Wednesday, November 01, 2023

Follow the Money: The Dirty Trail that Led to October 7th (Judean Rose)


Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.

How much money has the United States given to Iran over the years, either as outright gifts, or through the lifting of sanctions and unfreezing Iranian assets and revenues? The exact amount may be impossible to determine, but the thawing of $6b in Iranian revenues a month before the Hamas atrocities in Israel, obligates us to look closer and ask hard questions. How much money are we talking about? Was the latest thaw a greenlight to Iran to do as it wished with Israel? Which presidents gave money to Iran and why did so many Jewish Americans vote for them?

A recent Newsweek “fact check” article attempts to pin down the exact amount of money that flowed to Iran from the Obama administration. The article is slanted, focused on the irrelevant fact that at least much of the money was not a gift because it already belonged to Iran, and stressing that conditions had been placed on how the money could be spent (emphasis added):

As tensions simmer, conservative commentators shared claims that President Barack Obama's administration had given $150 billion to Iran, effectively, they argued, funding Hamas.

A post on X by Jack Posobiec, posted on October 16, 2023, referenced a Charlie Kirk tweet from September 11, 2015, which stated "Iran funds Hamas. Hamas kills Americans and Jews. Now we give Iran $150 billion. Where do you think that money will go? #IranDeal"

Posobiec wrote "Charlie warned us and now people are mad at him."

Kirk, founder of conservative student group Turning Point USA, was likely referring to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which granted Iran access to frozen assets.

This was not funding given to Iran. The amount quoted refers to foreign assets that belonged to Iran and were frozen by sanctions imposed to impede its nuclear program. The JCPOA was also an international agreement between Iran and a number of major world powers, including the U.S.

Despite the facts of this "fact-checking" article, there’s always a workaround. Two things can be true at one and the same time. Perhaps the thawed Iranian foreign assets could not be used to fund terror, but there was zero reason to imagine that a similar amount of money could not be drawn from elsewhere, for example from schools, hospitals, and government subsidies for healthcare to fund the Iranian terror machine. Then all Iran has to do is use its unfrozen assets to make up the difference, and voilà—no thawed assets were used to fund Iranian terror!

The Iranian windfall may not have paid for nuclear weapons production or to sponsor its proxy Hamas, but it might as well have done so, because here is another fact: Money can always be shifted around to balance a budget and make things work. That’s because money is fungible:

Back in 2015, Charlie Kirk, as cited by Newsweek, said the United States, under President Obama, gave Iran $150b. How did Kirk arrive at this figure? Does he have some kind of inside track? Nope. Kirk was only repeating the words from the man himself, Barack Obama:

How much these assets were worth has not been released, but $150 billion is the highest estimate provided by U.S. officials. The figure was mentioned in passing by Obama in an interview with The Atlantic in 2015, when questioned where the money could end up.

"The question is, if Iran has $150 billion parked outside the country, does the IRGC automatically get $150 billion?" Obama said.

Was the $150b referenced by Obama meant as an exaggerated hypothetical? It seems unlikely. If this astronomical sum had been far off the mark of the thawed Iranian foreign assets, surely the former president would have added context. He might have said, for example, “Not that the Iranian revenues we freed came to anything near that amount.”

Newsweek goes on to offer the reader other estimates for the Obama-thawed Iranian funds beginning with the far lower figures cited by a corrupt Iranian bank official:

In 2015, the former governor of Iran's central bank, Valiollah Seif, said in a state television address that the value of the frozen assets had been exaggerated.

Seif was sentenced in 2021 to 10 years in prison on corruption charges, reported Reuters.

The former official said that there were $29 billion of unlockable assets: $23 billion in foreign exchange that belonged to the bank and $6 billion of the Tehran government's money, The Times of Israel and Arabic news channel Al Arabiya reported in July 2015. The $29 billion Seif quoted was also reported by The New York Times.

Further figures are cited from a variety of sources to suggest that we are, indeed, speaking of much lower sums, which anyway, cannot be accessed by Iran, and certainly not for the purpose of funding terror:

Voice of America reported in January 2016, after the deal was signed, quotes from Seif saying Iran had gained access to $32 billion in assets.

Then U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew told Congress in July 2015 that Iran gained access to $56 billion via the agreement, a fact check by PolitiFact in 2018 noted.

In an August 2015 written testimony, Adam J. Szubin, then-acting Under Secretary of Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, said that while estimates suggested the Central Bank of Iran had foreign exchange assets between $100 billion to $125 billion, the usable "liquid assets" after sanctions were lifted would be around $50 billion.

Newsweek wraps things up by telling us unequivocally that the U.S. did not give Iran $150b in 2015, and anyway, the not-a-gift was at no cost to the American people:

False.

The U.S. did not "give" $150 billion to Iran in 2015. In 2015, as part of an international deal with Iran called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Iran agreed to cut back on nuclear enrichment programs in exchange for the unfreezing of its own assets.

The U.S. taxpayer paid nothing toward this, as might be implied by the post, and the value of the assets was said by some, including the U.S. Treasury, to be less than $150 billion.

Even should we stipulate that the non-gift to Iran was far less than $150b, Newsweek leaves out a most salient, and quite relevant fact. In addition to thawing Iranian revenues, Obama gave Iran $1.8 billion in cash, from The Hill, back in 2020:

Iran is indeed a dangerous terrorist state that not only has a powerful standing army, air force, navy and advanced weapons systems — including ballistic missiles and a growing space program — but also controls multiple proxy terrorist organizations responsible for killing and injuring hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children.

Included on that list of victims are thousands of American military personnel and contractors.

These were facts that former President Obama knew when he deliberately chose a policy of appeasement and cash payoffs instead of strength and accountability as the way to deal with Iran.

President Trump spelled this out in no uncertain terms on Wednesday when he addressed the nation while seeking to dial down the imminent threat Iran may pose to our nation, the Middle East and the world.

Said the president in part, “Iran’s hostilities substantially increased after the foolish Iran nuclear deal was signed in 2013 and they were given $150 billion, not to mention $1.8 billion in cash. … Then, Iran went on a terror spree, funded by the money from the deal and created hell in Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq. The missiles fired last night at us and our allies were paid for with the funds made available by the last administration.”

As we have seen and heard, some — especially Democrats, their allies in the media and Obama supporters — chose to challenge or quibble with Trump’s statement. That said, [author Douglas Mackinnon] spoke with a former senior intelligence official who said that much of the $1.8 billion cash payoff from the Obama administration was used explicitly to fund terrorism as an additional “screw you” from the leaders of Iran — including Soleimani —  to the United States. The rest of the money, [Mackinnon’s] source believes, ended up in the bank accounts of corrupt Iranian leaders and terrorists.

This money was not not-a-gift Iranian monies thawed, but an actual gift, or rather, according to Mackinnon, a payoff Obama thought he could hide from the public (emphasis added):

The cash payment authorized by Obama is one of the most disgraceful and shameful “negotiations” in the history of our nation. It was a payment the Obama White House first denied, then ignored and then grudgingly acknowledged.

We paid in cash, but not U.S. currency. Wary of using U.S. bills for a variety of reasons involving concealment, the Obama White House had the money converted to untraceable Euros, Swiss francs, and other foreign currencies. More troubling than those initial denials and deceptions was the fact that $400 million of that all-cash payment was used to pay a ransom to the government of Iran for the release of four American prisoners, in violation of standing U.S. policy.

In a pathetic attempt to hide behind semantics, the Obama administration finally did acknowledge that $400 million was delayed as “leverage” until the Americans were allowed to leave Iran.

While the Obama White House hid from the true definition of the word “leverage,” Iran’s state-run media was more than happy to brag that Iran had just forced the United States to pay a ransom.

Thawing Iranian revenues is one thing, even to the tune of $150b, but from where, you might reasonably ask, did Obama get $1.8b in cash? Was this gift on the taxpayer’s dime? Mackinnon gives us the skinny:

What many Americans don’t realize is that the Obama White House took the ransom money from something called the “Judgment Fund,” which is administered by the Treasury. That little-known account is entirely paid for by American taxpayers and was set up in such a way that Obama could bypass congressional approval to pay the cash to Iran.

Those who continually praise and defend Obama often describe him as “brilliant.” There is no doubt the former president is an intelligent person, certainly bright enough to realize — and admit, at least to himself — that the cash he turned over to the murderous regime leading Iran to ruin was not used for altruistic purposes.

Any honest assessment would conclude that at least part of that secretive, massive payment was used to finance terrorist attacks against Americans, our allies and innocent civilians . . .

 . . . For that reason, Obama should apologize for the thousands wounded and killed in terrorist attacks since Iran took possession of that tainted cash. That is his debt to pay.

