Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, February 06, 2024

Hey @UNCTAD, I have an idea to help Gaza's economy!

The UN Conference on Trade & Development issued a report saying that Gaza will take a long time to recover:

If the current military operation were to end immediately with reconstruction starting right away and the 2007-2022 growth trends were to persist with an average growth rate of 0.4%, it would take Gaza until 2092 just to restore the GDP levels of 2022, with GDP per capita and socioeconomic conditions continuously declining.

However, even with the most optimistic scenario that GDP could grow at 10% annually, it would still take Gaza’s GDP per capita until 2035 to return to its pre-blockade level of 2006.

The recovery of Gaza's economy from the current military operation will demand a financial commitment several times more than the $3.9 billion that resulted from the 2014 military operation in Gaza and will require a concerted international effort to restore pre-conflict socioeconomic conditions.

It bases its estimate of recovery in 2092 on a 0.4% average annual GDP growth rate, which is pretty low. But, they say, that was the average growth rate from 2007-2022 in Gaza.

Here is the GDP growth for Gaza and the West Bank combined from 1995 to 2022:

One can see that the annual GDP growth varied wildly from year to year. But in general, external events were what drove the Palestinian economy - and when things were more peaceful, their economy grew (with the exception of the Covid-19 drop.)

The first big spike came during the Oslo process when there was optimism and investment in Palestinian businesses. It all crashed with the second intifada terror spree. Things went up again as the intifada started winding down; they went down when Hamas won the 2006 election. There were dips for the 2009 Gaza war and the 2014 Gaza war.

Again, this is the West Bank and Gaza combined. Why would Gaza's annual rate be so much lower than the West Bank's?

Because when Palestinians try to kill Jews, their economy tanks. When they adhere to ceasefires, their economy prospers.

UNCTAD looks at Gaza's anemic 0.4% growth rate as the way things have to be. But they don't. If Gaza wasn't ruled by a genocidal death cult whose highest priority is martyrdom while killing Jews, Gaza's economy would be much better than it is and its GDP prospects would be a lot rosier.

Why wouldn't UNCTAD make this simple observation - that Palestinian aggression against Israel is the single biggest factor hurting its economy? That if Gaza will ever recover, it has to stop its habit of attacking Jews every couple of years?

The world simply doesn't expect Palestinians to even have the ability to act peacefully and like adults. No one says this out loud. But that is the reason no one points out what is obvious once you see it: the world expects Palestinians to prioritize killing Jews over the welfare of their own people and treats them accordingly.

But since that is racist, and peace is obviously nowhere on the horizon, people blame the adults in the room - Israel - for not making enough compromises with their would-be killers.

Combine this enormous cognitive dissonance with the religion of the Two State Solution, and it is only a short hop to the insane idea that if only the world would force Israel to give up land for a state filled with people who want to destroy it, we will finally have peace.

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 Ahram is Egypt's highest circulation newspaper with a circulation of over a million copies daily. It is majority owned by the Egyptian government and is considered the newspaper of record for Egypt.

Here is most of a column published in Al Ahram written by columnist Dr.Waheed Abdul Majeed:

One of the few advantages of the International Court of Justice’s interim decision in the Gaza genocide case is that it stripped the Israeli entity of the victim’s garment that it had worn for so long, and dressed it in the garment of the perpetrator that befits it, and put it in a cage accused of committing the crime of which the Zionists have long claimed to be victims, even though what happened to them was much, much smaller than the genocide they are carrying out now and its type.

...This is why it has become necessary to review the history of World War II in its relationship with all the events that preceded it. One of the most important things that needs to be reviewed is the responsibility of the German leader Adolf Hitler for that war, as he was leading a country seeking to liberate lands that were forcibly taken from it after the World War I, and to put an end to the humiliation imposed on him by countries whose criminal record exceeds that of any other country, including Germany.

It is also important to review the extent of the crime called the Holocaust, and the circumstances that surrounded and led to it. Its size has been multiplied many times, and the number of its victims has been swelled to no limits. But more important than the number that has been disputed for decades is reviewing the circumstances in which the crime was committed at a time when some Jews represented major problem throughout Europe.

