Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, February 04, 2024

02/04 Links: Mike Freer and the Islamist assault on democracy; Israel caught by surprise by leak of UNRWA's October 7 allegations

From Ian:

Mike Freer and the Islamist assault on democracy

Spot the difference? Cox’s murder was instantly treated as political. Indeed, commentators went far beyond blaming far-right ideology and laid much of the blame at the door of Nigel Farage and Vote Leave, given Cox was murdered during the EU referendum campaign. The day of Cox’s death, Polly Toynbee accused Brexit campaigners of stirring up ‘anti-migrant sentiment’ and emboldening fascists. ‘Rude, crude, Nazi-style extremism is mercifully rare. But the Leavers have lifted several stones’, she wrote.

By contrast, Amess’s murder was drained of any political content. MPs were exhorted to stop the partisan bickering. Articles gestured vaguely to our ‘toxic political discourse’, online and off. And so it has been with Mike Freer. House of Commons speaker Lindsay Hoyle responded to his resignation this week by urging MPs to ‘treat each other better’. That’ll show those Islamists.

The glaring double standards in how we talk about far-right and Islamist terrorism would be weird enough were it not for the fact that Islamist terrorism is the bigger threat by a country mile. Despite desperate attempts to pretend otherwise, the fact remains that, from the 7/7 London bombings in 2005 to David Amess’s murder in 2021, 94 people were killed in Britain by Islamist extremists. In the same period, three people were killed in Britain by far-right extremists.

We shouldn’t be picking and choosing which flavour of fascist violence – Islamist or far right – we are more bothered by. But that is precisely what the great and good are doing when they downplay Islamist terrorism while fluffing up Britain’s far right – which has long been pathetic and marginalised – into some existential threat.

This has consequences, not least for counter-terrorism. William Shawcross’s 2023 review into the Prevent scheme, aimed at stopping people being drawn into terrorism, argued that officialdom has become obsessed with right-wingers and soft on Islamists: the boundaries around what is even considered Islamist extremism are ‘drawn too narrowly’, concluded Shawcross, ‘while the boundaries around the ideology of the extreme right-wing are too broad’.

Of course, we shouldn’t be complacent about the far right. In 2019, neo-Nazi and paedophile Jack Renshaw was convicted for plotting to murder Labour MP Rosie Cooper. He said he was inspired by Cox’s murder. While Cooper courageously carried on serving her constituents for a few years after the trial, she decided to step down as the member for West Lancashire in 2022, admitting that ‘events I have faced have taken their toll’.

But nor should far-right extremism be used as a means to distract attention away from the much bigger threat to British life posed by Islamist extremism. The constant deflections are grotesque – and bred of a perverse, genuinely bigoted notion that to talk too much about Islamist extremism is to risk offending Muslims and / or radicalising the white working class, effectively treating both groups as volatile terrorist sympathisers.

That Mike Freer’s resignation has elicited little more than a sad-eyed shrug shouldn’t really surprise us. Our ruling elites have become so paralysed by political correctness and plain old cowardice that they would rather prattle on about civility in public life than name the barbarous movement that is menacing their colleagues.

No one can blame Mike Freer for feeling he had no choice but to step down. He has been abandoned by a political and media class who would rather throw one of their own to the wolves than risk having some uncomfortable conversations.

Stephen Pollard: Mike Freer is not alone. I too was targetted by Islamists

Most chilling of all was when we were told what to do if we opened the front door by mistake to someone threatening: run, with our children, as fast as possible to the back into the garden and then through a gap in the fence, while alerting the police. Let me tell you – it is no way to live, always on the lookout for something suspicious, never fully able to relax when outside.

The security minister, Tom Tugendhat, confirmed last year that Iran uses organised criminals to spy on prominent British Jews for a potential assassination campaign. “We know that the Iranians are using non-traditional sources to carry out these operations, including organised criminal gangs. They are paying criminal gangs to conduct surveillance … I do not issue these warnings lightly.”

Last month the Government proscribed the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir. That was important. But it is the tip of the iceberg. Despite programmes like Prevent, which is meant to stop radicalisation, the UK is rightly regarded worldwide as a haven for Islamists, which makes us a breeding ground for terror. Even in supposedly mainstream mosques there are many examples of preaching which is clearly designed to radicalise and which is often unambiguously anti-Semitic. These are not hidden or underground – you can see them on social media.

We let the Islamists off the hook as if we have no choice. When a teacher at Batley Grammar School attempted to lead a discussion on free speech and showed a cartoon of Mohammed, a mob descended on the school and he was forced into hiding – where he remains, three years on. We neuter ourselves from acting, in the name of “community relations”.

Nothing I have written is new or in any way surprising. I could have written it at any point in the past 20 years and it’s a near certainty that I will be able to write it for years to come. For all the bluster we hear about refusing to accept intimidation or Islamist threats, as a nation we still refuse to take radical Islam seriously. (Not, I should say, the police and security services, who continue to do brilliant work keeping us safe.) Until a few months ago, for example, the Government was – this would be funny if it wasn’t so appalling – attempting to negotiate a new nuclear deal with Iran, the world’s leading funder of terror. And Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has still not been proscribed.

Now an MP has decided to stand down because he is unwilling any longer to subject his family to the risks. The sentiment should be “enough is enough”. Except history shows exactly what will happen: nothing.

Dr. Muhammad Saber Arab is a professor of history at Al-Azhar University.. He was also the former Egyptian Minister of Culture and former chairman of the board of directors for Egypt's National Library and Archives.

And he believes that Jews murder gentiles to use their blood in Passover matzah.

Writing in the Arabic edition of the Oman Daily Observer, the historian quotes other Arab historians claiming that the 1840 "Damascus Affair" where Jews were falsely accused of the murder of Father Thomas and his Muslim servant after their disappearances. Jews were arrested and under extreme torture several of them "confessed" to murdering them and using their blood for Passover matzoh.

Dr. Arab says that he personally reviewed the archived letters between Damascus and Egypt and finds the accusations credible. He says that the prisoners were only released under intense pressure by Europe under Jewish influence but that they were undoubtedly guilty.

Muhammad Saber Arab concludes:

Despite the passage of more than one hundred and eighty years since these events, the influence of the Jews in American and European societies is still strong. Even today, these forces are involved in supporting Zionism, which practices genocide hour after hour in Palestine, under international cover, and with the support of the same European and American powers. However, this issue and many other issues cannot be subject to statute of limitations.

Yes, he wants to re-open the case against the ethnically cleansed Jews of Damascus. Their descendants? Jews altogether? Perhaps he wants to go to the International Court of Justice? They might take the case seriously!

