Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, January 28, 2024

01/28 Links: The U.N.’s War on Israel; Three US soldiers killed Iranian drone strike on base in Jordan; WH rejects report US slowing weapons sales to Israel

From Ian:

Eugene Kontorovich: Israel can limit the ICJ’s potential damage

Israelis on Friday displayed what is called Jewish joy—they celebrated that the pogromniks only broke the windows, but did not kill anyone. The good news was the International Court of Justice did not effectively order us to wait to be tortured and murdered, by demanding a halt to the Gaza War. That is certainly good—but only in the twisted world where the ICJ is putting Israel, not Hamas, on trial for the absolutely absurd charge of genocide.

Otherwise, the decision was horrible. The court accepted South Africa’s argument that it has jurisdiction and that Israel could possibly be proven to be committing genocide. The case is not over and will go on for years. In the meantime, the court has made clear that it considers itself to have authority to review and superintend every aspect of Israel’s war for survival—and demands monthly reports. No other country receives such treatment, and it is designed to make the military constantly look over its soldiers’ shoulders.

The ICJ is not an independent body—it is an organ of the United Nations. Its justices serve a renewable nine-year term, further undermining their independence. The judges are elected by the General Assembly and Security Council, and their positions largely track the foreign policy of their home countries. Thus while we might get lucky sometimes, over the long run, the policy of the court will reflect the policy of the United Nations.

The General Assembly’s obsessive condemnation of the Jewish state is well known—Israel would never agree to have its fate determined by them. But agreeing to the jurisdiction of the court indirectly does the same thing. In Israel it is thought unacceptable to have judges appointed by democratically elected politicians decide the meaning of ordinary laws. Yet we have agreed to have judges elected by dictatorial regimes decide the basic question of whether we can exist—whether we can defend ourselves.

It does not have to be this way: The ICJ does not automatically have jurisdiction over countries—they must specifically agree, typically by agreeing that The Hague can decide a specific dispute or questions under a specific treaty. In this case, Israel signed the Genocide Convention, which provides that “disputes between the…parties” about the treaty can be decided by the ICJ. But that does not mean cases like this, where a totally unrelated state has brought a purely political complaint in a matter it has no relation to. The court should not have accepted jurisdiction, and by doing so it effectively claimed for itself power to supervise the conduct of wars around the world, so long as some country claims genocide is involved.

Israel did not have to agree to the ICJ jurisdiction to be a member of the Genocide Convention, and in retrospect, doing so was a major mistake. Countries are allowed to opt out of ICJ jurisdiction in various treaties, and very commonly do so. Indeed, 16 countries have opted out of the Genocide Convention minus the ICJ jurisdiction—including the world’s largest democracies, the United States and India. Even the world’s biggest superpowers did not trust the ICJ to hear cases involving the use of force in an apolitical way.

WSJ Editorial: The U.N.’s War on Israel

What a day for the United Nations. Its International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued a preliminary ruling Friday in South Africa’s case against Israel that managed to be both outrageous and meaningless. At the same time, its special forever-refugee agency for the Palestinians, Unrwa, had to fire staff accused of involvement in Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre. Our global moral beacon in action.

The ICJ tribunal indulged South Africa’s genocide libel by going ahead with a trial and trashing Israel for self-defense against Hamas. But the justices rejected Pretoria’s request to order Israel to stop the war. The court instead instructed Israel to prevent acts of genocide, punish incitement and facilitate aid to civilians—which Jerusalem is already doing. Israel will have to report back in a month, and the court could take years to decide on the merits.

As law professor Eugene Kontorovich writes, “That’s Jewish joy—they defamed us, treated us like no other democracy, undermined our right to self-defense, put the victim on trial—but it could have been worse!” All true, and an order to halt the war while Hamas holds territory and 136 hostages would have put Israel in a tight spot.

The U.N.’s credibility is also on trial, especially through Unrwa, whose reports the court relied on. After Israel brought evidence that 12 Unrwa employees participated in the Oct. 7 attack, the U.S. State Department announced on Friday a pause in funding to the U.N.’s Palestinian refugee agency pending investigation.

A new U.N. Watch report, to be released and discussed in Congress on Tuesday, shows “how a Telegram group of 3,000 UNRWA teachers in Gaza celebrated the October 7th Hamas massacre.” The message group’s administrators, identified by name and Unrwa contract number, are seen praising Hamas’s “holy warriors” and praying for them to murder Israelis: “O God, tear them apart,” “kill them one by one,” “leave none of them behind,” “execute the first settler on live broadcast.” One urged that Gazans stay in place to help Hamas.

Caroline Glick: Israel’s isolated generals

Notably, all of the General Staff’s paradigms are shared by the U.S. foreign-policy establishment. So it isn’t surprising that a consistent position of the generals is that the United States, rather than the IDF, is the guarantor of Israel’s survival. Accordingly, the generals oppose actions that would limit or even end Israel’s strategic dependence on America. That dependence commits the United States to protect Israel, and that protection will be guaranteed if Israel maintains faith in its appeasement policies towards Israel’s enemies.

The public—and rank-and-file officers and soldiers on the ground in Gaza, along the border with Lebanon, and in Judea and Samaria—are unmoved by the generals’ demoralizing messages. They understand that Israel has no option other than to fight the war until victory, whatever the price. The notion of appeasement-based deterrence died on Oct. 7. In successive opinion polls since then, the Israeli public has made clear that it opposes cutting a deal for the hostages that will enable Hamas to survive the war. They oppose Palestinian statehood, and under no circumstances is the public willing to countenance a P.A. takeover of the Gaza Strip the day after the war.

The public’s unwillingness to accept anything less than victory has placed the General Staff in a bind. Reservists being sent home from the front have reacted not with happiness but with indignation at leaving before victory has been achieved. On Feb. 8, angry reservists are planning to hold a mass demonstration demanding to be permitted to fight to victory down the street from the Prime Minister’s Office.

On Wednesday and Thursday, hundreds of relatives of hostages, mothers of IDF soldiers and other concerned citizens blocked humanitarian aid trucks from entering Gaza through the Kerem Shalom border crossing. These citizens recognize that humanitarian aid is just a euphemism for resupply to Hamas. The government, they say, may need to agree to humanitarian aid to placate the Biden administration, but private citizens are under no such constraints. And given the dire implications of the aid for the war effort, standing idly by while Washington compels Jerusalem to give Hamas a lifeline to remain in the tunnels is nothing short of insane.

The public’s operations are not limited to the domestic realm. A new group, Mothers of IDF Soldiers, sent a letter to President Joe Biden on Thursday demanding an end to humanitarian aid to Gaza, arguing that the truckloads of fuel, food, water and medicine endanger the lives of IDF soldiers; is not being distributed to Palestinian civilians; enables Hamas to remain in charge of governing affairs in Gaza; and prolongs the war by giving Hamas terrorists the means to keep fighting from their tunnels and refusing to release the hostages.

Netanyahu, for his part, is not relenting. Nearly every day, he reiterates the war goals and insists that Israel will fight until it achieves all of them. He is demanding that the IDF provide him with benchmarks to measure its progress towards victory.

