Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, January 01, 2024

01/01 Links Pt1: Herzog calls on world leaders to pressure Hamas on hostages; Hamas rings in 2024 with rocket barrage; Ordinary Palestinians Aided and Abetted Hamas on Oct. 7

From Ian:

Herzog calls on world leaders to pressure Hamas on hostages

Israeli President Isaac Herzog issued a special New Year’s message in which he urged the international community to pressure the Hamas terror group to release hostages held in the Gaza Strip since Oct. 7.

“As we enter 2024, I call on the entire family of nations, on all world leaders, to demand and work for the immediate, unconditional release of our 133 hostages,” said Herzog.

“Babies, the elderly, women, men, are being held in brutal captivity by Hamas, without vital medication or visitation from the Red Cross. Their immediate release is at the core of our battle with Hamas terrorists in Gaza.

“May the light dispel the darkness, and may the New Year bring peace, hope, and healing for all.”

The post to X, formerly Twitter, was published in Hebrew, English, Arabic, Russian, Spanish, Italian, Hindi, French, German and Portuguese.

As we enter 2024, I call on the entire family of nations, on all world leaders, to demand and work for the immediate, unconditional release of our 133 hostages.

Babies, the elderly, women, men, are being held in brutal captivity by Hamas, without vital medication or visitation…

WSJ Freelink: Israel’s ‘Black Sabbath’: Murder, Sexual Violence and Torture on Oct. 7

Months have passed since the October day Israelis call Black Sabbath, when Hamas-led militants rampaged into Israel from Gaza, an attack that officials say killed some 1,200 people and included acts of torture, mutilation and sexual violence. Israeli investigators are now using some 200,000 photographs and videos and 2,000 witness testimonies to reconstruct what happened, with an eye toward building a legal case against those responsible that would meet international standards and provide a definitive historical accounting of the Oct. 7 attack.

Reporters from The Wall Street Journal examined some of that evidence, supplemented with interviews of first responders, survivors, families of victims and forensic scientists, to document an attack that Israeli Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai described as “systematic and unprecedented in its cruelty.”

Forensic evidence shared with the Journal by Israeli officials shows some victims were burned alive after militants used accelerants to set fire to their homes. Photos viewed by the Journal taken by first responders on the scene show bodies were mutilated including the sex organs of both men and women. The bodies of women and girls showed various signs of sexual assault, and recently, at least three female survivors have come forward to say they experienced sexual violence on Oct. 7.

Hamas officials have denied their fighters killed children and raped women.

Israel’s investigation is expected to yield a trial that would be the country’s most significant since the early 1960s, when Israel captured, tried and hanged former Nazi official Adolf Eichmann for his central role in the Holocaust.

“The state of Israel has never before dealt with crimes and an investigation on this scale,” said Roi Sheindorf, former deputy to the attorney general. “This will be one of the most important trials to take place in Israel.”

The Israeli police are examining testimonies from captured militants, footage from cameras obtained from them, social media, and vehicle dashboards and security cameras throughout southern Israel, as well as materials seized in Gaza.

One challenge for the investigation, legal analysts say, is that the collection of forensic evidence was limited in the aftermath of Oct. 7, while the Israeli military was engaged in combat in the area for days after the attack.

More than 21,000 Palestinians have since died in airstrikes and fighting between the Israeli military and Hamas, most of them women and children, according to Palestinian health authorities. The number doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants.

An accompanying goal of Israel’s investigation could also be preserving history, much like the Eichmann trial laid out Nazi Germany’s Final Solution to the world and began a process for witnesses to come forward en masse to speak of the horrors they experienced.

Israel has identified about 800 dead civilians from Oct. 7, including 37 minors under the age of 17, six of whom were under 5. Some 25 people over the age of 80 were killed, including a 94-year-old woman, according to the prime minister’s office.

Hamas militants and others kidnapped roughly 250 people on Oct. 7, according to Israeli authorities.

NGO Monitor Statement on EuroMed HR Monitor

The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor is an ideological advocacy NGO led by Palestinians alleged by Israel to be linked to Hamas. The organization uses the facade of human rights and focuses primarily on demonizing Israel, with no publicly available information on its budget or funding sources. The repeated allegations directed at Israel, including accusations of “organ theft,” as well as “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” “collective punishment,” are not supported by evidence.

In contrast, EMHRM systematically echoes and amplifies denials of Palestinian abuses and war crimes where the evidence is readily available, such as using Al-Shifa medical complex and other hospitals in the Gaza Strip for terror. In addition, social media posts by EMHRM officials systematically promote claims that delegitimize Israel and Zionism.

EMHRM also mixes political propaganda with blood libels and other forms of antisemitism, such as the organ theft charges, accusations of “slow poisoning of [Palestinian] children,” and declarations that “the legacy of the Holocaust lent uncritical credence to the Zionist narrative.” Richard Falk, Chair of EMHRN’s Board of Trustees and featured on the NGO’s website, is a 9/11 conspiracy theorist and has been widely denounced for his antisemitic statements.

Hamas Terror Links: Ramy Abdu and Mazen Kahel, respectively current and former chairman of EMHRM, were listed by the Israel Ministry of Defense in 2013 as “main operatives” for institutions considered by Israel to be fronts for Hamas in Europe.

EMHRN appears in the European Union’s transparency register of “‘interest representatives” who “carry out activities to influence the EU policy and decision-making process” (emphasis in original).

"048" graffiti in Haifa is a warning for Jewish Israelis (Forest Rain)

By Forest Rain

048 is the writing on the wall

The Hamas massacre happened because many people did not take Hamas at their word. Although Hamas openly declared their intentions and goals and followed up consistently with actions, many people in Israel and around the world pretended they did not see, did not know. It was easier. Less scary.

Long before the Hamas massacre of October 7^th I’ve been taking note of graffiti in my city, Haifa. The same message, written over and over and over on the walls of my city.

After October 7^th, this graffiti has increased.

What do you think the message is here?

048. On a guided tour of Haifa I attended years ago the guide said that the numbers indicate a sense of city pride as they are the Haifa area code, the first 3 numbers of Haifa telephone numbers.

Really? Do you believe anyone would be that enthusiastic about their area code?

The digits 048 seem innocuous. I’m sure I walked past them many times - before I saw them next to Arabic writing, the map of Israel with the watermelon (a fruit adopted as a Palestinian symbol due to its colors), the PLO flag, and the declaration SAVE SHEIKH JARRAH.

In this version of the graffiti, the number 19 appears within the 0.

