Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, January 03, 2024

The list of those who didn't condemn Arouri's assassination is more interesting than those who did

The Hezbollah-linked Al Mayadeen details "Arab, Islamic condemnations of al-Arouri's assassination."

The list is pretty pathetic:

- Iranian Foreign Ministry

- President of Iran, Ali Akbar Velayati

- The political bureau of Yemen's Ansar Allah (Houthis)

- Prime Minister of the Yemeni Government in Sanaa(Houthi)

- Yemeni Foreign Ministry

- Iraqi Kataib Hezbollah

- Secretary-General of the Islamic Action Front Party in Jordan

- Moroccan Observatory against Normalization

- Movement for the Society of Peace (Algeria)

- Hamas

- Islamic Jihad

Their Arabic version of the article adds:

- Head of the Lebanese caretaker government, Najib Mikati

- Lebanese Communist Party

- Iraqi Islamic Supreme Council

Not a single word of condemnation from a country that is not in Iran's pocket. Nothing official from Jordan, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia.

They don't say it out loud, but most Middle East leaders want to see Hamas destroyed.

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!

01/02 Links Pt2: Seth Mandel: ‘Squandering Sympathy’ By Surviving; America’s Mainstreaming of Hamas, Antisemitism, and Terror; Harvard Pres. Claudine Gay Resigns in Disgrace

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: ‘Squandering Sympathy’ By Surviving

These observations about Israel’s squandering nature are offered not in anger but in sadness, of course. Why can’t Israel ever do anything constructive with sympathy?

It’s not as though there’s some mysterious equation to solve here. Israelis gained all that sympathy on Oct. 7 by dying horrible deaths. What’s more important, sympathy or survival? The world is very disappointed in the Jewish state’s choice.

It’s an old story. After Germany’s 1938 annexation of Austria, Jews were desperate for escape. President Franklin Roosevelt wasn’t willing to effect any change in U.S. immigration policy, either by executive action or pressuring Congress. But he was willing to organize a conference of nations who would talk and talk and talk about how sad it all was, because that at least could “show our sympathy with the victims of those conditions.”

“Sympathy” for the Jews usually means a death sentence. And FDR ensured it would be so, as Rick Richman writes in And None Shall Make Them Afraid, his recent book of key moments in the life and work of various Zionist figures (also reviewed in Commentary’s July/August issue here): “The text of the invitation included an assurance that no country would be expected to change its laws to admit more refugees or to provide any funds to resettle refugees; any financing, the invitation noted, would have to be provided by private organizations.”

FDR also instructed the State Department to prevent any consideration of sending the fleeing European Jews to Palestine. Other Western democracies were no better.

In attendance to watch all this unfold was Golda Meir. She was both dejected and resolute. The lesson was that “Jews neither can nor should ever depend on anyone else for permission to stay alive.” The conference inspired one of her most famous comments: “There is one thing I hope to see before I die, and that is that my people should not need expressions of sympathy anymore.”

Meir would return to this theme time and again after the establishment of the state of Israel and her rise to the prime minister’s office. The world, she repeatedly recognized, was full of sympathy for dead and defeated Jews, and the Jews would squander that sympathy by surviving. What has changed isn’t the world’s preferences but the Jewish people’s ability to render those preferences irrelevant.

Dr. Dan Diker and Khaled Abu Toameh: America’s Mainstreaming of Hamas, Antisemitism, and Terror

We are currently witnessing the mainstreaming of Hamas in the U.S. Thousands of protesters across American cities and more than 200 university campuses have been calling to destroy the small, democratic, Jewish-majority state instead of advocating for a peaceful Palestinian one alongside Israel.

Since Hamas' Oct. 7 massacre in Israel, tens of thousands of American university students, faculty, and supporters have been chanting, "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," a call to replace the only Jewish-majority state with the 23rd Muslim Arab-majority one. Behind many of the demonstrations is Students for Justice in Palestine, a Hamas-linked group which quotes or echoes slogans and rhetoric from the 1988 Hamas Charter and Hamas leaders.

Hamas' jihadi rhetoric and extremist ideology is inciting violence against Jews and Jewish institutions across North America today. Senior Hamas official Mahmoud al-Zahar has threatened to target Jews "wherever they are." In the aftermath of the Oct. 7 massacre, Israel and diaspora Jewry are both targeted for elimination.