The so-called Jewish question has been at the forefront of political and cultural concerns since the crystallization of the nation-state in Europe. The question that requires an objective and courageous answer in this review can be posed as follows: If the situation of the Jews and the activity of some of them was considered a problem in many European countries at that time, is there any evidence that this problem became more acute in Germany when it fought a war with the hope of liberating its land and regaining her dignity?

...What is important is that there be a possibility of comparison between Hitler’s crime in the 1940s and the current unprecedented crime of the Zionists and the West to the extent that any other crime pales next to it.

Once again, this is not a marginal media outlet, and Majeed is not a marginal personality - he is the director of Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies which also reflects the Egyptian state thinking.

Antisemitism is official Egyptian policy.

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!

02/05 Links Pt2: A tsunami of antisemitic hate; Two states, one for Jews, one for terrorist; PA anxious to reward thousands of new terrorist prisoners

From Ian:

The Dangerous “Moral Aestheticism” of Israel’s War Critics

Another recent example of moral aestheticism is a New York Times opinion piece authored by Megan Stack, who lauds the South African case of genocide against Israel that was before the International Court of Justice. In recounting the horrors of the war, Stack states that “Israel did not promise, nor did it execute, a sharply targeted retaliation against Hamas … or a strategic hunt for the hostages … To understand this extraordinary spasm of violence as an act of national self-defense, you’d have to accept that Israel’s only chance for safety depends upon Gaza being crushed and emptied—by death or displacement—of virtually all Palestinians.”

But Stack doesn’t bother to mention Israel’s oft-stated war aim: to dismantle Hamas so Israel’s citizens from the south can return to their homes. The real moral question, which Michael Walzer poses, is “what contribution does destroying this target make to success in the ongoing battle or the longer-term military campaign—or to victory itself? Or to the deterrence of future conflicts?” To fairly evaluate Israel’s military actions requires one to understand what Israel is trying to accomplish. Stack’s failure to do so decontextualizes the destruction. It would be like surveying the devastation wrought by U.S. forces against ISIS (The U.S. reportedly killed nearly 30,000 civilians.) without referencing the American war aim to end ISIS’s murderous rampage through the Middle East.

The moral aestheticism practiced by Guterres and Stack is appealing because it substitutes ill-formed impressions for critical judgment and relieves gnawing doubts. And while this lack of moral reasoning is not new, it’s gotten much worse with the now vogue leftwing ideological predilection to divide up the world into the powerful and the powerlessness. In this worldview, the powerful are presumed guilty and the powerless innocent. Once one determines that there’s something fundamentally wrong with Israel, he or she is free to hold the Jewish state alone responsible for the conflict and to ignore all exculpatory evidence. Hamas can’t be responsible because it represents the supposedly powerless party.

Not all criticism of Israel is so simplistic and some reproval does indeed apply sound moral logic. Supporters of Israel, like me, who take moral discourse seriously must be open to evidence that specific Israeli commanders acted with ill intent or failed to take adequate cautionary measures in protecting civilian life. In the course of a long war, it’s quite possible that Israel did not always act within the bounds of the just-war doctrine or the laws of war. But we can’t make those judgments without hearing the evidence and multiple accounts of the events.

Unfortunately, the moral confusion about power and complicity, once confined to the extreme left, has caught on among the mainstream commentariat. Tired of contending with the bad optics of self-defense, these NGO leaders, opinion elites and journalists have resolved their conflicting impulses. Israel is guilty. Freed of all dialectical tension, they can now castigate Israel for its bad manners and the inherent repugnance of even the most legitimate self-defense.

If such moral aestheticism continues unabated, how will any country ever fight a just war and keep its citizens safe? Or does this level of scrutiny only apply to Israel?

Caroline Glick: 360 degrees of hostility: The Biden administration and Israel

The Mothers of IDF Soldiers group led a demonstration last week of army mothers, reservists in the Israel Defense Forces, bereaved families and other concerned citizens outside the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem. They demanded that President Joe Biden stop leveraging power to force Israel to resupply Hamas.

The following day, hundreds of Israelis, including parents of soldiers, families of hostages and terror victims gathered outside Ashdod Port. For hours, they blocked trucks laden with supplies for Gaza from exiting the port. Activists have been blocking trucks from entering Gaza via the Kerem Shalom and Nitzana border crossings for more than two weeks.