What do you see? I see a clear message, literally written on the wall. 1948. The “disaster” of Israel’s founding (not ‘67 when supposedly peace was thwarted by the “occupation” and “settlements”). 1948.

This is a declaration of intention and aspiration. In Haifa, the city that markets itself as a city of inclusion where Jews and Arabs live peacefully side by side.

We do live side by side, but does that mean there is peace?

Arabs in Haifa don’t physically attack their Jewish neighbors, at least not usually. There are mass graves in the old Jewish cemetery of Haifa that tell of a different interaction between neighbors pre-1948. The only physical violence I have seen in my time in Haifa was the pogroms of May 2021, during Operation Guardian of the Walls.

Every time there is an Operation in Gaza there are Arab demonstrations in Haifa, where Israeli Arabs, sometimes under missile fire, express their solidarity with Gaza and call “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”.

These demonstrators are a minority of the Arab population. That’s true. What’s also true is that they are Israelis who sympathize with terrorists who murder Israelis and declare the ultimate goal of destroying the country which gives them the freedom to scream that they too want to destroy the country.

It is easy to dismiss the “extreme minority.”

It’s also easy to see coexistence in the Arab-owned coffee houses and pubs full of highly educated, sophisticated Arab hipsters. It’s easy not to notice the signs and menus that are written in Arabic and English, with no Hebrew (the language of the land). If you don’t approach the employees of many of these places you might never come across those who will speak to you in perfect English but refuse to answer in Hebrew. If you don’t push them about why they, citizens of Israel won’t speak Hebrew you might never hear the answer that I have heard “I don’t speak the language of the occupation.”

I take people at face value. They don’t always tell you directly what they believe but if you pay attention, there are signs and symbols.

I take note when the smiling and pleasant Arab vendor wears a necklace in the shape of a machine gun. Before October 7^th, when asked about his necklace, he laughed and put it under his shirt.

After October 7^th, when all the Jews around me were somber and despondent, the Arab vendors in the market were jubilant. Today, at the end of December, the Jewish vendors will tell you in whispers: “They were acting like people act when their favorite sports team wins the championship.”

But if you don’t go and don’t ask, you might never know.

Interestingly, now that Gaza is being smashed to smithereens, the Arab vendors in the market (and other Arabs in Haifa) have reverted to their normal behavior. Not so loud, not so happy.

People express what they believe in various ways. Sometimes the writing is literally on the wall. Paying attention might just save your life.

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!

The bot campaign to break Israel's spirit

Last week, a representative of an Israeli social threat intelligence firm Cyabra spoke at a Knesset session about how a coordinated influence campaign from Iraq was using bots in the first days of the war to impact public opinion.

I've discussed this a little, and I spent some more time looking at the bots attacking my account.

Social media allows attackers to quickly adjust their methods to see what is working and what isn't. I'm finding that they are getting more effective at their messaging.

The ones attacking me are specifically trying to turn the Israeli public against the war. They post almost exclusively in Hebrew. They are using a few vectors for their messaging that would resonate with Israelis: attacking Netanyahu's leadership, pretending to care about the hostages, and claiming that the IDF is hiding things from the public during the war and things are going badly.

When they create new bot accounts, they will use Jewish and Israeli iconography in their profiles - lots of Israeli flags, for example.

They'll use typically Jewish and Israeli names - lots of "Levy" and "Cohen" and "Friedman"s. And there is a hierarchy - some older bot accounts that have been around for several months that aren't specifically Israeli sounding are feeding a second tier, which might have 30-150 fake followers of other bots, and then the bottom tier will only have one or two followers. Nearly all of the bottom tier accounts have been created within the past few weeks.

Often, the accounts will start off by following and retweeting actual popular Zionist accounts (including mine) to make themselves look legitimate,. and sometimes this fools real people into following them, making it a little harder to identify them.

I don't know where they get their content, but it is getting much more sophisticated every day. Here is a video that was posted by hundreds of those bots where they use humor to try to demoralize Israelis into thinking the IDF is killing hostages and being killed by Hamas because of stupidity. This one seems to have been created by an Arab account but they added Hebrew messaging.

As I mentioned last week, Iranian-linked sites are bragging that they are learning Hebrew and studying the Israeli psyche to fine tune these sorts of messages and make them appear to be truly from Israelis.

To these botmasters, Israeli dissension on how to conduct the war and anti-government protests are a godsend. It makes some of their messages look like they really could be from left-wing Israelis, and some of their material may indeed be from a fringe of Israelis. The sheer number of bots makes it appear that Israelis are far more divided.

The good news is that their attempt to use these bots to get a ceasefire or demoralize the Israeli public means that Hamas is losing, badly. But every social media user must understand how extensive and sophisticated these campaigns are to manipulate you. Tens of thousands of fake accounts, with millions of messages, is not a small scale campaign.

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!

Not surprisingly, 8 out of these top ten were written after October 7.

1. Israeli legal scholar icon discusses where NGOs and media get international law wrong

2. Israel didn't murder the Christian mother and daughter in Gaza. Hamas did.

3. Did the UN Human Rights Council just admit Hamas steals civilian aid? Plus, the dumbest argument yet against flooding tunnels

4. Map of Israeli attacks closely tracks with tunnel locations in northern Gaza

5. My Intersectionality Victimhood Calculator can predict how news articles are written

6. 67% of Democrats think there was once an independent Arab state called "Palestine." The more people know, the more they support Israel.

7. This two year old Palestinian boy was brutally murdered. There will be no mention of it in the NYT or by NGOs.

8. Proof that Gaza Health Ministry just makes casualty statistics up

9. My viral cartoon, Amy Schumer, 10/7 rape denial and other antisemitic lies

10. Poll shows yet again: Palestinians across the board overwhelmingly support the most heinous terror attacks

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!

Let's talk about "destroying cultural heritage" in Gaza

Israel has been accused of destroying Gaza's cultural heritage with various attacks. But Gaza's best known mosque is a site where Jewish cultural heritage was quite literally erased.

One of the accusations is that Israel destroyed the Great Omari Mosque of Gaza:

The Omari Mosque, Gaza's most iconic landmark and oldest mosque stretching back centuries, has been largely destroyed in an Israeli strike, Gaza City officials and eyewitnesses say.

An Israeli official, who spoke to NPR on condition of anonymity to offer a preliminary assessment, confirmed the strike and said the mosque grounds contained a tunnel shaft used by militants, and that Hamas fighters from the elite Nukhba battalion had regularly used the mosque for cover.