Why do feminists turn a blind eye to Islamists?

Other professional feminists and ‘thought leaders’ have been similarly silent on Hamas’s actions. A widely circulated open letter, entitled ‘Feminists for a free Palestine. Stop the genocide. End the Occupation’, neither mentions Jewish women nor condemns Hamas. By early November, over 1,200 ‘scholars who work in feminist, queer and trans studies’ had signed the letter.

Two things are at play in the warped response of Western feminists to the atrocities of 7 October. Firstly, their embrace of the ideology of ‘decolonisation’ and their simple-minded view of Israel as a ‘settler-colonial’ state has prevented them from standing in solidarity with Israeli women. They see them as part of an evil occupying force and therefore as less than human. Secondly, they are unwilling to criticise Islamist terror and violence, largely for fear of being labelled Islamophobic.

Indeed, Western feminists’ unwillingness to condemn Islamist violence against women extends beyond Hamas’s rape and mutilation of Jews. They have also shown themselves incapable of standing up for women persecuted by Islamist regimes in Iran and Afghanistan.

It is over a year since 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was killed by Iran’s religious police for violating Iran’s hijab law and failing to wear the veil ‘properly’. Amini’s killing may have prompted mass protests by brave, hijab-free women in Iran. But it has prompted very little in the way of solidarity in the West. In November, the death of teenager Armita Geravand, also apparently at the hands of Iran’s morality police, passed by with even less comment or outrage. It seems that Western feminists are too frightened of appearing Islamophobic to do what Iranian women have bravely been doing – challenging a misogynistic state that compels women to wear a veil.

Western feminists have shown a similarly curious reluctance to criticise the Taliban. After all, the Taliban ought to be an obvious target of feminist ire. Since it regained control of Afghanistan in 2021 it has banned Afghan women from any form of political participation, prevented them from dressing how they choose and banned them from education and most forms of work. Yet you will struggle to find much condemnation of this medieval sexism from Western feminists and ostentatiously ‘progressive’ organisations this year. After reports emerged that the Taliban has been imprisoning survivors of domestic abuse ‘for their own protection’, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan meekly said that the Taliban’s handling of ‘gender-based violence complaints’ was ‘unclear and inconsistent’. Which is one way of describing a movement that systematically degrades and oppresses women.

There does seem to be a massive Islamist-shaped blindspot here. Feminists and their progressive apologists are only too happy to call out relatively trivial acts of sexism in the West. Yet they show a repeated unwillingness to stick up for women suffering at the hands of Islamists, from Iran to Israel to Afghanistan.

If we want to advance women’s freedom around the world, then we cannot ignore the misogyny of the Islamists.

In October, Egypt's Youm7 - considered close to the government - published an article calling Israel's action in Gaza a "holocaust."

Israel's Institute for National Security Studies noted this and other Arab articles using that terminology, pointing out how outrageous it is.

Now Youm7 seems to have just discovered the INSS article and they are ecstatic. They claim the terminology was "a media bullet that pierced the heart of Israel."

And in a new article, they urge all Arabs to adopt this terminology, while tossing in some Holocaust denial:

After the Youm7 newspaper article “The Gaza Holocaust” raised a state of strategic anxiety for the Israeli entity, there is a question, which is why the Arab media - new and old - did not employ these terms that hurt and worry Israel, so I call on everyone who has a media platform, even a page on social networking sites [to us that term.] . ...We must be aware of the importance of terminology. Especially since it has become a weapon no less important than the weapons of field wars

The Zionist state developed and perpetuated the narrative of the Jewish Holocaust to serve its strategic goals, as a means and justification to blackmail the world under the name of anti-Semitism and international terrorism and an excuse to attract the sympathy of the international community to justify killing and aggression against the Palestinian people.

This is why they are concerned about describing what is happening in Gaza as a Holocaust: It is a new Holocaust, which is more credible and more horrific than the Holocaust of the Jews that they claim, because there are many Western and American voices that have begun to doubt the occurrence of a Holocaust of the Jews as it is portrayed by the Zionists, or at least that there are those who consider what happened to the Jews a Zionist exaggeration in numbers and the descriptions.

There is agreement by many experts, researchers, and international research communities that the Jewish Holocaust is nothing but a Zionist industry that has been exploited over many decades as a scarecrow, an attraction for immigration to the land of Palestine, and a means - as we mentioned - for global and moral blackmail and for achieving strategic gains for the Zionist entity.