Speaking to the crowd in the southern Israeli city of Ashdod, Shifra Shahar, who runs a nonprofit organization that cares for the needs of soldiers, addressed her remarks to Israel’s leaders:

“Government of Israel, defense minister, IDF chief of staff, get ahold of yourselves!

“No other nation feeds and sustains its enemy! It’s truly an Israeli start-up.

“We had elections last year. I don’t recall voting for [U.S. Secretary of State Antony] Blinken! Blinken is sitting in the war cabinet and protecting the interests of my enemy. … We have sons in Gaza. We have sons fighting. The entry of the trucks endangers them, prolongs the war, increases the number of casualties and delays the return of the hostages!

“They tell me, ‘There are constraints.’ He who is constrained doesn’t win the war.

“They tell me, ‘The Americans are threatening not to provide us with ammunition.’

“To this, I say, if we were besieging them, we wouldn’t need ammunition! The war would end. They’d be screaming for help, returning the hostages and the war would end!”

The rising expressions of rage at the Biden administration from ordinary citizens are a testament to the shock and anger Israelis feel at what they perceive as a betrayal of Israel’s most basic interests by Biden and his top advisers.

Three and a half months ago, when Biden came to Israel, most Israelis couldn’t imagine his warm embrace would transform into a torrent of hostile actions.

At the height of Biden’s emotional visit, he gave a speech to the people of Israel: “I come to Israel with a single message. You are not alone. You are not alone. As long as the United States stands—and we will stand forever—we will not let you ever be alone.”

For the overwhelming majority of Israelis, Biden’s declaration sounded like a bankable guarantee. But for the few with more sensitive ears, it sounded like a threat—that he and his administration would never leave Israel alone to fight the war to victory.

As the weeks and months passed, it turned out that the latter had it right. The administration has never let Israel alone to win the war whose outcome will determine whether the Jewish state can long survive. At every turn, in every quarter, the United States is constraining, undermining, subverting and coercing Israel to make moves that, as Shahar said, are “against the interests of the citizens of Israel.”

Seth Mandel: Democrats Should Stop Panicking Over Biden’s Israel Support

Morning Consult’s tracking poll shows that, on the question of whether respondents support Israel or the Palestinians, the largest gains have been made by a third category: those who say they support both equally. Israel’s numbers have dropped over the course of the current conflict but the Palestinians’ rose only slightly and then dropped again. Israel and “support both equally” have triple the support that the Palestinians receive in the poll.

Additionally, support for the Palestinians has dropped three points among respondents ages 18-34, precisely the demographic supposedly ready to toss Biden overboard over Gaza.

A Harvard-Harris poll two weeks ago showed that 80 percent supported Israel over Hamas in the current conflict and nearly 70 percent believed Israel was trying to avoid civilian casualties in Gaza.

Lastly, many of those who disapprove of Biden’s handling of the war believe he ought to support Israel even more strongly. Gallup found about 40 percent thought that what the U.S. has done so far to back Israel in the war is “not enough.”

Now, that doesn’t mean there are no polls with warning signs for Israel. According to an AP poll, 50 percent of American adults think Israel’s counteroffensive in Gaza has “gone too far.” According to YouGov, half of Biden’s 2020 voters think Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

But again, the question here is whether Biden specifically is facing a “disaster politically” for his current support for Israel, and the secondary question is whether he will bleed disaffected Democrat votes to RFK Jr. over the issue. Going by current polling, the answer to both is no. That might change, but what we’re seeing right now is that Biden isn’t endangering his reelection by supporting Israel. Instead, members of his party appear to wish the president was in more trouble than he is.

Two states, one for Jews, one for terrorists

How sweetly this is working out for Yahya Sinwar and the rest of them who run Hamas.

Not for them the disgrace of defeat when this is all over. Not for them anything like Japan’s ceremonial surrender aboard the battleship Missouri, MacArthur seeing to it that the Japanese delegation, heads bowed, signed all the papers to signify their formal humiliation and capitulation.

The Hamas terrorists have no such worries. For what they did Oct. 7, they are not being punished.