In 2021, CNN reduced the amount of the Obama cash gift to Iran from $1.8b to “about $1.7b”. We also learn that in 2021, there was a $7b thaw in the works, suspiciously close to the $6b that President Biden unfroze in September:

Then-President Barack Obama faced steep opposition from Republicans when it was revealed that his administration had transferred about $1.7 billion to Iran in early 2016 . . .

 . . . Pro-Iranian media reported last weekend that the US had agreed to unfreeze $7 billion in Iranian funds and arrange a prisoner swap as part of the negotiations, but the State Department rejected the prisoner swap reports as false and a senior official told reporters on Thursday that those responsible for the leak were guilty of “unspeakable cruelty.” The department did not weigh in on the reports that the US would unfreeze funds, but a source briefed on the talks said the $7 billion figure was incorrect.

The White House is at the same time facing pressure to tread cautiously from Israel, which sent a delegation to Washington last week to discuss, among other things, the ongoing Iran deal talks. In a brief meeting with Biden last week, Israeli top intelligence official Yossi Cohen reiterated what Israel has been saying publicly, said one person familiar with the meeting: namely, that it believes Iran cannot be trusted and that the US should not return to the nuclear deal.

Biden reiterated his commitment to the US-Israel relationship, the person said, and reassured Cohen that the US views a return to the deal only as a jumping-off point for further discussions about lengthening and strengthening its terms, to ultimately include limits on other areas of Iran’s malign behavior in the region.

Going back to the issue of irrelevant facts and the echo chamber, the Newsweek article cited earlier managed to side-step the issue of Obama’s $1.8b cash payments to Iran. It did so by pushing a flurry of irrelevant facts on the reader: that the 2015 money was not a gift; that it was nowhere near $150b, and the money was not used to directly fund terror. A US News article piles on further irrelevant facts to obscure the truth, this time regarding the recent $6b in Iranian revenues thawed by Biden one month before the October 7 Hamas terror attack.

We are told that no one serious believes the $6b was used for the attack on Israel (so what—money is fungible); the attack was long in the planning (so what—they planned it a long time ago but needed the money to make it happen); and there is “no evidence” that Iran funded the attack because Iran denies responsibility (as if Iran were a trustworthy source to be believed in regard to whether or not it funded Hamas):

No serious observer believes the money ordered released by the administration – accumulated oil revenue withheld from Tehran under a Trump administration financial restriction – was used for that purpose. Iran is known to play a major role in funding, supporting and training the militant group and has for decades, but U.S. officials have said early intelligence does not indicate Iran helped Hamas plan, train or otherwise carry out the assault and added that it appeared to have taken some senior Iranian leaders by surprise. While a Hamas spokesman told the BBC that Iran did assist in the attack, officials in Tehran have denied responsibility while praising the outcome. So any direct link remains tenuous.

With regard to the money, planning of the sophisticated operation appears to have been underway for far longer than the funds were available to Iran, for one thing. For another, Treasury Department controls mandate that the funds cannot be drawn down by Iran for anything other than humanitarian needs provided by third-party vendors. But mostly – as the administration’s one-note response emphasizes at every turn – the most obvious indication it wasn’t used for the attack was because Iran hasn’t yet touched the money after it was sent from South Korea to a bank in Qatar.

“None of the funds that have gone to Qatar have actually been spent or accessed in any way,” Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said on Thursday, speaking from Tel Aviv, where he met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as part of a multi-country diplomatic deployment across the Middle East.

Instead of focusing on the $1.8b cash payment (or $1.7b as CNN would have it), Mark Langfan, in 2020, did the math for us on the $150b figure cited by Obama in the Atlantic interview. At the same time, Langfan appears to place the onus for this dirty “deal” on then Vice President Biden (emphasis added):

Despite the fact that VP Biden knew that the Defense Department had already conclusively found by July 9, 2015 that Iran had directly murdered a minimum 500 US soldiers with Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) in Iraq over the past seven years, a mere five days later, on July 14, 2015, VP Biden cheerled the Iran Nuclear deal that handed Iran $150 Billion dollars.

Do the math. That means that in 2015, VP Biden paid Iran $300 million for each US soldier Iran murdered.

The echo chamber is slimy. It tells us about thawed Iranian revenues, but it doesn’t tell us about the large cash gift or that the American taxpayer paid ransom to Iran. Instead, the echo chamber peppers us with irrelevant facts, smug in the belief that wool can be pulled over the eyes of the American public. The tactic has demonstrated its efficacy over the years, with Americans amplifying whatever irrelevant talking points they are supplied. Is it a case of intellectual laziness or are they simply too trusting?

Richard Goldberg, senior advisor to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), and Rep. Darrell Issa, instead of irrelevancies, offer us a shocking piece of information. The recent $6b not-a-gift to Iran was only the tip of the iceberg and it’s far worse than Obama with his sneaky $1.8b cash payment. As it turns out, Biden enriched Iran by more than $50b and he did it via backchannels to avoid public scrutiny:

In May, White House Middle East Coordinator Brett McGurk secretly traveled to Oman to pass a message along to Iran: America will pay the Ayatollah’s price to keep Tehran from producing weapons-grade uranium. Later that month, the Sultan of Oman traveled to Iran to broker the deal while the governor of the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) — an institution subject to U.S. sanctions for its role in terror financing — unexpectedly departed for Washington.

In June, leaks to Israeli media revealed the extraordinary concessions Biden made to the Ayatollah: Iran would “stop the process of enriching uranium to high levels” in exchange for sanctions relief.

The Biden administration then issued a sanctions waiver to provide Iran with at least $10 billion frozen in Iraq – and allow the money to be deposited in Iranian bank accounts in Oman.

Unnamed officials would soon admit the U.S. had already stopped enforcing oil sanctions on Iran – tacitly approving a million barrel per day increase in exports from Iran to China and generating tens of billions in annualized revenue. By the time the administration authorized the much-discussed $6 billion from South Korea, a full-blown appeasement and enrichment effort towards Iran had been underway for months.

In effect, explain the authors, the $6b in thawed Iranian revenues was a smokescreen for a far greater cash infusion from yet another dirty president (emphasis added):

[Fixating] only on the $6 billion obscures how Biden has financed Iran’s nuclear protection racket, emboldened its murderous regime, and enabled the mullahs to focus their resources on destroying Israel, the one country conducting operations to stop Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons.

The Biden message sent to the ayatollah is that the U.S. fears escalation and will pay any price to avoid a direct confrontation. That was a green light for Iran to activate its terror subsidiaries and commence the kind of barbaric slaughter we witnessed [on October 7th].

To add insult to injury, Biden is even now strengthening the Iranian terror machine:

While Biden’s words condemn Hamas’ heinous crimes against humanity, he continues to enrich Hamas’ parent company, Iran. And while Biden is correctly giving Israel the time, space, and resources it needs to prepare for Hamas’ destruction, he’s simultaneously giving Iran the time, space, and resources it needs to rebuild that which Israel destroys.

Having discussed the thawed, not-a-gift Iranian revenues, it makes sense to then explore how the re-imposition of sanctions by President Trump in 2018, drastically drained Iran of resources to fund its terror activities. In 2020, Lindsay Graham and Morgan Ortagus outlined Iran’s dire economic situation, and described how the lifting of sanctions by President Biden would represent a $90b bailout to Iran (emphasis added):

The JCPOA infused Iran with cash. Right before the United States reimposed sanctions in 2018, Iran’s central bank controlled more than $120 billion in foreign exchange reserves. U.S. sanctions locked tens of those billions away in escrow accounts, and financial pressure forced Iran to draw down the accounts that remained open. After only two years of the maximum pressure campaign, Iran was down to a meager $4 billion in reserves. Meanwhile, U.S. energy sanctions cut Iran’s oil exports by more than 2 million barrels per day, depriving the regime of $70 billion that typically funds its budget.

The massive reversal of fortunes left Iran with barely any economic options, and the regime was forced to cut payments to its regional terror proxies. While Iran fended off collapse, much of the rest of the Middle East breathed a sigh of relief. Several countries in the region made historic peace with one another. Progress made by the Abraham Accords—which were struck in August 2020 by Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States—were contagious.

Alliances with Iran threaten to undo much of the progress made.

Right away, the regime could receive a payday of around $90 billion the moment Biden ends sanctions. After all, U.S. sanctions tied up $40 billion of oil and condensate sales in Asia and the Middle East while another $50 billion in funds remain inaccessible to the regime. Meanwhile, the restoration of the JCPOA would likely reinvigorate Iran’s oil exports, adding nearly $50 billion per year to the regime’s coffers at today’s market rate. Other economic sanctions would be lifted as well, bolstering the regime’s metals and petrochemicals sectors that are crucial to funding the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) foreign adventures. Iran’s economy will start to grow again, and it will not take any time for the suitcases of cash to find their way to Hamas or Hezbollah.

