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! |
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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! |
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Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza has inevitably drawn comparisons to other battles or wars, both modern and from the past. These comparisons are mostly used to make the case that Israel's operations in Gaza are the most destructive in history, or the deadliest in history.The Red Cross Still Hates the Jews
Yet while the use of historical analogy may be tempting for armchair pundits, in the case of Israel's current war, the comparisons are often poorly cited, the data used inaccurate, and crucial context left out. Given the scale and context of an enemy purposely entrenched in densely populated urban areas, as well as the presence of tunnels, hostages, rockets, attackers that follow the laws of war while defenders purposely do not, and proximity between the frontlines and the home front, there is basically no historical comparison for this war.
Let's start with the context: After Hamas crossed into Israel on Oct. 7, murdering over 1,200 Israelis in brutal ways that included mutilation and sexually assaults as well as taking over 200 hostages back into Gaza, Israel formally declared a defensive war against Hamas in Gaza in accordance with international law and the United Nations charter. Since, the IDF estimates it has killed 10,000 Hamas operatives, while Hamas claims that the total number of casualties is 24,000 (Hamas does not distinguish civilian deaths from militant deaths).
The truth is that Israel has painstakingly followed the laws of armed conflict and implemented many steps to prevent civilian casualties, despite enormous challenges. Israel's military faced over 30,000 Hamas militants in over 400 miles of defensive and offensive tunnels embedded in and under civilian areas, populations and protected sites such as hospitals, mosques, schools, and United Nations facilities across multiple cities.
Hamas tunnels
Hamas' strategy is to use Palestinian civilians as human shields, because their goal is not to defeat Israel's military or to hold terrain; it is far more sinister and medieval—to use the death and suffering of Palestinian civilians to rally international support to their cause and demand that Israel halt their war.
Meanwhile, Israel's war aims were more traditional: returning Israeli hostages, dismantling Hamas military capability, and securing their border to prevent another October 7 attack.
These goals required not one major urban battle but multiple. While Gaza is not the densest populated urban region on earth as many claim, it features over 20 densely-populated cities. And while the Israeli Defense Forces are engaged in fighting, Hamas has continued to launch over 12,000 rockets on nearly every day of the war from the combat area toward civilian-populated areas in Israel, literally over the heads of the attacking IDF, who it bears mentioning are fighting just a few miles from their homeland and the homes of their soldiers.
Put all of this together, this war is simply without precedent. Certainly, it cannot be compared to the host of other wars that have been used for comparison sake to paint Israel in an unflattering light.
Even now, after an agreement was brokered between Israel and Hamas by Qatar to deliver medication to the hostages in Gaza, via France to Qatar and then through Egypt, the ICRC refuses to touch the medicines and has said that it wants nothing to do with them.IDF rescues 2 hostages from south Gaza’s Rafah in daring nighttime operation
"We know that the medications effectively entered into Gaza. The modalities of their transfer to the hostages were dealt with under Qatar's mediation. We now expect to receive verifiable proof that the medications have reached their beneficiaries." — Unnamed French official, Times of Israel, February 6, 2024.
On social media, the ICRC has made no secret of its anti-Israel bias and its complete lack of care for the Israeli hostages held by Hamas. "77% [of the tweets] were focused on criticizing Israel, expressly or by implication. Only 7% of the tweets criticized Hamas... No statement was made speaking directly about the massacre of October 7th... it is evident that the ICRC has dedicated large amounts of resources to interviewing doctors and victims in Gaza.... Comparatively little to no attention was paid to Israeli victims." — UN Watch, December 11, 2023.
As if to confirm the ICRC's coverup for Hamas, the newly appointed head of the ICRC is Pierre Krähenbühl, who was the head of UNRWA, the UN's agency for Palestinian refugees from 2014 until 2019, when he was forced to resign after a damning internal ethics probe. UNRWA is effectively embedded with Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
This is not the first time the ICRC ignored the plight of Jewish victims. During the Holocaust, the ICRC did nothing to help any of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis and instead wrote a "favorable report of the good treatment of Jews in German camps."
In a complex overnight operation, Israeli special forces rescued two hostages from Hamas captivity in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip early Monday, marking the first successful extraction of captives held by the terror group in months.