Dr. Arab is not a marginal figure at all, but a mainstream Egyptian historian. Only a few days ago he spoke at the Cairo International Book Fair promoting his latest book. He has written dozens of books and articles. He is highly respected.

This is how endemic and widespread antisemitism is in the Arab world - not only among the masses but among the intellectuals and the elites.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

The Providence Journal reports:

Brown University student activists announced Friday they were undertaking a hunger strike ahead of a critical meeting where school could consider divesting from weapons manufacturers amid the Israel-Hamas war.

But so far, there are no signs it will.

A group of 19 students under the name Hunger Strike for Palestine said it wants Brown to fully divest "its endowment from companies enabling and profiting from the genocide in Gaza."

The striking group...said it "will refuse food until the full body of the Brown University Corporation hears and considers a divestment resolution, introduced by President Christina Paxson and presented by student representatives of the Brown Divest Coalition, in their upcoming meeting on Feb. 8 and 9."

The Brown Daily Herald student newspaper reports President Paxson wrote a letter to the students telling them that if they want divestment, there are procedures and rules they must follow:

President Christina Paxson has declined to meet the demands of 19 student protestors who began a hunger strike Friday afternoon, according to a letter Paxson sent to the demonstrators and reviewed by The Herald.

In her letter to the protestors, Paxson wrote that the first step toward requesting divestment “is not a Corporation resolution, but rather to submit a proposal to the Advisory Committee on University Resource Management.”

Paxson also wrote that she will “not commit to bring a resolution to the February 2024 Corporation meeting or any future meeting of the Corporation.”

“The bar for divestment is high,” Paxson wrote to the protestors Friday. “It requires a demonstration that the University’s investments in the assets of specific companies create social harm, and that divestment will alleviate that harm.”

“Our campus is a place where difficult issues should be freely discussed and debated. It is not appropriate for the University to use its financial assets — which are there to support our entire community — to ‘take a side’ on issues on which thoughtful people vehemently disagree,” she added.

The dictionary definition of "privileged" is "of a person, or class of people: having or enjoying certain privileges, rights, or advantages; treated with special favour."

Paxson is saying that there is no problem with the university considering divestment - it has divested from other investments in the past - but the students must follow the rules. The same rules that she had spelled out for them during previous divestment demands. The same rules that apply to all students.

The protesters know the rules. They are saying that the rules don't apply to them.

That's privilege.

They also plan not to attend classes this week at a school where their parents are paying over $65,000 tuition for them to learn.

That's privilege.

The y spend their parents' money not on sending food and supplies to Gaza, but on custom T-shirts.

The hunger strike is largely performative. There is little risk involved - the only photo of the protesters shows them all wearing masks, with two of them having even the rest of their faces blurred out.

As the Journal reports, the students will end the strike on February 9, after the corporation meeting, whether their demands are met or not.

They aren't exactly Gandhi. They are more like children who hold their breath to get their toys.

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!

Last week, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the IDF Arabic language spokesperson Avichay Adraee posted a video on all his platforms comparing Hamas with the Nazis. It's title was "Woe to those who are against us."

He said, "This year, Holocaust Remembrance Day occurs while the State of Israel is at war with an enemy challenging its existence. The goals of the Nazis and the October 7 terrorists are the same, to exterminate the Jewish people."

Adraee went on to say that the difference between the two events is now Jews have an army to defend themselves.

Then he spoke in ways that Arabs speak about Jews all the time, saying, this is “a holy war, and that the Jews will remain in Israel.” He added, "We swear by the souls of the martyrs that we will remain and be rooted in this land, because truth and justice are supreme and unsurpassed.”

There is nothing inaccurate about these statements. This war to defend the Jewish people is indeed considered a mitzvah in Jewish law, and the Jews will remain in their land no matter what.

But one usually only hears such language among religious Zionists, not IDF spokespeople.

Adraee is speaking in a way that Arabs can relate to and are comfortable with when used against others, and the message resonates - even if the responses are predictably angry.

Al Jazeera published an op-ed about this video, and of course misinterprets it as a threat against the entire Muslim and Arab worlds. It isn't at all: it is only a threat to Hamas and anyone else who tries to destroy the Jewish state and Jewish people.

The author, Mahmoud Abdel Hadi, pretends to give the Zionist he hates friendly advice: "Adraee made a mistake, whether intentionally or not, in directing such provocative content, which harms peace and normalization efforts, and feeds the roots of hostility and revenge. Such a speech is not in the interest of the Jewish people in the future, as circles turn, and time does not remain the same, and history is the best witness to that."

But Hadi is against any normalization with Israel! He should be happy if Adraee is hurting Israel's relationship with its Arab peace partners, shouldn't he?

That is the best indication that Adraee knows what he is doing. Hadi is upset not because the short video hurts peace, but because it restates what the Abraham Accords said, that Jews are an indigenous people in the Middle East and are not going anywhere - a message to the Arab world signed by the UAE and Bahrain. He is upset because he knows that Arabs respect a message that is clear and straightforward: the Jews are rooted in the land and are not going anywhere, and will go to any lengths to protect themselves.

When Arabs threaten Jews with this exact kind of language, it rolls off our backs - we've been hearing it for a hundred years. But when Jews use that same language back to the Arabs, they are aghast: how can this be? But they understand the language and the message, and they respond with exactly the anger and despair that they try to force the Jews to feel.

It is the only language many Arabs understand.

Adraee's message is important for another reason. Palestinians and other anti-Israel Arabs harbor a fantasy that Jews are fearful foreigners who will run away as soon as things are a little difficult for them. Adraee is forcefully saying that not only are Jews not going anywhere, but they are also not afraid of war. Wars are sometimes necessary.

Hadi of course supports slaughtering Jews, making him exactly like the Nazis that Adraee compares Hamas to. Right after October 7, Hadi wrote, "Throughout the Islamic world in the four corners of the globe, you will not find anyone among the two billion Muslims who was not happy with what the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades accomplished in their flood on Saturday, unless they are a hypocrite or a dissenter. "

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!

02/03 Links: Israel’s Obligations Under the Genocide Convention; 10 myths about UNRWA you may have mistakenly believed; I was in Hamas captivity – don't keep my husband there

From Ian:

Israel’s Obligations Under the Genocide Convention

I. Obligation
Israel’s war in Gaza is not a violation of its commitments as a contracting party to the 1948 Genocide Convention. It is, in fact, a fulfillment of its obligations under the treaty.

For Israel to do nothing in the face of Hamas’ actions on October 7, or to cut its actions short and somehow acquiesce to a reality where that orgy of murder, rape, torture, and abduction would recur, would be a violation of the first article of the Convention, which states:

“The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.”

