Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, February 12, 2024

Egyptian lawmaker condemns Jews in Parliament; speaker strikes the word "Jews" from the record

Egyptian MP Al-Saeed Amara said during a parliamentary session on Monday, “We are all supportive of the armed forces, and we stand united behind the political leadership and the armed forces, with one heart, to defend Egyptian sovereignty and Egyptian security, and we condemn the actions taken by the Jews aimed at exterminating the defenseless Palestinian people.”

In one sentence he said how much Egyptians care about Palestinians and how much they refuse to give them refuge.

Dr. Hanafi Jabali, Speaker of the House of Representatives, took issue with tAmara's wording. He noted that Egypt's Constitution stipulates the protection of citizens and that they are equal before the law, whether they are “Muslims, Christians or Jews.”

The Speaker of Parliament pointed out that there are Egyptian Jews in Egypt, saying: “Hence the word ‘Jews’ is deleted from the record."

As of a year ago, there were only three Jews left alive in Egypt compared to 80,000 who lived there in 1948. They are all women and the youngest is 72 years old. So, yes, I suppose the remaining Jews in Egypt are treated equally under the law. The other 80,000, I'm not so certain about.

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Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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Some of the dumbest Israel/Rafah/Super Bowl conspiracy theories getting millions of views

A good definition of when criticism of Israel crosses the line into antisemitism is when their narratives turn into conspiracy theories.

A great number of people think that Israel planned their hostage rescue to coincide with a sporting event because, something about distraction or something.

Here are some of the more prominent purveyors of the latest antisemitic conspiracy theories:

Anytime that someone accuses Israel of trying to do something evil when the world is "distracted" you can be sure they are raving maniacs.

Can you name one time that this worked?

The newscast I listened to this morning had the daring Israeli hostage rescue in Rafah as the top story, and the Super Bowl came in second.

According to the ones incensed by the Super Bowl ad to bring the hostages home, Israel bought the ad specifically so they can time the operation during the game. Ads are bought months ahead of time, but, hey, those Jews probably fixed the game anyway.

Apparently Usher is part of the conspiracy, too.

This is not "criticism of Israel." This is derangement. And it proves, as much as anything can, that anti-Zionism is psychologically identical to classic Jew-hatred - it is obsessive hate where anything even loosely associated with Jews/Israel is assumed a priori to be evil, and the details of exactly how to make the evidence fit is an exercise to be done after the fact.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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02/12 Links Pt1: IDF rescues 2 hostages from Rafah; How the U.S. Can Punish the UN; Israel to shut down all UNRWA offices; The Red Cross Still Hates the Jews

From Ian:

John Spencer: Memo to the 'Experts': Stop Comparing Israel's War in Gaza to Anything. It Has No Precedent

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.

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.

The Red Cross Still Hates the Jews

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.

"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."

IDF rescues 2 hostages from south Gaza’s Rafah in daring nighttime operation

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.

It is a quintessential New York Story.

Gazala's is an unusual restaurant, with Druze cuisine and owned by Gazala Halabi, a divorced Druze woman from Israel. Located in Manhattan, it has had good reviews for years.

The owner is a proud Israeli and displays Israeli flags and a map of Israel on her menu. Since October 7, she has been subject to death threats, screaming customers, vandalism and her glass door has been smashed.

Ever since her restaurant has been subject to attack, the New York Jewish community has been showing solidarity, coming to her restaurant and helping her out.

This is a perfect story for the New York Times. After all, only days after October 7, the newspaper featured a Palestinian restaurant in Brooklyn, Ayat, that was also under attack - with a wave of bad reviews on Yelp.

No one vandalized Ayat. No one threatened the owners or their workers. No one broke plates and glasses. No one screamed at them. While Gazala's restaurant features Israeli flags, Ayat features murals of evil looking Israeli soldiers breaking into the bedroom of an innocent Palestinian girl.

Even the bad reviews were removed quickly.

Both Ayat and Gazala's previous restaurant has positive reviews in the New York Times - Ayat, twice, making that the third NYT article featuring the Palestinian restaurant in four years.

But the Times has not mentioned Gazala's being under attack, Halabi's patriotism and perseverance, and the Jewish community's support for her.