Those billions of dollars would go a long way for the leading state sponsor of terrorism. Iran’s entire military budget has been reduced to less than $20 billion a year. But historically, Iran spent more than $16 billion supporting allies in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen since 2012 and sent $700 million a year to Hezbollah.

There’s not much need for speculation regarding what Iran would use its sanctions relief for. Instead, just look to six years ago. Instead of spending funds on cancer research or infrastructure like promised, the regime’s defense budget reached record highs. The IRGC spread mayhem and death across the region, and the same thing could happen again.

Only this time, under the terms of the original JCPOA, nuclear restrictions on Iran are almost up. Within the decade, Iran will have no cap on nuclear enrichment quantity or quality, no cap on the number of centrifuge sophistication, no ban on the import and export of ballistic missiles, and the expiration of more than a dozen other prohibitions.

In 2022, Nikki Haley criticized Biden’s intention to lift the sanctions. But Haley goes further, offering a tie-in between the thawed Iranian money and Biden’s support to the PA and Hamas regimes (emphasis added): 

Haley [criticized] Biden’s recent trip to the Middle East, including Israel, where he announced a $300 million cash infusion to the Palestinian government. The Free Beacon exclusively reported last week that a large portion of this cash is funding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, known as UNRWA, which has a history of inciting violence against Jews.

"The money has no conditions, no strings, nothing. The Palestinians can keep stoking hatred of Israel," Haley said of the renewed funding. "They can keep paying the families of terrorists, which encourages more suicide bombings. Basically, the Palestinians can use America’s money to attack America’s ally. It’s a disgrace."

In examining the events of October 7, it is important here, to consider the role played in the atrocities by Rob Malley, the recently-suspended envoy to Iran who allegedly mishandled classified material (emphasis added):

“Rob Malley deserves extensive scrutiny — yesterday, today and tomorrow,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) told [the New York Post] after the Wall Street Journal reported that officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps planned and signed off on this weekend’s atrocity that killed at least 900.

“These reports could not be more concerning, and they hint at what could be the worst State Department scandal since Alger Hiss,” Issa added.

“Malley and others created an incredibly permissive environment for Hamas, for Iran, to do all these things,” added Gabriel Noronha, a former special adviser on Iran at the State Department.

Noronha, who served under former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, said Malley and his negotiating team “purposefully funneled billions of dollars to [Iran] through lack of sanctions enforcement and provision of sanctions relief that has given them somewhere between $50 [billion] and $80 billion over the last two and a half years.”

A senior House Republican aide told The Post that the cash influx followed an even more generous payout of $1.7 billion that the Obama administration made to Iran in 2016, eventually contributing to Saturday’s attack that triggered the Jewish state’s first declaration of war in 50 years.

In 2022, Michael Rubin said that all told, thanks to Malley, the Biden administration planned to give Tehran, in total, twice the amount of Biden’s recent “non-gift” to Iran (emphasis added):

In May 2021, Malley was offering Iran relief equivalent to $7 billion, nearly equal to the budget of Iran’s entire conventional military for 2022. As Iranian negotiators stonewalled — they have not sat down with Malley or his team but instead insist on talking through intermediaries — Malley’s team upped the ante. Today, the Biden administration appears poised to provide Tehran with $12 billion, equivalent to a quarter of Iran’s total budget at the real exchange rate. This does not include, of course, the windfall Tehran seeks to gain from increased oil sales already augmented by lack of sanctions enforcement. This fund does not include off-budget spending, such as the oil revenue directly allocated to the Revolutionary Guards or the additional billions that Iran’s national oil company allocates for national stabilization and development but in actuality flows into Revolutionary Guards’ coffers.

Should Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei accept Malley’s offer, the regime will receive an infusion of over $20 billion over the following year, essentially doubling the Revolutionary Guard’s budget. To put that conservative estimate in perspective, a suicide belt costs just $1,500, and the bombing of the Hebrew University cafeteria that killed five Americans cost only $50,000.

Nor does the money now offered to Iran account for the billion-dollar ransoms that the Iranians expect for hostage releases. After all, ever since Jimmy Carter’s administration acquiesced to release Iranian funds in exchange for hostages and Ronald Reagan traded arms for hostages, the Iranian regime simply seizes new hostages to use as chits in their negotiations.

Lee Smith, writing for Tablet, describes how Malley brought an Iranian agent into the State Department and the Pentagon, where she served in sensitive positions related to United States defense (emphasis added):

The Biden administration’s now-suspended Iran envoy Robert Malley helped to fund, support, and direct an Iranian intelligence operation designed to influence the United States and allied governments, according to a trove of purloined Iranian government emails.

The emails, which were reported on by veteran Wall Street Journal correspondent Jay Solomon, writing in Semafor, and by Iran International, the London-based émigré opposition outlet which is the most widely read independent news source inside Iran, were published last week after being extensively verified over a period of several months by the two outlets. They showed that Malley had helped to infiltrate an Iranian agent of influence named Ariane Tabatabai into some of the most sensitive positions in the U.S. government—first at the State Department and now the Pentagon, where she has been serving as chief of staff for the assistant secretary of defense for special operations, Christopher Maier. . .

The contents of the emails are damning, showing a group of Iranian American academics being recruited by the Iranian regime, meeting together in foreign countries to receive instructions from top regime officials, and pledging their personal loyalty to the regime. They also show how these operatives used their Iranian heritage and Western academic positions to influence U.S. policy toward Iran, first as outside “experts” and then from high-level U.S. government posts. Both inside and outside of government, the efforts of members of this circle were repeatedly supported and advanced by Malley, who served as the U.S. government’s chief interlocutor with Iran under both the Obama and the Biden administrations. Malley is also the former head of the International Crisis Group (ICG), which directly paid and credentialed several key members of the regime’s influence operation.

What should we make of these efforts by Presidents Obama and Biden to enrich not only Iran, but the PA and Hamas regimes in the wake of the depraved Hamas massacre of October 7? For one thing, it clarifies for us that these men, and the men who work(ed) for them, are dirty almost beyond belief. Also: they really hate Israel.

However inconvenient it is to consider who put these men in office, we must talk about this. While American Jews are a miniscule percentage of the American voting public, a large majority of them voted for Obama and Biden. They put domestic issues like healthcare ahead of Israel. They failed to register the possible impact of the JCPOA on the Jewish people and on the world at large.

The world has undergone a drastic change in the short few weeks since October 7. Pogroms now threaten Jews in Russia and in France. American college campuses have never been more dangerous for Jewish students. We are on the verge of a world war. This state of affairs is due to the machinations of Obama, Biden, and all those who ever worked for them (and voted for them).

There is a lesson to be learned here: you don’t vote for the guy who wants to give money to Iran, echo chamber notwithstanding. It doesn’t matter whose money it is, or how they propose to get it to the mullahs. The stipulations they promise to put on that money also do not matter.

It is evil to make funds available to the evil, period.

On October 21, 2012, just before Obama was reelected, I reviewed Obama’s intentions to plow through with the JCPOA and what this might mean for the world, something perhaps akin to the horrors of the Holocaust, for lack of a better description. I then asked my readers a simple question: “If you could have saved the 6 million by pulling a different lever, would you have done so?”

Eleven years later, my question is no different, even though the alternative candidate is a man reviled by the majority of Jewish American voters. “If you could have saved the Jews who were massacred on October 7th by pulling a different lever, would you have done so?”

Jewish voting patterns. The middle column represents the percent of Jewish votes received by each candidate (screenshot from the Virtual Jewish Library)

This writer is not afraid to stipulate that Trump is an unpresidential ass. I don’t like his crassness and the way he insults his competition. I don’t like the way he speaks about the Jewish people, and I don’t like what he says about my prime minister. In spite of all this, I know that that there’s always a trade-off: Trump would never have given money to Iran, or unfrozen its revenues.

In fact, it was Trump who re-imposed the sanctions on Iran. The Iranian war machine was nearly bankrupt when Biden assumed office. The evidence leads to an obvious conclusion: Had Donald Trump won the election, the events of October 7th would not have occurred.

And I hate like hell that my prediction of a Holocaust came true. 

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!
 

 

  • Wednesday, November 01, 2023
  • Elder of Ziyon

One reason Iran will keep opening up new fronts in the war: Honor



An analysis in Lebanon24 gives an interesting reason why Iran cannot accept a military loss in Gaza. 

The reason? Honor.

As always, it is useful to look at the conflict through the lens of honor/shame. 

Iran looks at itself as the ever-growing superpower in the Middle East. Over the years it has gained control of Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Gaza, as well as significant influence over Iraq and West Bank cities like Jenin. It has imposed its will on the West. It is now a partner with Russia.

A loss in Gaza would be a tremendous loss of honor. It would symbolize a reversal of fortune for the Iranian "axis." The Muslim world, they believe, would lose respect for Iran since they respect the "strong horse." 