Besides the obvious antisemitism, note that the only reason they give to use that terminology is not accuracy, but because it upsets the Jews and because it frames the war to be other than what it is.

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!

Benjamin Moser, who is of course anti-Zionist himself, writes in the Washington Post that anti-Zionism cannot be antisemitism because anti-Zionism was created by Jews:

Anti-Zionism, after all, was a creation of Jews, not their enemies.

Before World War II, Zionism was the most divisive and heatedly debated issue in the Jewish world. Anti-Zionism had left-wing variants and right-wing variants — religious variants and secular variants — as well as variants in every country where Jews resided. For anyone who knows this history, it is astonishing that, as the resolution would have it, opposition to Zionism has been equated with opposition to Judaism — and not only to Judaism, but to hatred of Jews themselves. But this conflation has nothing to do with history. Instead, it is political, and its purpose has been to discredit Israel’s opponents as racists.

The article is dishonest on a couple of levels. The main deception is that Moser conflates pre-1948 anti-Zionism with today's - and they are not the same at all. After Israel was reborn, anti-Zionism changed from being against creating a Jewish state to wanting to dismantle the only Jewish state. It is the desire to see a recognized nation destroyed - and by remarkable coincidence, only the Jewish one. Not the Christians ones, not the Muslim ones - just the Jewish one. What are the odds?

Secondly, he quotes early Reform Jewish thinkers on the topic:

“This country is our Palestine, this city our Jerusalem, this house of God our Temple,” said Rabbi Gustavus Poznanski of Charleston, S.C., in 1841. A century later, during the Holocaust and World War II, Rabbi Samuel Schulman of Temple Emanu-El in New York declared that “The essence of Reform Judaism for me is the rejection of Jewish Nationalism, not necessarily the eating of ham.”

But the Reform movement disavowed its anti-Zionist position before 1948. Its 1937 "Columbus Platform" said, " Judaism is the soul of which Israel is the body." Its 1950 statement said:

The Union of American Hebrew Congregations in Convention assembled send affectionate greetings to our brethren in the State of Israel. We take pride in your heroic achievements. We offer prayers for your continued success. We pledge continued aid for your historic task of rehabilitating the homeless of Israel.

We favor the extension of aid to Israel by the United Nations and the United States Government in order to sustain and strengthen a vital democratic State in the heart of the Near East.

Thirdly, there have always been different flavors of antisemitism. The vast majority of Jews overlapped in each of them, but a few outliers didn't. That doesn't make it any less Jew-hatred.

Racial antisemitism claimed it had nothing against the religion per se the way Christian antisemitism did. I list a whole bunch of different flavors of antisemitism here.

Just because anti-Zionists swear up and down that they aren't antisemitic doesn't make it so - just as the phrase "anti-semite" was coined to make hating Jews sound scientific and not bigoted. Antisemites over the centuries always claimed that they had solid reasons for their hate, it was never capricious. Just read Martin Luther.

If the effect of your beliefs is to demonize the vast majority of Jews by any definition - racial, religious, or political - then it is, in reality, Jew-hatred.

Even when done by Jews themselves.

Anti-Zionism is part of a long tradition of finding new reasons to hate Jews. When you look at anti-Zionism through the lens of historic antisemitism you see that it is an old wine in a new bottle.

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!

01/02 Links Pt1: Israeli drone kills Hamas deputy chief al-Arouri in Beirut; Top UN official ‘breached’ guidelines over liking series of anti-Israel tweets

From Ian:

The Peace Processors Return, Having Learned Nothing from Their Mistakes

Among Western opinionmakers and policy experts—even those supportive of Israel in its war against Hamas—there is a widely held belief that after the fighting ends, Washington must renew efforts to get Israel and the Palestinians to agree to a two-state solution. Daniel Kurtzer and Aaron David Miller, both former State Department officials, recently made such a case in Foreign Affairs, despite the repeated failures of this approach, and the bloodstained results. Elliott Abrams comments:

Our two peace processors . . . acknowledge that “addressing legitimate Israeli security concerns” must be part of the picture—but they give no sense of what they think those concerns might be and how they might be “addressed.” They acknowledge that “even if Netanyahu leaves office, no other current top politician in Israel appears eager to embark down a path of peace. And there are no Palestinian leaders with the gravitas and political weight to engage seriously with Israel in the aftermath of the conflict.” But they do not draw the obvious conclusion from those two sentences: well, okay, so that’s dead. . . .