Israel was reported to have destroyed the same mosque in 2014. Amazing how this historic mosque can be destroyed so many times.

Hamas used the mosque as a military site. And it wouldn't be the first time Hamas was associated with the mosque.

In 2007, Fatah gunmen shot dead the imam of the Great Omari Mosque, Mohammed al-Rifati, 40, by attacking his home with rocket-propelled grenades, because he was a Hamas supporter.

In 2014, Hamas chose the supposedly destroyed Omari Mosque as the spot to publicly execute six men in front of hundreds of spectators including children. The hooded suspected "collaborators" were dragged along the floor to kneel by a wall facing the crowd, then each man was shot in the head individually before being sprayed with bullets fired from an AK-47.

Hamas leaders regularly preached at the Omari mosque. Ismail Haniyeh preached there in 2018, and at a funeral there in 2016 for seven Hamas men who were killed in a tunnel collapse he praised those building tunnels.

Hamas senior official Mahmoud Zahar gave a press conference at the mosque last year.

In 1870, archaeologist Charles Clermont-Ganneau examined the Great Omari Mosque of Gaza and found a column with an unmistakable menorah, lulav, etrog and shofar in bas relief. In Hebrew and Greek underneath the image it said "Hananiah bar Yaakov."

He took a squeeze of the find and published it:

Apparently, the Muslims took a column from the site of an ancient synagogue and placed it there.

The anti-Zionist-and-definitely-not-antisemitic Gazans methodically chiseled out and smoothed over this representation of Jewish symbols sometime between 1987 and 1993.

Here's another famous case of Palestinians deliberately destroying Jewish heritage in Gaza: In 1966, Egyptian archaeologists discovered a mosaic in Gaza which in a building they identified as a church, showing a figure playing the lyre. A photo of the figure was published, and it was obvious that the Hebrew word "David" was next to the figure, and it was a synagogue that was uncovered, not a church.

When Israel took over Gaza in 1967, they went to the site - and found that the Gazans had gouged out David's face and other parts of his body.

The mosaic has since been restored.

The treatment of ancient artifacts in Gaza is a microcosm of the war itself. Hamas cynically hides itself under Gaza's historical heritage and blames Israel when it is destroyed in pursuit of Hamas. But Gazans deliberately destroying Jewish heritage in Gaza aren't condemned at all.

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!

12/31 Links: Why the full extent of Hamas’s sex crimes may never be known; Hamas is succeeding at playing the West for fools; Israel wants UNRWA out of Gaza

From Ian:

‘Nothing prepares you for it’

“We’d walk into a room full of blood and see no sign of shooting or bombing. There, Hamas terrorists didn’t use a gun to kill their victims, they used an axe to chop them into pieces,” said Simcha Greiniman, a 47-year-old veteran ZAKA.

Since Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre of 1,200 people in Israel, 800 ZAKA volunteers have worked around the clock to recover the remains of the dead.

“I am there every day from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. to make sure that these families get the closure they need to properly mourn their loved ones,” Greiniman told JNS.

Founded in 1995, ZAKA deals with instances of unnatural death, and works in close cooperation with emergency services and security forces.

Over 3,000 ZAKA volunteers are currently deployed cross the country, on call 24/7, to respond to terror attacks, accidents or natural disasters. ZAKA With Destroyed Cars, Oct. 7 AttacksZAKA personnel work at a field with destroyed cars from the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks, Dec. 12, 2023. Photo by Chaim Goldberg/Flash90.

Greiniman has been volunteering for ZAKA for the past 32 years and oversees groups in charge of conducting Chesed Shel Emes, honoring the dead by bringing bodies to burial, which is considered one of the greatest mitzvot [commandments] in Judaism.

“In the Bible, there is a special need to make sure bodies get a proper burial and that no part, not even blood samples or small bones, are left behind,” explained Greiniman. ZAKA personnel clean blood off the ground at the scene of a suspected terror attack near the entrance to Jerusalem, on Nov. 22, 2022. Two explosions at two bus stops left one person killed and at least another 13 injured. Photo by Yonatan Sindel/Flash90.

As part of ZAKA International, Greiniman has volunteered both in Israel and overseas in scenarios ranging from natural disasters to accidents and terror attacks. In recent years, ZAKA International flew to Haiti, India, Turkey and Morocco.

Why the full extent of Hamas’s sex crimes may never be known
Free link

There was little time for investigation, and little expertise to formally identify the crimes Hamas had committed.

But forensic reviews of video footage of the aftermath of the attacks, and dozens of interviews clearly points to a pattern of gender-based violence on Oct 7.

There are believed to be at least seven locations where Israeli women and girls appear to have been sexually assaulted, or mutilated.

Dozens of bodies of women and girls with signs of sexual abuse were found, medics told The New York Times.

Videos of the aftermath are said to show soldiers shot in the vagina, and kibbutz residents with nails driven into their thighs and groin.

The scenes at the rave are some of the most graphic, with reports of Hamas terrorists with hammers gang raping party-goers, and cutting off breasts to throw to each other as they laughed.

Both Mr Otmazgin and Ms Mendes admitted that they were overwhelmed on the day of the attacks and their work was focused on finding survivors or preparing bodies.

Ms Mendes said everyone was in a hurry at the morgue to release the bodies to the families for burial instead of looking for clues about exactly what had happened to them.

“Our main concern, especially in the initial days, was identification so that family members could be notified and only then preparation for burial,” Ms Mendes told the UN earlier this month.

Meanwhile, the means by which bodies were collected from the scene of the atrocities may have hampered evidence records.

Mr Otmazgin recalls how he raced to the festival site on the morning of the terror attacks only to be stopped in the road by an Orthodox Jewish man trying to help recover the scores of dead.

When the man opened the boot of his white Skoda, Mr Otmazgin saw the bodies of two young women, in short shorts and trainers lying next to each other.

Mr Otmazgin swore at the man, and then placed the bodies in the ambulance and drove on south.

He came across some soldiers blocking the way while fighting was still raging.

Overwhelmed, they had rushed to remove some bodies from the party that needed to be collected.

Mr Otmazgin works for Zaka, a volunteer group of ultra-Orthodox men who deploy to mass-casualty events simply to collect bodies as fast as they can. They are not there to investigate.

While evidence of pervasive sexual violence became known among therapy providers, gynaecologists and first responders, the details were not initially widely publicised.

Israel building biggest case against Hamas since Eichmann trial

Israel is preparing for the country’s most significant trial since the 1961 court case against Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.