As the article says, "The Iranian axis would lose its political discourse forever, and will begin a path of decline at the political and popular levels, not just the military level. "

Moreover, if Gaza is lost - Iran thinks - a voracious Israel would then turn to Lebanon and Syria to defeat Iranian proxies there. 

The reason this may turn into a major regional conflict is that Israel cannot afford to lose - and Iran believes, because of "honor," that it cannot afford to lose, either. 

One other factor may be Iran's own propaganda. According to polling from the regime, 77% of Iranians support Hamas in the war. Iran's anti-Israel rhetoric has been extreme for decades, and Iranians who believe it are growing up with that hate, and itching to go to war to destroy Israel.

The Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Revolutionary Guard, Brig.Ali FadwaIn front of a crowd of university students in Tehran, who organized a gathering in support of Gaza, said that “the Resistance Front’s hand is on the trigger, and this country is capable of practical and direct action with the push of a button, after which rockets  would rain down on the occupied territories.”

In response to a student’s question about the possibility of  Tehran actually participating in Operation “Al-Aqsa Flood,” he responded, "Some people believe that the practical move is to launch missiles directly towards Haifa. Yes, we will implement that with certainty and freedom if necessary."

Historian Benny Morris wrote in Haaretz that this is Israel's best chance to attack Iran directly. I don't know about that, but the world must recognize that this isn't an Israel/Hamas war - but a war between Israel and Iran. Only Iran can decide to escalate or cool things down, and the Western world must start doing its part diplomatically and politically to make sure Iran knows that if it expands the field, it is not only Israel they are fighting.

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!
 

 

11/01 Links Pt1: Sharansky: Never Again Is Now 15 IDF soldiers killed fighting Hamas; FBI Director Says Hamas Attack Will Inspire ISIS-Level Terror Threat

From Ian:

Natan Sharansky: Never Again Is Now
With this, the parallel between these contemporary critical theories and the Marxism-Leninism of my Soviet youth has received new proof. Recall that the major pogroms in Eastern Europe started in 1881, when Tsar Alexander II was killed and his murder blamed on Jews. The organization behind the murder, Narodnaya Volya (the People’s Will), was a predecessor of the Communist Party, with both an extremist wing responsible for the killing and a more moderate wing that spread propaganda to the people. When the awful pogroms started, the latter tried to defend these aggressions by explaining that this was how the social movement of the masses—and with it the worldwide revolution—would begin. They argued that their target was not the Jews per se, but an entire oppressive system, which their movement sought to overthrow in the name of justice and liberation.

The rationalization of today’s Hamas sympathizers on campus are remarkably similar to these. And if the connection seemed largely theoretical before, today it is practical, articulated and even acted upon not by extremists but in the heart of the academy. While Jewish organizations were busy fighting tactical battles against BDS and other localized affronts, we failed to see that terrorism received an intellectual rehabilitation in the most prestigious segments of American society. Consider the words of prominent feminist scholar Judith Butler, who in 2006 proclaimed at the University of California, Berkeley, that “understanding Hamas [and] Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of a global left, is extremely important.”

The struggle for campuses is a struggle for America and its values—for an America that is liberal, that supports free speech and human rights, and that protects all of its citizens, regardless of race or creed, from vicious, lawless assault.

Even the presidents of leading universities—unlike the president of the United States—have refused to denounce Hamas’s evil, speaking instead about violence on both sides. Those who protest microaggressions are unable or unwilling to differentiate between the most awful forms of pogrom and the legitimate self-defense of the attacked.

As a result, if 20 years ago to be openly and proudly pro-Israel was bad for students’ careers, today it is a threat to their physical safety. The number of antisemitic events, including physical assaults, has skyrocketed since Oct. 7, and campuses are now flooded with the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” For those unfamiliar with geography, this means that there is no place for a Jewish state on the world map.

Israel is currently fighting a war for its survival. We realize that Hamas crossed a red line on Oct. 7 and that for the state to continue to exist, we have to win. In fact, we know that we are fighting not only for ourselves but for the future of the free world, to preserve the values of democracy and freedom in the face of an organization that would destroy them completely.

In a different way, the United States is also fighting a war for its survival. American universities crossed a red line in the aftermath of Oct. 7. The struggle for campuses is therefore a struggle for America and its values—for an America that is liberal, that supports free speech and human rights, and that protects all of its citizens, regardless of race or creed, from vicious, lawless assault.

In 2015, following the terrorist attacks on the Charlie Hebdo newspaper and on Jewish targets in Paris, I asked the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut whether he thought there was a future for Jews in Europe. He responded that he could not answer my question directly, since he was not part of the organized Jewish community, but that he worried there may not be a future for Europe in Europe—that is, for a Europe that cherishes liberal values and is willing to defend them in the face of barbaric assault.

If there is to be a future for America in America, it is time to step up in defense of its core values, and in this American Jews can play an important role. Let us start with a March of One Million: students, parents, Jewish organizations, and allies coming together in support of academic freedom and against a primitive ideology that silences truth and justifies murderous rampages as a form of liberation.

We have done this before: In 1987, hundreds of thousands of Jews marched to Washington, D.C., to support their brethren in the Soviet Union, chanting the slogan “Let my people go.” In 2002, thousands rallied in front of the U.S. Capitol in opposition to terrorism and support for the Jewish state.

Only this time we will be fighting not only for our own people, but for America as well—for the values it represents and for its continued role as a beacon of light around the world.
Dennis Prager: The Hamas Slaughter Confirmed Everything I Have Believed
Why Jews are hated
There is no hatred like Jew-hatred. It is the longest ongoing hatred in history. It is the most universal. And it is the one exterminationist hatred: Those who hate the Jews want them destroyed. There is a Hebrew statement that is probably two thousand years old, and which is recited during the Passover Seder service: “In every generation, they arise to annihilate us.”

Note that the sentence does not say “to persecute us” or “to enslave us,” but “to annihilate us.”

The question is why?

I wrote an entire book — “Why the Jews?” — 40 years ago explaining antisemitism. But I can sum it up in a few sentences: Jew-hatred is largely a result of the Jews being The Chosen People. You can laugh at the idea if you are secular and inclined to do so. But those who hate the Jews have not laughed at the idea; they have hated the Jews because of it — because they believed it and/or because it is true.

The Jews introduced to humanity the God in which most of the world believes; brought into existence the Bible that is the basis of the New Testament and the Quran; gave the Christian world its Messiah; and gave much of the world its morality through the Torah, the Prophets, and the Ten Commandments. Those who hate that moral code hate the Jews. The two groups who have tried to exterminate the Jews in the last hundred years, the Nazis and the Islamists (not all Muslims), hate that moral code. And they hate the Jews for embodying it — compared to the Nazis and compared to Islamic regime of Iran, Hezbollah, ISIS and Hamas, Israel is composed of saints.

So, when I read about the horrors inflicted by Hamas on young Jews, old Jews and Jewish babies, I was horrified, but not at all surprised. That is what the most evil of any generation do to Jews. And that is why non-Jews who dismiss Iran, Hamas, or Hezbollah as the Jews’ problem are fools. Tens of millions of non-Jews were killed because most people dismissed Hitler and the Nazis as the Jews’ problem.

In fact, aside from increased loathing of Hamas and their Muslim and left-wing supporters, the only effect the events of Oct. 7 had on me was to reinforce my faith in the chosenness of the Jews.
Kurt Schlichter: America's Shame
America has seen these little Kristallnachts erupt all across the country in the wake of the hideous October 7th massacre in Israel. The anti-Semites have been emboldened, and they have been worse than merely tolerated. They have been celebrated. From college faculties to Hollywood jerks, they have been in encouraged in their support of not just Hamas but the whole agenda of “decolonialization.” And it’s not like they do not know what that means. They do. It is some of the targets of “decolonialization” who refuse to accept the reality that these people want to exterminate first the Jews, then the Christians, then anyone else on the far side of the oppression hierarchy bell curve.

You would think maybe self-preservation would inspire them, but no. Are they just delusional, or do they think that the monster will just rape and behead them last?

Their stupid/cowardly refusal to not accept this degeneracy has made this degeneracy acceptable. That anyone can go out in decent society waving their Palestinian flag and giggling about their transgressive paraglider sign without being shunned and despised like some doofus wearing a white robe setting fire to a cross illustrates the depravity of our elite. But they can do it, and they will be applauded for doing it.

Their objection to the Holocaust is not that it happened but that it ultimately failed. Understand what “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” means. It means free of Jews. And it’s not like the Jews – the “settlers” – are meant to have a chance to pack up and travel to their exciting new home. They are meant to be butchered in an orgy of blood. And when that’s done, it’s time to do the same to the settlers here in America. Do you think those idiotic land acknowledgements are meaningless exercises? They are laying the groundwork for the same kind of ethnic mass murder. “We acknowledge that this ground was stolen form the Whatever Whoever tribe by the European bad people of badness” is moronic but not meaningless. It seeks to established a blood guilt for those races and religions and political affiliations that have been declared subhuman. If you are reading this, you probably fall into the subhuman category. And the end state the bad guys want is you dead.