The Second Article of the Convention defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”

When Hamas Einsatzgruppen swept into southern Israel on the morning of October 7, their rampage spared no one they were able to reach. It was not a military campaign targeting only security installations or key national infrastructure or targets of political, economic, or religious symbolism. Nor was it a terrorist attack on random civilians designed to shock or pressure others.

It was an attack on every Israeli they could get to. There are no stories of people spared for any reason. Wherever Hamas forces made contact with Israelis, they killed. And if they didn’t kill, it was to kidnap. Villages on the border that weren’t scenes of fire, looting, and murder were those where Hamas forces were either repelled successfully or which they never managed to penetrate before their forces were overcome. Wherever Hamas militants could kill Israelis, they did so, making no effort to distinguish soldier from civilian, man from woman, adult from child, or even Jew from Arab.

None of this is inconsistent with the basic ideological and theological commitments of Hamas as an organization or of the larger movement of which it is only one manifestation. Its Charter evinces a pathological and conspiratorial conception of Jews and openly calls for their physical annihilation. And its spokespersons openly boast of their intention to execute more October 7-style actions in the future.

These beliefs and actions meet all the minimal requirements of the definition in Article II of the Convention. There is the intent to destroy a national group, and that group is targeted “as such.” That is, the killing of civilians who are members of the target group is not a side effect of other acts war, but the goal itself, stated in words and observable in deeds.

If a Jewish state has any purpose at all, it is to prevent this. And if the State of Israel has any obligation under the Genocide Convention, adopted in 1948, the year of Israel’s birth, and conceived largely as a response to the genocide of the Jewish people which had just concluded three years before, it is to act forcefully against it.

At this moment, Israel stands accused of violating its commitments under the Genocide Convention, not because it hasn’t acted forcefully enough against the Hamas regime which has controlled the Gaza Strip for the last 17 years, but rather because it is acting at all.

ICJ genocide case shows the world is upside-down and perverse

Deuteronomy 28:32 states “They are an upside-down generation... ”

While this verse refers to the warning Moses gave to the Israelite nation before he died and handed over leadership to Joshua, the concept of a world behaving in an irrational and 180-degree perverse manner is evident today.

Moses warns of an upside-down world, a concept strikingly relevant today as we witness the absurdity surrounding the accusation of genocide brought by South Africa against Israel in the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The parallels between ancient warnings and contemporary events are stark, prompting us to examine the perplexing nature of our current reality.

The claim of genocide against Israel becomes increasingly transparent as the antisemitism it really is, when one considers the deliberate steps taken by Israel to protect civilians in conflict zones. Unlike historical instances of genocide, Israel has established humanitarian corridors, allowing civilians to leave harm’s way voluntarily. This raises a fundamental question: How can it be genocide when the so-called “victims” are granted the opportunity to escape the conflict?

The antisemitism in accusing Israel of genocide
Israel’s commitment to minimizing civilian casualties goes beyond mere rhetoric. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) dropped millions of leaflets, providing explicit warnings to civilians before initiating military action. Such preemptive measures are unprecedented in the history of conflict, challenging the very notion of genocide.

Furthermore, Israel has put its own troops at increased risk by employing targeted strikes to avoid collateral damage. This commitment to precision strikes and the protection of innocent lives reflects the IDF’s dedication to ethical conduct in the face of adversity. Colonel Richard Kemp, former commander of British troops in Afghanistan, has even gone so far as to describe the IDF as the most moral army in the world.

The absurdity of the genocide claim becomes glaring when one considers the alternatives Israel could have pursued. If Israel harbored genocidal intentions, it could have resorted to indiscriminate bombings similar to the Allies in Dresden or employed nuclear weapons as the US did in Japan. However, Israel’s strategic decisions have consistently prioritized minimizing civilian harm, not just raising doubts about the validity of the genocide accusation but demonstrating the upside-down attitudes of the contemporary world.

10 myths about UNRWA you may have mistakenly believed

Myth 8: UNRWA is the most efficient way to deliver assistance to Palestinians.
No, it certainly is not, and not just because UNRWA lets Hamas run off with lots of goods. There are far more efficient, less corrupt, and less grossly political aid agencies, some of which already are present in Gaza (and the West Bank), that can be mobilized to replace UNRWA. This includes USAID, UNICEF, and the World Food Programme. They could all do the work without succumbing to Palestinian legerdemain.

Myth 9: UNRWA can be fixed.
UNRWA needs more than an “urgent audit,” as the EU reluctantly mumbled this week, and much more than “enhanced due diligence and other oversight mechanisms,” as one unfriendly-to-Israel congressman grudgingly called for.

UNRWA needs to be abolished so that Gaza’s transition away from aid and toward economic development, and away from genocidal fantasies and toward peace building can begin quickly. It is certainly true that the current division of labor – UNRWA services above ground, Hamas terror operations below ground and from within UNRWA facilities – cannot continue.

This requires different international actors that can develop productive industry and jobs in Gaza, and that can lead the construction and operation of civilian services. International funding may still be necessary, but it should be administered by foreign governments directly and by different organizations that are subject to continuous oversight and rigorous accountability.

Myth 10: Wartime is not the right time to shutter UNRWA.
Now is the perfect time to do so. As Israel liberates Gaza from Hamas, the international community can unshackle Palestinians from UNRWA. At the same time Israel can unchain itself from destructive dependency on UNRWA and its problematic Israeli counterpart, the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories – COGAT.

Then the rebuilding of Gaza can advance, free from rank corruption, destructive indoctrination, the coddling of terrorism, and overall moral rot that for too long has contaminated international aid politics for Palestinians.

02/02 Links Pt2: Elliott Abrams: The Two-State Delusion; Seth Mandel: The Lazy Fantasy of a ‘Palestinian Mandela’; Britain’s Jews are being terrorised

From Ian:

Elliott Abrams: The Two-State Delusion

Everyone knows what to do about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Arrange the “two-state solution.” That has been a commonplace for decades, going back to the Oslo Accords, all the international conferences, the “Roadmap,” and the efforts by a series of American presidents and their staffs of ardent peace processors.

In the West, the call for a “two-state solution” is mostly a magical incantation these days. Diplomats and politicians want the Gaza war to stop. They want a way out that seems fair and just to voters and makes for good speeches. But they are not even beginning to grapple with the issues that negotiating a “two-state solution” raises, and they are not seriously asking what kind of state “Palestine” would be. Instead they simply imagine a peaceful, well-ordered place called “Palestine” and assure everyone that it is just around the corner. By doing so they avoid asking the most important question: Would not an autocratic, revanchist Palestinian state be a threat to peace?