Investigators and prosecutors are compiling a massive amount of evidence for an indictment against the captured Hamas terrorists who participated in the Oct. 7 massacre of some 1,200 persons in the northwestern Negev. Thousands more were wounded and at least 240 kidnapped back to Gaza. Terrorists committed acts of rape, sexual abuse, torture, burning and desecration of corpses.

Some 200 Hamas terrorists were captured in Israel during the Oct. 7 invasion, and additional terrorists are being taken prisoner as the Israel Defense Forces continues its ground offensive against the terrorist organization in the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli parliament voted in early December to form a subcommittee that will create a legal framework for the prosecution of Hamas terrorists who participated in the Islamist group’s Oct. 7 massacre.

“The state of Israel has never before dealt with crimes and an investigation on this scale,” Roi Sheindorf, former deputy Israeli attorney general, told the Journal. “This will be one of the most important trials to take place in Israel.”

I’m a former hostage. What I thought when I saw Hamas release captives

Ana Diamond works with the Oxford Disinformation and Extremism Lab and the Red Team Network at OpenAI. She is also the co-founder of the Alliance Against State Hostage-taking, having endured over 200 days in solitary confinement as a hostage in Iran between 2016 and 2018.

As 105 hostages were slowly released during the pause in fighting over the end of November, a particularly unsettling phenomenon caught my eye as I perused social media: the crude denialism, even erasure, of Hamas’ atrocities toward their hostages in Gaza. It involved the active online participation of what could best be described as pro-Hamas publicity by sharing footage of Israeli hostages who appeared to be smiling, exchanging high-fives, waving and, at times, even expressing gratitude to their captors.

These images, the Hamas sympathizers insisted, were proof that the hostages had been treated decently and liked their Hamas guards. One user on X (formerly Twitter) wrote, “[Hostages] were having the time of their lives”; another one commented on how “they were treated well.” I find this very difficult to believe, especially since there have been instances where the hostages have taken the risk to attempt an escape from their captors – only to be tragically killed by the Israel Defense Forces by mistake. Furthermore, harrowing details shared by relatives of released hostages speak to beatings, hunger and lack of proper medical care.

As a former hostage of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps of Iran (IRGC), I was distraught to see the misleading viral narratives disseminated about the Israeli hostages on social media. Iran is the country that set the blueprint for rogue hostage-taking when Islamist students held more than 50 US Embassy staff hostage following the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and unsurprisingly it is now funding Hamas.

It is true that hostage takers have good reason to keep their prisoners alive — they can extract a higher price for their release. While it is dangerous to idealize Hamas’ actions as humane, the fact that the hostages’ value lies in their well-being does mean their external conditions can appear relatively adequate. But even if there aren’t explicit signs of physical abuse, the psychological repercussions of terror and shock can take years for hostages to overcome. Leading psychiatrists have remarked on the necessity of extensive treatment for the trauma experienced by the hostages released from captivity in Gaza.

But it is wildly problematic to read any meaning into one orchestrated moment of release when hostages were still under Hamas control. In these politically precarious times, our social media landscapes have transformed into virtual war zones. It’s imperative to acknowledge that every hostage release serves as a carefully curated photo opportunity for Hamas, and for us to understand what the accurate experience of hostages in these circumstances is.

Happy October 86th

For the families of the hostages being held, for the families of the soldiers risking their lives day in and day out in Gaza, for the more than 1,400 families who have lost a loved one, for those cradling one of the many thousands of wounded in battle and for the country at large which experiencing the worst trauma in its history, it doesn’t matter that 2023 has made way for 2024.

Only in the hope that this calendar year doesn’t contain the heartache and grief of its predecessor (a very low bar, indeed), are we able to mark a differentiation between 2023 and 2024.

As long as our boys are dying in battle, our collective family is being held in inhumane conditions in Gaza, and Hamas is still clinging to a semblance of control, there is no room in our hearts – and no time in our lives – to celebrate.

The best we can do is raise a toast in the hope that October 86th will soon make way for a date in January or February to be determined. And that come next December 31st, Israel will have a blowout to match any New Year’s Eve celebration. And we won’t call it Sylvester.

Exclusive Interview With Dr. Harold Rhode: Understanding The Middle East Requires Knowing The Difference Between Shalom And Salam (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

I had the opportunity to talk with Dr. Harold Rhode.

Dr. Harold Rhode has a Ph.D. in Islamic history and lived for years in the Muslim world. He served as an advisor on the Islamic world to the Department of Defense for 28 years.

Dr. Harold Rhode

Do all of the signatories to the Abraham Accords, Arabs and Israelis, see the Abraham Accords the same way?

We Jews want people to love us. And the peace we are looking for is that you will stop fighting, and we will stop fighting, and everyone will live together in peace. But the Muslims do not have a concept like that. They won't stop until the whole world will be Muslim. They follow what their prophet Muhammad did. He signed a 10-year ceasefire with Quraysh. After 2 years, Muhammad realized Quraysh had weakened -- so he attacked them, and won. There is a classic Latin phrase "Bellum omnium contra omnes, pace inter omnes interpellatur," that war is the natural state of man, interrupted by periods of peace.

We do not look at life like that, but historically most people do. From a Muslim point of view, they can agree to have relations with their enemies -- whether they be Muslims, Jews, or anybody else. They can make temporary agreements just like their prophet did. Those agreements can be renewed, renewed, and renewed. But to think that the Saudis see peace the way we Jews see it is a pipe dream.

In 1949, after Israel's War of Independence, there was a peace conference in Rhodes. The Arabs insisted the borders be called "ceasefire lines" and not borders. The situation was not set in stone. Arabs do not have the concept that when the fighting is over, we can be friends. If we think we will have a peace agreement with the Saudis in the way we understand peace, we will be disappointed.

Does this mean the Abraham Accords are a pipe dream?

No, that does not mean the Abraham Accords are an illusion. We can have agreements with the Arab countries -- as long as we have things they want from us, such as hi-tech, connections to the outside world, and alternate routes in place of the Suez Canal. They are interested in what is in it for them, not for the sake of friendship. Friendship is between people. Countries ally themselves because of common interests. The Abraham Accords are not about peace; they are about what is in both sides' interest.

The Arab word “salam” has nothing to do with the Hebrew word shalom. Shalom comes from the root for "completeness." The word "shalaim", means to pay. When two people come to an agreement on a price, that payment completes the process.

