
historian Arthur Koestler.
The Jews never were a people and they never will be. The
Zionist organization will continue to invent its own history and transpose
it into the books of human knowledge, and even into the holy books, in all
languages. This is in order to achieve the goal of mobilizing and gathering
enough human ammunition [i.e., immigrants] to carry out missions of
occupation and settlement, which the colonialist world powers and empires
imposed on it.
What of this so-called proof Abbas brings from “Jewish-Hungarian” author and historian Arthur Koestler? According to Yiddish scholar and expert on Ashkenazi surnames Alexander Beider, there is none. Beider describes the evolution of the unfounded Khazar theory in Ashkenazi Jews Are Not Khazars. Here’s The Proof (emphasis added):
Since the late 19th century, the so-called “Khazarian theory” has promoted the idea that a bulk of Ashkenazic Jews living in Eastern Europe descended from medieval Khazars, a semi-nomadic Turkic people who founded a powerful polyethnic state in the Caucasus and north to the Caspian, Azov and Black seas. The theory received a recent boost with the 1976 publication of “The Thirteenth Tribe,” a book by Arthur Koestler. Most recently, the Khazarian hypothesis has been promoted by authors like the Tel Aviv University professor of history Shlomo Sand and Tel Aviv University professor of linguistics Paul Wexler, as well the geneticist Eran Elhaik.
Despite this institutional backing, the theory is absolutely without evidence. As any historian will tell you, generations of Jews, like generations of any people, leave historical traces behind them. These traces come in multiple forms. For starters, people leave behind them historical documents and archaeological data. Predictably, archaeologic evidence about the widespread existence of Jews in Khazaria is almost nonexistent. While a series of independent sources does testify to the existence in the 10th century of Jews in the Kingdom of Khazaria, and while some of these sources also indicate that the ruling elite of Khazaria embraced Judaism, the Khazarian state was destroyed by Russians during the 960s. In other words, we can be confident that Judaism was not particularly widespread in that kingdom.
A later report by Matar on the meeting between Abbas and the so-called “Palestinian intellectuals” details the PA president’s sickening assertions of a connection between Nazism and Zionism. Hitler’s “Jewish question,” according to Abbas, arose from the failure of the “Khazar Jews” to properly integrate into European society:
We must focus on what the president said regarding the [Jewish] question or ‘the Jewish problem,’ because its cause is that the Jews of the Khazar kingdom did not integrate in the European societies.
A separate report on the same meeting, this time written by Muhammad Al-Masri, appeared in Ma’an, an independent Palestinian news agency, on Dec. 25, 2021:
[PA] President Mahmoud Abbas presented those present
with a concise historical survey, such that dealt intensively with the
injustice caused to the Palestinians when the world powers – and foremost among
them the US and Britain – agreed to the theft of the homeland and land and to
granting them as a gift to the Zionist movement, which is an inseparable part
of the international colonialist movement.
President Mahmoud Abbas was clear
when he said that inflaming the dreams of the Jews and realizing these dreams
within a political entity was not the fruit of the efforts of the Jews
themselves, but rather colonialist-theological plans and visions of colonialist
world powers, as the modern-day Jews are mostly of Tatar origin.They
are descendants of dynasties that established a kingdom in the 9th century
called ‘the Khazar kingdom.’ In this statement, it appears that President
Mahmoud Abbas sought to say that the colonialist world powers used the Jews in
order to execute the great colonialist plan – dismantling the Ottoman Empire
and afterwards dismantling the Arab nation.
According to Ehud
Yaari, this too is a lot of hooey (emphasis added):
It should be noted that Abbas has his facts about the Khazar
empire wrong: the Khazars were not Tatars—rather they were a Turkic
people—and [the conversion of the royal dynasty and aristocracy as reported by
medieval sources] took place, according to most historians, sometime
between 740 and 865 CE. His Prime Minister, Muhammad Shtayeh, also had his
dates wrong when declaring on June 26, 2021: “Present day Jews are Khazar Jews,
who converted to Judaism in the 6th century.” Regardless of the historical
inaccuracies about the Khazar dynasty itself, both statements are instead the
product of a more recent and dangerous historical trend, reviving the case
offered by the late Syrian president, Hafez al-Assad, against the justification
of a Jewish homeland. These assertions follow in the vein of numerous Arab
writers who have produced a number of volumes over the past five decades
identifying the Ashkenazi communities as refugees from the destruction of the
Khazar Qaganate by Prince Svyatoslav of Kiev c.965 CE.