From everything we can see about Palestinian politics and public opinion, basing Israeli security on dreams about Palestinian pacifism is nuts. Moreover, Iran has under way a vast effort to build proxy forces and strengthen every terrorist group—from the Houthis to Hizballah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad to Hamas—to attack Israel by stocking the groups with guns and money. That is the problem with the two-state solution: no one can explain how a sovereign and independent Palestinian state will not constitute a grave security threat to Israel (and Jordan as well, by the way). Kurtzer and Miller certainly don’t explain it; like all the peace processors, they wish it away, conjuring up a mythical Palestine that loves peace. If you believe, clap your hands!

This is going to be a hard sell in Israel. It ought to be an equally hard sell in Washington.

Inside the tunnels of Gaza

The types of sandy or loamy soils common in Gaza made it both easier for Hamas to excavate the tunnels and harder for Israel to destroy them, two experts said.

The three main types of soil in the 365 sq. km. enclave are:

An illustration of the three types of soil in the Gaza Strip: Dune sand, loess, fluvial and eolian, and calcareous sandstone.

Even in the trickier areas - such as the dunes near the Mediterranean coast that are prone to water infiltration - Hamas had enough building materials and resources to adjust to the type of soil they were dealing with, said Professor Joel Roskin, a geomorphologist and geologist with Israel's Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv, who has studied the tunnel network.

“What we've seen is that there are so many tunnels that have been reinforced with concrete,” Roskin said, adding that Hamas had invested considerable money and manpower in construction.

“To dig deeper demands more resources, more energy. The deeper tunnels are of course more difficult to detect.”

A map of the major exposed rock types across Israel and Gaza. Alluvium (gravel, sand, silt, clay, and rock), sand, and calcareous sandstone, red sandstone, and loam are the types found in the Gaza Strip. In the east, towards Jerusalem, the area is predominantly covered by chalk, limestone, dolostone, and chert. Next to the map sits two charts visualizing a cross section of the rock layers below the surface. One for the Nirim area in the Gaza Strip and another for the area surrounding Jerusalem.

John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute and a founding member of the International Working Group on Subterranean Warfare, said the sandy nature of the soil had certainly made it easier for Hamas.

“I have seen many videos of them digging by hand or using simple power tools,” he told Reuters. “The soil is conducive to rapid and unskilled digging.” By contrast, he said, the Lebanese Shi’ite group Hezbollah had to dig through solid rock in south Lebanon to build cross border tunnels into northern Israel.

Hezbollah has not confirmed the existence of the tunnel network but, in 2019, the Israeli military put on display one tunnel that, it said, reached depths of 80 meters (265 feet) as it ran from a kilometer inside Lebanon into Israel near Zar’it in the Upper Galilee.

The relative softness of the soil in Gaza is also a disadvantage to the IDF teams seeking to clear and destroy the network, Spencer said.

“The loose soil actually reduces the IDF use of explosives to destroy tunnels as the soft soil absorbs explosive force. Add the blast doors in the tunnels we’ve seen, and that further reduces the effects of explosive force traveling through the tunnel.”

An illustration showing the steps for building a tunnel. Initial excavation is usually done manually, with the help of shovels and other tools. In areas where the terrain is tougher, pneumatic hammers are utilized. Lastly, the illustration shows that as progress is made, the walls are reinforced with prefabricated cement or wood slabs.

On Nov. 22, the Israeli army showed some news organizations a concrete-lined tunnel near Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City that, it said, was a command post for Hamas fighters. The tunnel complex, which the IDF said was at a depth of around 10 meters below ground, featured a bedroom, a tiled bathroom, kitchen and meeting room.

Reuters photographer Ronen Zvulun went inside the tunnels. “The tunnel floor is sand but the walls and roof are lined with concrete, like a tiny road or train tunnel. And just about high enough for someone to stand upright.”

Expert: Hezbollah has built a vast tunnel network far more sophisticated than Hamas’s

Two weeks ago, the IDF spokesman revealed one of the biggest attack tunnels in the Gaza Strip — four kilometers long, wide enough for vehicles to drive through, and running from Jabaliya, north of Gaza City, up until some 400 meters from the Erez border crossing into Israel.