But there is resistance. Many of our politicians are rejecting the bigotry. A few people in the pop culture are too. In the social media world, many of us are taking a hard stand for what is right. Sadly, though, far too many on our side have somehow decided to sit out the battle or have cavorted with the enemy. They use terms like “Zionist” and “neocon,” and talk about forever wars,” but what they mean is “Let them kill the Jews.”


  • Wednesday, November 01, 2023
  • Elder of Ziyon

Hamas says it will never stop killing Jews. When will the world believe them?

When Hamas lies, the West assumes they are telling the truth.

When Hamas tells the truth, the West assumes they are lying.


MEMRI summarizes:
Ghazi Hamad of the Hamas political bureau said in an October 24, 2023 show on LBC TV (Lebanon) that Hamas is prepared to repeat the October 7 "Al-Aqsa Flood" Operation time and again until Israel is annihilated. He added that Palestinians are willing to pay the price and that they are "proud to sacrifice martyrs." Hamad said that Palestinians are the victims of the occupation, therefore no one should blame them for the events of October 7 or anything else, adding: "Everything we do is justified."



This has been Hamas' consistent message since its founding. They've never deviated from it. And yet, for decades, "experts" and "analysts" have dismissed Hamas threats as mere rhetoric, Westsplaining that Hamas is really pragmatic and not genocidal. 

October 7 proved that nothing has changed. This interview shows, more than anything, that Israel has the moral obligation to destroy Hamas no matter what. 

And because Hamas has spent a decade and a half turning Gaza itself into a huge fort to protect itself, Hamas is responsible for every civilian that dies. 


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

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  • Wednesday, November 01, 2023
  • Elder of Ziyon

"Conflicting claims" - NYT gives equal weight between rapists and a professional army



Here's how the New York Times reported on the attack on Jabalya yesterday:

The two sides gave conflicting accounts of a deadly Israeli airstrike in the Jabaliya community north of Gaza City, site of a long-established and densely populated refugee camp, where photographs taken on Tuesday showed at least one large blast crater that was not present in earlier satellite images, and significant damage to buildings.

The Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry said that the strike had killed and wounded hundreds of people. Dr. Marwan Sultan, medical director of the nearby Indonesian Hospital, said there were dozens dead and his facility had received hundreds of injured patients. The figures could not be verified.

The Israeli military said the strike had killed a Hamas commander who was a key plotter of the Oct. 7 assault on Israel that the Israeli authorities say killed more than 1,400 people and captured more than 200 hostages.

The commander, Ibrahim Biari, was actively directing attacks against Israeli targets from a “vast underground tunnel complex,” Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, a spokesman for the Israeli military, said in a late-night briefing. He said that in Israel’s estimation, “dozens” of Hamas combatants were killed along with him when the underground complex imploded.

Hamas denied that any of its commanders were in the area of the strike.
So even-handed!

According to Israel, a major military target was attacked. In the photo you can see the airstrikes appear to be along a path that follows the "alleged" tunnels underneath the camp - which is known as a Hamas stronghold. They identified a specific person and verified his death. They are confident enough that he was killed that they are saying it definitively and publicly. If he pops up in a video, Israel's entire credibility is lost.

According to Hamas, Israel just decided to murder hundreds of civilians for no reason and there were no Hamas members there. 

The photo above shows that the craters are all in the street, which is where tunnels would generally be. If Israel wanted to murder civilians in Jabaliya, why aim at the street?  And I'm no military forensics expert, but the craters indicate that there was an empty space fairly deep underneath the ground which collapsed. 

Only one narrative makes sense. The other is obvious propaganda, although it is likely that dozens of civilians did die. 

Like any country at war, Israel is not going to reveal its intelligence. It is not going to give details of its strategy, tactics or methods. But only one story makes any sense, and the track record of Israeli statements like this is far better than that of Hamas. 

Beyond that, Israel has made its military goals clear: it intends to destroy Hamas. Hamas' cynical use of human shields to protect its tunnels is the only war crime here, and Israel has given redicents weeks to evacuate. It has done everything properly under international law, and it is not obligated to wait indefinitely to target Hamas military targets. This is the most salient fact that the media consistently ignores. 

Giving equal weight to both sides, and ignoring the international law of one side, isn't journalism - it is a betrayal of informing the readers of the truth. 


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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

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  • Wednesday, November 01, 2023
  • Elder of Ziyon

Palestinians, including Hanan Ashrawi, engage in 7/10 denial



MEMRI has videos of a number of prominent Palestinians and Muslims denying that Hamas attacked civilians on October 7.

"On October 7, Hamas targeted military personnel only. All the [Israeli] civilians who were captured or harmed – it was not done by the Hamas fighters, but rather by the civilian masses who dashed when the border wall collapsed, and were utterly ecstatic about returning to the land of their forefathers. Hamas did not target a single [Israeli] civilian."

And media darling Hanan Ashrawi:

"Even the Europeans swallowed all those lies at the beginning of the incursion, in which they accused the Palestinians of horrible things, without evidence, without substantiation, without any kind of proof, and then it became actual fact. We have to walk back the women being raped, or children being beheaded, or all that nonsense, doctored pictures, and so on. What about the Anglican hospital? Immediately the Israelis said, 'We [Palestinians] bombed ourselves' …[with] the Palestinian rocket. Biden just blindly parrots of the things he hears from the Israelis. And I said this the Israelis have a spin machine. And they are good at it, I must say, because they spend billions on it."

This is the 21st century's Holocaust denial.


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

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Read all about it here!
 

 

Tuesday, October 31, 2023

10/31 Links Pt2: Phillips: The west's mass psychopathy moment; O'Neill: The normalisation of savagery; To Be Anti-Racist is to be Pro-Hamas

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The west's mass psychopathy moment
This terrible conflict has been kept going by the west, which by supporting the Palestinian cause has indulged, funded, sanitised, legitimised and incentivised an agenda of annihilation, ethnic cleansing and murderous antisemitism.

The problem of Gaza will only be solved, like the Palestinian issue itself, if the west stops supporting the Palestinian cause -- and start addressing this conflict not as a fight over the division of land but as a genocidal war of extermination against Israel and the Jewish people.

Israel is fighting in Gaza not just against Hamas but against Iran. It is fighting a war for its existence against a genocidal enemy. That’s why this is a just war by Israel — indeed it could hardly be more justified. And the failure by the west to grasp how this has come about is why the west is now being convulsed by the forces of barbarism from within.

For it’s impossible to exaggerate the extent to which support for the Palestinian cause has destroyed the west’s moral compass. It’s not just that it’s been supporting an agenda whose aim, whether people understand this or not, is the annihilation of Israel and the murder of Jews. It is that it has produced a diabolical and deranged inversion of morality, which views genocide against the Jews as resistance and Jewish resistance as genocide.

As a result, the west has the blood of countless Jewish and non-Jewish Israeli innocents on its hands — and unless it purges this poison from its culture, its hands will be stained by yet more.
Brendan O'Neill: The normalisation of savagery
So it is not surprising, or contradictory, that campus ideologues who fume against un-PC words now welcome, or at least excuse, neo-fascistic violence. They are projecting their ideology of safety on to events in the Middle East. In their minds, Israelis are violators of the Palestinian safe space, and thus vengeance against them is not only justified but good. It is striking how much the Western language of mental dread is being used to explain the crisis in the Middle East. There will be a ‘tsunami of mental-health woes’ as a result of the latest Israel-Gaza conflict, reports NPR. The assault on Gaza is having a terrible impact on the ‘mental health of Palestinian children’, says a US-based psychologist. Many campus radicals also read every event through the prism of Western notions of vulnerability. It would not be surprising if they viewed Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October less as a racist onslaught against the Jewish people than as an act of therapeutic vengeance against a ‘privileged’ neighbour – cathartic payback against those who make Arabs feel ‘unsafe’.

Since the October pogrom, anti-Semitism has soared on campuses in the US, and much of it is underpinned by the self-regarding cult of safety. Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, reports a student saying to him that ‘what would make her feel safe’ in his law school would be ‘to get rid of the Zionists’. In short, to flatter my narcissistic feelings of psychic and ideological security, certain Jews must be kicked out. The safe space clearly licences racism, too.

The hate has been relentless. A professor at Columbia University said the Hamas assault on Israel was a ‘stunning victory’. A Yale professor said 7 October was an ‘extraordinary day’ and a great blow to the ‘genocidal settler state’ of Israel. An art professor in Chicago said ‘Israelis are pigs. Savages… Irredeemable excrement.’ A professor at the University of California, Davis ominously said ‘Zionist journalists… have houses [with] addresses, kids in school’, and ‘they should fear us’.