Promoting this narrative has not just been the effort of
Palestinian and Syrian politicians; many Egyptian, Saudi, and Lebanese
intellectuals have also been drawn to a narrative that deprives contemporary
Jews of pre-medieval Jewish lineage and history connecting them back to the
land. Books dealing with the subject are still on sale all over the region and
these theories are widely available across the internet.
This approach is deeply rooted in a widely popular theme of
Soviet anti-Semitism, prevalent in many of the institutions where a number of
Arab intellectuals studied. In a state where history became subservient to the
reigning ideology, Soviet historians depicted the conversion of the Khazars
as a humiliation of the Russians, poisoning their values and beliefs and sowing
corruption in society. In a famous article published in Pravda (1951) under the
pseudonym “Ivanov”—posited to be Stalin himself—an argument was put forth that
it would be “shameful” to accept that a Jewish empire governed the vast area between
the Caspian and the Black Seas before the appearance of the early Russian
princes. This became the official interpretation of the Khazars, mixing
dangerously with contemporary accusations of a “Jewish nationalistic plot.”
Abbas would have acquainted himself with these concepts while writing his
Holocaust-denying Ph.D in Moscow twenty years later.
Abbas was indeed well acquainted with these concepts. In May 2018, Abbas gave a speech to the
Palestinian National Council, the legislative body of the PA, in which he claimed
that the nonsensical Khazar theory is backed by Jewish sources:
The sons of Jacob were 12. Where did you bring 13 from? They invented
it. Where? In the Khazar Kingdom. When? In the 9th century. It was an
irreligious kingdom. Afterwards it became a Jewish kingdom. The emperor
converted to Judaism and therefore [the kingdom] converted to Judaism.
Afterwards it broke apart, and all its residents migrated to Europe, and these
are the Ashkenazi Jews.The Ashkenazi
Jews are not Semites, and they have no connection to Semitism or Abraham,
Jacob, or others. It was a Tatar-Turkic state...
...Now we are talking about the Jewish homeland. They are talking
about longing for Zion and that's why they are going [there] and so forth. I
say - not me, rather history says that these words are baseless.
Employing a variety of standard techniques for the analysis
of population-genetic structure, we found that Ashkenazi Jews share the
greatest genetic ancestry with other Jewish populations and, among non-Jewish
populations, with groups from Europe and the Middle East. No particular
similarity of Ashkenazi Jews to populations from the Caucasus is evident,
particularly populations that most closely represent the Khazar region.
Thus, analysis of Ashkenazi Jews together with a large sample from the region
of the Khazar Khaganate corroborates the earlier results that Ashkenazi Jews
derive their ancestry primarily from populations of the Middle East and Europe,
that they possess considerable shared ancestry with other Jewish populations,
and that there is no indication of a significant genetic contribution either
from within or from north of the Caucasus region.
And still, as late as August
24, 2023, Abbas was still spouting his wildly embroidered Khazar lies. MEMRI
shared these excerpts:
The truth that we should clarify to the
world is that European Jews are not Semites. They have nothing to do with
Semitism. . .The story began in 900 CE, in the Khazar Kingdom on the
Caspian Sea. It was a Tatar kingdom that converted to Judaism. . . [In the 11th century], this empire collapsed, and all its
population left to the north and to the west. They left for Russia and Western
and Eastern Europe. They spread there, and they are the forefathers of
Ashkenazi Jews. So when we hear them talk about Semitism and antisemitism – the
Ashkenazi Jews, at least, are not Semites.
Everybody knows that during World War I, Hitler was a
sergeant. He said he fought the Jews because they were dealing with usury and
money. In his view, they were engaged in sabotage, and this is why he hated
them. We just want to make this point clear. This was not about Semitism and
antisemitism.
As for the eastern Jews, they are Semites, because all of
them originated in the Arabian Peninsula and they traveled to Al-Andalus, and
then came back. We are familiar with this history.
Actually, they are familiar not with history but with lies. Since
2006, the world has known that two fifths of
Ashkenazi Jews are descended from four women. Judy Siegel-Itzkovich reported
on the discovery by a team of Israeli geneticists:
The team, which studied mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) passed on solely by mothers
to their children, found evidence of shared maternal ancestry of Ashkenazi and
non–Ashkenazi Jews, a finding showing a shared ancestral pool that is
consistent with previous studies that were based on the Y chromosome. This
evidence pointed to a similar pattern of shared paternal ancestry of Jewish
populations around the world originating in the Middle East. They concluded
that the four founding types of mtDNA—likely to be of Middle Eastern
origin—underwent a major overall expansion in Europe over the last thousand
years.