In Arabic, the word “salam” is similar to the Hebrew word “shalom,” but they do not have the same meaning. “Islam” and “salam,” come from the same Arabic root. Islam means “submission,” while “salam” means something like the special sense of joy that someone has by submitting to Allah’s will through Islam. Shalom, on the other hand, means letting bygones be bygones, a concept that is totally alien to Islam. Clearly, "salam" and "shalom" do not mean the same thing.

The following example illustrates the Arabic meaning of the word in a Muslim context: If you take a look at the correspondence between Yemen and Saudi Arabia during the war in 1934, the leaders of the two sides wrote the most threatening things to each other -- and then closed their letters with "salam alaikum". These leaders hated each other, but they were fellow Muslims addressing each other. So if "salam" meant peace, how could they end their letters to each other with “salam alaikum?” How could they close their letters with "Peace be unto you"? Because the phrase has nothing to do with peace -- it is about submission to Allah, which both of them, as fellow Muslims, are required to do.”

So, we are dealing with cultures that are so incredibly different from ours, from the Western culture, which is partially based on the Hebrew culture.

I am for the Abraham Accords, very strongly so. The Arab countries are interested because Israel is strong. The proof of that goes back to when contact between Israel and the UAE became serious. Netanyahu spoke before Congress against the Iran deal in 2015, in defiance of the US. He showed Israel was an independent country that could make its own decisions, and was willing to stand up to the US. That was when the Arab countries decided they could do business directly with Israel. It is why Saudi Arabia and Israel have had good relations for a long while and both have a strong dislike for Mahmoud Abbas, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood.

But wouldn't you think that at some point the "experts" would catch on to the fact that the Arab world is different?

No, not at all. Few of these “experts” know the languages or haven’t taken the time to learn about and understand the cultures of the Muslim world. They think anyone who speaks English is a closet American. The White House ignored the Kurds, but when Iraq was liberated during The Gulf War, the White House greeted them as part of Iraq. A State Department senior official approached the Kurds and told them, "You have to stop thinking of yourselves as Kurds; you have to think of yourselves as Iraqis."

The experts don't read Bernard Lewis. They read Edward Said. His approach is that you can never understand another culture, so don't waste your time trying to. Don't learn the languages and don't learn the culture. Bernard Lewis' attitude was quite different. He said you had to immerse yourself in the culture and the language. You have to try to understand what they are doing and saying in terms of their culture. In modern parlance, what the experts are doing is the equivalent of telling a person not to think of themselves as a man or a woman, but rather as a human.

I recall the reaction of a very senior leader when war broke out in Syria in 2011. I suggested this was nothing more than the return of the ancient Shiite-Sunni conflict. His response was, "Well, we can't have that!" I said to myself it didn't matter if we could or could not have it. The fact is that they see it this way. The reality is the reality, and if you choose to ignore it, you do so at your own peril.

Let's talk about October 7. On the one hand, Israel's weakness was revealed by the Hamas attack. On the other hand, Israel has entered Gaza and taken the battle to Hamas to a degree few could have predicted.

Hamas misread the Jews.

But how do the Saudis and the rest of the Gulf states read this? Do they see this as a sign of Israeli weakness or do they see Israel's reaction as a sign of Israel's strength?

They understand strength very well and Israel has come back very strongly. That part of the world has immense patience -- the Jews don't, but everyone else there does. They know how to wait. Let the Saudis put off signing the agreement. I don't really care if there is a formal agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, because their relationship is so strong. The relationship is between governments, because these Arab countries rule from the top, down, unlike in a democracy, where leaders are elected by the people and must take into account the will of the people they lead.

Israelis seem to have a Westernized view of the Middle East. You would think they would have a keener insight and understanding of their Arab neighbors.

Superficially, Israel is a Westernized country. But when you scratch the surface, you see how the Israelis have reacted to the issue of judicial reforms, which the Arabs saw as a weakness -- it is another reason why Hamas decided to pounce now -- but Israel has created a younger generation, who are going to have a huge say after this, a revolution against the politics, military, intelligence, and the media: "We put our lives on the line -- not for you, but for the Jewish people." That is what they are saying. We will see where all this leads. It is only going to be healthy.

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!

Whitewashing Palestinian Arab desire to murder Jews: "Most Gazans didn't support Hamas before the war" - but they did support terrorism

Thomas Friedman, in the New York Times, wrote:

Gazans know the truth. Fresh polling data reported by AFP indicates that on the eve of Oct. 7, “many Gazans were hostile to Hamas ahead of the group’s brutal Oct. 7 attack on Israel, with some describing its rule as a second occupation.”

The AFP article says:

Amaney Jamal

"We find in our surveys that 67 percent of Palestinians in Gaza had little or no trust in Hamas in that period right before the attacks," said Amaney Jamal, dean of Princeton's School of Public and International Affairs.

"This is especially important because of the (erroneous) argument that all of Gaza supports Hamas, and therefore all of Gaza should be held accountable for the actions, atrocious actions of Hamas."

Jamal is one of the driving forces behind the Arab Barometer which conducts surveys and polling in the region, including in Gaza where fieldwork concluded on the eve of the attacks on Israel.

She said that Hamas, which won elections in the Palestinian territories in 2006 and is designated a "terrorist" organization by Washington and the EU, was seen as "corrupt" and "authoritarian" by many respondents.

"Seventy-five percent said in the previous 30 days, they could not afford to feed their households. So again, this is an impoverished society, a society that is basically saying the Hamas-led government has some levels of corruption," said Jamal.

It is true that most Gazans felt Hamas was corrupt ahead of the war. They aren't blind; it is a corrupt organization - giving land and apartments and other perks to its own members, spending money on tunnels instead of the wellbeing of Gazans. Everyone in Gaza knows this.

But that doesn't mean that they were against Hamas' genocidal aims.

A majority of Gazans, and of Palestinians altogether, supported "armed struggle" - meaning terrorism - against Israeli civilians ahead of the war. And as I've noted many times, when asked after the fact whether they support specific terror attack against Israeli civilians, the numbers are consistently over 70% for over 20 years.

This "expert" and others have been twisting the poll results in the media to imply something that is the opposite of the truth, that Gazans hate Hamas terror and want peace.

In that same AFP article, Jamal added a whopping lie:

Ahead of the attacks on Israel, more than half of respondents favored a two-state solution -- a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

The remainder opted either for a Palestinian-Israeli confederation or a one-state solution. But one-in-five supported armed resistance before the events of October 7, and the massive Israeli military response that followed.