No matter: The belief in the “two-state solution” is as fervent today as ever. The German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said it’s the “only solution” and Britain’s defense minister chimed in that “I don’t think we get to a solution unless we have a two-state solution.” Not to be outdone, U.N. Secretary General Guterres said, “The refusal to accept the two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians, and the denial of the right to statehood for the Palestinian people, are unacceptable.” The EU’s Foreign Minister Josep Borrell said recently, “I don’t think we should talk about the Middle East peace process anymore. We should start talking specifically about the two-state-solution implementation process.” What if Israel does not agree, and views a Palestinian state as an unacceptable security threat? Borrell’s answer was that “One thing is clear—Israel cannot have the veto right to the self-determination of the Palestinian people. The United Nations recognizes and has recognized many times the self-determination right of the Palestinian people. Nobody can veto it.”

In the United States, 49 Senate Democrats (out of 51) just joined to support a resolution that, according to Sen. Brian Schatz, is “a message to the world that the only path forward is a two-state solution.” Biden administration officials have been a bit more circumspect in public. At the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos in January, Secretary of State Blinken told his interviewer, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, that regional integration “has to include a pathway to a Palestinian state.” National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan called for “a two-state solution with Israel’s security guaranteed.” And President Biden meandered around an important security point: “there are a number of types of two-state solutions. There’s a number of countries that are members of the U.N. that … don’t have their own military; a number of states that have limitations, and so I think there’s ways in which this can work.”

The Biden administration, then, joins all enlightened opinion in saying there must be a Palestinian state, but adds that it must not have an army. No other precondition seems to exist for the creation of that state once the Palestinian Authority has been “revamped” or “revitalized” so that it becomes “effective.” And most recently, Blinken has asked his staff for policy options that include formal recognition of a Palestinian state as soon as the war in Gaza ends. This would be a massive change in U.S. policy, which for decades has insisted that a Palestinian state can only emerge from direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. But the pressure is growing, it seems, to skip niceties like negotiations and move quickly to implement the “two-state solution.”

There are three things wrong with this picture. First, none of the current proposals even acknowledges, much less overcomes, the obstacles that have always prevented the “two-state solution.” Second, the “effective governance” reforms fall very far short of creating a decent state in which Palestinians can live freely. And most important, any imaginable Palestinian state will be a dangerous threat to Israel.

Joe Biden Hates Israel

A second, almost as atrocious, low point in Blinken’s speech was his reiteration of Biden administration policy that Israel not allow Gazans to leave Gaza. In what war is the population of the war-torn country not allowed to leave? Much like the U.N. has been falsely claiming refugee status for Palestinians for 75 years so that they can continue to be used as political pawns, the United States’ refusal to allow Gazans to leave serves only one purpose: to make it harder for Israel to “de-Nazify” the radicalized Palestinian population, to allow whatever remains of Hamas to survive, and to add fuel to its obsession with a “two- state solution.”

The U.S. wants all areas depopulated because of the war to be repopulated, thereby making it impossible for Israel to repopulate its southern towns/cities. So effectively, a security zone with Gaza would mean a reduction in Israel’s territory.

Blinken also demanded that no action be taken in the North against Hezbollah, effectively turning Northern Israel into a similar security zone, precluding 80,000 Israelis there from returning to their homes.

Lastly, he invoked the atrocious line about a “cycle of violence” and reaffirmed the administration’s demand for a “two- state solution.”

It's not a “cycle of violence” when thousands of animalistic, sub-human, monsters murder, brutally rape, and mutilate thousands of civilians, followed by a war targeting those responsible for the atrocities. And, at this point does anyone seriously believe that a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria, in the heart of central Israel, plus territory in Gaza, wouldn’t be a death sentence for Jews?

More recently, Blinken was in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum. While there, he was interviewed by the New York Times’ resident Israel hater, Thomas Friedman. Incredibly, Blinken seemed to say that the Israelis of today are the terror loving Palestinians of yesterday:
“The profound difference now, I think, is in the mindset of leaders throughout the Arab world and in Muslim countries, and in a way it’s a reversal, it’s a flip, as you know so well better than anyone. When in previous times we came close to resolving the Palestinian question, getting a Palestinian state, I think the view then – Camp David, other places – was that Arab leaders, Palestinian leaders, had not done enough to prepare their own people for this profound change. I think a challenge now, a question now: Is Israeli society prepared to engage on these questions? Is it prepared to have that mindset?”

Did you get that? After thousands of Israelis were murdered, raped, mutilated, and wounded, America’s Secretary of State is blaming Israel for not being as gracious as the Arabs who murdered us for decades before 10/7.

Israel, after decades of giving up territory, not utterly destroying Hamas and Hezbollah, not attacking Iran and its proxies (another demand of the Biden administration), prioritizing Arab civilian life at the cost of IDF soldiers, all while 136 Israelis are still being held hostage and brutalized, is not enough for this administration.

Israelis have the wrong “mindset.”

Some friend to Israel.

Seth Mandel: The Lazy Fantasy of a ‘Palestinian Mandela’

Hamas’s latest negotiating ploy is to ask for Israel to release Marwan Barghouti, a popular Fatah leader who is serving a handful of life sentences for murder. Barghouti is often compared by the press and his Western admirers to Nelson Mandela, because his admirers have very active imaginations.

Freeing Barghouti is the “break glass in case of emergency” option for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The belief is that he has become both popular enough and moderate enough to lead the Palestinian Authority after Mahmoud Abbas, who is still alive and refuses to hold elections and therefore cannot be replaced by the Palestinian Mandela or the Australian Ghandi or the Ecuadorian Martin Luther King or the Scandinavian Dalai Lama or anyone else.

In the absence of any other changes, therefore, what freeing Barghouti would accomplish is the further destabilization of the Palestinian Authority-ruled West Bank. Hamas thinks this is a great idea. The Israelis are unconvinced.

Barghouti’s advocates in the West like to tout his support for a two-state solution. But Barghouti’s starting position is at the 1967 lines, from which Israeli-Palestinian negotiations moved on a decade and a half ago, so perhaps his supporters like him because he’d actually undo some of the progress made toward a two-state solution.

The other pro-Barghouti talking point has long been his renunciation of some violence in some places. (This is why calling him “the Palestinian Mandela” is deeply insulting to Nelson Mandela.)

Barghouti was the most prominent signer of a coalitional letter known as the Prisoner’s Document back in 2006. It was a manifesto of sorts for incarcerated Palestinians of various parties and stripes, including Hamas. That manifesto trumpets “[t]he right of the Palestinian people to resist and to uphold the option of resistance of occupation by various means and focusing resistance in territories occupied in 1967 in tandem with political action, negotiations and diplomacy whereby there is broad participation from all sectors in the popular resistance.”