The Israel Defense Forces said that Fernando Marman, 61, and Louis Har, 70, were in good condition after being rescued, following an operation that involved battles with Hamas terrorists and massive Israeli airstrikes in Rafah. Both were later reunited with their families in an Israeli hospital and were said to be in good condition.
The pair had been abducted from Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak on the morning of October 7, when Hamas-led terrorists killed 1,200 people and took 253 hostages in a murderous rampage in southern Israel.
It was only the second such successful operation of its kind since October 7. The first was the rescue of soldier Ori Megidish in late October. In early December, the IDF attempted to rescue another hostage, but he was killed.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the operation “among the most successful rescue operations” in Israel’s history.
The joint operation by the police’s elite Yamam counterterrorism unit, the Shin Bet security agency, and IDF began at around 1 a.m. in Rafah, an area that Israeli forces had not yet maneuvered into during their ground offensive against the Hamas terror group.
IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said Yamam officers “carried out a very complex action on the premises and the second floor where the hostages were held.” A military helicopter arrives at Sheba Medical Center in Ramat Gan with two hostages rescued from Gaza in a military operation, February 12, 2024 (IDF)
“Reaching the target in the heart of Rafah was very complex,” Hagari said.
He said the forces breached the apartment with explosives at 1:49 a.m., killing the three terrorists guarding the hostages and “hugged and protected Louis and Fernando with their bodies.”
“The troops pulled Louis and Fernando out of the apartment and rescued them under fire, until they reached the safe zone,” Hagari said.
The IDF later released footage from the air showing the rescuers entering a building and strikes hitting the area.
"Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious"
"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslim fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him"
"We should not forget to remind every Muslim that when the Jews conquered the Holy City in 1967, they stood on the threshold of the Aqsa Mosque and proclaimed that 'Mohammed is dead, and his descendants are all women.'"
The 'greatest anti-Semitic massacre of our century'? No, Mr. @EmmanuelMacron . The victims of 7/10 were not killed because of their Judaism, but in response to Israel's oppression. France & the international community did nothing to prevent it. My respects to the victims.
IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari offers details on the rescue of hostages Marman and Har.“The IDF and the Shin Bet have been working on this operation for a long time,” he says.“Conditions were not ripe to carry it out until now, and we waited for them to ripen.”He adds: “Reaching the target in the heart of Rafah was very complex.”Forces clandestinely arrived at the target at around 1 a.m., and carried out a very complex action on the premises and the second floor where the hostages were held.”He says preparations included “backup, a major aerial envelope, and intimate intel.”He says forces then broke into the building through a locked door and exchanged fire with gunmen in the building and in adjacent buildings, while extracting the hostages to armored vehicles.“There was intense firepower from the air. Fire was opened from nearby buildings. The Air Force struck intensively there,” he says. At the same time, the armored corps also provided cover for the extraction.Hagari says “many terrorists were eliminated tonight in this action.”One soldier was lightly injured, but beyond that no Israelis were hurt.“The entire operation lasted about an hour from start to finish.”
The Israeli occupation committed a massacre in the city of Rafah, in the south of the Gaza Strip, leaving dozens of martyrs dead and hundreds wounded.Medical sources reported that more than a hundred martyrs so far and hundreds of injuries arrived at Al-Kuwaiti Hospital and Abu Youssef Al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah, after the occupation aircraft targeted several homes and mosques with dozens of raids, noting that the sounds of violent clashes between the Palestinian resistance and the occupation army were taking place near the vicinity.
Fatah, following its terrorism debut in 1965, grew in strength as would the other Muslim terror fraternities. Still, not since the founding of the UN in 1945 had there been one resolution, amid hundreds on the interminable violence, referring to a “Palestinian people” as a party to what otherwise was known as the Arab-Israeli conflict. Not until GA Resolution 2628 of December 8, 1970 did the General Assembly produce its first document referring to a “Palestinian people.”Right beneath UNRWA's headquarters: Israel Hayom gets inside look into Hamas' servers
And the rest is history. In the decade of the 70s, PLO Arabs so “mugged” Europe with their terror attacks, in 1980 the European Community (precursor to the EU) submitted to their demand for recognition as not criminal terrorists but political activists in a legitimate war of national liberation. It was called the “Venice Declaration.”