The “four founding mothers,” [Professor Skorecki] added,
“are from lineages that originate long before the launching of the Jewish
people some 3400 years ago. They probably came from a large Middle Eastern gene
pool.
“As consistent with the Bible, in which the founding Jews
were Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and his sons, and the matriarchs were ‘imported’
from non–Jewish peoples and then converted, the haplotypes of contemporary
Jewish men are much less varied.”
Is there any truth to the idea that the Khazars converted to
Judaism? According to Prof. Shaul
Stampfer, no. The research simply does not support this idea:
Did the Khazars convert to Judaism? The view that some or all
Khazars, a central Asian people, became Jews during the ninth or tenth century
is widely accepted. But following an exhaustive analysis of the evidence,
Hebrew University of Jerusalem researcher Prof. Shaul Stampfer has concluded
that such a conversion, “while a splendid story,” never took place. . .
From roughly the seventh to tenth centuries, the Khazars ruled an
empire spanning the steppes between the Caspian and Black Seas. Not much is
known about Khazar culture and society: they did not leave a literary heritage
and the archaeological finds have been meager. The Khazar Empire was overrun by
Svyatoslav of Kiev around the year 969, and little was heard from the Khazars
after. Yet a widely held belief that the Khazars or their leaders at some point
converted to Judaism persists.
Reports about the Jewishness of the Khazars first appeared in
Muslim works in the late ninth century and in two Hebrew accounts in the tenth
century. The story reached a wider audience when the Jewish thinker and poet Yehudah
Halevi used it as a frame for his book The Kuzari. Little attention was given
to the issue in subsequent centuries, but a key collection of Hebrew sources on
the Khazars appeared in 1932 followed by a little-known six-volume history of
the Khazars written by the Ukrainian scholar Ahatanhel Krymskyi. Henri Gregoire
published skeptical critiques of the sources, but in 1954 Douglas Morton Dunlop
brought the topic into the mainstream of accepted historical scholarship with
The History of the Jewish Khazars. Arthur Koestler’s best-selling The
Thirteenth Tribe (1976) brought the tale to the attention of wider Western
audiences, arguing that East European Ashkenazi Jewry was largely of Khazar
origin. Many studies have followed, and the story has also garnered
considerable non-academic attention; for example, Shlomo Sand’s 2009
bestseller, The Invention of the Jewish People, advanced the thesis that the
Khazars became Jews and much of East European Jewry was descended from the
Khazars. But despite all the interest, there was no systematic critique of
the evidence for the conversion claim other than a stimulating but very brief
and limited paper by Moshe Gil of Tel Aviv University.
Professor Shaul Stampfer
Stampfer notes that scholars who have contributed to the subject
based their arguments on a limited corpus of textual and numismatic evidence.
Physical evidence is lacking: archaeologists excavating in Khazar lands have
found almost no artifacts or grave stones displaying distinctly Jewish symbols.
He
also reviews various key pieces of evidence that have been cited in relation to
the conversion story, including historical and geographical accounts, as well
as documentary evidence. Among the key artifacts are an apparent exchange of
letters between the Spanish Jewish leader Hasdai ibn Shaprut and Joseph, king
of the Khazars; an apparent historical account of the Khazars, often called the
Cambridge Document or the Schechter Document; various descriptions by
historians writing in Arabic; and many others.
Taken together, Stampfer says, these sources offer a cacophony of
distortions, contradictions, vested interests, and anomalies in some areas, and
nothing but silence in others. A careful examination of the sources shows
that some are falsely attributed to their alleged authors, and others are of
questionable reliability and not convincing.Many of the most reliable
contemporary texts, such as the detailed report of Sallam the Interpreter, who
was sent by Caliph al-Wathiq in 842 to search for the mythical Alexander’s
wall; and a letter of the patriarch of Constantinople, Nicholas, written around
914 that mentions the Khazars, say nothing about their conversion.