They are being rewarded… if Biden has his way. Some deal this is. Murder Jews, congratulations, you’ve won yourselves a country.

Biden has already signaled that he is prepared to formally recognize a separate state for the Palestinian Arabs, run by the Palestinian Authority, themselves terrorists.

Presumably then, Gaza all over again. We’ve seen this movie. Back in 2005, under Ariel Sharon’s generosity, Gaza was handed over to the PA, who were then ousted by Hamas.

By the way, along with Gaza, don’t the Palestinian Arabs already have a state? It’s called Israel, where nearly two million of them enjoy the full rights of citizenship.

That gives them three states, in one form or another, by my count…Gaza, Israel, and swathes of Judea/Samaria. Not bad for a people who feel oppressed.

Meantime, the Israelis still only have this one country, but for Biden, and others around the world, that’s too much.

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!

By the logic of Israel haters, the Allies' side in the Pacific War in World War II was a racist endeavor

Jewish Insider reports:

The president of a new Columbia Law School group formed to combat rising antisemitism on campus told Jewish Insider that its adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism played a role in the Law School Student Senate’s vote to reject it as a recognized university group.

“A group of students were strongly opposed to our formation from the very beginning,” Marie-Alice Legrand, president of the Law Students Against Antisemitism, recalled, noting that some condemned its use of the State Department-adopted IHRA definition.

The article goes on to say that an anti-Israel group, “Concerned Jewish Students at CLS,” sent a letter against the proposed student group. In that letter, they wrote:

Many individuals accurately believe that the creation of a State of Israel was a racist endeavor because doing so involved killing more than 15,000 Palestinians, expelling more than 700,000 Palestinians, and creating a refugee crisis that has resulted in over 2 million Palestinian refugees worldwide.

The "15,000 Palestinians" killed, "700,000 Palestinians expelled" and "2 million Palestinian refugees" are all lies.

But let's set that aside. By their own definition and false figures, virtually every major war is racist, since it involves killing and displacing the enemy's civilians.

Let's pretend that we are woke college students and we want to say that the United States is racist.

Let's take accurate facts about the Pacific Theater in World War II.

3 million Japanese were killed, including hundreds of thousands of civilians. And there was plenty of anti-Japanese racism in America. Here's a typical cover of a comic book from that era, and there are scores more.

Not only that, but the US rounded up Japanese Americans and put them in camps. Moreover, the US occupied Japan for years after the war.

If those are the only facts you know about the war between the US and Japan, you would conclude that the war was a racist endeavor by the US, just because Americans hated Japanese people and coveted their land.

But anyone with even a passing knowledge of history knows that this doesn't accurately describe the war. It is just a highly selective set of facts meant to bring an ignorant reader to a foregone conclusion.

In this case, unlike the anti-Israel group at Columbia's letter, all of the facts are 100% accurate. But they ignore Pearl Harbor, Japan's partnership with Nazi Germany, Japanese expansionism, Japanese war crimes and inhumane war practices. If the facts I listed are all you know, your conclusion would be wrong even though, in this case, the facts are accurate.

This is how anti-Israel propaganda works. The Israel haters hate context. They don't want anyone to know anything besides their own highly curated version of events.

And they also lie, knowing that most people won't bother to publicly correct them. Think about it: they sent this letter to the senators, presumably the top leaders at Columbia's law school, secure in the knowledge that none of them would point out that the letter was filled with lies not only about history but also about the IHRA definition. They have learned from the Palestinians (and the Soviets) that lying is an excellent strategy, especially when you claim to be supporting a supposedly oppressed group. Instead of being treated worse than cheaters and plagiarists, they are rewarded by their fellow students.

Propaganda works. Lies work.

If Columbia's law students accepted this letter and its implications as truth, they are going to be spectacularly poor lawyers and judges in the future.

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!

02/05 Links Pt1: Biden's 'Two-State Solution' To Reward Palestinian Terrorism, Destroy Israel; Palestinians have no future with UNRWA; Un-Hijack Human Rights

From Ian:

Bassam Tawil: Biden's 'Two-State Solution' To Reward Palestinian Terrorism, Destroy Israel

The declared policy... of the US and Britain since the 1993-95 Oslo Accords has been that a two-state solution should come as part of a negotiated settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.