And as for UNRWA, many of its sixty-seven donor nations support it in fear of these “Palestinians” if they do not. For others, it has never been anything but a false front for peoples with histories of atrocious hostility and persecution of Jews who have supported the gangs in Gaza, Judea and Samaria with billions of dollars. Post-Holocaust, with antisemitism out of fashion, “Palestinian nationalism” became the new, “legitimate” way of reviling Jews and accusing them of crimes against humanity. UNRWA has been the conduit for maintaining more than a million people on its welfare rolls. And why? To give the Jews no peace. For such nations, UNRWA is ostensibly about charity for the “Palestinian refugees” that cloaks a timeless hatred of Jews.
There is nothing “Palestinian” about these people, and they certainly are not refugees. Their great-grandparents were, but unlike other war refugees in history, they were never helped to restart their lives in a new country of asylum. The PLO terrorists got the UN to recognize that the status of “Palestinian refugee” passes to their children and grandchildren, etc. until they can all “return home.” It is the only war-refugee population in history that has not dissolved over time via resettlement and the inexorable reality of actuarial tables but ballooned exponentially. The original 200,000 refugee migrant workers suddenly in Gaza in 1949 produced between one and two million of the Arabs in the Strip today, all of them recognized by the world as “Palestinian refugees” when they never in their lives sought refuge anywhere.
In the last week in January, UNRWA made headlines when the IDF revealed evidence of some dozen employees participating in the satanic Jew-killing, Jew-raping, Jew-mutilating, and Jew-kidnapping, sadistic murder orgy of October 7. At first, UNRWA protested they were a few bad apples and unrepresentative of the organization. But IDF soldiers in Gaza have been astonished to find Hamas propaganda, weapons and ammunition in home after home. Thousands worked for UNRWA/Hamas. These IDF veterans of Gaza have come to believe that everyone in Gaza is Hamas.
And that is why all the recipients of UNRWA handouts in Gaza, that is, 70% of the population, must be relocated away from Israel, which should be no problem since there are 56 officially Muslim states, 21 of them officially Arab as well, so surely Believers in the One True Faith will want to care for their co-religionists by taking them in and helping restart their lives.
With impressive cooperation between the 401st Brigade, the IDF Military Intelligence Direcotrate, the Engineering Corps, the Shin Bet security agency, and the 162nd Division – the careful clearing of the tunnel began. For several days our forces advanced meter by meter. They discovered a maze whose deciphering required great ingenuity. They also discovered the luxury conditions that the terrorists had prepared for themselves underground – from a first aid kit for emergencies to motorized scooters that would save them from having to walk bent over for 300 meters there and back, to state-of-the-art Electra air conditioners.
These were intended not only for the people – even in winter it's hot underground – but mainly for Hamas' technological brain, meaning for the server room located, as mentioned, beneath UNRWA's main compound in Gaza.
We were not allowed to see the full room, but even from the little we saw, it's clear this computer system would not embarrass an advanced high-tech company. Columns and columns of servers are cooled by new white air conditioners. Next to it, is a power facility, connected above ground.
"We are at the heart of the secret, in the server farm," Col. Nissim Hazan, who was brought in to command the operation to expose the tunnel, says. "This is the farm from which Hamas created its intelligence superiority. There are ten server cabinets here, full of much-coveted information. You could only get to this place with maneuvering soldiers. You can't do this by remote control or with an aerial bomb. Above us is UNRWA's huge building, which Hamas intentionally located here so we couldn't strike it. This is Hamas' intelligence treasure."
The information in the servers behind it will soon be sucked out. In the meantime, one can only guess that they were used to plan the murderous attack, to collect and concentrate intelligence information ahead of the raid, to remotely control the firing of missiles at Israel over the years, and perhaps also to prepare and build the tunnel array itself. What's certain is the connection to UNRWA is there for everyone to see in broad daylight.
After we again sank into the mud, crawled through the tunnel, walked hunched over for hundreds of meters, and came out into Gaza's trembling skies, the IDF APCs brought us to UNRWA's headquarters. There, among offices, schools, kindergartens, and SpongeBob drawings, the commander of 401st Brigade, Col. Benny Aharon, shows us the agency's own server room.
"We're in UNRWA's server room. Coincidentally – I say this cynically – it's located right above the server room you found underground," he says. "Notice that all the cables are ripped and disconnected, they left almost nothing, only what they managed to cut off. We're lucky a few cables remained that they didn't manage to cut off some of the cables that going down below. They took out all the DVRs and computers from here. Only someone who has something to hide does something like this. What kind of international humanitarian organization that only has good intentions behaves this way?"