This is the great compromise document. It boils down to: Kill Jews in the West Bank, Gaza, and at the Jewish holy sites in Jerusalem, but inside “Israel proper” just call general strikes and marches intended to bring the economy to a halt. Because Barghouti is a man of peace who has learned his lesson, apparently.

How could anyone say no?

02/02 Links Pt1: Biden is playing politics with the Gaza war, not Bibi; Gaza hostage deal not coming soon, if ever; UNRWA's crypto wallets investigated over Hamas ties

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: It’s Biden who’s playing politics with the Gaza war, not Bibi

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reputation as a master political schemer and a cynical seeker of power is so deeply embedded in the public consciousness that there is literally nothing he can do without being accused of acting only to seek some sort of advantage over his opponents. Yet in the current crisis as he seeks to lead his wobbly unity government to achieve what may well be two mutually exclusive objectives—the elimination of Hamas and the freeing of the remaining hostages still being kept captive in Gaza—while being besieged by criticism at home and abroad, it may be that Netanyahu is not the one who is really playing politics.

While no one should ever underestimate the prime minister’s capacity for maneuvering even at a time when, after the Oct. 7 disaster, the end of his career would seem to be in sight, it’s not he who is cynically using the hostage negotiations or the talk about what would follow the end of the war in Gaza to score political points. Whatever one may think of Netanyahu’s character or policies, or whether he should be forced out of office because of the catastrophe that occurred on his watch, the person who is playing politics with the security of Israel and the fate of its citizens is President Joe Biden.

Netanyahu probably still hopes to salvage his reputation and serve out the rest of his term after being returned to office in November 2022. But the widespread characterizations in both the Israeli and the international press of his stand on the hostage negotiations, the conduct of the war and what will happen in Gaza once the fighting ends, as merely another example of his desperate attempts to cling to office is largely inaccurate. He may be pursuing two goals that cannot both be achieved as well as clinging to his pre-war strategic objective of getting Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel. Yet the real scheming going on right now is in Washington, not Jerusalem. It is Biden who is playing a double game in which he seems willing to ensure Hamas’s survival in power in order to settle scores with Netanyahu, as well as to defeat former President Donald Trump in November.

A hostage deal trap
That’s the context for the discussions about the latest proposal for a ceasefire and the release of 136 hostages—some living and some presumed dead—in which the double-dealing government of Qatar is playing a central role. Whether or not this effort, like previous ones, will be shot down by Hamas, Netanyahu will continue to face enormous pressure from both the families of the hostages and the United States to either pause or end the war.

Netanyahu’s government is currently beset by a host of domestic and foreign critics. The hostage families understandably want it to do anything to save their loved ones and will—like anyone in that awful position—demand concessions in the form of freeing terrorists or halting the Gaza campaign, whether or not it’s in the country’s best interests. They are being boosted by Netanyahu’s political foes. Most of the Israelis who spent the months before Oct. 7 demonstrating for Netanyahu’s ouster and against judicial reform have put politics aside in the name of a unified effort to defeat Hamas. But the hard-core anti-Bibi resistance has shown that, if given the opportunity, it will try to return to the streets with the aim of forcing the prime minister out of office.

At the same time, Netanyahu is also under fire from those Israelis who fault him for not prosecuting the war against Hamas more vigorously. In particular, they blame the prime minister for bowing to American and international pressure to allow aid to flow into parts of Gaza still under Hamas control, which, though ostensibly a humanitarian gesture, is almost certainly sustaining the terrorist forces and enabling them to continue to hold on. His right-wing critics are correct that the hostage deal is a trap for both Israel and Netanyahu.

Israeli ministers: Gaza hostage deal not coming soon, if ever

Israeli ministers said that no plan for a hostage release deal has been presented to the cabinet, stressing that any such deal isn't coming soon, if ever, N12 reported on Friday.

The ministers, who remained unnamed in the report, told N12 that "the feeling that the plan is coming is unfounded. The deal is still far away and it is not certain that it will come to fruition."

The ministers stressed that it would be very difficult if not impossible to get a deal approved if it includes a ceasefire for longer than a month, the release of terrorists with blood on their hands, and the release of large numbers of terrorists. The ministers added that the members of the cabinet are demanding to be involved in the continuation of negotiations.

Qatari Foreign Ministry says Hamas gave initial approval for hostage deal
The report comes after the Qatari Foreign Ministry said that Hamas had given its initial approval for a ceasefire and hostage deal in the Gaza Strip, although both Hamas and Israeli officials have stated that there is still a long way to go until a deal is reached.

Hamas was unlikely to reject a Gaza ceasefire proposal it received from mediators this week but will not sign it without assurances that Israel has committed to ending the war, a Palestinian official close to the talks said on Thursday.

Qatari and Egyptian mediators presented Hamas this week with the first concrete proposal for an extended halt to fighting in Gaza, agreed with Israel and the United States at talks in Paris last week. Hamas has said it is studying the text and preparing a response.

The Palestinian official said the Paris text envisions a first phase lasting 40 days, during which fighting would cease while Hamas freed remaining civilians from among more than 100 hostages it is still holding. Further phases would see the release of Israeli soldiers and the handover of the bodies of dead hostages.

"I expect that Hamas will not reject the paper, but it might not give a decisive agreement either," said the Palestinian official speaking on condition of anonymity.

"Instead, I expect them to send a positive response and reaffirm their demands: for the agreement to be signed, it must ensure Israel will commit to ending the war in Gaza and pull out from the enclave completely."

The only pause in the fighting so far, at the end of November, lasted only a week.

John Bolton: Abolish UNRWA

The truly humanitarian strategy for Palestinians is to settle them in locations with sustainable economies. To that end, we should realize that Gaza is very different from the West Bank, and the futures of Palestinians should be separated accordingly. On the West Bank, there may well be prospects for long-term stability with the cooperation of Israel and Jordan. That possibility does not exist in Gaza. Assuming Israel and Jordan can agree on a political solution, circumstances on the West Bank are far better for long-term settlement of the existing Palestinian population than in Gaza, which is merely a high-rise, long-stay refugee camp.

Ironically, precisely because of the way prior enemies of Israel abused the Palestinians, there is enormous reluctance to accept them for resettlement. Egypt and Jordan, the real countries of first asylum, are the most vocal in rejecting the option. Indeed, no country in the Middle East has shown interest in permanent refugee resettlement. Surely, however, all can see that simply rebuilding Gaza is a guaranteed failure, perhaps leading quickly to a repetition of Oct. 7.

In any case, Israel is physically reshaping Gaza to ensure its own security, and new Israeli buffer zones and strong points are not going away soon. All parties with a stake in the conflict must accept that the two-state solution is dead. Not only is there no viable economic future in Gaza alone, but connecting it with an archipelago of Palestinian islands on the West Bank won’t improve prospects.