Neighborhood New York papers did. Jewish newspapers did. The New York Post did. Israeli newspapers did. Even Haaretz just published a story on Gazala and Gazala's.

But not the New York Times, which prides itself on stories of oppressed minorities fighting back against bigotry and hate.

Media bias is not only crimes of commission. Often they are crimes of omission.

There is no way the local reporters and editors in the Metropolitan section of the paper are not aware of Gazala's. Bany metric of what is newsworthy, Gazala's is far more important than Ayat.

But to them, an Arab Druze woman defending her country of birth and being supported by her supposed enemies is not newsworthy - when she is a proud Israeli.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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Last week, France's president Emmanuel Macron stated that the October 7 massacre was “the largest anti-Semitic massacre of our century.”

Who could possibly argue with that? Hamas is unapologetically antisemitic. Its (still current) founding charter includes phrases like

"Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious"

and

"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"

and

"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.'"

Hamas officials, in Arabic, are not shy about their antisemitism.

But UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese knows more about Hamas than Hamas does. She responded to Macron's statements with not only a denial that the October 7 pogrom murdering men, women and children was targeting Jews, but she even justified it as an attack against Israeli "oppression."

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.

With every other form of bigotry, the global Left does everything they can to maximize the definition of the terms to assume that every action is motivated by the hate by the "oppressor." The entire "genocide" accusation of Israel - which Albanese asserts is "likely"- is meant to paint all Israeli Jews as bigots against the Palestinian people as a whole, without even considering any other interpretation of events that contradict the thesis of innate hate.

But when a terrorist group attacks thousands of Jews, suddenly the definition of bigotry shrinks down to nothing. We cannot possibly read their minds, even though their own words explicitly prove their hate of Jews. And even if some of them are antisemitic, that has nothing to do with them attacking Jewish communities and Jewish people.

The President of the State of Israel is accused of hating all Palestinians, but bloodthirsty terrorists who brag about murdering Jews are given the benefit of the (nonexistent) doubt that their motives were pure.

When Jews are defending themselves, they are really trying to wipe out a people. When Jews are the victims, the attacks are justified and noble.

No fair minded person can interpret this hypocrisy as anything but pure antisemitism.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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The @NYTimes believes Hamas propaganda without question; but is still not quite sure if Israel really rescued hostages

These two adjacent stories in the New York Times "Israel-Hamas War" news, the most recent stories as of this writing, illustrates anti-Israel bias as perfectly as possible.

The source for the claim of "17,000 children orphaned or separated from their parents" is UNICEF. And UNICEF freely admits that it is a complete guess ultimately based on Hamas propaganda, saying, "Of course, this is an estimation since it is nearly impossible to gather and verify information under the current security and humanitarian conditions."

But the New York Times is reporting this wild guess as established fact. And it is indeed a wild guess, based on Hamas propaganda of the number of casualties and the percentage of women and children killed that even the UN no longer believes.

Contrast this with reporting about the hostage rescue. Perhaps as an initial headline it made sense when early reports were not complete, but the Times has updated the story since then - everyone knows the names and ages of the rescued hostages, their family members have been interviewed, we have photos.

But neither the headline nor the blurb has been updated.

Israeli statements are suspect even after they show clear documentary proof. Statements that even the source admits are made up (and the Times knows that) are reported as fact.

There is another more subtle bit of bias in the very name of the section.

Hezbollah has been shooting rockets into Israel since October 8. Houthis fired rockets towards Israel starting October 19. Rockets have been shot from Syria since at least October 24. Iraqi groups attacked Israel on November 2. And of course Islamic Jihad and other Gaza groups are also involved.

It isn't an Israel-Hamas war. It is an Israel-Iranian proxy war. By naming the conflict incorrectly, the NYT and virtually everyone else are framing Israel as the aggressor when in fact it is being attacked from literally all sides (including the Mediterranean Sea on October 7.)

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!

Two hostages rescued in dramatic IDF operation in Rafah. Terrorists claim "massacre."

From Times of Israel on the dramatic rescue of Israeli hostages Fernando Marman and Norberto Har:

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.”

Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, Egypt and the US have been pressuring Israel not to operate in Rafah. After seeing that hostages are kept there and Israel saved some, practically no Israelis will agree.

The terrorists, knowing that their hope that Israel won't invade Rafah have dwindled, decided to make up a story about massive massacres there without mentioning the rescue. Islamic Jihad's Palestine Today almost admits that terrorists were killed, but not quite:

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.

Ramallah News reports that "The Palestinian Red Crescent said that the city of Rafah is witnessing violent Israeli raids concentrated in the center of the city, targeting inhabited homes opposite the headquarters of the Red Crescent Society."

This indicates that Hamas is keeping hostages near areas like medical facilities in order to dissuade rescue attempts.

Altogether this was an extremely impressive operation. It points to the need for the IDF to go into Rafah in order to get rid of the rest of the major Hamas battalions and leaders - if there are any left who haven't already fled under tunnels from Rafah to Egypt.

This also points to how Israeli successes breed more success. Intel received from detained terrorists, computers and documents captured make it easier for Israel to mount pinpoint operations that can be better planned and better executed.

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!

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!

02/11 Links: UNRWA, the Greatest Welfare Scam Ever; US obsession with two-state solution is ‘delusional’; There’s no bigger hypocrite than a Left-wing ‘anti-racist’

From Ian:

UNRWA, the Greatest Welfare Scam Ever

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.”

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.

Right beneath UNRWA's headquarters: Israel Hayom gets inside look into Hamas' servers

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?

Axios reported last week:

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.

We've seen since the spyware stories started coming out in 2021 that the overwhelming amount of attention was paid to Israeli spyware companies and the fact that that they are linked to Israel, even though there are similar companies throughout Europe.

And guess what? The US doesn't ban spyware use by the US government!

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.

When the decision as to who will be sanctioned is made on a "case by case basis" that means there are no rules and no consistency in applying them. This makes this policy ripe for abuse for political purposes. In fact, politics seems to be the entire reason for this policy change right now.

This isn't a national security policy, and not a policy against all spyware as a potential vector for human rights abuses. Just like the recent anti-"settler" executive order, it is a policy to send messages of displeasure to Israel, and uses spyware as a convenient excuse.

The messages are getting louder and clearer.

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!

Biden is throwing Israel under the bus to win Michigan

Axios reported on January 31:

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.

What has changed? It isn't as if Palestinians have become more moderate, or willing to accept a Jewish state, over the past decade. It isn't as if they have turned against terror - on the contrary, the vast majority of Palestinians supported Hamas October 7 attack and the Abbas government never condemned October 7.

It is true that Saudi Arabia's foreign ministry said last week that it will not open diplomatic relations with Israel unless an independent Palestinian state is recognised on the fictional "1967 borders" with East Jerusalem as its capital. But this came only days after the Saudis signaled that they would accept only declarative steps of Israel saying it commits to an eventual Palestinian state to move forward because they are eager to forge a NATO-style pact with the US within two months and didn't want the Palestinian state issue to get in the way.

Which means that the Saudis aren't the reason the US is considering recognizing a Palestinian state. It strongly indicates that the Biden administration told the Saudis that they have the political space to demand more, and provide cover for any change in US policy.

So we are back to the question of why the US is sending the message of a change in longstanding US policy, to publicly support the worst antisemites in the world and throw Israel under the bus?

All indications point to Michigan.

Michigan is a key swing state in the November elections, and it has 200,000 Muslim voters - double the number of Jewish voters. And while the Jews reliably for the Democratic party no matter what its Middle East policy is, Muslim and Arab leaders have been saying since October 7 that they will abandon Biden and even allow Trump to win out of displeasure of Biden's public support of Israel after the massacre.

Back in October, the New York Times wrote about how Michigan Arabs and Muslims say they are willing to abandon Biden out of anger at the US' pro-Israel policies.

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.

Biden cannot afford to lose Michigan if he is to win the election. Trump is only 2 points ahead in Michigan in the most recent poll.