The generals in charge owe their positions to their full adherence to the strategic paradigms of the United States and the political left. They don’t want to move on. But the unanimity of opinion from the public below and the government above will leave them little choice. They will either get on board and deliver the required victory, or they will eventually be forced to resign and make room for others capable of doing the job.

A tweet of mine goes massively viral, and the antisemites are seething. They don't want you to know the truth.

On Friday, after listening to the ICJ give credence to the blood libel that Israel is "plausibly" committing genocide in Gaza, I tweeted a variant of the title of Richard Landes' excellent book:

Over Shabbat, the tweet went truly viral. As of this writing, the tweet has over 700,000 views, 6,500 "Likes" and 3,200 "Replies" that are overwhelmingly negative.

Since it was getting so much attention, I wrote a short follow-up essay for anyone who finds my thesis hard to believe but has not yet been completely poisoned by hate by both the modern antisemites and the seemingly objective media.

Here's that essay, with some additions and links:

________________________________

Based on the responses to this tweet, tens of thousands of people actually believe the argumentum ad populum fallacy. (Or just maybe in the case of Israel.)

Clearly, most people responding negatively don't know the first thing about the conflict. But others think that the curated news they read represents the truth.

For those who can still think for themselves and are not motivated by hate, I suggest a couple of facts that the mainstream media downplays.

First, the IDF has an entire organization (since 1994) dedicated to helping Palestinians in the territories, COGAT. I've spoken to members. They care deeply about Palestinians and their wellbeing. They work tirelessly to coordinate aid and trade. They even have organized trade shows for Palestinians to learn new farming or medical techniques, providing them with the latest methods for success.

Of course, they also care about the safety of Israelis. But such an organization wouldn't exist in a state that is hellbent on destroying the people on the other side. The people demonizing Israel don't want you to know about COGAT, or they want to distort it. (COGAT's head is an Israeli Druze general, not a Jew.)

Second, the IDF is treated in the media like a toddler throwing a temper tantrum. It is a professional army, respected by all militaries worldwide. It doesn't shoot indiscriminately. It doesn't target civilians. Dead Gazans don't help its cause, and on the contrary, it hurts it. Hamas has embedded itself in the entire infrastructure of Gaza and part of its strategy is to maximize civilian deaths. I am not exaggerating. If you can name a single thing Hamas has done to protect Palestinian lives, I'd love to hear it.

Relatedly, in previous wars, the goal was to dissuade Hamas from wanting to attack Israel because the cost would be too high. October 7 proved that Hamas doesn't care about the cost: their hate and antisemitism is what drives them, not a desire for a state (in fact, they desire a caliphate, not a Palestinian state, except as a stage to their pan-Islamist goal.)

Also, if you think Hamas had modified its antisemitic charter, you are dead wrong. They issued a document but say in Arabic that it does not replace their charter.

As such, it is a valid military goal to utterly destroy a group hellbent on destroying you. Hamas' urban tunnel strategy - a strategy that is utterly unprecedented in world history - is designed to allow Hamas to survive, and the phrase "human shields" is not a slogan but its major defensive weapon.

The threat of thousands of dead children is Hamas' Iron Dome.

There is a lot more to say. Read the Modern War essays from West Point to see what real military experts have to say about Israeli and Hamas strategy and international law. The more you learn about actual combat from real soldiers, the more you realize that the New York Times and CNN and Human Rights Watch are utterly clueless, and their biases guide their reporting more than reality. Their articles about Israel using so-called "dumb bombs" are a classic case in point: computer guided and released "dumb bombs" are nearly as accurate as smart bombs and make far more sense for certain targets like warehouses. But the point is that Israel is fighting a very difficult war with constraints that no army in history had to deal with, where the population is being kept in their "open air prison" not by Israel but by their fellow Arabs who seemingly share Hamas' goals of maximizing casualties.

Israel's former chief justice Aharon Barak wrote in his ICJ opinion on Friday:

International law is an integral part of the military code and the conduct of the Israeli army. The Code of Ethics of the Israeli Defense Forces states that “[a]n IDF soldier will only exercise their power or use their weapon in order to fulfill their mission and only when necessary. They will maintain their humanity during combat and routine times. The soldier will not use their weapon or power to harm uninvolved civilians and prisoners and will do everything in their power to prevent harm to their lives, bodies, dignity and property.”

When those norms are violated, the Attorney General, the State Attorney and the Military Advocate General take the necessary measures to bring those responsible to justice, and their decisions are subject to judicial review. In appropriate cases, the Israeli Supreme Court may instruct them how to act. This is Israel’s DNA. Governments have been replaced, new justices have come to the Supreme Court, but the DNA of Israel’s democracy does not change.

Israel’s multiple layers of institutional safeguards also include legal advice provided in real time, during hostilities. Strikes that do not meet the definition of a military objective or that do not comply with the rule of proportionality cannot go forward. The holdings of the Israeli Supreme Court and Israel’s institutional framework demonstrate a commitment to the rule of law and human life - a commitment that runs through its collective memory, institutions, and traditions.

Israelis know this as well as they know their own names. The Israel that is portrayed in the media has nothing in common with the real Israel and the real IDF.

If you accept that Israelis are human beings who do not want to hurt the innocent and are not monsters, and look at the news through that lens, and if you are not already blinded by hate, you will see that the simplistic "Israel is bad" narrative is a mere meme, and the truth is way beyond the headlines.

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!

There is a gaping hole in the ICJ provisional measures ruling issued on January 26.

The major provisional measure requested by South Africa - indeed, the first one listed in its application - was "(1) The State of Israel shall immediately suspend its military operations in and against Gaza."

The ICJ provisional measures included six orders, that roughly correspond to most of the other measures requested by South Africa. And the orders that it did consider were overwhelmingly approved by the judges, either by votes of 15-2 or 16-1.

So why didn't the ICJ judges vote on the main request from South Africa?

The ruling itself barely addresses this issue. It says (76-77), "The Court recalls that it has the power, under its Statute, when a request for provisional measures has been made, to indicate measures that are, in whole or in part, other than those requested.... In the present case, having considered the terms of the provisional measures requested by South Africa and the circumstances of the case, the Court finds that the measures to be indicated need not be identical to those requested."

Reading between the lines, it seems that the ICJ considered South Africa's main request for Israel to immediately stop all military activities to be so absurd as to not even be worth consideration or discussion.

In his separate declaration, Judge Dalveer Bhandari (India) wanted to add this order: "All participants in the conflict must ensure that all fighting and hostilities come to an immediate halt and that remaining hostages captured on 7 October 2023 are unconditionally released forthwith." Even he did not consider South Africa's demand for Israel - and only Israel - to stop fighting, without a similar demand of Hamas and a demand for Hamas to release the hostages, to be worth considering.

Now, imagine if the ICJ judges would have voted on the request by South Africa for Israel (and only Israel) to stop fighting. The vote would have been overwhelmingly if not unanimously against it.

What would the world headlines have been? "The ICJ rules for Israel and dismisses South Africa's main demands."

The ICJ did not want to make it appear as if Israel won and South Africa lost on the main points. So it changed the provisional measures voted on to only the ones that could appear to be overwhelmingly against Israel. And it didn't even discuss why the main South African demand was not considered.