If the Oslo Accords are so cavalierly abrogated, what do any international agreements mean, and why would any country sign one in the future?

The assumption that normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia in return for the establishment of another failed and corrupt Arab state would bring peace, security and stability to the Middle East is a deadly fantasy.

The Americans and British are evidently no longer demanding that the Palestinians halt their homicidal incitement against Israel and Jews or stop paying financial rewards to Palestinian terrorists who murder Jews.

The Americans and the British are also ignoring the fact that most Palestinians are opposed to the idea of a two-state solution because they want a Palestinian state to replace Israel, not have a state next to it.

Those who are promoting the idea of creating a Palestinian terror state next to Israel -- again capitulating to terrorists and rewarding terrorism -- are paving the way for more October 7-like massacres. They are essentially asking Israel to commit suicide at a time when its soldiers are fighting to eradicate Hamas and ensure that the Gaza Strip will no longer serve Hamas, or its terror master Iran, as a base for murdering Jews, Americans or anyone else in the West.

Israel's Long War for the West

The common thread weaving Hamas, Hezbollah and the Shia militias together is the significant funding and support each receives from Iran, which has in turn received it from the Obama and Biden administrations. When the Biden administration came in, Iran had $6 billion of reserves; it now has, according to former US Army Gen. Jack Keane, more than $100 billion-- which is presumably what it used to finance its proxies and its nuclear program.

The Biden administration now appears about to compound the problem with another catastrophic retreat: there are reported to be discussions about the US pulling its troops out of oil-rich Iraq – just as the Iranian regime has been trying to force the US to do since Iran's Islamic Revolution of 1979.

"Israel didn't start this war. Israel didn't want this war.... In fighting Hamas and the Iranian axis of terror, Israel is fighting the enemies of civilization itself.... While Israel is doing everything to get Palestinian civilians out of harm's way, Hamas is doing everything to keep Palestinian civilians in harm's way. Israel urges Palestinian civilians to leave the areas of armed conflict, while Hamas prevents those civilians from leaving those areas at gunpoint." — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Wall Street Journal.

Iran's former Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Salehi recently confirmed that the "the confrontation between Iran and Israel will continue as long as [Israel] exists... even if a Palestinian state is established."

Israel is actually well on its way to winning. The least we can do is to enable it to have whatever it needs to complete its mission, and the time in which to do it.

[P]rotecting our borders and protecting our allies is not an either-or choice.... America's outstanding troops are fighting abroad not because the US is irresponsibly gallant, and not recklessly to fund the military-industrial complex, but to defend us here at home better.

If you have a strong military, you will not have to use it: no one will test you.

Palestinians have no future with UNRWA

As a UN agency, UNRWA is supposed to remain impartial and work solely on humanitarian efforts for Palestinians. However, UNRWA has a history of promoting antisemitic violence in its school systems, glorifying terrorism and teaching students to become martyrs.

Hamas has regularly used UNRWA schools as military bases, weapon storage facilities and rocket launching pads. How can an organization call itself impartial when it actively promotes Hamas’s ideology in the Palestinian school curriculum and gives the terror group the ability to launch an assault against Israel?

Since the Hamas-Israel war began on October 7, more and more evidence has emerged on how Hamas has infested itself within the agency. UNRWA teachers can masquerade as ordinary civilians with legitimate UN employee IDs, then simultaneously work as military combatants for Hamas.

The initial evidence came about after one Israeli hostage who was released in the first hostage-prisoner swap revealed that he had been held captive in the attic of a teacher employed by UNRWA (who was also a father of 10 children). The former hostage said he had been locked away for nearly 50 days and was barely provided with food or any medical needs. A month later, UN Watch, a Geneva-based nonprofit that monitors the UN, revealed that 3,000 UNRWA educational employees celebrated the October 7 massacre and called for the execution of the hostages in a telegram channel.

All of these are terrible revelations on their own and prove that UNRWA is far from impartial and, at the very least, complicit in aiding Hamas. However, this was just the tip of the iceberg, as more evidence has come out over just how involved UNRWA staff were in the murder and kidnapping of Israelis. What we can confidently say is that the United Nations is using global taxpayer money to fund the salaries of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists.