Evening is falling and a cool breeze comes from the sea. The APCs head back to the beachfront handoff point. The brand new Netz unit – black coffee is their courtesy – again takes us in the armored vehicles, this time out towards Be'eri. We speedily cross areas our forces destroyed, and on that same route, the Hamas killers raced toward our communities that fateful morning.
The whole way, I couldn't stop thinking, why did they do this? The Hamasniks knew that one day the IDF would arrive. Hence the tangled tunnels, hence the fortified steel doors, hence a whole array of obstacles meant to delay the invasion that would sooner or later come. But if so, if you knew that in the end, Israel would defeat you anyway, why did you do this? What's the logic and benefit of committing crimes against humanity that end in your own destruction?
The State Department will start restricting visas Monday for people who are believed to be linked to misuses of commercial spyware.The State Department plans to decide who would fall under this category on a case-by-case basis, a senior administration official told reporters.The visa restrictions would prevent those who have profited from or facilitated the misuse of commercial spyware from traveling to the U.S., the official added.
The timing of this announcement sure seems to indicate that this is another US salvo against Israel.
As Haaretz reports:
The new U.S. policy may also expose Israelis active in the field to new sanctions, even if they have been acting with the approval of Israeli authorities.
Sources in the Israeli cybersecurity technology ...claimed that the American decision is an attempt by the Biden administration to pressure Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in connection with the current war in Gaza.
Though the decision is a continuation of an existing policy that began with the placing of Israeli spyware manufacturers like NSO and later Intelexa on a Biden administration blacklist, the timing of the new decision – during the war in Gaza – is "disturbing," senior industry sources say.
A number of leading figures in Israeli cyber intelligence firms all agreed that the announcement had less to do with spyware and more with sending a message to Netanyahu: "Precisely like the reports on [United States] withholding ammunition, like sanctions on [extremist Jewish] settlers, this is another case of the U.S. trying to create leverage on Israel and pressure the Netanyahu government to agree to American terms," a senior Israeli cybertechnology executive told Haaretz.
The Biden administration has not banned all uses of spyware within the U.S. government — the ban only covers use cases involving companies the administration deems a threat to national security, such as Cytrox, NSO Group and others.
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! |
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Secretary of State Tony Blinken asked the State Department to conduct a review and present policy options on possible U.S. and international recognition of a Palestinian state after the war in Gaza, two U.S. officials briefed on the issue told Axios.For decades, U.S. policy has been to oppose the recognition of Palestine as a state both bilaterally and in UN institutions and to stress Palestinian statehood should only be achieved through direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.Efforts to find a diplomatic way out of the war in Gaza has opened the door for rethinking a lot of old U.S. paradigms and policies, a senior U.S. official said.Some inside the Biden administration are now thinking recognition of a Palestinian state should possibly be the first step in negotiations to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict instead of the last, the senior U.S. official said.
Some prominent Arab American figures in Michigan have predicted that many voters in the state will choose to leave the presidential candidate ballot blank next year.One of them is Osama Siblani, the publisher of The Arab American News and an outspoken voice on Middle East policy. He has heard the worry that abandoning Mr. Biden means that Mr. Trump, should he be the Republican nominee for president, will prevail.“My argument is, ‘Let him win,’” he said of Mr. Trump.
Unlike Jews, Michigan Arabs look at the Middle East as their most important issue. In a poll commissioned by the Arab American Institute in October, nationwide support among Arabs for Biden went down from 59% in 2020 to 17% now.
In Michigan, that would translate to 84,000 votes lost for Biden. Biden carried Michigan in 2020 by only 154,000 votes, and Trump won in 2016 by only 11,000 votes.
Recognizing a Palestinian state would probably barely affect the Jewish vote in Michigan at all but Arab and Muslim leaders are threatening, as a bloc, to abandon Biden.
Real or perceived breach of UNRWA neutrality as humanitarian actor• Donors reduce their financial support.• Reputation of UNRWA as a non-neutral actor creating distrust among beneficiaries and partners
The Ethics Office took the lead in developing a new mandatory, all staff, e-learning course on social media and neutrality, two issues representing a significant reputational risk to the Agency.
Neutrality issues that could be addressed included the removal of political graffiti or posters on the outside walls of the installations. Many of the issues that remained unsolved related to long-standing memorials to individuals killed in the conflict that the Agency was unable to remove.