Palestinian US Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat, has not supported Biden during the presidential campaign. Her sister, Layla Elabed, is spearheading a campaign for Michigan Arabs and Muslims to vote "uncommitted" in the February 27th Democratic primary just to embarrass Biden and send a strong message that they prefer that Trump wins unless Biden does a U-turn on US policy away from Israel.

There have been numerous articles claiming that Benjamin Netanyahu is waging war in Gaza for political reasons only. But here we see that political reasons are the only possible reasons for the US to signal a sea change in policy against Israel and to unilaterally support a Palestinian state - and there is barely a squawk of protest from the people who claim to be the moral compass of America.

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!

This weekend we found out that there was a huge Hamas data center directly underneath UNRWA's Gaza headquarters. The main entrance to the tunnel was located under a UNRWA school in the area. Cables were found between the Hamas data center and the UNRWA data center above it.

UNRWA Commissioner-General Phillipe Lazzarini responded, saying that UNRWA was not aware of this and "In the past, whenever suspicious cavity was found close to or under UNRWA premises, protest letters were promptly filed to parties to the conflict, including both the de facto authorities in Gaza (Hamas) and the Israeli authorities. The matter was consistently reported in annual reports presented to the General Assembly and made public."

As someone who has discovered UNRWA websites that extolled martyrdom and antisemitism, UNRWA employee social media posts that support murdering Jews and UNRWA schools that directly teach students to murder Jews, I wanted to see how transparent UNRWA has been about incitement in previous investigations.

In my experience, UNRWA was quick to take down websites and even to discipline employees that violated its policies, but they never seemed to actively try to fix the underlying problem. And the things that they did discover were not publicized, but hidden under innocuous sounding sections of reports that didn't spell out what exactly the violations were.

After my and UN Watch's exposes, UNRWA began to take steps to address these issues we found - but even in their official reports, one gets the impression that the reason is to protect their own reputation and funding, not to ensure that there was true neutrality.

In their 2015 Operational Report - the year I had discovered so many damning examples - they wrote in one table:

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 organization started a Department of Internal Oversight Services to investigate these sorts of issues. But even they admit that their reason for existence is to make UNRWA look good more than actually rooting out the deep-seated problems in UNRWA itself. Their 2017 report about their response to the social media posts that support terrorism says:

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.

Not a risk to the students learning hate. No, the main risk of teachers who openly support terror is the reputational risk to UNRWA, which results in bad publicity and a loss of revenue.

Similarly, in 2015 they began doing "neutrality inspections" of schools to look for visible examples of things that were "non-neutral." They found them. But they only dealt with a few:

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.

Meaning, UNRWA refused to remove memorials to known terrorists, because it would upset - UNRWA employees.

They decided that the reputational risk of employees publicly protesting to keep memorials to terrorists was higher than the reputational risk of someone outside finding out about the memorials - so instead of removing the incitement and support for terror they made a calculation based on the comparative reputational risks and chose to keep the memorials.

Anyone see a problem here?

Which is what is happening now with the revelations of UNRWA employees moonlighting s Hamas terrorists and Hamas siphoning off UNRWA electricity (and probably network access.) The response is about the importance of maintaining the flow of cash to UNRWA more than anger at finding terrorists inside the organization.

In the end, the claim of "neutrality" is ludicrous anyway. The entire purpose of UNRWA is to keep the fake refugee issue alive, with the sole purpose of destroying Israel one day via "return." It doesn't get less neutral than that.

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!

02/10 Links: Under UNRWA’s Gaza HQ, IDF uncovers Hamas data center; The Global Complicity in Hamas’s Mayhem; A Brief History of the ‘AsAJew’

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The Global Complicity in Hamas’s Mayhem

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.)

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.

The Master of Israeli Fiction Comments on King David and the “Secret” of the IDF

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:

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.

Eli Lake: A Brief History of the ‘AsAJew’

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.”

02/09 Links Pt2: UNRWA's "Nobel Prize for Genocide"; Anti-Zionism is not ‘worthy of respect’; Biden gives Israel 45 days to submit report on international law violations

From Ian:

UNRWA's "Nobel Prize for Genocide"

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.

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.

Our own worst enemies

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).

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?

Anti-Zionism is not ‘worthy of respect’

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.