Abolishing UNRWA and replacing it with UNHCR will be difficult, but UNRWA may be collapsing under its own weight. Firing all UNRWA’s roughly 40,000 employees, well over 90% of whom are Palestinians, may be impossible, but whoever is reemployed must be vetted carefully and supervised for a probationary period before receiving job security. UNRWA’s mindset must be eliminated and replaced with UNHCR’s.

There must be a dramatic shift in expectations and policy objectives for the Palestinians as a matter of humanitarian priority, no matter how wrenching and disappointing. For decades, the two-state policy has been tried and failed. It’s time for a new direction.

Was Hamas' "Great Return March" a diversion to destroy the buffer zone and set the stage for October 7?

Suddenly, the media is freaking out over Israel creating a buffer zone in Gaza.

AP writes:

Satellite photos show new demolition along a 1-kilometer-wide path on the Gaza Strip’s border with Israel, according an analysis by The Associated Press and expert reports. The destruction comes as Israel has said it wants to establish a buffer zone there, over international objections, further tearing away at land the Palestinians want for a state.

The Telegraph has a similar story, as does the Washington Post. The US State Department says it opposes any such zone.

Hardly mentioned in these articles is that a buffer zone inside Gaza already existed for many years.

There was a 1 kilometer buffer zone before Israel withdrew from Gaza. Israel rebuilt it after Hamas took over to keep infiltrators away from the fence, and regularly went in to clear land near the fence so have a line of sight towards any attackers, such as the shooters of a laser guided Kornet missile at a school bus that killed a child in 2011.

Anti-Israel activists complained about the buffer zone over the years, which then was 300 meters wide in most places, falsely claiming that it took up a huge amount of Gaza's farmable land.

During the 2014 Gaza war, Israel expanded the buffer zone again to one kilometer. It was a temporary move.

So what happened to that buffer zone?

Hamas appears to have meticulously erased it, inch by inch. And it might have been in anticipation of the October 7 attacks.

In 2018 and 2019 Hamas staged riots at the Gaza fence, daring Israel to shoot at huge crowds of people who gathered there - in the buffer zone.

Later in 2019, Hamas built a playground in the buffer zone, making children human shields. At the time they openly admitted their plan to keep building there to challenge Israel.

It appears to have worked. Israel doesn't seem to have been enforcing the buffer zone since these events, instead concentrating on relying on its high-tech fence at the border for security.

And because of this laxity, the IDF did not respond properly to October 7.

There is no difference between the potential buffer zone now and the one during the 2010s, which did not bother any governments or media at all.

But now the idea of Israel defending itself from bloodthirsty genocidal jihadists is considered "controversial." And the fact that there is so much criticism of this potential buffer zone after the October 7 pogrom, when there wasn't any such criticism beforehand, sends a clear message to Israel that its citizens' lives are worthless.

Which is a much bigger problem than any buffer zone could ever be.

By the way, Hamas itself built a buffer zone at the Egyptian border, at the request of Egypt, As far as I can tell, no "human rights" groups showed any concern over any private property or building destruction by Hamas at the time.

Israel is being judged by standards that no one else ever has been. And it is only getting worse.

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The @NYTimes decides that anti-Hamas cartoons are really "offensive depictions of Arabs"

In November, the NYU Langone Health hospital system fired one of its cancer researchers, Dr. Benjamin Neel, for reposting a series of anti-Hamas cartoons to his social media that were claimed to be offensive.

He's suing to get his job back.

The New York Times has written about this story at least twice. It described the cartoons in November:

Most of the social media posts at issue were reposts of political cartoons, according to the lawsuit. One of the cartoons takes aim at western defenders of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel. The cartoon shows a protest in which demonstrators are holding aloft signs justifying torture and rape. Another cartoon questions whether negotiating a two-state solution is viable with Hamas in power.

But it also said:

Dr. Neel had reposted a variety of anti-Hamas political cartoons, including two with offensive caricatures of Arab people.

Now, they are repeating that the cartoons are offensive:

[A] prominent cancer researcher in his 60s was outspoken in defense of Israel and had posted a variety of anti-Hamas political cartoons, including some with offensive caricatures of Arab people.
...Dr. Neel reposted political cartoons that included offensive depictions of Arabs and questioned whether negotiating a two-state solution was possible with Hamas.

Both of these were written by the same journalist, Joseph Goldstein.

The hospital system responded to the lawsuit with their own filing claiming that Dr. Neel “exercised extremely poor judgment by insidiously sharing racially and ethnically offensive posts on social media without regard for the potential impact on others.”

Are the cartoons really anti-Arab?

I found three of the cartoons that people complained about, claiming that these cartoons were "racist" and "anti-Arab" and "dehumanizing."

One of them was mine:

Another, like mine, made fun of Hamas' defenders from the progressive Left:

A third was a classic 2014 cartoon from Legal Insurrection's artist Branco:

I've already described why the criticisms of my cartoon are all lies. It is objectively true that Gazans raped Jewish girls - and not just Hamas members. Claiming that the cartoon is referring to every single Gazan is absurd. The signs people are holding are progressive justifications for heinous crimes, which were all over social media are are barely exaggerated.

The other two cartoons include caricatures of Hamas terrorists, not "Arabs." Branco's shows a man with a Hamas headband, the other is showing a Hamas terrorist on October 7.

Without publishing the cartoons so readers can decide for themselves, the New York Times is stating as unchallenged fact that these cartoons showing Hamas terrorists are really anti-Arab.

Anyone who looks at these cartoons and decides that they are anti-Arab are proving themselves to be the real racists. They, not the artists, are the ones who are saying that there is no distinction between violent, bloodthirsty terrorists and all Arabs.

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With every attack, there's always a little bit of "the Jews deserved it"

On October 3, 1980, a PFLP terrorist placed explosives outside a synagogue in Paris. The explosion killed four people outside the synagogue and injured over forty worshipers inside.

The Prime Minister of France at the time, Raymond Barre, was especially outraged - at the deaths of non-Jews. He said to French television station TF1, "This odious attack was aimed at hitting Israelites going to the synagogue but hit innocent French people who crossed the Copernic street."

Barre didn't consider Jews to be "innocent French people."

We're seeing a lot of that kind of thinking. Usually a little more subtle, but when Jews or Israelis are murdered by Arabs, there is always a little bit of "well, Palestinians are understandably upset at Jews" in the reactions and coverage.

If the Houthis would take Egypt's advice and only attack ships that have clear links to Israel, the world would shrug.

Because attacking Jews is normal. It is expected. And, to too many, it is deserved.