Israel has exposed that 12 UNRWA employees in Gaza were directly involved with Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israeli civilians. It is difficult to wrap your head around how the crimes committed by these 12 individuals and the fact that the UN pays for their salaries. The allegations against them include kidnapping hostages, participating in the actual murder of Israeli civilians and filming hostages being taken captive. One of the twelve is an UNRWA elementary school teacher who has been accused of being a Hamas commander and of having participated in the massacre in Kibbutz Be’eri.

At the same time, another is a UNRWA social worker who was involved in the kidnapping of an IDF soldier’s body on October 7. Israel’s revelations summarize that six UNRWA employees infiltrated Israel as part of the massacre, four were involved in kidnapping Israelis, and three additional UNRWA employees were “invited via an SMS text to arrive at an assembly area the night before the attack and were directed to equip themselves with weapons.”

Ilan Pappé is a fraudulent historian who has been found to falsify sources numerous times to twist history to fit his anti-Zionist ideology.

He attended a Zoom call over the weekend where he apparently made up another "fact" out of thin air:

The Israeli historian who supports the Palestinian cause, Professor Ilan Pappé , said that it is not possible to coexist with Zionism because it is “an evil that must be eradicated,” and peace cannot be reached with the Zionist entity, but rather it must be dismantled and eliminated.

In a Zoom symposium for intellectuals, most of whom are Palestinians, Pappé said that Zionism, since its inception, has been working to eliminate the Palestinian people and their cause and not to coexist with them.

Pappe continued in his lecture: “Zionism has tried to displace and kill the Palestinian people since 1929, during the Nakba in 1948, and after the Nakba and the (1967) Naksa and all the attacks that followed until this day. This was clearly demonstrated in the aggressive war on the Gaza Strip, and they will continue their aggressive approach. But the Palestinian National Movement and the Palestinian people always surprised the Zionists and rose again despite the endless financial, military and political support from Western colonialism for Zionism and the Zionist entity.”

Everything he says is a lie, and an easily proven lie. Indeed, most of what he claims has already been debunked.

But this little speech includes something seemingly new: the claim that Zionism has tried to displace and kill the "Palestinian people" since 1929.

Where does he get that from?

In the book that made him famous, "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine," Pappé only mentions 1929 in romantic terms. He classifies the horrific 1929 pogroms where gangs of Arabs murdered every Jew they could find and raped and dismembered women as a mere "uprising." And he writes it was an uprising against British policy, not Zionism.

If the ethnic cleansing of Arabs began in 1929, wouldn't his 384 page book about supposed Jewish ethnic cleansing of Arabs even make a passing mention of this root cause?

What seems to have happened is that there has been an attempt by Israel haters to say that "history didn't begin on October 7." But if you look at the history of who has killed whom first between Arabs and Jews in Palestine, the Arabs win that contest hands down - murdering Jews in Safed in 1834, murdering Jews in Palestine in 1920, 1921 and especially 1929.

As a fake historian, Pappé must show that the murderous 1929 rampage of Arabs against Jews in Hebron, Jerusalem, Motza and Safed were justified, just as he attempts to justify October 7. So he makes up a new accusation, that the righteous Arab rapists were not engaging in ethnic cleansing but responding to one.

This is an accusation that Pappé himself has apparently never made before, even though this is his main area of supposed expertise.

How convenient!

An additional irony is that the 1929 pogroms resulted in the actual ethnic cleansing of Jews from a number of communities that they lived in. No Arabs were forced to leave their homes - only Jews.

Pappe isn't concerned with that ethnic cleansing.

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!

Egypt has said that it would suspend its peace agreement with Israel if even one Gazan goes to Egypt to flee a war zone.

As we've seen, Egypt constructed a huge wall and other barriers to block any chance of Gazans escaping.

In every other war zone, human rights groups are solidly on the side of refugees and displaced persons. They show zero sympathy towards the nations that restrict entry of refugees.

Except when the refugees are Palestinian.