This indicated that the ICJ cared more about optics than law. It didn't want to make South Africa look bad, even as it dismissed its main legal argument for a unilateral Israeli ceasefire without discussion.

But it had no problem writing paragraph after paragraph that Israel might "plausibly" be committing genocide, using extraordinarily thin evidence compared to that used in similar cases brought before the court, as Judge Aharon Barak's separate opinion showed (paragraphs 34-36.)

Barak wrote plainly what the ICJ refused to say explicitly:

South Africa came to the Court seeking the immediate suspension of the military operations in the Gaza Strip. It has wrongly sought to impute the crime of Cain to Abel. The Court rejected South Africa’s main contention and, instead, adopted measures that recall Israel’s existing obligations under the Genocide Convention. The Court has reaffirmed Israel’s right to defend its citizens...

By burying its rejection of South Africa's attempt to hamstring Israel's ability to defend itself, and instead emphasizing the supposed "plausibility" of the genocide charge, the ICJ showed that the law is not its main consideration when it comes to Israel. It knows that any explicit ruling in Israel's favor on even one point would result in thousands of op-eds, articles and posts attacking the legitimacy of the Court from antisemites.

It didn't want to be the object of protest. It didn't want the roads to the ICJ to be blocked by angry Jew-haters.

Its ruling showed that it cares more about politics and optics than the law itself.

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!

In January 2005, an International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur presented the results of its research to the United Nations Secretary-General - and determined that, contrary to what many nations insisted, there was no genocide in by the government of Sudan against the Black African tribes targeted in Darfur. They were behind some horrific war crimes but not genocide.

The report shows how high the bar is for determining genocidal intent. And part of that calculation is saying that if the Janjaweed or the government had the opportunity to murder someone in the targeted tribes and didn't, that is a good counterargument to the charge of genocide.

It says:

513. Was there a genocidal intent? Some elements emerging from the facts including the scale of atrocities and the systematic nature of the attacks, killing, displacement and rape, as well as racially motivated statements by perpetrators that have targeted members of the African tribes only, could be indicative of the genocidal intent. However, there are other more indicative elements that show the lack of genocidal intent. The fact that in a number of villages attacked and burned by both militias and Government forces the attackers refrained from exterminating the whole population that had not fled, but instead selectively killed groups of young men, is an important element. A telling example is the attack of 22 January 2004 on Wadi Saleh, a group of 25 villages inhabited by about 11 000 Fur. According to credible accounts of eye witnesses questioned by the Commission, after occupying the villages the Government Commissioner and the leader of the Arab militias that had participated in the attack and burning, gathered all those who had survived or had not managed to escape into a large area. Using a microphone they selected 15 persons (whose name they read from a written list), as well as 7 omdas, and executed them on the spot. They then sent all elderly men, all boys, many men and all women to a nearby village, where they held them for some time, whereas they executed 205 young villagers, who they asserted were rebels (Torabora). According to male witnesses interviewed by the Commission and who were among the survivors, about 800 persons were not killed (most young men of those spared by the attackers were detained for some time in the Mukjar prison).

514. This case clearly shows that the intent of the attackers was not to destroy an ethnic group as such, or part of the group. Instead, the intention was to murder all those men they considered as rebels, as well as forcibly expel the whole population so as to vacate the villages and prevent rebels from hiding among, or getting support from, the local population.

515. Another element that tends to show the Sudanese Government’s lack of genocidal intent can be seen in the fact that persons forcibly dislodged from their villages are collected in IDP camps. In other words, the populations surviving attacks on villages are not killed outright, so as to eradicate the group; they are rather forced to abandon their homes and live together in areas selected by the Government. While this attitude of the Sudanese Government may be held to be in breach of international legal standards on human rights and international criminal law rules, it is not indicative of any intent to annihilate the group. This is all the more true because the living conditions in those camps, although open to strong criticism on many grounds, do not seem to be calculated to bring about the extinction of the ethnic group to which the IDPs belong. Suffice it to note that the Government of Sudan generally allows humanitarian organizations to help the population in camps by providing food, clean water, medicines and logistical assistance (construction of hospitals, cooking facilities, latrines, etc.)

516. Another element that tends to show the lack of genocidal intent is the fact that in contrast with other instances described above, in a number of instances villages with a mixed composition (African and Arab tribes) have not been attacked. This for instance holds true for the village of Abaata (north-east of Zelingei, in Western Darfur), consisting of Zaghawa and members of Arab tribes.

517. Furthermore, it has been reported by a reliable source that one inhabitant of the Jabir Village (situated about 150 km from Abu Shouk Camp) was among the victims of an attack carried out by Janjaweed on 16 March 2004 on the village. He stated that he did not resist when the attackers took 200 camels from him, although they beat him up with the butt of their guns. Instead, prior to his beating, his young brother, who possessed only one camel, had resisted when the attackers had tried to take his camel, and had been shot dead. Clearly, in this instance the special intent to kill a member of a group to destroy the group as such was lacking, the murder being only motivated by the desire to appropriate cattle belonging to the inhabitants of the village. Irrespective of the motive, had the attackers’ intent been to annihilate the group, they would not have spared one of the brothers.

The report bends over backwards to find reasons not to call the actions genocide. It goes way beyond the Genocide Convention definition - there actually was a genocide in Darfur and the UN report whitewashed it.

The COI didn't even bother to catalog racist statements by the Sudanese government and its Arab allies. A 2009 study of women raped by the groups concluded that "Combined attacks by Sudanese government forces and Janjaweed militia forces led to racial epithets being used more often during sexual victimization in Darfur. Our results suggest that the Sudanese government is participating in the use of sexual assault as a racially targeted weapon against ethnically African civilians." Another observer said that the Janjaweed would frequently refer to the Blacks as "slaves". And before this study was published, the US State Department documented,

When describing attacks, refugees often referred to GOS soldiers and Jingaweit militias as a unified group; as one refugee stated, "The soldiers and Jingaweit, always they are together." The primary victims have been non-Arab residents of Darfur. Numerous credible reports corroborate the use of racial and ethnic epithets by both the Jingaweit and GOS military personnel; "Kill the slaves; Kill the slaves!" and "We have orders to kill all the blacks" are common. One refugee reported a militia member stating, "We kill all blacks and even kill our cattle when they have black calves."

What is clear is that by the criteria that the UN COI used in Darfur, it is absurd to charge Israel with genocide. Every reason that the UN gave to exonerate the Sudan government of genocide applies a thousandfold more to Israel.

As usual, standards applied to Israel do not apply to anyone else, no matter how heinous their crimes. The double standards show that this isn't a question of human rights, but of antisemitism.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

01/27 Links: The UN’s Complicity in Terrorism; 10 Countries suspend funding to UNRWA; A hollow Holocaust Remembrance Day

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The UN’s Complicity in Terrorism

The timing of this disclosure is interesting for another reason. On Tuesday, the House Foreign Affairs Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing titled “UNRWA Exposed: Examining the Agency’s Mission and Failures.” Foundation for Defense of Democracy’s Richard Goldberg and UN Watch’s Hillel Neuer are two of the planned witnesses.