"(Gazans were) open to a peaceful reconciliation with Israel based on 1967 borders," Jamal said.

In polls, everything depends on how a question is worded. And in this case, the Gazans were given four choices - but not the choice that they have consistently and overwhelmingly supported from the beginning, which is a single Arab state and destroying Israel. When asked if they support “regaining all of historical Palestine from the river to the sea” Palestinians always choose that over a two state solution. And even a September poll showed that Palestinians opposed a two state solution by a 2-1 margin.

The dean of Princeton's School of Public and International Affairs is lying. She is whitewshing what Palestinians really think, which can be seen consistently in poll after poll. She is pushing propaganda that Palestinians want to live in peace with Israel and that it is Israeli actions, like defending itself from a genocidal group, that cause Palestinians to hate Israel.

Arab hate for Jews, including in Palestine, was around for centuries before 1948. And that is something that is not taught in Princeton or any other Ivy League school, nor mentioned in any AFP article, nor ever even considered by Thomas Friedman.

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!

Back in 2018, I introduced the Intersectionality Victimhood Calculator. And it has remained quite accurate five years later.

To recap, the calculator is meant to determine who is the "winner" in any conflict in this new woke world.

The actual facts in any conflict are utterly irrelevant - only the victimhood score, which is the sum of all victimhood or oppressor values a person has.

One with a negative victimhood score is perceived as an oppressor, a positive score means that one is oppressed.

My scoring system is:

Intersectionality Calculator 1.1

Attribute	Victimhood Score
Trans	8
Black	8
Native American or other First People	7
Woman	6
Gay	6
Muslim	5
Arab or other Middle Eastern	5
Hispanic	4
Disabled, pregnant	4
Anti-Zionist Jew	4
Wears hijab	2
Palestinian	2
Asian American	1
White	-1
Republican or conservative	-3
Christian (white only)	-3
Jew	-3
Visibly religious Jew	-3
Jewish settler	-6
Trump Supporter	-8
White nationalist/Neo Nazi	-18
Zionist	-8

Total score: 0

People with a positive victimhood score who are also Zionist are considered traitors to their intersectionality rankings, and therefore have their scores multiplied by -1 to flip to negative.

The system has held up amazingly well.

In the context of the current Gaza war, after the initial October 7 shock, things normalized to usual: Gazans, even those who cheered the massacre, even those who participated in the massacre, have victimhood scores of at least 12 if they are Muslim, while Israelis generally have scores ranging from -2 to -17. An Israeli Jewish woman who was raped and murdered is still an oppressor and her rapist is a victim.

The only change I might need to make is to modify the "Jewish settler" category to just "Israeli citizen," as the woke crowd no longer even pretends to distinguish which side of the Green Line Israeli Jews live. They are all "settlers."

But there is a new application for the calculator: it also informs us of how the media will report on the war.

Let's take an example from this weekend:

Israeli forces shot at a United Nations convoy of armored vehicles in central Gaza on Thursday evening as it was returning from delivering aid in the northern part of the territory, U.N. officials said.

“Israeli soldiers fired at an aid convoy as it returned from northern Gaza along a route designated by the Israeli Army,” Thomas White, the Gaza director for UNRWA, the U.N. relief agency for Palestinian refugees, wrote on social media. He said that one vehicle in the convoy had been damaged, adding: “Aid workers should never be a target.”

The Israeli military did not immediately comment when asked about the episode.

The convoy, whose vehicles were marked with U.N. insignia, was returning from delivering aid, including flour. It was south of Gaza City when it came under fire, Juliette Touma, spokeswoman for UNRWA, said in an interview. Before setting out to deliver the aid, the convoy had coordinated its plans with the Israeli military and notified it of the routes it would take, she added.

Ms. Touma said that the Israeli military had told the convoy to take a different route, which it did. “They rerouted and then the shooting happened,” she said.

In this case, the accusers are UNRWA employees who might be white, but they weren't on the ground during the alleged incident - they are quoting "witnesses" who are Gaza Palestinians with scores of at least 12. This is why they reflexively blame Israel for the shooting (if there was a shooting) and not Gaza militants - it is what the calculator tells them to do. Even though the accusation makes zero sense, the amount of proof required by the New York Times for the accusation is essentially zero.

It is up to the IDF to figure out what happened if anything before issuing a denial. This will take several days. By then, no one will follow up with a new story.

If the media treated both sides equally, it would at least ask for some proof, some witnesses, some verification from UNRWA, and find out if there are any other factors in play - like historic antipathy towards Israel - that might make them shade the truth a little bit.

The Al Ahli hospital attack was reported the same way: the accusations against Israel by "victims," with no evidence that it was an Israeli airstrike, is what created the narrative.

The Gaza casualty figures is another place where the victimhood calculator writes the story more than the reporters themselves. The BBC story on the Gaza death toll not only believes Hamas figures of the total number killed, but also their breakdown of how many are women and children. It quotes officials who have no actual evidence as verifying Hamas' figures - because they have their own internal victimhood calculator that trusts those with higher victimhood scores. But when it comes to Israeli estimates of roughly 7.000-8,000 Hamas terrorists killed, the skepticism goes way up, both from the BBC and their quoted "experts:"

The BBC has not been able to establish a clear method of verifying the number of fighters killed.
Prof Michael Spagat, said he would "not be at all surprised" if around 80% of those killed were civilians.
The IDF's numbers for combatants killed "have been all over the place, devoid of details and without explanations", he added.

But Hamas figures are believed! Because even terrorists always have a higher victimhood score than Israeli officials, so therefore their statements are believed far more readily than Israeli statements.

An honest reporter would ask how Hamas could have such detailed and specific data when they don't have reliable communication channels, and when all experts at actually counting victims in war zones say how it takes a great deal of time to get accurate numbers. If you look at estimates of the number of victims of other wars in Wikipedia, you will find huge variances from different sources - but Hamas figures being so specific doesn't raise any red flags.

Any wild accusation by Gazans is taken seriously by the media, any detailed denial by Israel is not believed . While antisemitism is part of this - it is baked into the calculator - a lot of the reason is also because perceived victims are considered more trustworthy than perceived oppressors.

And being slaughtered, raped, kidnapped and burned is not enough to make you a victim when your victimhood scores are below zero.

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!