Citing the lack of any reliable source for the conversion story,
and the lack of credible explanations for sources that suggest otherwise or are
inexplicably silent, Stampfer concludes that the simplest and most
convincing answer is that the Khazar conversion is a legend with no factual
basis. There never was a conversion of a Khazar king or of the Khazar elite, he
says.
Years of research went into this paper, and Stampfer ruefully
noted that "Most of my research until now has been to discover and clarify
what happened in the past. I had no idea how difficult and challenging it
would be to prove that something did not happen."
In terms of its historical implications, Stampfer says the lack of
a credible basis for the conversion story means that many pages of Jewish,
Russian and Khazar history have to be rewritten. If there never was a
conversion, issues such as Jewish influence on early Russia and ethnic contact
must be reconsidered.
Stampfer describes the persistence of the Khazar conversion legend
as a fascinating application of Thomas Kuhn’s thesis on scientific revolution
to historical research. Kuhn points out the reluctance of researchers to
abandon familiar paradigms even in the face of anomalies, instead coming up
with explanations that, though contrived, do not require abandoning familiar
thought structures. It is only when “too many” anomalies accumulate that it is
possible to develop a totally different paradigm—such as a claim that the
Khazar conversion never took place.
Stampfer concludes, "We must admit that sober studies by
historians do not always make for great reading, and that the story of a Khazar
king who became a pious and believing Jew was a splendid story.” However, in his opinion, "There are
many reasons why it is useful and necessary to distinguish between fact and
fiction – and this is one more such case."
Mahmoud Abbas lies like a rug and he repeats the same lies over
and over again as if they were fact. His constituents and Jew-haters at large already
know the drill. Abbas says it, and the Jew-hating echo chamber will happily repeat
the false narrative until it takes on a life of its own. Mark Twain said that “A
lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its
shoes.”
Lies spread like wildfire; they have power. We see it with Mahmoud
Abbas and the Khazar origin story. The more Abbas repeats his lies about Jewish
lineage, the less anyone cares to hear the truth. The truth simply no longer
matters; it has been rendered irrelevant.
Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!
Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.
Last week, Russia’s announcement that it is seeking a seat on the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) stirred some outrage in the West. To anyone familiar with that organization—where such countries as China, Cuba, and Qatar join in libeling and condemning Israel while diverting attention from their own human-rights abuses—it will be no surprise if Moscow’s bid succeeds. And this sort of corruption is endemic to the United Nations as whole. The UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), for instance, recently made the ancient city of Jericho a “world heritage site” with a statement that ignored any ties to Jewish history.
As Richard Goldberg and Enia Krivine point out, the U.S. had left both the UNHRC and UNESCO because of such behavior. The Biden administration has rejoined, on the grounds that “engagement” is the only way to obtain reform—with little success:
The U.S. rejoined [UNESCO] and began paying down more than $600 million in arrears in July, only to be sucker-punched with another anti-Semitic act as the president arrived in New York last week. The administration had demanded the legal ability to rejoin UNESCO, claiming it necessary to counter China within the UN system. But . . . the Biden administration’s track record of countering China at the UN is abysmal.
The administration didn’t even try to challenge the WHO’s Beijing-influenced director-general despite China’s continued cover-up of COVID-19’s origins. A U.S. attempt to hold China accountable inside the Human Rights Council for its genocide in Xinjiang failed. And China still works with Russia to stymie Washington in the Security Council. The goal of countering China within the UN system is noble. Believing that it can be achieved by abandoning U.S. leverage is woefully misguided.
Countering China, however, is not the real reason the U.S. has rejoined a UN organization that continues to spew anti-Semitism. The real reason is the Biden administration’s unshakable ideological belief in the utility of UN engagement for engagement’s sake—the notion that swimming against anti-American currents in a sea of dictators will produce positive results for U.S. national security. The overwhelming evidence suggests the opposite is true.
Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan had pointed remarks for the world body after being detained by its security personnel, telling Fox News Digital that antisemitism is "very prevalent" within the halls of the U.N.
"The U.N. is a building, and it's fair to say that in this building, antisemitism sadly is very prevalent," Erdan said during an interview with Fox News Digital. "There are many antisemitic countries like Iran who want to annihilate the one and only Jewish state, and we don't hear any condemnation against Iran for saying it."
Erdan's comments come after U.N. security personnel detained the Israeli ambassador after he left the General Assembly Hall to protest a speech by Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi.