Last night, an administration official told Israel Hayom that “UNRWA continues to deliver critical assistance in Gaza and remains a trusted US partner. UNRWA will be a central pillar of stability in post-war Gaza, and we strongly support it.”

Perhaps that assessment, like U.S. funding to the agency, will come under some much needed reconsideration by the Biden White House. As it is, President Biden had restored U.S. funding to UNRWA after President Trump put a stop to it. Like the removal of the Houthis from the list of foreign terrorist groups, re-funding UNRWA looks to be another case of the president’s desire to undo the vestiges of Trump’s foreign policy without giving thought to whether those policies were correct. That’s a shoddy way for a superpower to act, and it ought to change.

UNRWA is not just corrupt; its existence is a corruption of international laws and norms. It has created its own definition of “refugee” only for Palestinians, because its goal is to keep the conflict unsolved so it can act as a vanguard of the war on the Jewish state. It is a cash conduit to one of the world’s major terrorist groups, which also happens to be an Iranian catspaw. May this be the beginning of a thorough investigation and the end of our complicity in UNRWA’s reign of terror.

Aviva Klompas: Holocaust Remembrance Means Rooting Out Oct. 7 Denial

Two years ago, the United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly condemned Holocaust denial. In all, 114 countries co-sponsored the resolution. They sent a statement to the one dissenting voice—Iran—that even the UN, a frequent critic of Israel, would not give quarter to distorting the history of atrocities against Jews.

As we approach International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27 this year, we face a startlingly different reality.

Hamas's Oct. 7 attack awakened a sense of horror and helplessness that Jews haven't felt since the Holocaust. Our shattered sense of security has been compounded by the vitriolic nature of protests that have sprung up all over the world.

Returning to a Scene of Horror
Just two days after the Saturday massacre, before all the bodies were collected or the full number of hostages known, protesters gathered outside the Sydney Opera House and chanted, "Gas the Jews."

This was not an isolated incident. It took frighteningly few days for revulsion at Hamas's attack to morph into revulsion at Israel's response. Since October, among the swells of protesters who have flooded major cities all over the world, it's not hard to spot overtly antisemitic sentiments, including calling for the obliteration of Israel and violence against Jews.

And it's not just on the streets. Individuals who have pledged their careers to defending civilians have applied an appalling double standard by denying or downplaying the atrocities committed on Oct. 7.

The former director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East Department blamed Israel for the massacre. The director of a sexual assault center at a Canadian university denied that Hamas committed rape and other sexual crimes. It is chilling to watch those who hold positions of influence downplay or deny the crimes.

Holocaust denial stretches back almost to the Holocaust itself. In the decades after World War II, Nazi sympathizers ignored forensic, first-person, and photographic evidence to claim the Holocaust never happened or that it wasn't as bad as claimed. The movement gained momentum in the 1970s with the rise of pseudo-academic organizations like the Institute for Historical Review and the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust.

Not surprisingly, these deniers found allies among Middle Eastern voices who oppose Israel's existence. If the Holocaust never happened, they reason, do Jews really need the protections afforded by having their own nation-state?

History is Repeating Itself Once Again

I recently watched the Oscar nominated film Zone of Interest and a few things really struck me. In case you haven’t seen or heard about it, it’s a work of historical fiction centered around an Auschwitz commandant and his family, who happen to live directly adjacent to the death camp. The most striking thing about the film, and this is no spoiler, was simply the juxtaposition of the world’s most notorious extermination factory and the idyllic, pristine family home of the camp’s commanding officer. The meticulously manicured garden, swimming pool—complete with a slide to delight their five Aryan children, the greenhouse and the lavish parties. They entertained guests, basked in their good fortune, all with billowing smoke ever-present in the distance and a muted soundtrack of desperate screams, barking attack dogs and intermittent gunfire eerily humming in the background. The scariest part was that no one—save for one of their blonde, blue-eyed children and a mother in-law with a hacking, human ash-induced cough–appeared to notice any of it. This model Nazi family and their guests were somehow able to inure themselves to what was happening just on the other side of a ten-foot cement wall. There was no empathy, conscience or even recognition of the horrors that were taking place a mere stone’s throw away. In their minds, they had reached their zenith. They were living in their dream home not despite the cruelty, but because of it–and their relishing of the spoils of war was yet another profoundly disturbing display of man’s inhumanity to man. And it made me wonder, “what did they tell themselves to justify their existence?” “What lies did they feast upon in order to dehumanize the screams and the wafting scent of burning flesh?” And then a chill ran down my spine as it dawned on me that this is precisely what’s happening right now.

On October 7, Hamas didn’t just attack Israel, it attacked every Jew on planet earth. It punctured the tenuous bubble that we were living in, resurrecting our generational trauma and once again reminding us of our vulnerability. And the aftershocks of this seismic shift in our collective psyche continue to reverberate as we witness not just silence, but pure, unadulterated hatred – from all corners. It’s as if the anti-Semites of the world now have license to unleash the venom they’ve been keeping under wraps. And how is this Jew hatred justified? With the same lies that everyday Germans told themselves when their neighbors were being thrown onto cattle cars—except now, the conduit for this disinformation isn’t leaflets, radio addresses and offensive caricatures, but something far more efficient and global in reach.

Social media is propaganda on steroids. Goebbels would have had a field day on TikTok, X and Instagram, with their supercharged ability to disseminate lies, conspiracy theories and blood libels with immediacy and on a massive scale. This capability, combined with a public that sees no value in truth or facts, and seeks only to reinforce pre-existing narratives propagated by terrorists and self-promoting influencers, has gotten us to the Twilight Zone in which we are living today. A world where GoPro footage shot by Hamas themselves is labeled as Israeli propaganda, where a sovereign nation that was savagely attacked on 10/7 is being charged with Genocide at the Hague for defending itself, where our supposed best and brightest are loudly and proudly calling for death to Jews on their Ivy League campuses, where morons in Keffiyehs are chanting “Allahu Akbar” mere steps away from the site of 9/11, where the Red Cross refuses to lift a finger to help our hostages, where the UN is complicit in funding and enabling Hamas’ terror tunnels, where feminists are silent in the face of barbaric sexual violence and where Queers for Palestine are rallying for savages who would throw them from a roof if they dared to wave a rainbow flag anywhere in the Middle East, other than Israel.

01/26 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: The rotten edifice of ‘humanitarianism’; Douglas Murray - Cowardice Is Killing The West; Israel considers ending water deal with Jordan

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The rotten edifice of ‘humanitarianism’

The United Nations was set up to promote peace and justice around the world. Instead of doing so, however, it has become a key weapon against peace and justice in the global armory of evil causes.

Nowhere has this been more baleful and done such appalling intergenerational harm than in the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), which administers health care, education and welfare for the Palestinian Arabs of Gaza.

The U.N. maintains that its staff in Gaza merely deal with Hamas on an operational level as the authority in charge. This is disingenuous nonsense. Wittingly or unwittingly, UNRWA behaves as a Hamas tool.