The global complicity in Hamas’s brutal reign is quite a thing to behold. Egypt won’t accept even the temporary residency of Palestinian civilians, but it knows that under its nose Hamas leaders mosey in and out of the Sinai. The Qataris only possess leverage in the hostage talks because they are Hamas’s checking account, funding their wayward buddy’s murder habit. Turkey is, for crying out loud, in NATO. And yet Ankara hosts Hamas offices, aids the group financially, gives it diplomatic backing whenever conflict flares up (always at Hamas’s instigation), and even temporarily hosted one of the key planners of the October 7 rampage, Saleh al-Arouri. (Israel eliminated Arouri in Lebanon right around the new year.)The Master of Israeli Fiction Comments on King David and the “Secret” of the IDF
None of this even gets into the support Hamas gets through the various agencies of the United Nations, or from naïve-seeming Western nations, or even the fundraisers on America’s college campuses.
All of which is to say: On this issue, there isn’t much credibility to go around. Israel deserves full support from a chastened community of nations—especially those that will benefit from a Hamas defeat. That includes Egypt, which will sit on its hands while Israel dismantles terror tunnels underneath Egyptian sands. In fact, defeating Hamas will benefit everyone in the region who is threatened by Iranian expansionism. And this certainly includes the Biden administration. Washington’s sudden obsession with taking “irreversible” steps toward the establishment of a Palestinian state cannot even be contemplated so long as Hamas rules a single square foot of land on which such a state would stand.
All these countries’ opinions on Gaza deserved consideration up until the moment October 7 revealed a dearth of clean hands among them. And if the IDF’s operation in Rafah further embarrasses Hamas’s enablers, so be it.
In 1964, an Israeli journalist asked S.Y. Agnon, a towering figure of 20th-century Hebrew literature, to comment on the fact that the Jewish state was now defended by a Jewish army. Herewith, an excerpt from Jeffrey Saks’s translation of his reply:Eli Lake: A Brief History of the ‘AsAJew’
I think the army is nothing to play around with, but dabbling in pacifism is a bad business. Regarding our regular pacifists, who bask in their pacifism, the sages have already said, “Whoever shows mercy to the cruel ends up being cruel to the merciful.” I had one of the Shomer HaTzair members visit, from that leftwing youth movement. In response to the opinion he shared with me, I responded that the time when the people of Israel outstretched their necks for slaughter has passed. They claim that an army and war are not fitting for the people of Israel. Is it “fitting” for our enemy to slaughter us and for us to be slaughtered? Regarding the messianic era, it is said, “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation” (Isaiah 2:4)—but to achieve that we must be worthy of the messiah.
I don’t like the military. I would not talk about a Gentile army this way. I am not moved by anything practical or technical. . . . Yet when I witnessed, here in the Talpiot neighborhood [of Jerusalem], the young men in the War of Liberation, how they defended us and how they would come from their posts on Shabbat eves to hear kiddush—then I couldn’t hold back tears.
Israel, which had the insight to make the great and valiant warrior King David into a poet of the Psalms, one who sits and passionately studies the Torah—perhaps this is the secret of our army’s endurance.
The intellectual godfather of the AsAJews is a former professor named Norman Finkelstein. In the 2009 documentary American Radical, Finkelstein says he was proud of the sign he waved at a protest of the Israeli consulate in New York at the start of the 1982 Lebanon War. It read: “This son of survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Auschwitz, Maijdenek will not be silent. Israeli Nazis Stop the Holocaust in Lebanon.”
One hears this atrocious equation of the Jewish state to the Third Reich all the time today. Forty years ago, though, Finkelstein was a pioneer. Comparing Israel to the Nazis was something one might hear at a Weather Underground meeting or on Egyptian state radio, but not inside the corridors of power. Today, this defamation is a core part of Finkelstein’s performance.
A clip of Finkelstein addressing college students who asked why he compared Zionist students to the architects of the Holocaust has gone viral since October 7. With the pitch of his voice rising into a fury of indignation, he tells a student who is in tears: “Both of my parents were in the Warsaw uprising, and it is precisely because of the lessons they taught me and my two siblings that I will not be silent as Israel commits its crimes against the Palestinians.”