During his protest of the speech, Erdan held up a picture of Mahsa Amini, the Iranian woman who sparked protests across the country last year after she was killed while in the custody of police for not wearing the proper head covering in public, with a caption of Erdan's photo reading, "Iranian women deserve freedom now!"
Erdan expressed disgust with the U.N.'s "red carpet treatment" of the Iranian president to Fox News Digital, noting that Raisi is "responsible for the murder of thousands of his own people."
"I felt that I had to do something," Erdan said. "So I protested peacefully, and I held up the picture of Mahsa Amini and suddenly… I was roughly manhandled by the U.N. security."
Erdan said that his detention "was a small price" to pay for the protest, arguing that he wanted to convey an important message that "the people of Israel stand in solidarity with the people of Iran" against "this ruthless regime."
Nasrallah and the ayatollah are on the same page because Iran is quite good at controlling the narrative it puts out, using both its media and its proxies to conduct a full-court press. It could even operationalize other proxies, such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or the Houthis in Yemen.
The concern now in Tehran is that it has not been able to push its agenda as much as it would like. Earlier this year, it was able to obtain reconciliation with Riyadh via a China-brokered deal, and it later got the Assad regime to come in from the cold via reintegration with the Arab League.
This all looked like positive news to Tehran, possibly opening the door to concessions from Washington. But since then, it has seen many of these pawn-like movements on the chessboard of the region face hurdles.
Saudi Arabia has its own interests in reconciliation with Iran. But Riyadh also has its own independent foreign policy, and Saudi Arabia pursues its own interests on its own time; they run both together and independently.
This means Tehran may have miscalculated what it could get out of the moves it made over the past year. Reports about its strategy in Syria, trying to use Hezbollah to help arm Arab tribes to challenge the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces in exchange for also getting something from Russia, show Iran flailing about for a new policy.
Tehran fully knows it now faces an uphill struggle against the momentum toward normalization. It will attempt to destabilize various arenas in an effort to get the ball back in its court.
Israel reportedly carried out 32 attacks in Syria in 2022, and since early 2023 it has already struck 25 times in the country—at the very least. . . . The Iranian-Israeli clash stands out in the wake of the dramatic events in the region, chiefly among them is the effort to strike a normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and later on with various other Muslim-Sunni states. Iran is trying to torpedo this process and has even publicly warned Saudi Arabia not to “gamble on a losing horse” because Israel’s demise is near. Riyadh is unlikely to heed that demand, for its own reasons.
Despite the thaw in relations between the kingdom and the Islamic Republic—including the exchange of ambassadors—the Saudis remain very suspicious of the Iranians. A strategic manifestation of that is that Riyadh is trying to forge a defense pact with the U.S.; a tactical manifestation took place this week when Saudi soccer players refused to play a match in Iran because of a bust of the former Revolutionary Guard commander Qassem Suleimani, [a master terrorist whose militias have wreaked havoc throughout the Middle East, including within Saudi borders].
Of course, Israel is trying to bring Saudi Arabia into its orbit and to create a strong common front against Iran. The attack in Syria is ostensibly unrelated to the normalization process and is meant to prevent the terrorists on Israel’s northern border from laying their hands on sophisticated arms, but it nevertheless serves as a clear reminder for Riyadh that it must not scale back its fight against the constant danger posed by Iran.
Arabic language media often uses the phrase "Talmudic rituals" as an epithet for anything religious that Jews do. But for a while, the BBC did, too.
In an article published yesterday, as seen in Google cache, BBC Arabic wrote, "Israeli Communications Minister Shlomo Karai performs Talmudic rituals and prayers for the so-called “Sukkot Festival” in Riyadh."
This mirrors the language in countless anti-Israel and antisemitic sites, including calling Sukkot "so-called."
Apparently a BBC editor noticed this and changed the story several hours later to say, "The Israeli Broadcasting Corporation 'Kan' reported that Communications Minister Shlomo Karai performed a Jewish prayer called 'Sukkot' in Riyadh." (The prayer isn't called "Sukkot' so the editor didn't quite fix everything.)
But the BBC's original captioning of the video of Karai saying "Hoshanot" as "performing Talmudic prayers" remains at this Arabic news aggregation site, screenshot above.
This points to a long-standing problem at not just the BBC but other Western media sites who rely on anti-Israel Arab reporters to write their stories. The Arabic sections get less editorial oversight than the Western-language sites do, and antisemitic language makes it into the supposedly professional Western media.
Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!
Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.
This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For 20 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.
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