Earlier this month, the monitoring group UN Watch revealed internal UNRWA group chats that took place on Telegram. They showed that more than 3,000 UNRWA staff and teachers celebrated the Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom in Israel and praised the murderers and rapists as “heroes.” Their comments included calls to execute Israeli hostages, expressions of joy and support for jihad, and cheers for video footage of the atrocities with messages such as “just wait, sons of Jews.”

When the U.N. tried to deny this, UN Watch started to publish on Twitter the names of the Telegram participants, at which point the U.N. suggested it might investigate.

Meanwhile, as a result of Israel’s military operation in Gaza, the IDF has been uncovering copious evidence of UNRWA’s links to Hamas.

Jonathan Conricus, who until recently served as an IDF spokesman, told The New York Sun: “Every UNRWA school we entered had Hamas weapons in it. Each one was a place for Hamas to hide in and fight from.”

In these schools, the IDF found a number of books glorifying militancy and spreading antisemitism. Last March, a report by UN Watch and IMPACT-se—a research body that measures school curricula against UNESCO-defined standards of peace and tolerance—revealed that UNRWA teachers regularly call for the murder of Jews and create teaching materials that encourage terrorism, demonize Israelis and incite antisemitism.

UNRWA is itself complicit in Hamas’s activities.

Uncivil Combatants

The Biden administration declared in July that the laws of war require presuming persons and structures in combat areas are civilian, overturning longstanding Department of Defense (DOD) rules. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, echoing the administration’s new position, has pressured Israel to limit its self-defense, citing the effect on Gazan civilians and infrastructure. Hamas, of course, regularly disguises its combatants as civilians, and uses civilian structures such as homes, mosques, schools, and hospitals as military facilities.

Hamas’s regular violations of the laws of war, including its use of human shields, make it impossible for Israel to defend itself without also killing Gazan civilians. Hamas has long sought to force Israel to harm Gazan civilian targets in order to stop the terror group’s genocidal violence. Blinken’s blaming Israel for Gazan casualties reverses causality and rewards Hamas’s strategy.

The actual extent of civilian harm in Gaza is unknown, and given the fog of war, likely unknowable. It is also impossible to know what portion of the damage to Gaza was caused by Israel, by Hamas attacks targeting Israelis that misfired and killed Gazans, or by the explosion of Hamas munitions hidden throughout Gazan population centers. As President Biden stated, Hamas Health Ministry casualty statistics are not credible; the ministry’s reported causes of such casualties are no more reliable.

Blinken’s declaration that “far too many” civilians have been harmed in Gaza sidesteps the questions of who is a civilian, and what constitutes civilian infrastructure. As the current Department of Defense Law of War Manual notes, combatants include not just those firing weapons, but all those performing “acts that are an integral part of combat operations or that effectively and substantially contribute to an adversary’s ability to conduct or sustain combat operations.”

Gazans involved in Hamas infrastructure-building, weapons-production, transportation, and logistics are not civilians, but combatants. So are those aiding Hamas’s military operations, such as spotters, including women and children, who help gunmen target Israelis and monitor troop movements. Gazan families imprisoning in their homes kidnapped Israelis are combatants committing war crimes.

Part-time war participants do not attain protected civilian status during their down time. The DOD’s Law of War Manual rejects the 1977 Protocol I to the Geneva Convention (a document that the U.S. signed but has refused to ratify) provision stating that “civilians shall enjoy the protection [from being made the object of attack], unless and for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities.” In addition, Hamas combatants do not magically become civilians because they are not wearing uniforms, even if some are also reporters. In fact, Hamas’s practice of disguising its fighters as civilians constitutes “perfidy” under international law, which refers to “acts that invite the confidence of enemy persons to lead them to believe that they are entitled to, or are obliged to accord, protection under the law of war, with intent to betray that confidence.”

Eve Barlow: Think like your enemy

A while ago, a wise friend told me that when you’re trying to understand people’s motivations, or the state of play, and you’re overwhelmed and confused by trickery, the best thing to do is to think like your enemy. Put the enemy’s hat on, and ask: if you were them, what would you do?

Last week I listened to a brilliant podcast. It is one of the best explanations I've ever heard about why Islam is obsessed with Israel. It explains the wider conflict with the Arab world in a way I had never heard before courtsey of Haviv Rettig Gur of The Times of Israel. Here is an excerpt:

"The Jews – the refugees who they kicked out of every country, penniless and weak – are pushing back to conquer a piece of Islam. It’s not about the Jews, it’s about the fact that even Jews can push back on Islam. For the Iranian regime the problem of Israel isn’t that it exists, it’s that it cannot be destroyed by Muslims. If it could be, it wouldn’t have to be destroyed by Muslims because it wouldn’t be the standing symbol of Islamic weakness, and therefore distance from God. The path to Islamic redemption and renewal and return to a powerful agent in history cuts a bloody path through ‘Jewish arrogance’, which is what Israel is to them.” [This explains why there are crowds celebrating every time Israel is attacked; which is echoed across the globe in marches for Palestinian rights.] "Why would the Iranian regime, which doesn’t believe in human rights, invest billions that it doesn’t have in the idea of Palestinian rights? It has nothing to do with Palestinian rights. It has to do with Islam coming back as a force in history and proving that they are not far and distant from their god. Israel’s existence – because the Jews are so weak – is incontrovertible evidence that Islam does not have god’s grace."

This explains the intent of Hamas on October 7 while go-pro-ing and broadcasting their humiliation of Israel. That was the core message. Render Israel weak.

This coming Friday, just before Shabbat, and a day before the non-Jewish world’s annual attempt to let itself off the hook for the Shoah while talking about everything and anything except for the six million Jews who were killed by Nazis (ie, International Holocaust Rememberance Day), the International Court of (In)Justice will deliver its order on the request for the indication of provisional measures submitted by South Africa in the case South Africa vs Israel. I don’t have high hopes, despite the excellent defence provided by Israel’s legal team a few weeks ago.

Why? Well I’m thinking like the enemy. That’s what I’ve been doing more of. That’s why I’m scared about the ICJ. Because if I was thinking like the enemy I’d be wanting an international legal body to kosher all the propaganda I’ve just placed in every Western institution to truly isolate the Jews and Israel and I’d hire a willing assailant to perform this exercise (ie, South Africa, who I’ve built a great relationship with going back decades now, and who aren’t exactly beacons of morality themselves), and I’d effectively negotiate for the verdict I want. There’s precedent for this, proving that it may be successful (The Dreyfuss Affair in 1906). A result here legitimizing my decades’ worth of international investment and time with The UN, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Western universities including Harvard and Penn, and political leaders such as Jeremy Corbyn, and Ilhan Omar, would be of high value. Worth some business.

From El Watan News (Egypt) and other Arabic news sites:

"The Message" is a theatrical performance presented by the children of the schools of the Al-Ajami Educational Administration in Alexandria. It tells the history of the exile of the Jews to the land of Palestine. It reveals plans that were carried out and whose goal was to exile the Jews far from Europe and to expel them, because they are arrogant terrorists and the cause of the destruction of many European countries.

The goal of the theatrical performance is to introduce new generations to the history of the Palestinian issue with the Zionist enemy.