Note the vicarious thrill these people seem to derive from faraway acts of unimaginable violence. The cult of vulnerability – and its ugly cousin, vengeance – has robbed them of their humanity. Viewing Israelis as pigs and shit, and Western Zionists as suspect creatures who deserve to live in fear, speaks to the inhumanity of constantly abstracting individuals. Of treating people either as ‘oppressed’, and thus good, or ‘privileged’, and thus bad. It is a short step from academic theories of ‘white privilege’ to demeaning Israelis as excrement whose murders should be celebrated. The reason some in American universities are taking second-hand pleasure from Hamas’s pogrom is because they believe it fortifies their privilege / oppressor worldview and gives physical force to their own contempt for the merchants of unsafety. They welcome the pogrom as a kind of primal therapy.

It is chilling how many young people seem relaxed about Hamas terrorism. A Harvard poll in the US found that 52 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds support Israel but a staggering 48 per cent support Hamas. Fifty-one per cent said Hamas violence against Israeli civilians is justified. As a headline in Newsweek said, ‘An insane number of Gen Zers support Hamas’s slaughter of innocent Israelis’. Polls in the UK suggest significant numbers of young people reject the idea that Hamas are terrorists. There can be no greater indictment of our education system, and of all the new systems of socialisation, than the fact that many in the new generation witnessed the worst act of anti-Semitic violence since the Holocaust and thought: ‘Maybe Israel deserved it.’ We can now see, clear as anything, what a pernicious impact the politics of identity and cult of pity have had on the souls of the young. It has torn them from the values of our civilisation, to such an extent that they feel more affinity with the regressive, anti-Western barbarism of Hamas than they do with the Jewish civilians and democratic state that were desecrated by that barbarism.

We are living through a normalisation of violence. The decimation of the ideals of freedom, especially among millennials and Generation Z, has given rise to a situation where debate is discouraged on account of its hurtfulness, where brute force is wielded against dissenters, and where even genocidal terror can be celebrated if it silences the ‘privileged’. In the absence of freedom of speech, the pre-modern rituals of humiliating and punishing transgressors against orthodoxy have returned with a bloody vengeance. Surely the bleak and tragic month of October 2023 will be a wake-up call for the West.
David Harsanyi: Liberal Jews Have No Reason To Be Surprised By Progressive Antisemitism
Even Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League — a partisan group that’s spent years highlighting every dog whistle (real and imagined) while ignoring or actively diminishing the rise of antisemitism on the left — felt compelled to ask MSNBC, the leading left-wing cable network, “who is writing the scripts? Hamas?”

No, not Hamas. But their allies. MSNBC is where propagandists from the Qatar state-run theocratic network Al-Jazeera go to work. They host shows and join Al “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house” Sharpton, cozying up to the Morning Joe crew. One of them, Mehdi Hasan, has called non-Muslims “cattle” and “people of no intelligence.” This would be tantamount to hiring a Pravada reporter to cover the Cold War.

It is only antisemitism for Democrats if you say something unkind about their sugar daddy, George Soros. An enemy of Jewish people, the billionaire not only funds BLM but numerous Jewish front groups to create the perception of support for terrorists. Two of these groups, “Jewish Voice for Peace” and IfNotNow, beneficiaries of at least $15 million, were at the Capitol calling for Israel to give Hamas terrorists a pass.

Maybe, just maybe, giving unfettered loyalty to a president who played footsie with likes of Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright and who was good friends with former PLO spokesperson and agitprop Rashid Khalidi was a clue that this kind of thinking would be normalized on the mainstream left. Of course, not only did Obama (and, to a similar extent, Biden) bolster the Islamists in Iran — an effort to blunt Israel’s regional power — but he also reached out to Hamas and pumped millions into Gaza and Hamas.

Our elite schools and protest movements where philanthropic Jews drop millions every year sign petitions defending baby killers? Intersectionality. Decolonization. They’re all intertwined with identitarianism and antisemitism. Berkeley, like most campuses, is teeming Jew-baiting race-hustlers and pseudointellectuals who function in closed-minded havens for extremists. Sooner or later, those extremists are going to be emboldened. Sooner or later, they were going to be in positions of power.

Sooner is now.

Three particularly stupid recent @NYTimes statements

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that Israel was employing a particularly galling trait: not broadcasting its military strategy to the media.


It apparently requires an in-depth  news analysis to understand why an army wouldn't announce what it was doing, or planning on doing. 

But this wasn't the only piece of stupidity in the New York Times recently. Also yesterday, for example, reporters were not certain about something:

Could the women have made the video themselves and then asked Hamas to kindly release it for them?

And here, in an otherwise decent piece about Hamas hoarding, we see this:


The ruling government might not have any responsibility to its population?

There is a theme here: Israel is expected to act in ways that go beyond what any other country ever would do; when it doesn't reach those artificial expectations it is big news. Palestinians aren't expected to adhere to even the minimum standards of decency and are given the benefit of the doubt no matter what. 

It isn't just a New York Times problem. It is an everybody problem.




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!
 

 

  • Tuesday, October 31, 2023
  • Elder of Ziyon

Disgusting, antisemitic Arab American News pretends that practically none of the 10/7 victims were civilians

The Arab American News is accusing Israelis, and all Jews worldwide, of being liars while exonerating Hamas of crimes against humanity as it pushes antisemitic tropes of Jews controlling the media:
Israel lies about civilians losses to conceal its colossal failure. Here is the proof

Since the Hamas onslaught on the Southern area of Israel on October 7, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, along with the U.S. administration has insisted on advancing a deceitful narrative of the event. They claim that this attack targeted women, children and elders who cannot defend themselves in civilian towns and kubutzes [sic]  near the Gaza strip. This narrative was so overwhelming that President Biden personally, in an address to the nation, had to lie. A lie that was not a temperamental off-the-cuff statement, but one that he read from a teleprompter. He said that he saw babies and women being slaughtered, describing this as the most horrifying scenes he has seen in his life.

...Israel has been a master in the media field for decades. It knows how to mold and win public opinion and how to turn the human stories of Jewish victims into front page headlines and leading segments in the news. But this time there were no innocent faces in despair, no broken family lives and no evidence to support the narrative at all.

What happened to the most effective propaganda machine in the world? Did the Israeli media lose its touch, or was it hit by a sudden paralysis? To answer this question, one must take a closer look at the source: The Israeli media. There were no stories about the young or elder victims. Very little coverage was given to the victims, whom Israel said are more than 1,300 people.

...The great majority of civilians were between the ages of 18 and 70, which make them by definition a part of the reserve forces. Only the names of a total of 14 children (under 18 years) and seven elders (70 or over) are listed. Of course, these facts paint a picture that must drive the Israeli leadership mad and make them quite frightened. How can the Netanyahu government face its people or the world with this scandalous failure after taking such pride in being the best guarantor of the Jewish people’s safety and security? It is a colossal failure of apocalyptic proportions, and all the media tricks and the international support won’t be enough to hide the truth regardless of how the false narrative is advanced.

There were no stories in Israeli media about child victims? Or about the elderly? There are dozens printed every day!  Plus videos taken by the terrorists themselves, in the kibbutzim and towns that are obviously not military!

But the nauseating newspaper makes up facts (like all Israelis are in the reserves until age 70) to push a narrative of the Hamas pogrom as a legitimate military action. 

Israel is still identifying victims, including many babies who have been burned beyond recognition. The current list from Haaretz has over 1000 victims, including these children the article didn't count:



And I stopped trying to list all the elderly they missed:


Looking at the list, one is stunned by how many entire families were murdered. To say these weren't "civilian" is grotesque. 

Not to mention the people who weren't Israeli, like the workers and the visitors.

So this is an altogether disgusting, antisemitic article. From a newspaper that many Arab Americans rely on for their news.

(h/t Dan)




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!
 

 

10/31 Links Pt1: Anatomy of a Blood Libel; They back ‘Palestine’ because they hate Jews; Israel’s Arrow system intercepts Houthi missile

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: They back ‘Palestine’ because they hate Jews
The idea that there is something wrong with publicly exposing those who engage in antisemitism is bizarre, especially coming from those in the academy who have done their best to drive conservative critics of their toxic theories from the public square. Cancel culture is about demonizing and penalizing those who engage in normal political debate. Opposing it has never meant justifying and defending actual racism like those who are neo-Nazis or members of the Ku Klux Klan.

That’s why the doxxing of Harvard students who support the destruction of Israel and who back Hamas terrorism isn’t wrong. Reasonable people would never excuse anyone who suggested lynching African-Americans. Yet that is what is being asked for by those who are cheering on or justifying the pogroms against Jews in Israel. Indeed, Harvard even seeks to protect their right to be hired at the country’s most prestigious law firms and corporations—something it would never do for those who call for the murder of any other minority.