While the tunnel did not cross the border, it presumably could have enabled terrorists on motorcycles and other vehicles to drive underground from the Jabaliya area and exit close to the border before IDF surveillance soldiers or patrols could block them. The IDF did not specify whether this was the case when 3,000 Hamas-led terrorists poured into Israel on October 7, slaughtering 1,200 people and abducting 240.

The uncovering of this vast tunnel, of which there are several more in Gaza, has revived discussion of similar tunnels near, at and under the Lebanon border — especially amid the ongoing clashes there with the Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorist army, the forced evacuation of tens of thousands of Israeli residents of the north, and the Israeli leadership’s repeated insistence that Hezbollah must be forced back from the border and deterred.

The Lebanon tunnel project was begun and developed long before the one in Gaza. Existing intelligence indicates a vast tunnel network in southern Lebanon, deep and multi-pronged.

At the Alma Research and Education Center, which focuses on the security challenges on Israel’s northern border, researchers have spent many years investigating Lebanon’s underworld. Tal Beeri, the director of Alma’s Research Department, who served for decades in IDF intelligence units, has exposed that subterranean network in material based on considerable open-source intelligence.

Several years ago, Beeri managed to track down on the internet a “map of polygons,” covering what he called the “Land of the Tunnels” in southern Lebanon. “The map is marked, by an unknown party, with polygons (circles) indicating 36 geographic regions, towns and villages,” he wrote in 2021 paper.

“In our assessment, these polygons mark Hezbollah’s staging centers as part of the ‘defense’ plan against an Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Each local staging center (‘defense’) possesses a network of local underground tunnels. Between all these centers, an infrastructure of regional tunnels was built, interconnected [with] them.”

Beeri assessed that the cumulative length of Hezbollah’s tunnel network in south Lebanon amounts to hundreds of kilometers.

In an interview, Beeri recalls that the research paper on Hezbollah’s “Land of the Tunnels” was published immediately after 2021’s Operation Guardian of the Walls — where the IDF had engaged in tackling Hamas’s underground “metro” in Gaza, an operation that in retrospect did not achieve its goal of destroying the tunnels in the enclave.

The paper also featured a map assessing the likely 45-kilometer route of one “attack tunnel” in south Lebanon.

Israeli drone kills Hamas deputy chief al-Arouri in Beirut

An Israeli drone strike on a Hamas office in Beirut eliminated top terror chief Saleh al-Arouri on Tuesday night, Hamas’s Al-Aqsa Radio announced.

The explosion rocked the south Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh, a Hezbollah stronghold. In addition to al-Arouri, at least three other Hamas operatives were also killed in the blast, Reuters reported.

Al-Arouri, the commander of Hamas operations in Judea and Samaria, as well as the deputy politburo chief under Hamas chairman Ismail Haniyeh, had been based in Lebanon in recent years.

He was one of the top Hamas leaders on Israel’s target list following the terrorist group’s Oct. 7 massacre of at least 1,200 people in the northwestern Negev.

In a statement cited by Saudi Arabia’s Al Arabiya channel on Tuesday, Hamas described al-Arouri as the “architect” of the massacre.

Al-Arouri was informed of the impending invasion half an hour beforehand so he could alert Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, French outlet Le Figaro reported last week.

Local media said Nasrallah canceled a speech scheduled for Wednesday following the reports of al-Arouri’s death.

Israel is anticipating a response to the alleged assassination, according to Hebrew-language media, including possible long-range rocket fire.

During a Nov. 3 speech, Nasrallah threatened the Jewish state, telling Israelis that a preemptive strike against Lebanon would be “the most foolish mistake you make in your entire existence.”

The Hezbollah leader has repeatedly warned that any assassination in Lebanese territory would be met with a “strong reaction.”

We've seen plenty of idiotic anti-Israel Western celebrities like Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon and Cynthia Nixon.

But Arab celebrities may be even dumber.

A Kuwaiti singer known as "Shams" gave an interview on an Egyptian TV channel.

She said, “We are in a time that repeats itself every 2,000 years, and we are currently living in the Age of Aquarius, and these are astronomical and scientific calculations. Over the next 2,000 years, which will begin in 2024, there will be frightening scientific and technological development and high-level achievements, but they will be years of fraud, falsity, lies and deception."