Ahmed Al-Rifai, the author of the play and head of the theatrical team in the schools participating in the show under the Al-Ajami Educational Administration, told Al-Watan that the show tells the story from the beginning of the Lebanese Sursock family buying land in Palestine from the Ottoman Empire and then the Jews obtaining it through gambling, and it was a haven for the Jews. Only after they were successively expelled from European countries by strict royal decrees, did they then flock to Palestine and formed a lobby that penetrated until there was a state, and they named it after the Prophet of God, Israel, “our master Jacob.”

30 children participate. 3 schools show and the work is presented in several languages at the same time.

Yes, most Arab children really do learn to hate Jews with their mothers' milk.

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!

01/26 Links Pt1: ICJ rejects South African bid to halt war against Hamas; U.S. halts UNRWA funding over staffers’ involvement with Oct. 7 terror attacks

From Ian:

Top UN court rejects South African bid to halt war against Hamas

The International Court of Justice, the main judicial arm of the United Nations, rejected a request on Friday from South Africa to order a halt to Israel’s defensive war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

In its provisional ruling, the high court insisted that the Jewish state take all necessary means to prevent actions that could lead to genocide, and it dismissed South Africa’s demand that residents of the northern Gaza Strip be allowed to return to the area immediately.

A final decision from the court could take years. Friday’s ruling is binding according to international law, yet the court lacks an enforcement mechanism.

The court, which is based in The Hague, ordered Israel to “take all measures within its power” to prevent the commission of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, to ensure that Israel Defense Forces troops do not commit acts of genocide and to punish alleged public incitement to genocide.

The ruling also called on Jerusalem to “take effective measures to preserve evidence” of military actions that might fall under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and submit a report to the court within a month.

Israel must also take “immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently-needed, basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians” in the enclave, which is controlled by the Hamas terror group.

‘Mark of disgrace’

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the court “rightly rejected the outrageous demand to deny” Israel the right to defend itself against terrorism.

“The very claim that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians is not just false, it is outrageous, and the court’s willingness to discuss it at all is a mark of disgrace that will not be erased for generations,” he added.

Netanyahu vowed to continue the war against Hamas until “absolute victory,” and until all 136 hostages are returned and Gazans no longer pose a threat to Israel.

Ruth Wisse: Kafka at the International Court of Justice

“Are you reminded of Kafka’s The Trial?” a reporter asks me, echoing cries of “insane” and “Kafkaesque” that I’ve been hearing from many of my fellow Jews about proceedings at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) where South Africa has accused Israel of committing genocide for defending itself against the explicitly genocidal attacks of Hamas. But no, the case before the ICJ is not like the work Kafka wrote in German in Prague during the First World War. Der Process was angst; this is evil.

Kafka’s classic novel opens on a mystery we expect the rest of the book to solve: “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” A regular legal case reveals who is leveling the accusation and provides relevant details of the alleged crime. But Joseph K. never learns what he stands accused of, by whom, or under what authority. In this state of indeterminacy, no man can prove his innocence. Unable to figure out the system that has put him on trial, he is ultimately killed. “It was as if the shame of it must outlive him.”

Joseph K.—the deracinated Jew with a truncated identity who stands politically and metaphysically at the mercy of forces he no longer understands—became a universal symbol of modern man’s fate at the hands of the very institutions he looks to for guidance. But Kafka himself came to realize the implications of what he had written, and by the time of his death in 1924 he was studying Hebrew with the intention of moving to Palestine. Several members of his Zionist circle did move to Jerusalem, and one brought with him Kafka’s archive, where it now rests in the National Library of Israel.

By the time Kafka’s sisters were murdered in Auschwitz, several waves of Jews had established the infrastructure for statehood in the land of Israel that had been under foreign occupation for 2,000 years. That return of the Jews to political sovereignty is one of the great chapters in human history. Had the Arabs, their fellow Semites, accepted the principle of coexistence, the Middle East—numbering one Jewish state among more than 20 Arab neighbors—would have flourished in peace and prosperity. Instead, Arab and Muslim factions still compete over who can best whom at destroying the Jews.

Hamas recently beat the competition with a demonstration of savagery unlike the earlier improvised pogroms in Europe to which it has been compared. October’s slaughters were plotted with crucial input from Gazans employed in Israeli homes they had scouted and mapped for the purpose, making this the first military campaign designed to culminate in acts of beheading, torture, and rape of predetermined victims. As attempts to destroy Israel through conventional warfare had only made Israel militarily stronger, the new tactics aimed at destroying the Jews’ will to remain among antagonists sworn never to leave them in peace. More than to intimidate, these attacks were made to demoralize.

Survivor-witnesses describe new refinements of psychological warfare. Hamas murdered parents and children in each other’s presence so as to sharpen the survivors’ agony. They took hostages—not, as others do, for eventual exchange—but to taunt the country with images of prisoners’ suffering, and fear that many would never be returned. Every Jewish value—respect for women, honoring the human being who was made in the image of God—was gleefully defiled.

As for the Jews living in nearby Gaza, many of them self-described Jewish “peaceniks,” they had prided themselves on the medical help and hospitality they extended to their Gazan neighbors, persuaded that cooperation was obviously to everyone’s benefit. The terrorists exploited the Jews’ desire for peace as a means of entrapment and further opportunity for torment. By attacking on a Jewish holiday and a secular festival, they intended to destroy the Israelis’ joy in life. Anyone reading Dan Senor and Saul Singer’s exhilarating book about the collective strengths that constitute The Genius of Israel will recognize how Hamas turned precisely those virtues into weapons of torture to tear the Jewish people apart.

Alan Dershowitz: This ICJ compromise means Israel will continue its honourable quest for justice

The ICJ’s decision was written by one of its real judges — an independent jurist who does not take orders from the nation that appointed her. Other judges on the court are simply pawns in their countries foreign policy. It’s surprising therefore that this compromise decision, despite its lecturing tone, was rendered by a court that includes a Hezbollah-appointed judge from Lebanon.

Previous decisions on the court have been entirely political and deserving of no respect. This decision deserves the respect of a thoughtful law review article written by a distinguished professor of international law, but because of the makeup of the so-called court, it does not deserve the respect accorded independent judicial authorities.

Wearing robes does not turn politicians and diplomats into judges. To be a real judge, a lawyer must be completely independent of the government that appointed her or him. The ICJ can never be a real court, as long as the appointment and removal process of its judges remain in the hands of individual countries. The International Criminal Court is somewhat better in this regard, because its judges are not answerable — at least in theory — to their countries of origin. But in practice, many of its judges are in fact beholden to their countries.

International law, and especially the law of war, is largely an academic enterprise. Enforced mechanisms are entirely political and not deserving of the respect accorded real judges.

So let Israel continue in its honourable quest for justice regarding the past atrocities committed by Hamas, and the prevention of future atrocities promised by Hamas leaders. When Israel next reports to the court in 30 days, hopefully the war will be winding down and fewer civilians will be killed. Already the number of civilian deaths has decreased dramatically, but the best way to reduce any further would be for the international community to enforce international law that prohibits the use by Hamas of human shields. Unless the ICJ addresses the Hamas war crimes, it will deserve no respect.