In a saner era of American public life, those who rationalize Hamas slaughter as “decolonization,” as Attiah does, wouldn’t be editors at The Washington Post. They’d be driven to the margins of American society where they could advocate for whatever variant of antisemitism they like.

The same could be said of the Daily Wire’s Candace Owens, who described the pro-Hamas demonstration in London as proof that “people are not accepting the media narrative about what is happening in the Middle East despite the insistent rhetoric from government officials.” But what else did we expect from a defender of Kanye West’s antisemitism, whether she calls herself a conservative or not?

The ability of Harvard’s Jew-haters to go on to glittering careers, or the ability of Owens and Attiah to retain their influential perches, isn’t the real question. It’s whether society has now gone so far in accepting the demonization of Israel and Jews that there is no penalty attached to public expressions of Jew-hatred, whether they pose as sympathy for Palestinians or not.

What does matter is whether moral people are willing to go along with the pretense that demanding Israel’s eradication and the murder of its population is acceptable discourse. What is needed is for all people of goodwill—no matter where they sit on the political spectrum, no matter their faith or background—to denounce these vile ideas as hate speech. What’s more, they should demand that those who support this hatred be given the opprobrium and shunning that would be their fate if they were avowed Nazis, rather than merely those who support Hitler’s Islamist successors.
Anatomy of a Blood Libel
On Friday, the Associated Press published two pieces related to the blast. The first, quoting a French intelligence assessment, pointed to a “Palestinian rocket” as the cause, and the second, a full AP investigation of the available evidence, made a strong case for the failed rocket theory as well, even citing morning-after AP photos of the blast zone that showed “a small crater … in the hospital’s parking lot [that] appeared to be about a meter across, suggesting a device with a much smaller explosive payload than a bomb.” BBC published a quasi mea culpa for their initially hasty reporting, writing, “The devastating human cost of the explosion at the Al Ahli hospital in Gaza and the competing narratives put forward by Israel and the Hamas-led Palestinian authorities, as to who was responsible, have made this a difficult and complex story to cover … However, as we have reported, based on the evidence available it isn’t possible to be definitive about what caused the blast. We will continue to analyse new information as it emerges.” And Canada’s public news outlet CBC wrote, “UN calls for investigation into Gaza hospital strike as France says Israel not responsible.”

By Saturday, Canada’s military had published the findings of their own inquiry, saying, “Analysis conducted independently by the Canadian Forces Intelligence Command indicates with a high degree of confidence that Israel did not strike the al-Ahli hospital on 17 October 2023,” adding their voice to the conclusion already reached by U.S. and French intelligence services. Al Jazeera and other outlets carried the Canadian conclusion in their reporting. The Wall Street Journal was also ready on Saturday to add their analysis to the mix, concluding that “Video Analysis Shows Gaza Hospital Hit by Failed Rocket Meant for Israel.”

And on Sunday, The New York Times took much of the air out of their initial reporting, writing, “Six days after Hamas accused Israel of bombing a hospital in Gaza City and killing hundreds of people, the armed Palestinian group has yet to produce or describe any evidence linking Israel to the strike, says it cannot find the munition that hit the site and has declined to provide detail to support its count of the casualties.”

This Monday, the Times editors issued an unusual note:
The Times’s initial accounts attributed the claim of Israeli responsibility to Palestinian officials, and noted that the Israeli military said it was investigating the blast. However, the early versions of the coverage—and the prominence it received in a headline, news alert and social media channels—relied too heavily on claims by Hamas, and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified. The report left readers with an incorrect impression about what was known and how credible the account was.


But on Tuesday, in spite of the Italian foreign minister announcing definitively that Israel did not cause the blast, and that the death toll was more likely 50, not 500, and in spite of Vanity Fair publishing Slack messages from inside The New York Times which showed that some editors were concerned from the jump about publishing the claims presented by a single Palestinian source, NPR published a piece which reads, “experts are increasingly doubtful that the publicly available evidence will be enough to settle the question of who was behind the incident.”

Also on Tuesday, The New York Times published its own analysis of video footage of the suspected rocket, casting doubt on the already established analysis of some of its peers, claiming that the rocket in question was actually fired from Israel and would have detonated two miles from the hospital. They write:
The Times’s finding does not answer what actually did cause the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital blast, or who is responsible. The contention by Israeli and American intelligence agencies that a failed Palestinian rocket launch is to blame remains plausible. But the Times analysis does cast doubt on one of the most-publicized pieces of evidence that Israeli officials have used to make their case and complicates the straightforward narrative they have put forth.

And the beat goes on.


Herzog on Islamists: Europe will be next
Israel is at the forefront of a global clash of civilizations, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said Tuesday.

“Hamas, Al Qaeda and Islamic State are all together in wishing to ban us all from the face of the earth,” he told a group of European Jewish leaders. “It starts with Israel, it starts with the Jews. It will never end there. Europe will be next. And that is why we are fighting a battle on behalf of the entire world.”

Herzog expressed serious concern about the significant rise in antisemitism in Europe and around the world in recent weeks. “This is a message that must be heard loud and clear,” he said. “When [anti-Israel protesters] say ‘from the river to the sea,’ they mean without any Jews.”

“When they demonstrate on campuses against Israel—they mean without Jews. When they criticize Israel fighting to defend its people, and fighting against the most brutal attack that humanity has seen in last generation—they mean no Jews,” he added.

“This is a fight not only against Israel. It is a fight against antisemites all over the world, and we are here to strengthen our brothers and sisters of Jewish communities all over the world, to show solidarity with them, because we are all in this together,” he said.

"Alternate Reality" Threatens Both Israel and Jewish Communities Around the World (Daled Amos)

Language is created by people. It's a reflection of both their times and their mindset.

No less an authority than Calvin & Hobbs pointed this out:


Calvin is right, the word "access" was originally only a noun.

Here is the entry for "access" in Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary -- from 1970:


Websters in 1970 defined "access" only as a noun, and then it defined "accessible" as "usable for access" or "easy of access" -- using "access" as a noun. The fact it defines "accessibility" as "easy of access" instead of "easy to access" is because there was no such thing as "to access" at the time. 

In time, possibly because of computers, "access" became a noun and a verb since it was more convenient to say "access" instead of "gain access."

But even Calvin stopped short of the whole truth. He said that "verbing weirds language." 
Actually, ideology "weirds" language too.

How long have we argued about the difference between militants and terrorists? This issue comes up when the media reports about Palestinians attacking Israeli civilians and trying to kill them. The media insists on calling these Palestinians "militants" instead of "terrorists." And no wonder. Unlike militants, terrorists target defenseless civilians while militants do not. 

A good example of this wordplay is the BBC. In the midst of the current war between Israel and Hamas, BBC has refused to call Hamas "terrorists," despite the Hamas massacre of 1,400 Israeli civilians and the over 200 hostages dragged back to Gaza:
The BBC has defended its decision not to describe Hamas militants as "terrorists" in coverage of the recent attacks in Israel.

UK Defence Secretary Grant Shapps said the policy is "verging on disgraceful".

A BBC spokesperson noted it was a long-standing position for its reporters not to use the term themselves unless attributing it to someone else.

Veteran BBC foreign correspondent John Simpson said "calling someone a terrorist means you're taking sides".
Pity the BBC. The term terrorist is decidedly negative so they felt they had to find another word -- because synonyms like assassin, bomber, fanatic, guerrilla, gunman, and hijacker didn't seem to reach the level of neutrality they needed to avoid tainting the Hamas name.

The BBC has recently dropped the use of 'militant' to describe Hamas attackers and instead is continuing to describe the group as a terrorist organisation proscribed by the UK Government and others.

The broadcaster's bosses had faced calls to review its editorial guidelines amid anger - including from Government ministers - at the corporation for not directly referring to Hamas as a terror organisation.

The guidelines state that journalists should not use the term terrorist without attribution - meaning it is permitted only when used by others - and that words such as 'bomber', 'attacker', 'gunman', 'kidnapper', 'insurgent' and 'militant' should be used to describe perpertrators.
According to BBC policy, they will use the T-word only for attribution, but not as a "judgment call." Yet the BBC had no problem describing other groups as terrorists:

Just 2 weeks ago, the BBC actually reported about a terror attack -- in Brussels:


The BBC has now dutifully wiped the headline so that it now reads, "Brussels shooting: 'Europe shaken' after two Swedes shot dead." The T-word is still used 5 times in the article -- twice while quoting an official and the other 3 times could arguably also be an attribution, each time without any qualification.

But this is part of a larger phenomenon we have been seeing in the US during the whitewashing of violence to support a political, ideological agenda.

In 2020, CNN was widely mocked for describing a riot as a 'fiery but mostly peaceful protest'
CNN national correspondent Omar Jimenez was reporting live in the early hours on Tuesday morning on the unrest that had taken place in Kenosha, Wis., following the police-involved shooting of Jacob Blake.