There is one epithet that was reflexively associated with Israel by modern antisemites over most of the past fifty years: "occupation." Never mind that Arabs attacked Jews before 1967, the "occupation" had turned into the evil that must be fought. Israel-haters could pretend that they had nothing against a Jewish state, but only the "occupation." Give up the land and there would be peace!

Have you noticed that the word has disappeared in the current anti-Israel discourse? It's been replaced with "genocide." There is no longer a pretense that Israel should exist in any form.

One reason is because the October 7 pogrom was not against "settlers." Previously, the Israel haters could pretend that they are against terror attacks on innocent civilians inside the Green Line, or that such attacks were rare and not supported by Palestinians in general.

But they cannot say that this time. So they have changed their entire discourse from being against "occupation" to being against Israel altogether, just to exonerate Hamas.

And they are emboldened because they were so successful with the "occupation" lie, and then with the "apartheid" libel.

Their success is partially due to the world's thinking that the Jews deserve it.

Think about it:

* Hamas attacks Israel first

* Hezbollah attacks Israel first

* Iranian backed Syrian groups attack Israel first

* The Houthis shoot rockets at Israel first

And Israel is still framed as the aggressor.

The Jews are always presumed guilty, even in the mainstream discourse, even if only a little.

(h/t Arnold, Avi)

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02/01 Links Pt2: America and Britain cross a treacherous red line; The Dangerous Racializing of Anti-Zionism; How Palestine Hijacked the U.S. Civil Rights Movement

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: America and Britain cross a treacherous red line

In The New York Times, Thomas Friedman, who is used as a conduit for the Biden administration’s anti-Israel trial balloons, wrote that the proposed recognition of “Palestine” signals an awareness that the United States “will never have the global legitimacy, the NATO allies and the Arab and Muslim allies it needs to take on Iran in a more aggressive manner unless we stop letting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hold our policy hostage.”

This venomous distortion breathtakingly blames Netanyahu for fighting to defend Israel against genocidal Iran. Yet it was the appeasement of Iran by the Obama and Biden administrations that led to the Oct. 7 pogrom, the unleashing of Iranian war across the region and now three deaths and dozens of casualties among Americans.

To imply that the Iranian regime which screams “Death to America!” and aims to Islamize the world is only waging this war because of the absence of a Palestinian state is as unhinged as it is disgusting.

The Biden administration is riddled with vicious haters of Israel holding key Middle East policy positions. And, of course, Britain is the original cause of this conflict, having torn up its commitment under the Palestine Mandate to settle the Jews throughout Palestine and offering part of it to their Arab attackers instead—the original “two-state solution.”

In the 1930s, Britain’s response to Palestinian Arab pogroms against Palestinian Jews was to reward the Arabs with a proposed state of their own.

In 2024, Britain’s response to a Palestinian Arab pogrom against Israeli Jews is to reward the Arabs with a proposed state of their own.

The supercilious Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton resembles nothing so much as a British Colonial Office poohbah, busy selling the pass in Mandatory Palestine while looking down his nose at the uppity Jews.

While Israel is forced to sacrifice the flower of its youth as it fights for its life, its so-called allies are placing the West itself in increasing peril as they threaten to hang the Jewish state out to dry once again to conceal their own malevolent ineptitude.

Seth Mandel: The Dangerous Racializing of Anti-Zionism

The city of Chicago is coming in for much criticism and ridicule for passing a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, instead of doing something for the residents of Chicago. But in Mayor Brandon Johnson’s defense, there will sooner be peace in Khan Younis than in Chicago.

Chicago, where a couple million people wake up every day despite their city government’s best efforts, is far from alone. Several large U.S. cities have redirected their taxpayer-funded time and attention away from their own towns and toward a place with greater potential: Gaza.

To be sure, none of these councils actually support a ceasefire in common parlance—which is to say, peace. Hamas has vowed in clear terms that if a ceasefire along the lines of Chicago’s were to be enacted, the terror group would simply conduct another Oct. 7. So what supporters of Chicago’s resolution, and others like it, are calling for is the spilling of more Jewish blood.

I don’t say this to demonstrate contempt for Brandon Johnson and his likeminded lemmings, for I truly believe they are beneath contempt. The point is that the rest of America should be aware that this kind of Jew-baiting is being baked into political survival strategies, perhaps in their own home town or state, threatening dark times upon our beloved republic.

At least the reporting on this trend has been entertaining. Take Reuters. Here’s the wire service’s headline: “US city councils increasingly call for Israel-Gaza ceasefire, analysis shows.”

They’ve run the numbers, you see. “Analysis,” in this case, means “the ability to count higher than ten.”

Gil Troy: How Palestine Hijacked the U.S. Civil Rights Movement

For over 50 years, the American left has tried rebranding the Palestinian cause by camouflaging Palestinian terrorism with the slogans of America’s civil rights movement. Today, a new generation of would-be radicals has stumbled onto this zombie corpse of ahistoric sloganeering with the confident excitement of college freshmen on their first beer run.

Using pseudo-intellectual jargon like “intersectionality,” multiple identity groups and astroturfed leftist political organizations have made fealty to the Palestinian cause a litmus test for belonging to the wider left. That is why many progressives were “exhilarated” by Hamas’ massacre of innocent people, and feminists remained silent about the Gazans’ mass rape of Israeli women. The artificiality, or often absurdity, of the supposed “intersection” between Palestine and the fashionable cause of the moment matters not at all. Hence, Palestine is a queer issue, as much as it is a feminist issue, and a social justice issue. The common thread remains supposed shared oppression—regardless of how homophobic, sexist or dictatorial Palestinian society might be.

But most group identities, no matter how politically fashionable, lack the social, cultural, and political heft to integrate the Palestinians into the new hierarchy of American victim groups and protected minorities. In America, only race has that valence. That is why other identity groups keep trying to graft their victimhood onto the story of the Black civil rights movement to cement their legitimacy.

The Palestinian cause has gained a seat in the progressive sectarian tent by piggybacking off the historical experience of American Blacks. Especially since 2020, Palestine has become thoroughly incorporated into Black Lives Matter sloganeering and visual aesthetics. As a result, an Arab nationalist movement fighting a battle 6,000 miles away from America’s Atlantic coast has become a central component of America’s “anti-racist struggle,” regardless of its lack of even the slightest connection to the historical reality of race-based discrimination in America, or to the values of the American civil rights movement.

The differences between the Palestinian national movement and the American civil rights movement are obvious and fundamental. Palestinians have played no role in American history or the history of slavery. Palestinians played no role in the civil rights struggle. The Palestinian-Israeli clash, which is occurring a world away from America, is national not racial. Most Israelis are dark-skinned, while some Palestinians are light-skinned. Nonviolence fueled the civil rights struggle, while the Palestinian movement keeps perfecting new forms of political violence and terror-porn, from hijacking to suicide bombing.