In the New York Times, an associate professor from The New School named Sean Jacobs gushes over the morality of his native South Africa charging Israel with "genocide" at the ICJ:

On the eve of the hearing, a friend messaged me from Cape Town: “It feels a little bit like Christmas Eve or something here. Or the night before a big final.” Because of the time difference, I watched a recorded version once I got to my office on Jan. 11, the first of two days of hearings. By then, Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur on Palestine, had already sent a message on X that “watching African women & men fighting to save humanity” from the “ruthless attacks supported/enabled by most of the West will remain one of the defining images of our time. This will make history whatever happens.”

As a Black South African who grew up during the nation’s liberation struggle and came of age watching the birth of South African democracy, for me, Albanese’s words resonated.

[By] forcing the International Court of Justice to act, South Africa is putting down a marker for global civil society. South Africa stepped up. It showed what we could be and how groups that have faced oppression and violence can stand up confidently for one another on the world stage.

So moral! So righteous!

And so silent on Arabs deliberately murdering many black Africans on the same continent, in the same place that there has been a real genocide two decades ago!

As summarized in Just Security last month:

Less than 20 years after the Darfur genocide unfolded, history is repeating itself. The current conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group established by Sudan’s deposed president Omar al-Bashir, has already claimed the lives of more than 12,000 and displaced more than six million people since it broke out in April.

This is all happening against the backdrop of one of the world’s largest, most pressing humanitarian disasters. According to the U.N. Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), approximately 25 million Sudanese people, or half the country, are in dire need of humanitarian assistance. In Darfur, hundreds of miles away from Khartoum, the indigenous non-Arab ethnic groups are even more vulnerable, living under the reign of RSF terror and genocidal violence. The RSF has left a trail of mass atrocities in its wake with near impunity, reminiscent of the same brutal tactics used by the Janjaweed in the 2000s. Today, the RSF, as the Janjaweed’s successor entity, is committing the same atrocities and targeting the same indigenous groups on the international community’s watch. During the Janjaweed atrocities of the 2000s, policymakers not only failed to act in time to prevent genocide but even downplayed the nature of the violence to preserve other political interests. This time, there can be no debate over the magnitude of the horrors facing non-Arab ethnic groups at the hands of the RSF, or excuse for the repetition of our collective failure to uphold the promise of never again.

The Economist describes how the Arab RSF is murdering all the men they can find, shooting babies and raping women:

Hanan Khamis just wanted to get to safety. In mid-June, after surviving weeks of gunfire and rockets directed at the Masalit, a black African ethnic group, she fled el-Geneina, the capital of the state of West Darfur in Sudan. Hoisting her 23-month-old baby boy, Sabir, onto her back she started walking towards Chad. Yet fighters wearing the uniforms of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) soon surrounded them. They dragged men to the side of the road and told the women to run. Before she could do so, a gunman wrenched open the shawl on her back that covered Sabir. “No men can escape to Chad,” he shouted. Then he shot her baby in the head.

In Chad a humanitarian worker identifies four other mothers who tell of similar horrors. One says she was stopped at a roadblock where Arab militiamen murdered the men in her group. When they saw her 15-month-old son strapped to her, they shot him dead as he clung to her. The bullet burst through his tiny body and into hers, where it remains lodged. “If that isn’t a genocidal act, I don’t know what is,” says Mukesh Kapila, a former un chief in Sudan who blew the whistle on massacres in Darfur 20 years ago.

Zahara Adam Khamis, a women’s rights activist, weeps as she recounts how a 27-year-old university student she knows was gang-raped by five militiamen in front of her mother. ”The baby will be Arab,” they said as they finished.

In November, CNN aired this searing report showing videos of atrocities by the Arab gangs against Black African tribes:

Sean Jacobs founded a website called Africa Is A Country. But he hasn't written or tweeted a word about Darfur or Sudan over the past year. And he has tweeted obsessively about Israel, dozens of times, i the same timeframe.

And the government of South Africa has been curiously silent about the targeting and murder of Black Africans much closer than Gaza. The only statement they made was out the outset of the war, expressing concern - but the words "Masalit" and "RSF" or "Darfur" are not to be found in any of their official statements.

Using the ICJ case as proof of South Africa's concern over human rights is absurd, when that country doesn't defend Black Africans being systematically murdered on its own continent. The South African case against Israel while ignoring actual attacks against its fellow Africans in truth indicates antisemitism, not human rights.

Not surprisingly, in its bio of Jacobs, the New York Times edited a book titled "Apartheid Israel." The New York Times didn't mention that he has a vested interest in this topic.

And if you want one more example of the world's hypocrisy, in 2009, the UN said that what happened in Darfur was not genocide, saying, "the crucial element of genocidal intent appears to be missing, at least as far as the central government authorities are concerned."

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!

Israeli hacker group is sending very strong messages to Iran: "We can really, really hurt you if we want"

Wired has a fascinating story about the Israel-based Predatory Sparrow hacking group and their majr attacks against Iranian infrastructure.

These attacks go beyond defacing or taking down websites. They are actually affecting the lives of Iranians, and they show that cyberwar can not only affect cyberspace but the real world as well.

Predatory Sparrow is distinguished most of all by its apparent interest in sending a specific geopolitical message with its attacks, says Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade, an analyst at cybersecurity firm SentinelOne who has tracked the group for years. Those messages are all variations on a theme: If you attack Israel or its allies, we have the ability to deeply disrupt your civilization. “They're showing that they can reach out and touch Iran in meaningful ways,” Guerrero-Saade says. “They're saying, ‘You can prop up the Houthis and Hamas and Hezbollah in these proxy wars. But we, Predatory Sparrow, can dismantle your country piece by piece without having to move from where we are.’”

But the group is calibrating its message:

SentinelOne’s Guerrero-Saade argues that [their] actions suggest that Predatory Sparrow may be the first effective example of what cyber policy wonks refer to as “signaling”—using cyberattack capabilities to send messages designed to deter an adversary's behavior. That's because, he says, the group has combined a relatively restrained and discriminating approach to its politically motivated hacking with a clear demonstration of willingness to use its capabilities for broad effects—a willingness, he points out, that the United States’ hacking agencies, like the National Security Agency and Cyber Command, have often lacked.

“There’s no such thing as effective signaling if you can’t show credibly to the other person that not only do you have the capability, but that you’re willing to use it,” Guerrero-Saade says.

The article lists several specific attacks.

In 2021, Predatory Sparrow triggered malware on Iranian transportation systems, forcing train delays and other problems.

Later that year, the group performed a limited attack on Iranian gas station point of sale systems, but made it clear that they could have caused far more damage. They even warned Iranian emergency services to fill up their vehicles with fuel before the attack.

The next next attack was game changing. "In June of 2022, Predatory Sparrow carried out one of the most brazen acts of cybersabotage in history, triggering the spillage of molten steel at Iran's Khouzestan steel mill that caused a fire in the facility."

And recently, the group repeated its attack on gas stations in Iran, causing chaos for drivers.

There are other attacks attributed to Israel itself that have affected real world living in Iran. The Stuxnet attack on an Iranian nuclear plant was the most famous one. And in 2020, Israel is suspected to have mounted a cyberattack on an Iranian port, effectively stopping most imports to Iran from sea for days. This was in response to an Iranian attempt to poison Israel's water system in its own cyberattack.