Jimenez was standing in front of a raging fire and the chyron at the bottom of the screen read, "FIERY BUT MOSTLY PEACEFUL PROTESTS AFTER POLICE SHOOTING."


MSNBC did something similar

NBC came out right into the open to clarify that NBC would not use the word "riot" to describe the reaction to George Floyd's murder:

NBC News came under scrutiny Thursday for allegedly telling its reporters to refer to the events in Minneapolis this week as "protests" and not "riots," according to one of its anchors.

Craig Melvin, an MSNBC host and co-anchor of "Today," shed some light as to how his network is framing its reporting. 

...Melvin's tweet raised eyebrows among critics who accused the network of downplaying the violence that took place in the city to protest the death of George Floyd.

"What kind of alternate reality is this where the mass looting and burning of businesses is not considered a riot by a news network? A protest is what we had here in LA last night. What’s happening in Minneapolis is the textbook definition of a riot. Protesters don’t loot. Period," local Fox affiliate reporter Bill Melugin tweeted.

The ability to whitewash riots, lootings and the burning of businesses as mere "protests" in defense of left-wing groups such as BLM established the precedence that violence and destruction could be excused and even covered up for a "righteous cause." It set the stage for our current "alternate reality" where people gloss over the Hamas massacres of 1,400 Israeli civilians and the kidnapping of over 200 by Hamas terrorists, and blame the victims.

Peggy Noonan writes about this "alternate reality" in the face of the Hamas massacre. She notes that while people who are middle-aged or older feel sympathy and loyalty towards Israel, the young see the situation in a completely different way. They feel antipathy, "sometimes accompanied by rage, sometimes by almost violent accusations against the colonialist oppressor state." This is more than seeing a righteous cause.

According to Noonan:

At the bottom of today’s progressive politics there is blood lust. They speak of justice and equity but that’s not what they want, they want dominance. It’s all about the will to power. Progressive students have absorbed the idea it’s good to be militant in your views, it shows you’re authentic. No, it shows you got the talking points. [emphasis added]

And now -- consistent with the whitewashing of BLM riots -- university students, armed with those talking points that Noonan mentioned, defend and praise terrorists while condemning their victims. These students are defended by university administrations and by many in the media. Protesters recite their mantra that Israel is an occupier and is therefore responsible for any "violence" committed by Hamas. They may be taking their cue from Francesca Albanese, who under the guise of a law degree, spreads her ideological hatred of Israel and admiration of Hamas and claims that Israel has no right to self-defense.

While Israel is in a battle to change the reality in Gaza, Jewish communities around the world face a rise in antisemitism that threatens to create a new reality of its own.



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!
 

 

  • Tuesday, October 31, 2023
  • Elder of Ziyon

Haters reveal Israel's secret "ethnic cleansing" plans! (They don't mention that many Gazans would happily move to Egypt if they could.)

Mondoweiss and +972 have revealed not one but two super-duper secret Israeli plans to expel all Palestinians from Gaza and take it over!


The Hamas attack on Israeli towns surrounding Gaza on October 7 has provided a pretext for an unprecedented, genocidal revenge campaign by Israel involving the massacre of now nearly 5,000 Palestinians, including over 2,000 children – and that may only be the beginning. Now, an Israeli think tank with ties to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is promoting plans for the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza. 

On October 17, the Misgav Institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy published a position paper (PDF) advocating for the “relocation and final settlement of the entire Gaza population.” The report advocates exploiting the current moment to accomplish a long-held Zionist goal of moving Palestinians off the land of historic Palestine. The report’s subtitle makes it clear: “There is at the moment a unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the whole Gaza Strip in coordination with the Egyptian government.” 

A think tank writes up something and suddenly it becomes Israeli policy!

 But it isn't only a think tank, but an Israeli ministry that hardly anyone ever heard of! From +972:

The Israeli Ministry of Intelligence is recommending the forcible and permanent transfer of the Gaza Strip’s 2.2 million Palestinian residents to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, according to an official document revealed in full for the first time by +972’s partner site Local Call yesterday.

The 10-page document, dated Oct. 13, 2023, bears the logo of the Intelligence Ministry — a small governmental body that produces policy research and shares its proposals with intelligence agencies, the army, and other ministries. It assesses three options regarding the future of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in the framework of the current war, and recommends a full population transfer as its preferred course of action. It also calls on Israel to enlist the international community in support of this endeavor. The document, whose authenticity was confirmed by the ministry, has been translated into English in full here on +972.

At least +972 puts this a little bit in perspective: 

The existence of the document does not necessarily indicate that its recommendations are being considered by Israel’s defense establishment. Despite its name, the Intelligence Ministry is not directly responsible for any intelligence body, but rather independently prepares studies and policy papers that are distributed to the Israeli government and security agencies for review, but are not binding. The ministry’s annual budget is NIS 25 million and its influence is considered relatively small. It is currently headed by Gila Gamliel, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party.  

Palestinian response to the Ministry of Intelligence plan is predictable:
“We are against transfer to any place, in any form, and we consider it a red line that we will not allow to be crossed,” Nabil Abu Rudeineh, spokesman for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, said of the report. “What happened in 1948 will not be allowed to happen again.”
First of all, there has been a lot of speculation about the future of Gaza after Hamas is destroyed. It is quite reasonable for a government to look at all possibilities.

The Intelligence Ministry's paper is not genocidal. It looks for what would be best for Palestinians themselves.

It describes three alternatives: 
Option A: The population remaining in Gaza and the import of Palestinian Authority (PA) rule. 
Option B: The population remaining in Gaza along with the emergence of a local Arab authority.
Option C: The evacuation of the civilian population from Gaza to Sinai.

Out of these hypotheticals, it examines the pros and cons of each. Again, this is prudent, not genocidal. And Option C is determined to be best for everyone, including Palestinians themselves:

2.In our assessment, post-evacuation combat is likely to result in fewer casualties among the civilian population compared to the expected casualties if the population remains (as presented in options A and B).

3.Large-scale migration from war zones (Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine) and population movement is a natural and sought-after outcome due to the dangers associated with remaining in the war zone.

4.Even before the war, there was significant demand for emigration from Gaza, among the local population. The war is only expected to increase this phenomenon.

5.Legally:

a.This is a defensive war against a terrorist organization that conducted a military invasion into Israel.

 b.The demand for the evacuation of the non-combatant population from the area is a widely accepted method that saves lives, and it was the approach used by the Americans in Iraq in 2003.

c.Egypt has an obligation under international law to allow the passage of the population.

...8.In the long run, this option will gain broader legitimacy because it involves a population that will be integrated within a state framework with citizenship.

Now, this will never happen. Egypt is dead-set against a single Palestinian on its land. (The Misgav Institute plan describes how a voluntary relocation of Palestinians to become Egyptian citizens, paid for by Israel, would be good for Egypt's economy as well as those of surrounding countries.)

Palestinian leaders try to brainwash Palestinians into thinking this would be a second Nabka. However, what none of the critics dare examine is what the Palestinian civilians in Gaza themselves want to do.

Which is why the outcry over this plan is so hypocritical. Not one of the supposed "pro-Palestinian" groups have ever asked Palestinians what they want.  But all evidence shows that if given a choice, many if not most would love to become full citizens of other Arab countries. 

The real question is, why is it so unfathomable - nay, "genocidal" - to think about a plan that would, if implemented correctly, be good for everyone: Israel, Gazans, and even Egypt? 

No one will force Palestinians to become citizens of Egypt if they don't want to - but what do they want?

If you aren't asking that question, then your pretense of being "pro-Palestinian" is exposed as just a smokescreen for hating 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!
 

 

  • Tuesday, October 31, 2023
  • Elder of Ziyon

Was the Turkish hospital in Gaza hit by a terrorist rocket?

The Gaza ministry of health  announced that Israeli aircraft targeted the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital for cancer patients.

Some news reports said it was "destroyed."

So I looked for video or pictures of this destruction.

One video shows "the moment the hospital was hit." I see a lot of smoke, but no visible damage to the building.


Photos from the hospital Facebook page shows minor damage that could have come from a nearby airstrike, or from a terror rocket.. There is no hole in the wall that they show.




Finally, there is a video where an employee walks through the mostly undamaged hospital to show the videographer the major damage: what appears to be part of a wall that fell in, but it did not look like it was an outside wall.


Finally I found a photo that showed some real rubble, and it looks like a window was shattered. This is clearly not the damage from an Israeli missile.




It is certain that Israel didn't "target" the hospital as they claim. It may have been shrapnel from a nearby IDF attack, but it appears at least as likely that this was a Gaza rocket that fell short.




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!
 

 

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Elder of Ziyon - حـكـيـم صـهـيـون



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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