Howard Jacobson: Why are Jews uncomfortable in Australia? Two words: The left

Before the Six Day War, Jews had been paradigmatic victims of colonialism. After the Six Day War, they were its paradigmatic proponents. Australia ceased to be the greatest place to be a Jew. Or a reader of Jane Austen, come to that, since she had been soft on slavery. Though as yet, the Australian left hasn’t called for her to be gassed.

As a highly regarded left-leaning journalist, Michael Gawenda is able to account for these changes to the moral climate of Australia from the inside. Full disclosure: My Life as Jew makes complimentary reference to me. You will have to take my word that I would have admired the book no less had it not mentioned me at all. It is a bracing, muscular, unflinching memoir, that begins, unconventionally, with a detailed account of a broiges with a one-time colleague; goes on to trace the author’s beginnings in a displaced persons’ camp after the War; and then returns to take up the question of what makes a Jew and why so many Jews, Australian and otherwise, find being Jewish such a problem for their politics. By interweaving the public and the personal in this way, Gawenda makes his life in Australia a sort of case study. The book asks how to live as a Jew in Australia, but more generally how to live as a Jew anywhere, how to love the Jewish people (as he is not afraid to put it) at a time when there is so much pressures not to do so.

In this way, it is both a memoir and a conversation, a passionate confrontation with the faint-hearted, whether they are distinguished Jewish thinkers of the past, such as Hannah Arendt, or friends and contemporaries on the left with whom he could once talk about a Jewish future but who now toe the party line on Zionism and expect him to do the same. Here, Gawenda admits to an understandable confusion of feelings, part anger, part grief, part grim humour. “It is a shocking thing,” he writes, that in the eyes of many leftists “I have journeyed to the dark side”.

Gawenda has plenty of fight in him but don’t suppose that My Life as a Jew is a Book of Broiges. If anything, it is an exemplary story of personal and philosophical survival, a struggle to hold on to what drew the author to the left originally while not letting its prevailing partisanship suck him down into its whirlpool of cant. It is also a promise to himself to find a meaning that vindicates the “rich and living Jewishness” his parents brought with them from Poland to Australia, allowing that just as they could not fully pass it on to him, so he cannot fully pass it on to his children.

“What Kind of a Jew am I?” Gawenda goes on asking and it his insistence on remaining a “Jew in full” that powers this invigorating book through what could have been a deep existential despondency. Instead, he keeps his wits about him and his options open. He is as engaged in Australian culture as ever, but Judaism goes on beckoning to him “in some mysterious, inexplicable way”. As the book ends, he is writing poems in Yiddish and his son is putting them to music. Looking back is also a way of looking forward.

Yes, it really is impossible to transplant organs from dead bodies

In November, I noted that the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor accused Israel of stealing organs from dead Palestinians in Gaza, and mentioned that it was medically impossible to transplant organs from dead bodies.

In December, after there was no public pushback against the NGO's accusations, Hamas claimed the same thing, saying that bodies returned from Israel to Gaza had "evidence" of stolen organs. I went into a bit more detail how this is impossible and the media that parroted these accusations without mentioning the science were allies of Hamas.

But I'm not a doctor, nor do I play one on TV. So why should they listen to me?

At the Times of Israel, David weill, a doctor who specializes in organ transplants, sets the record straight:

I have spent over three decades in the transplant field, most recently directing the Lung Transplant Program at Stanford University. I find these accusations alarming, though wholly unsubstantiated. We in the transplant community take illegal organ trafficking extremely seriously.

Like many people around the world, especially health care workers, I am devastated by the loss of innocent civilian lives, in this conflict and others. But seemingly in wanting to keep the narrative alive that there is moral equivalence between what Hamas has done and how Israel has responded, we now hear from the same sources that Israel is stealing body parts from people who have long been dead, including allegedly exhuming dead bodies from gravesites as a source of organs for transplantation. Never mind, I suppose, that the organs would be unusable, if something this outlandish were tried.

Under the best of circumstances in a controlled hospital environment, procuring viable organs for transplant is complicated, a primary reason being that there is a long waiting list. A battlefield is not the place to attempt to expand the donor pool and has never been suggested as such by transplant professionals.

But let’s not let the medical facts get in the way of tantalizing propaganda. Until now, no similar credible accusations have ever been made against Israel, a country where transplant has been performed for decades carefully and responsibly without a hint of any unethical practices.

Will this slow down the blood libels? Of course not.

Facts are strictly optional nowadays. And even in mainstream media, only the facts that support the viewpoint of the writer or reporter are allowed to be mentioned.

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With No Nearby Cancer Hospital or Synagogue, Palestine Activists Lack Protest Venue (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Berkeley, February 1 - A coalition of groups that sought to demonstrate solidarity with the people of the Gaza Strip and to showcase their vehement opposition to the nation-state of the Jews defending themselves from Gazans, acknowledged today that they felt stymied by circumstances that deprive them of a suitable place in the vicinity for their demonstration, such as a prestigious cancer-treatment and research facility, or a Jewish house of worship.

Members of local chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, and the Committee on American-Islamic Relations, among others, expressed their frustration Thursday that the area lacks a high-profile medical facility that may or may not have accepted generous donations from people who have also donated to Zionist causes, and that the only synagogue they can locate lies far away from any convenient gathering venue - meaning that the activists have nowhere to convene, disrupt traffic, chant antisemitic slogans, and bully passers-by or those in the facilities, in the name of Palestine.

"We're not New York, I know that," admitted Nerdi Kissassi, the coordinator of the would-be demonstration. "New York has both synagogues in large numbers, unfortunately, and top-flight cancer treatment centers. We don't have anything comparable in northern California. That means our avenues for expression of solidarity with Palestine, and to glorify resistance to the Zionists by any means, are much more limited. We can't hope to make headlines the same way."

She noted that some enterprising activists had targeted Jewish cemeteries and institutions with vandalism and pro-Palestine graffiti, but that failed to garner the desired attention and caused a backlash among locals. "You've got to go big if you're going to play the intimidation game, which is the nature of Palestine activism in the west," she explained. "Playing on people's sympathy will only get you so far, because all the Zionist propagandists have to do is show images of October 7 and all our efforts are wasted. No, we need to scare into silence or inaction those who would otherwise try to speak out for, or protect, Jews, regardless of where their sympathies lie. Unfortunately for us, the Bay Area doesn't have any major Jewish institutions of global, or even national, stature, and we're not going to get air time or news coverage by shouting, 'From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free!' outside an abortion clinic or random day care center. It's a serious problem for us."

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