In November 2023, when I debated Finkelstein, he was more subdued. But he still repeatedly referred to the Gaza before October 7 as a concentration camp and said he could not bring himself to condemn Hamas’s massacre for the same reason that many abolitionists would not condemn the Nat Turner slave rebellion before the Civil War.
On the substance, Finkelstein is, of course, dead wrong. There are shopping malls and luxury hotels in Gaza. Billions in humanitarian aid have poured into the Strip since before Israel forcibly withdrew its soldiers and settlers from the land in 2005. And much of that aid has been stolen by Hamas for its war machine. To compare the conditions of Gaza to Auschwitz or Dachau or for that matter a plantation is an act of moral and historical illiteracy.
But leaving these facts aside, we should say that Finkelstein is a gift to the enemies of the Jewish people. After all, a Gentile who traffics in such toxic analogies would be instantly labeled an anti-Semite. But a child of Holocaust survivors? That is something entirely different. What’s more, if Israel is the Nazi state that Finkelstein claims, can you really blame the Palestinians for their blood lust on October 7?
In this sense, Finkelstein is following in the footsteps of Pfefferkorn, who brandished his credential as a former Jew to slander the Talmud, just as Finkelstein brandishes his credential as the son of survivors to slander Israel.
These libels matter. They justify, rationalize, and incite atrocities large and small. Jews do not learn black magic from the study of Talmud, but millions of Europeans believed this lie for centuries. Israel does not target Palestinian children; rather, Hamas endangers them by shooting rockets from schools and mosques. But millions of people around the world believe that Israel does.
The anti-Semites of the Middle Ages needed AsAJews to provide credentials for the lies that justified their pogroms and expulsions. Today, Hamas and its allies in Iran need the AsAJews to persuade the Hague, European governments, and the White House to delegitimize Israel’s right to self-defense.
The silver lining is that, just as in Pfefferkorn’s time, there are righteous Gentiles like Reuchlin. The honor roll includes New York Representative Ritchie Torres, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, and many others. But the biggest surprise since October 7 has been Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania. He ran as a left-wing populist in 2022 and managed to win his race despite suffering a stroke that diminished his brain’s speech functions. As he has recovered, Fetterman has emerged defiant of the pro-Palestinian activists in his party. In January, he walked past a group of them with a wide grin as he waved a small Israeli flag. When South Africa began its prosecution of Israel in the show trial at the Hague, he told the Orthodox Union, “South Africa oughta sit this one out.”
It is important to know that there is a long tradition of converts who work hard to credential the libels of the enemies of the Jews. But we must also acknowledge the tradition of righteous Gentiles who have debunked them—even if those who advance these slanders testify to these lies “as a Jew.”
Norwegian Labour MP Asmund Aukrust recently nominated the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) to receive a Nobel prize. The UNRWA nomination comes as the world bears witness to incontrovertible evidence of UNRWA employees' direct role in the Hamas mass terror invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.Our own worst enemies
UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer testified before Congress on Jan. 30, 2024, documenting UNRWA employees' incitement of the murder of Jews and glorification of the Hamas massacre. "In November 2023, we sent a report to the UN on 20 teachers who celebrated the October massacre. In March, together with the organization Impact-se, we identified 133 UNRWA teachers who promoted hate and violence on social media....The core problem with UNRWA is that the very purpose of the agency is to perpetuate the war of 1948, and to send the message to Palestinians that the war of 1948 isn't over."
UNRWA isn't the only worthy nominee for the "Nobel Prize for Genocide." The South African government is another leading candidate for its abominable and unforgivable referral of Israel to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on charges of genocide.
Just months before South Africa's ICJ petition was submitted, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) teetered on the verge of bankruptcy. Almost magically, following South Africa's minister of international relations, Dr. Naledi Pandor's, Oct. 23, 2023, visit to Tehran, it was reported that the ANC's finances had "stabilized." Pandor's visit was almost immediately followed by South Africa's full-throated accusation of genocide against Israel. Soon after, the South African Parliament voted in favor of severing diplomatic ties.