Last July, Human Rights Watch condemned Egypt for making it more difficult for Sudanese refugees to enter Egypt. It wasn't a ban, just additional procedures:

Egyptian authorities have claimed the new entry visa rule would reduce visa forgery. As of late June, thousands of displaced people remained stranded in dire humanitarian conditions as they attempted to obtain an entry visa from the Egyptian consulate in Wadi Halfa, a Sudanese town near the Egyptian border. Some have been compelled to wait up to a month as they struggled to secure food, accommodation, and health care.

“The need to combat visa forgery does not justify Egypt denying or delaying entry to people fleeing Sudan’s devastating conflict,” said Amr Magdi, senior Middle East and North Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The Egyptian government should rescind its entry visa rule for Sudanese nationals during the current crisis, permit them swift entry, and facilitate access to asylum procedures or treat them as the refugees most if not all are.”

Amnesty similarly said:

“Allowing swift passage across borders for all people fleeing the conflict and providing immediate access to asylum registration would ease the dire humanitarian situation along the borders,” said Tigere Chagutah, Amnesty International’s regional director for East and Southern Africa
“States should not deny access to those fleeing a conflict based on a lack of identification documents or visas. Yet, the stringent entry regulations on those without valid travel documents or visas have created insurmountable barriers for individuals in desperate need of safety, leaving them at serious risk.

But when it comes to Egypt (and Jordan) creating far more draconian measures to stop every single Gazan from escaping, literally making Gaza into a prison for those who want desperately to flee, , suddenly these human rights groups and others are mute. These righteous words about the rights of desperate people in war zones are never, ever applied to Palestinians in Gaza.

All of these groups issue more and lengthier reports on human rights for Palestinians than for any other group in the world. But their concern for Palestinian human rights suddenly ends if helping them also helps Israel destroy a terrorist group with fewer casualties.

Hamas has built its entire war strategy on using innocent Gazans as human shields. HRW, Amnesty, Oxfam and Gisha are on Hamas' side: they all agree with Hamas that Gaza civilians should protect the rapists, kidnappers and mass murderers of Jews.

Indeed, the only reason for their silence is that they would prefer thousands of Gazans die than Israel defeating Hamas.

The hypocrisy cannot be more obvious. These groups discard human rights when it conflicts with their anti-Israel agendas.

The real irony is that if these so-called human rights defenders would treat Palestinians the way they treat Sudanese and Eritreans in danger, the world would pressure Egypt - and hundreds of thousands of Gazans could be out of danger. Gazans are in the headlines far more than these other groups, and a single word against Egypt's reprehensible behavior would be widely publicized and start a serious debate that could easily result in Egypt's caving to pressure, or at the very least negotiating a way to leverage the crisis into helping Egypt's economy to handle the additional influx - something that other nations would be glad to fund.

This is a case where human rights groups could actually save lives. And they are making an active choice that they'd rather see Gazans die so they can write up more reports about how monstrous Israel is.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Arabs say Jewish challah covers were a factor that forced them to murder Jews in 1929. This is the "logic" of today's terrorist defenders.

A tweet of mine went viral last week:

How is it that
* 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 framed as the aggressor?

There were hundreds of furious responses, most saying that Hamas' pogrom was a reaction to Israeli actions and Israel was the original aggressor, that "history didn't start October 7." (I even saw one person made a poster twisting even these facts against Israel with the caption, "Only Israel can bomb four countries and still be perceived as the victim.")

To which I responded:

To the idiots who say Israel started - either in Jerusalem over the past few years, or in 1967, or in 1948. No doubt you would also claim that the Jews started the riots in 1929 as well.

Some reacted with astonishment that I should bring up 1929 - ancient history - when thousands of Palestinians are being murdered now. In other words, some people who say history didn't start October 7 also say history started on October 8 when one takes them at their word and looks at history.

Others responded that Jewish "colonialism" started before 1929 - implying massacres of Jewish rabbis, women and children was justified.

In other words, no matter what argument they use, they lose. But their attempts to justify the most horrific crimes prove their antisemitism.

I looked at Wikipedia's entry on the 1929 massacres, and found a "reason" for them I had never seen before: Challah covers.

For some time, Jewish institutions of Jerusalem had given their supporters abroad items such as Challah covers and Passover Seder tablecloths featuring imagery of the Dome of the Rock either below or emblazoned with Jewish symbolism such as the Star of David and the Temple menorah. Zionist literature published throughout the world had also used provocative, Judaized imagery of the Dome of the Rock. One Zionist publication featuring a Jewish flag atop the Dome of the Rock was picked up and redistributed by Arab propagandists.