12/30 Links: Kids in Israel Feel Connected to Their Country; Douglas Murray, Col. Richard Kemp explain uphill battle for Israel; How Hamas weaponises victimhood

From Ian:

Kids in Israel Feel Connected to Their Country

On Wednesday, Sammy Jackman, an immigrant from Britain, eulogized his beloved son, Efraim, who was killed in battle in Gaza. He described his ambition and drive, his love for family, his high standards and unwillingness to compromise, and the way he gave his all for the army, his country and his people. He said: "Only in Israel can you raise children like this." It's true.

Kids are educated to give of themselves to society at large. This spirit of volunteerism pushes them to serve as counselors in youth movements, to run camps for the physically disabled, to visit the elderly, and to organize all kinds of group activities to help their communities. This tough spirit fosters independence and idealism. That's what happens when you give 18-year-olds guns and tell them they are responsible for each other's lives.

The so-called "Tik-Tok generation" in Israel was able to put down their screens in a matter of moments and get out there to protect their people and their country. They have shown little sign of the entitlement, coddling, or failure to take responsibility that plague many of their counterparts in other countries.

Douglas Murray, Col. Richard Kemp explain uphill battle for Israel

RESPONDING TO the issue of the hostages, Murray said that he was genuinely shocked by “the lack of empathy for Israel internationally.”

A glaring example, he said, was the tearing down of posters of the hostages around the world. “If you put up a poster of a missing cat or dog in your neighborhood, you would not expect anyone to rip it down,” he asserted.

“And if anyone did rip it down, you would think that person was subhuman. This wasn’t dogs or cats. These were Jewish children. In city after city, sociopaths tore down these posters. This lack of empathy has been there since [Oct. 7].”

Addressing the tragic incident in which three hostages were mistakenly killed by Israeli troops, Murray said: “The media treats it as more evidence of the brutality of the Israeli soldiers – ‘they even kill their own!’

“Imagine the lives of those soldiers who shot those three hostages, how they must have felt. And yet, instead of recognizing what a tragedy that is for everybody involved, they use it as a weapon against Israel! That really has slightly startled me.”

When asked by the moderator about “the day after,” Kemp said: “The IDF has no option whatsoever, apart from to stay in control of Gaza from now on. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks; it doesn’t matter what President Biden might want to happen.

“What is absolutely certain is that the IDF must maintain security control of Gaza. It means either a permanent IDF presence inside the whole of Gaza, or it means the creation of a one- or two-mile buffer zone on the inside of the Gaza border that no one is allowed to go into and that the IDF can police.”

About the general population of Gaza, Kemp said: ”The reality in Gaza is that the vast majority of allegedly innocent civilians support Hamas. Even when they see the horrors that Hamas has brought on them, they still support Hamas. And there will be efforts to have a Hamas 2.”

Murray concurred that it is a “very bleak necessity” for Israel to stay in Gaza. For how long? “Call me a pessimist,” Kemp said, “but I would say forever.”

Both Kemp and Murray spend time visiting the wounded in hospitals. On a recent visit, Murray met a farmer from a border kibbutz who had lost his wife, son, and both his legs in the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack. He told Murray: “I have been a leftist all my life. I now want to look out on nothing but potato fields from here to the Mediterranean.”

Commented Murray: “Who can risk living beside these people? Nobody else in the world would be expected to have to put up with that. I think you should have the right to live in peace and know that the border you have does not contain genocidal maniacs on the other side who want to kill you.”

Kenyan reverend: UN ‘obsessed’ with Hamas war, ‘hates Jews’

A prominent reverend from Kenya, who also directs the Israel Allies Foundation African office, has accused the United Nations of having “an obsession with antisemitism.”

Speaking to The Jerusalem Post via WhatsApp a few days after he returned to his country from a solidarity mission in Israel, Rev. Dennis Nthumbi said that “the war against Hamas has exposed the decay in the UN and its moral rot that has led to the molestation of its statutes.”

He accused the UN of becoming so preoccupied with the Israel-Hamas conflict “because it hates Jews” that it has failed to offer a response to real genocides – one in his area – namely the genocides of the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar in Southeast Asia and the Masalit civilians in Sudan.

“The UN is no longer useful,” Nthumbi said. “Abolish it. All sane member nations should either demand a refund or a leadership change.”

He also accused the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) of “running an education system that is enshrined on the principles of jihadism” with an objective of “churning out child terrorists” and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) of disregarding the slaughter of Israeli children on October 7.

Nthumbi is a senior, though unofficial, adviser to Kenya’s president, William Ruto, whom he accompanied on a mission to Israel in May. Both Ruto and Nthumbi are devout Christians who believe their biblical obligation is to support Israel.

12/29 Links Pt2: On the Hatred of Jews; The unholy alliance between wokeism and barbarism; Fetterman’s Clear Thinking and Clean Conscience

From Ian:

Rabbi David J. Wolpe: On the Hatred of Jews

Israel is the only country in the world that is routinely and widely targeted for eradication. So is anti-Zionism synonymous with antisemitism?

There are exceptions, but the overlap is striking. I have never heard of activists who are angry with China targeting Chinese restaurants in Paris, but when Hamas terrorists were recently arrested in Europe with plans to blow up Jewish institutions, they were not targeting Israel, but Jews. If someone is angry at Israel, they target Jewish synagogues, businesses, and restaurants — anything associated with Jews, anywhere in the world — no matter their relationship to Israel.

This enmity has deep roots.

I have a position at the Harvard Divinity School, and I often wonder whether we teach students that both the New Testament, and to a lesser extent the Koran, contain messages hostile to Jews. Do the students learn that Martin Luther said Jews “are a serpent’s brood” and their synagogues should be burned, or how during periods like the Almohad persecution, Jews could accept Islam, flee, or die? How Christians persecuted and periodically murdered Jews for some 1,500 years?

Jews experienced more acceptance in Muslim lands, yet still were labeled impure, subjugated, and were often persecuted. Many of my congregants in Los Angeles were forced to flee Iran when the Shah fell in 1979 — their property confiscated, the leader of the community executed, and the Khomeini regime making clear they were unwelcome in the new Islamic republic. Having lost everything and escaping with their lives, years later, they still have nightmares.

Why all this hatred against one small people? We remained different, distinct. We would not become Christian or Muslim. We were outsiders, others, champions of diversity.

Moreover, Jewish culture — portable, book-focused, and one that venerates scholarship and learning — primes us for economies where information and mental agility lead to success. When you don’t like someone, seeing them succeed magnifies the antipathy.

Finally, Jews introduced the idea of ethical monotheism — the moral demands that one God makes on human beings — to the western tradition. As Jewish essayist Maurice Samuel said, “no one likes an alarm clock”; Jews represent conscience and conscience is a disruptive and painful partner in our lives.