It’s bad enough that we have real enemies who are attacking Israel; the last thing we need is “friends” who, perhaps with the best of intentions, are undermining Israel’s case in the United States. One example is an organization I have never heard of, the A-Mark Foundation, which erroneously believes “clear, concise and unbiased information on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is difficult to find.” Maybe, if you don’t bother to look. My publication, Myths and Facts, has only been around for 60-odd years (originally published by the founder of AIPAC), and the legacy Jewish organizations have produced plenty of material. My first impulse was to think, “Let a thousand flowers bloom,” but then I saw that the material is based on the work of UCLA professor Dov Waxman, a frequent critic of mainstream American Jewry and one of the signers of an anti-Israel screed published before Oct. 7 (another was Harvard University professor Derek Penslar, who Harvard naturally put on its antisemitism task force).Anti-Zionism is not ‘worthy of respect’
If the material A-Mark published, based on Waxman’s book, The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: What Everyone Needs to Know, is any indication of his scholarship, students at UCLA are in trouble, as are any readers of the A-Mark answers to the “10 Common Questions About the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.” Waxman exemplifies the worst of woke academia, where facts don’t matter as much as narratives, and their truthfulness or speciousness is irrelevant because everyone’s narrative is their truth. He says both sides dismiss the others’ narratives as myths. He doesn’t acknowledge that facts can be distinguished from myths. It’s a flypaper version of history where there are two sides, and it doesn’t matter which side the fly lands on.
The first paragraph in the “unbiased” answer to question one on what the conflict is about is misleading and inaccurate, reducing it to the two peoples fighting over one piece of land cliché. The religious dimension of the conflict is ignored completely; that is, the Islamic rejection of a Jewish presence on “Muslim land” from the days of the Mufti to Hamas today.
He dates Palestinian nationalism to the mid-19th century, which is untrue. People at that time identified themselves by clans and religion. In the 1920s, the Palestinians began to talk about wanting to be part of Greater Syria, not an independent state. The Jews wanted to return to their homeland and were willing to share it. Unhappily, they accepted the reduction of the size of the Jewish homeland.
Starting in 1937—and as recently as 2008—the Palestinians were offered opportunities for statehood nine times and rejected every one. The Palestinians’ disinterest in independence during the 19-year Jordanian/Egyptian occupation is not mentioned.
It is simply taken for granted that the Palestinians should get a state just because they want one. The Kurds and Basques have a greater claim to independence. Why are only Palestinians entitled to one?
But there is something about the language of the ruling that I find unsettling. After all, strictly speaking, it is not based on upholding Miller’s right to free speech. It’s based on Judge Rohan Pirani’s unprecedented claim that anti-Zionist views, including Miller’s obsessive hatred for Israel, are ‘worthy of respect in a democratic society’ and therefore protected under the Equality Act.
This aspect of the Equality Act has been at the centre of various free-speech battles of late. It has enabled many gender-critical feminists – most famously, Maya Forstater – to assert their right to criticise trans ideology and its impact on women’s rights. The trouble is, this aspect of the law is not about upholding free speech for all, it is about deciding which views are and aren’t permitted. It is about which views fit within the Overton window. Unlike the US First Amendment, which takes a content-neutral approach to protecting speech, the UK’s Equality Act effectively allows the state to decide what is and isn’t ‘worthy of respect in a democratic society’.
That the courts have judged anti-Zionism to be ‘respectable’, then, is disturbing. After all, anti-Zionism doesn’t just express an opposition to an ideology – like ‘anti-Communism’ does – it also expresses hatred for a nation. Namely, Israel. The tribunal has effectively dressed up a bigoted hatred of Israel as a considered philosophical position, as a perfectly normal belief.
It is unlikely that the court would have come to this view before the 7 October pogrom. Yet, in the shadow of the Israel-Hamas war, not only have anti-Israel and even anti-Semitic sentiments become increasingly prevalent, they have also been normalised and legitimised.
This was something Miller’s lawyer, Zillur Rahman, clearly recognised. After the verdict was delivered, he said that when Miller ‘expressed his beliefs about Zionism, which led to him being dismissed, they weren’t that widely known’. But since the Israel-Hamas war broke out, people have ‘woken’ up to the supposed fact ‘that Zionism is inherently racist and must be opposed’.
Here we can see how Miller’s victory has provided a platform for anti-Israeli propaganda. Miller has every right to spout his conspiratorial nonsense. But we shouldn’t be expected to treat it as a respectable philosophical position. We must challenge and protest against this bigotry before it becomes fully institutionalised.
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The Apartheid charge, the Abraham Accords and the "right side of history"
With Palestinians, there is no need to exaggerate: they really support murdering random Jews
Great news for Yom HaShoah! There are no antisemites!