Here is one of the challah covers from Jews in Jerusalem circa 1925, where the Dome of the Rock is shown behind the Kotel (Western Wall) which is featured.

Even as early as 1863, way before modern Zionism, the Dome of the Rock is depicted in a challah cover designed in Jerusalem (detail):

Yet here is how antisemitic site Palestine Remembered characterizes another covering:

"Zionists place the Israeli flag and Jewish emblems over the Dome of the Rock and other Muslim holy places, documenting their plans for destruction and usurpation of these sites to build a Jewish Temple."

There is not even a hint of a desire to destroy the Dome of the Rock shown here. The Hebrew quotes the Psalm 137:5 "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand lose its cunning." Under that it says "The place of the Temple." Which it is.

The same site shows another picture, not sure whether it is also a challah cover, a picture for the wall or maybe a Simchat Torah flag.

It also shows the Dome of the Rock as the holy spot, as a place for veneration, and there is nothing close to a call for its destruction. If anything, the Jews who drew these pictures are showing extreme respect for the building. One cannot imagine Jews publishing pictures of churches to beautify their homes but this Muslim site was a central decorative motif in thousands of Jewish homes in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Arabs behind the site are upset at the Dome being shown underneath a Temple menorah.

So even today, Arabs are claiming that table coverings and other innocuous illustrations by Jews who consider the Temple Mount to be the most sacred spot in the world are justifications for murdering Jews.

No matter how far-fetched, today's antisemites will always find some supposed crime that Jews did to justify their being slaughtered. In fact, Mahmoud Abbas has used that same logic to justify the Holocaust, more than once, saying that how Jews acted brought it about. And it is the same logic that blames events in Jerusalem, or a "sirge" that had largely already been ended before October 7, for mass murder and rape and kidnapping of Jews.

There is no daylight between antisemitism and today's anti-Zionism. And you can see it in a challah cover.

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Another indication that perhaps dozens of the @UNRWA workers killed in Gaza were linked to terror

The Telegraph examines some statistics about the number of UNRWA workers killed in Gaza, and the timeframes. They are trying to imply that Israel was targeting UNRWA workers in the first weeks of the war when the bulk of them were killed.

But while they report another anomalous statistic, they don't speculate as to the reasons.

The article says that there are 13,000 UNRWA workers in Gaza, of whom 59% are women. Yet among the UNRWA casualties, only 38% are women.

Why would so many of the UNRWA deaths be military age males?

Moreover, as the article points out, the UNRWA deaths in the first weeks were evenly divided between the north and south parts of Gaza, even though Israel's general bombing campaign was far more concentrated in the north.

Either Israel was targeting UNRWA males - which seems highly unlikely, since there is nothing to gain from that.

Or Israel was targeting Hamas and other militants, and a high number of UNRWA males killed were moonlighting as Hamas operatives.

The Telegraph unwittingly supports that theory by saying that 148 out of the 150 UNRWA employees killed through mid-January were off-duty - it was after hours. It does not say how many of them were at their homes and how many were elsewhere - and I doubt that UNRWA would ever share that information.

Anyway you look at it, the difference between the 61 males expected to be killed if Israel was targeting all UNRWA workers, and the 93 males actually killed who were UNRWA workers, is statistically significant. Chances are that many of the UNWRA male casualties were in proximity with Hamas or Islamic Jihad militants - or were terrorists themselves.

Another possibility is that some of the UNRWA workers killed, including women, were human shields.

UNRWA told the Telegraph that Israel knows where UNRWA workers live and implied that any airstrikes on them were deliberate, but that is not how the IDF works. However, from the 2014 war we know that Hamas terrorists were found killed in the houses of families with different last names.

Top Hamas commander Ahmad Sahmoud was killed in 2014 in an airstrike along with 19 children of the Abu Jame' family. Why was he staying with so many young children?

Is it not possible that Hamas, knowing that UNRWA employees enjoyed some level of protection in previous wars, had some of their people use UNRWA homes as safe havens?

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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.

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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.

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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. "

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