Cyberwar is real. And it has real-world consequences. But it is not only limited to state actors, and talented private individuals and groups can cause mass chaos if they choose.

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!

Al Jazeera Arabic features a 30 minute long interview - in English - with Moshe Aryeh Friedman, who they describe as a "haredi Jewish rabbi" and "former chief rabbi of Austria."

He tells them what they want to hear - that the war in Gaza is a genocide that is the worst in history.

He said in the interview that history “will condemn everyone who stood silent in the face of the bloodbath now flowing in the Gaza Strip, which exceeds all the massacres of history,” including, he said, the Holocaust.

In reality, Friedman was never chief rabbi of Austria, and he does not appear to have even ever been ordained.

He attended the infamous Holocaust denial conference in Iran in 2007 and embraced then-Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. At the conference he said he didn't deny the Holocaust, but claimed that only one million Jews perished - which indeed makes him a Holocaust denier.

The Austrian Jewish community then excommunicated him, forcing him to move to Boro Park in Brooklyn.

There Friedman and his family moved into two apartments but refused to pay rent for two years. It appears he was evicted as a result, and then moved to Antwerp in 2011, where the schools refused to admit his children because of his noxious views on the Holocaust.

The supposedly religious "rabbi" then sued to allow his boys to attend an all-girls Belzer hasidic Jewish school. He lost that case on appeal.

This is the "rabbi" that Al Jazeera is pretending is a respected scholar and religious figure.

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!

01/25 Links Pt2: An ‘Eichmann Trial’ for Hamas’s Crimes; Niall Ferguson: “The Treason of the Intellectuals,”; Tu b’Shvat Is a Testament to Jews’ Connection to Their Land

From Ian:

Seth Frantzman: An ‘Eichmann Trial’ for Hamas’s Crimes

Putting Sinwar on trial for his war crimes would absolutely garner the attention that Eichmann’s trial received; we are after all in the era of social media and livestreaming. But that’s not necessarily a good thing. The Nazis had plenty of sympathizers, but their ideology was not dominant (though it was present) throughout American educational institutions from Harvard down to various public grade schools. The ideology that justifies Hamas’s Oct. 7 campaign of mass murder, sexual torture, and child kidnapping is dominant on campuses and has had no trouble worming its way into the curricula fabric at every level of education. Whether you call it “decolonization” or find some German compound word for it, the race-obsessed conspiracy-addled theory justifying the extrajudicial murder of Jews is all the rage, and Sinwar would be preaching to an aggravatingly large choir.

It would certainly be revealing to watch Intersectionality Eichmann be elevated to godlike status in the enlightened West. But it would also be unbearably dark, a point of no return if ever there was one.

It would, however, solve the representation problem. Eichmann found a German lawyer to defend him and Israel picked up the tab. Sinwar would have a line of high-profile American and British attorneys begging to take up his case pro bono.

Nevertheless, a legal process to establish facts for posterity would be of great benefit to society, even without an Eichmann figure at its center. The most intriguing angle is one Haaretz reported on a few weeks after the attacks, when Israeli domestic security and law-enforcement teams were put on the case: “A number of Israeli firms with expertise in digital intelligence were enlisted to build what is called ‘the library’ — a database of all the Hamas terrorists who entered into Israel and documentation of their actions, almost minute by minute.”

That “library” is being built on the foundations of Hamas’s own despicable pride: many terrorists wore body cameras to document their own descent into psychotic barbarity.

The massive amounts of evidence being gathered by investigative authorities and emergency responders and other officials is clearly intended to be used in a court of some kind, but Israel will not be taking its case to international or UN courts, whose legitimacy cannot be salvaged. Eichmann was tried in Israeli courts, and Hamas terrorists can be tried in those courts or in military tribunals, though the latter would somewhat defeat the purpose of the trials, which would be to place in the public domain an unimpeachable record of events. The Oct. 7 version of Holocaust deniers have come out of the woodwork already, existing as they do in a postmodern world of “living your truth.” The library of evidence that Israel is currently building is the proper antidote to the lobotomizing poison of such a world.

Brendan O'Neill: Why Are People More Agitated by the Gaza War than by Any Other?

This week, Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf said there is a dearth of political concern for the poor people of Gaza. I'm sorry, what? There have been more public displays of sorrow for the people of Gaza than for any other people caught up in a war as far back as I can remember. Solidarity with Gazans is virtually mandatory at dinner parties across the land.

We've seen think piece after think piece about the pain of the Palestinians. Bourgeois youths have hit the streets every weekend to register their compassion for Gazans and their hatred for Israel. MPs have made tub-thumping speeches on the need for a ceasefire. Palestinian flags fly from lampposts. The keffiyeh has become the fashion item du jour for the ostentatiously virtuous.

The real question is not why people are silent on Gaza (they're not), but why they seem so much more agitated by this war than by any other of recent times. There's been a tsunami of media coverage on Gaza. Far more than there was for the Saudi-Yemen war, every African war of recent years, or the horrific return of Azerbaijan-Armenia hostilities last year. Our activist class have obsessively devoted themselves to the cause of Gaza, to the exclusion of every other issue on earth.

Where were these people when tens of thousands of Muslims, including Palestinians, were slaughtered in the war in Syria? Or when the mullahs of Iran massacred hundreds of their own citizens for the sin of standing up for women's rights? Do the lives of young women in Iran who want to show their hair in public have a "different value" to the lives of people in Gaza? The lives of Syrian dissidents?

Why did they not make as much noise over those violent assaults on Muslim life as they have done over Israel's war against Hamas? Because it is only when the Jewish state is involved in the loss of Muslim life that people take to the streets in vast numbers.

Tu b’Shvat Is a Testament to Jews’ Connection to Their Land

Today is the holiday of Tu b’Shvat, the “new year of the trees.” In the diaspora, this day over the centuries came to embody the Jewish longing for the Land of Israel. With the return from exile, it has taken on a new meaning as a day to be celebrated by planting trees. Alon Tal considers its significance:

There is no more concrete manifestation of the Zionist impulse as the national movement of an indigenous people, than Israel’s forests. Seventy years ago—when the country was an impoverished, developing nation, the founders set about returning the woodlands to a decimated land—a land where 97 percent of the original vegetation had been extirpated.

That is not Zionist propaganda. Empirical evidence from aerial reconnaissance photography of the British army in World War I confirms the absolute bareness of Palestine following 2,000 years of Jewish exile. Since then, almost two million dunams of woodlands have been planted. There is something deeply meaningful about this profound act of national, ecological revival during these troubled times.

Over the years, I was always annoyed that Palestinian leadership never respected the authenticity of my Israeli identity and Jews’ historic connection to their homeland. But invariably, I let it go. Many Jews working on coexistence even avoided openly defining themselves as “Zionists,” lest they create unnecessary antagonism. The main thing was to get on with the “peacemaking.” In retrospect, this was a mistake.

To-thousand years ago, the Mishnah codified the four new years that are built into our national calendar. . . . The fact that Israel has revived this arboreal birthday and turned tree-planting and tree-preservation into a national holiday is a sign of just how much our heritage informs our present-day lives.