Shams added, “I see that starting in 2024 the world will be divided into slaves and masters based on the dualities of good and evil, male and female, and black and white.”

Shams continued "The reality is that 7 million Jews rule humanity, which numbers 7 billion people, because they control medicine, the media, banks, science, and all the oxygen of life."

Well, there you have it.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Jordanian newspaper Sarrah News reports that a "blacklist" has been created of five brokers who are selling tomatoes and cucumbers from Jordan to Israel.

The Jordanian Agriculture Ministry has no tools to stop anyone from selling or reselling those vegetables to anyone who wants them, and according to the article, Israel has suffered a shortage of the vegetables since the Gaza war - both because of no imports from Gaza and the reduction of shipping through the Red Sea. There is also a looming shortage of locally produced vegetables because of fewer foreign workers on farms.

Among the five names on the blacklist are two Palestinian brokers who are linked to a former senior security commander in the Palestinian Authority.

The Minister of Agriculture, Khaled Hanifat, told the brokers that they should be ashamed of themselves. But the law does not allow him to interfere in exports of tomatoes and cucumbers.

The free market always finds a way.

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!

Since antisemitism in the Arab world is hitting record levels, one can expect that the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" myth would be widely referred to again.

Sure enough, it is. Here are some mentions in Arabic media in the past month alone.

Popular Egyptian newspaper Al Masry Al Youm published a summary of a book in which the Protocols are assumed to be legitimate:

We have reached a stage of weakness and humiliation that is not hidden from anyone. But we are facing the most dangerous people, and even the most hostile, the Jews, who have opposed God Almighty. The Zionist Jews worked to establish a law and a charter of their own, which they called the Protocols, in which they laid out their approach to controlling the world.. which is what the thinker Dr. Mustafa Mahmoud reveals to us in his book. Nazi Israel and the Language of the Holocaust, in which he talks about the Zionists and some of their issues.

Guess what "Zionists" means?

Another popular Egyptian news site, Youm7, shares a recent video where one of their writer describes the "Protocols" in five minutes.

The same site reviews another book, called "International Zionism," which is summarizes this way:

The book International Zionism includes 25 sections: As follows: Zionism before Christ, Zionism from birth to the nineteenth century, Zionism since the Balfour Declaration, International Zionism, International Zionism...their crime against themselves, International Zionism...the claim of persecution, International Zionism and genius, International Zionism and its fifth columns in the fields of politics and economics. , International Zionism and its fifth columns in the fields of culture, International Zionism and its fifth columns in the parliaments, International Zionism and its fifth columns in Eastern politics, International Zionism... its methods in the present era (1), International Zionism... its methods in the present era (2), Zionism Internationalism... its methods in the present era (3), the fanaticism of Zionism in the field of culture and politics, the fate of international Zionism and international causes, the fate of global Zionism and its threatening influence, the fate of global Zionism and its contradictory structure, international Zionism... their fate in their eyes, the fate of international Zionism in the eyes of their friends The fate of global Zionism and the boycott of the Arabs, Zionist colonialism, Zionism and the future, global Zionism. In conclusion, a commentary on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

See? He has nothing against Jews, just Zionists who have been around for 3000 years.

The forgery is also mentioned as fact in this Oman op-ed,

This Lebanese newspaper admits that the Protocols might be fake, but that doesn't really matter:

Regardless of whether the book "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is a real or a fake document promoted by opponents of the Jews to distort them and justify their persecution in Europe, it is certain that some religious leaders and even politicians in Israel are repeating a speech surprisingly similar to what was contained in that book..

Apologists for Arab antisemitism love to say that they didn't treat Jews as badly as Europeans did. This is generally true. But the Arab world really embraced the worst components of European antisemitism, and today they are the main purveyors of the "Protocols."

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!

01/01 Links Pt2: How "Antiracism" Becomes Antisemitism; French Students: Make Oct. 7 ‘World Day Against Antisemitism’; How Qatar Bought the Ivy League

From Ian:

WSJ: How "Antiracism" Becomes Antisemitism
Freelink How ‘Antiracism’ Becomes Antisemitism

Over the past 2 1/2 months, Jew-hatred has rocked elite college campuses. Tony neighborhoods in blue cities have witnessed marches calling for the elimination of the Jewish state and protests outside Jewish-owned businesses - this in response to the systematic butchering and kidnapping of Israeli Jews by terrorists.