The energy and outrage Jews generate — making up 0.2 percent of the world population — is oddly disproportionate. Antisemitism is a wild, irrational eruption.

Harvard has a long and ignoble history of antisemitism, as Harvard President Claudine Gay said in her remarks to Harvard Hillel in October. It is time to admit it, confront it and overcome it. One can criticize policies without calling for the end to the only homeland Jews have ever known. One can demand a Palestinian state without globalizing the intifada — the term for a protest that previously resulted in over 110 suicide bombings that targeted buses, cafes, and malls.

If we cannot learn to argue civilly at Harvard, how can we have hope for the civility of other places in the world?

Jews gave the world a precious gift: the idea that each human being is an image of God. I pray that we all remember and honor that gift.

Yisrael Medad: ‘Palestine’ and the energy of colonization

In what can only be considered as an ironic twist of intention, it has become apparent that not only has the idea of a free Arab state of Palestine become an agenda item of the first degree for the United Nations, human-rights NGOs, and other similar bodies and institutions, but it has become the ideal of these bodies as well. The slogan “Palestine must be free” has literally colonized the minds of intellectuals, academicians, diplomats and university students, thus assuring, at least for the short term, it being a constant of discussion, debate and involvement.

In what I have termed as the rhetoric of obversity—that is, the orchestration of language to mean not what was originally intended, as well as the expanding of their meaning to include new definitions—the normative definition of settler colonialism has been modified. Settler colonialism is when invaders occupy a territory to permanently replace the existing society with the society of the colonizers so as to enjoy metropolitan living standards and political privileges. It has been applied, wrongly and falsely, to Zionism.

This allows news items, such as one from Dec. 20, “Illegal Israeli Colonizers Raze Land,” to hammer the term into the heads of Jewish youth who should know better as it more easily does into the thinking of others.

Implicit in applying the “settler colonialism” terminology is to suggest that the goals of Zionism were and are the elimination and exploitation of the “native” population. However, that never happened, nor was it the intention of the Zionist enterprise. In fact, it’s the opposite.

Cary Nelson, is his magnificent “Israel Denial” on the faculty campaign against the Jewish state, notes on pages 120-123 how the older claim of Zionism as a colonialist movement has now been linked to the false assertion not only of a supposed Arab Palestinian identity but an Arab Palestinian indigeneity as well, thereby interlocking the core forces that drive the anger and involvement of college student even while this causes a racialization format.

In an academic treatment, Sai Englert quotes Fayez Sayegh who described the core of Zionism’s ideology as one of “racial self-segregation, racial exclusiveness and racial supremacy” on p. 22 in a 1965 PLO booklet. Sayegh, the Syrian-born founder of the Palestine Research Center of Beirut, is held to be a pioneering analyst in the field. Perhaps one of the more illustrative examples of language rape practiced by the proponents of pro-Palestine propaganda is the one used at the March 2011 Seventh Annual Conference of the London’s SOAS Palestine Society. It would have us believe that “[f]or over a century, Zionism has subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new colonial Israeli society.”

To give but one example of the relative primitiveness of the approach in its early period is to quote from Sayegh writing: “The frenzied ‘Scramble for Africa’ of the 1880s stimulated the beginnings of Zionist colonization in Palestine.” Jews at that time were a permanent feature for centuries in Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias and Hebron. Leading up to 1740 and in the following decade, thousands immigrated to Eretz Yisrael expecting the Messianic era to evolve, including Rabbi Moses Haim Luzzatto and Kabbalist Rabbi Haim ben Attar.

Indeed, in all the previous centuries, Jews were moving to reside in Eretz Yisrael, including hundreds of rabbis and some of the greatest luminaries of Jewish scholarship. In the mid- to late 18th century, hundreds of Chassidim, many with families, were immigrating to the country. By the early 19th century, the pupils of the Vilna Gaon, too, were making the move. Not antisemitism but religious motivation was the force behind this.

How Westerners Empower Radical Islam

Yasmine Mohammed - not her real name - is the author of the 2019 book Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam. Born in Vancouver with a father from Gaza and an Egyptian mother, she says, "any criticism of Islamic cultures is deemed xenophobic or racist." But this reluctance to apply to Islam the same pressures for change and improvement we apply to ourselves is a form of the inverse racism of low expectations.

This is evident in the failure of many Westerners to properly condemn Hamas' actions on Oct. 7. Instead of heaping condemnation on Hamas, as we would do with any other group, she feels that many Western universities, media, and politicians imply its behavior is a fitting response to Palestinian grievances.

"After the Holocaust, would you now expect Jewish people to jump into the homes of German people and start slaughtering families and kidnapping people? Of course not." But when it comes to Arabs or Muslims, a different, lower set of expectations is applied - as if barbarism is perfectly OK.

The media often quotes the "Gaza Government Media Office."

It has been the source for the recent charge that Israel is harvesting organs from dead Palestinians, for many sketchy casualty allegations, that Israel is is guilty of hundreds of "field executions" of civilians, that Israel destroyed over 200 archaeological sites, and so on. It is a non-stop factory manufacturing lies.

So, who is behind it?

Their website is down. Their YouTube channel has been removed.Their Instagram and Facebook pages have not been updated since October. They are not holding press conferences.

Everything comes from their Telegram channel (which, as of this moment, I cannot find the link to.) That is what gets quoted in Arabic media.

Earlier, we discussed Israel's transparency. Well, here is an example of Hamas' opacity.

There is no means to check anything released by the Hamas media office. There is no name attached to it.

The head of the media office was Salama Marouf, but he hasn't posted anything on his own Facebook or TikTok since October 9, and his last messages on Facebook strongly hint that he was not healthy. He posted, "Our Lord, do not burden us with what we have strength to bear, forgive us, and have mercy on us, You are our Lord, so give us victory over the disbelievers."

So we don't even know who is in charge of the Telegram channel. We don't know its sources.

The media that quotes Hamas' media office knows literally nothing about who they are transcribing. It could be an AI, it could be a hacker, it could be a 14-year old son of Marouf.

Yet this completely opaque channel is trusted enough to be quoted as if the journalists know that it is legit, let alone that the information it spreads is accurate.

And while statements from this mystery terrorist Telegram channel are trusted, official Israeli statements given by people with real names and real faces and backed up with real evidence are treated as potential lies.

Treating what Jews say as barely more reliable than the statements of murderers and rapists is not journalism. It is antisemitism dressed up as journalism.

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!