To these expressions of bigotry, high-ranking public officials and university administrators have issued bland disavowals of "violence" and "hatred in all its forms." The Biden administration, though so far pursuing a broadly pro-Israel policy in the Middle East, responded to the rash of antisemitic marches and assaults on Jews by announcing a "National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia."

For several years a variety of academics and writers have argued that Jews are "white" or "functionally white" or "white passing." The words "white" and "whiteness" came to be used as though they signified a disease. "White," in this usage, has nothing to do with genetic characteristics. It signifies allegedly unjust privilege and legacies of oppression. Calling Jews "white" was a way of depriving them of any cover as a racial minority and classifying them with persecutors and exploiters.

Assaults on Jews go almost without comment in most of the mainstream press. For weeks after Hamas took hundreds of hostages, including Americans, the U.S. news media showed minimal interest in their whereabouts. It was only when Hamas offered to return some of them in exchange for a ceasefire that reports on their plight began to circulate - almost as though the hostages' usefulness lay exclusively in stopping Israel from just retribution.

French Students Launch Appeal to Make Oct. 7 ‘World Day Against Antisemitism’

One of France’s leading Jewish intellectuals is promoting a petition initiated by a group of students, several from Muslim backgrounds, calling for Oct. 7 — the date of the Hamas terrorist pogrom in southern Israel in which more than 1,200 people were murdered and over 200 taken hostage — to be named as the “World Day Against Antisemitism.”

Marek Halter, a Polish-Jewish novelist and film-maker, announced his support for the petition over the weekend. “I was contacted by a few young people, mostly from immigrant backgrounds,” Halter said, according to the news outlet Valeurs Actuelles. “Upset by the events of Oct. 7 on the Gaza border, they wished to launch an appeal for this date to become a world day against antisemitism.”

Added Halter: “I admit I was embarrassed not to have thought of it myself.”

The petition’s main initiator, 23-year-old French Muslim student Hichem Mouttaki, explained in an interview with broadcaster CNews that young people had little sense of the nature of Hamas.

“More and more students, middle and high school students, for lack of information or dialogue, refuse to see Hamas as a terrorist organization,” Mouttaki said.

Following the interview, Mouttaki was reportedly inundated with hateful messages and threats from supporters of Hamas.

The petition warns that antisemitism has returned with a vengeance. “The hatred of the other, the hatred of the Jew, is again at work,” the petition states. “In the absence of a collective dream capable of mobilizing our hopes, the rejection of the Jew again becomes, as before World War II, the only answer to the political and social frustrations that confront our societies.”

The petitioners said they were calling on “all international organizations to declare Oct. 7 ‘World Day Against Antisemitism.'”

Latest EoZ cartoons

I think I'm finally caught up....

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!

Naharnet (Lebanon) reports:

Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi on Sunday said he rejects the spread of the Gaza war to south Lebanon, calling for a halt to the cross-border clashes and for "the protection of the Lebanese and their homes and properties."

"We demand the removal of any rocket launchpad planted between homes in the towns of the South that might draw a destructive Israeli response," al-Rahi urged in his Sunday Mass sermon.

"Let everyone respect (U.N.) Security Council Resolution 1701 and all its articles for the sake of Lebanon's welfare," the patriarch added.

For him to say this out loud, that means every Lebanese citizen knows that Hezbollah is placing its rocket arsenal in the middle of the civilian population, just like Hamas does in Gaza.

A comment on the story is interesting:

This is exactly what happened in the sunni-village Chebaa on October 14th. An elderly couple was killed after Hezbollah-members had fired against an Israeli position from near their home. They were spotted by Israeli drones and were fired upon immediately. The Hezbollah-members sought cover in a random house and the Israelis fired a direct hit at the house. Paramedics tried to reach the house after the bombardment ended, but other Hezbollah-members had cordoned off the area until they could remove the bodies of their soldiers and their equipment. When the paramedics finally were allowed to enter they found the dead bodies of the couple embracing each other in a corner of the kitchen.

I couldn't verify all the details, but the details I could verify all jive with this. A couple was killed and Israel said that it hit the source of the rocket fire. One Hezbollah member did get killed that day in the Shebaa Farms area and the group did not admit the circumstances of his death.

And Hezbollah's cynical use of civilians as defensive weapons gets exactly as little condemnation as Hamas does.

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Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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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.

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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!