Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, March 11, 2024

Hamas steals flour from the UN, sells it to a baker - and @NPR celebrates his cakes

NPR has what is meant to be a heartwarming, inspirational story:

ANAS BABA, BYLINE: Ibrahim Abuhani is a professional baker with shops across Gaza, but he did not plan on making cakes during this war. He had to flee his home, like most people in Gaza, and opened his cake shop just to the people in order to charge their phones. And it was for free. There is no electricity now in Gaza, and his bakery runs on solar power. But a month ago, a man walked into the shop and asked for a cake.

ABUHANI: (Speaking Arabic).

BABA: The man said that his own son got injured in the war. And when he woke up from the anesthesia, he said, where is the birthday cake you promised me? The baker hesitated but agreed to take his order. As he was baking the cake, someone else walked in. He said his little daughter was scared by the war, and he wanted to throw her a little party. Little by little, Abuhani was baking again, and he was shocked by the demand for cake.

Some other anecdotes of customers begging for cakes which Abuhani claims to sell at no profit come next.

Then NPR offhandedly mentions this:

Abuhani struggles to find ingredients. Supplies are so low in Gaza, sugar and eggs cost a fortune, so he's not making a profit. He says he feels bad buying flour on the black market - flour that belongs to the United Nations to give away as aid - but he says it's worth it to see the joy in his customers' eyes.

Hold on a second.

He's buying flour that was meant to be given away for free by the UN?

Who, exactly, is selling this flour to him? Who is making the profit on the flour?

There aren't too many stories on the Gaza black market in English. Al Hurra had a detailed report in January in Arabic, where Hamas was not accused directly of stealing aid by Gazans, but it sems pretty clear that is who is referred to:

A Palestinian journalist said, in statements to Al-Hurra website on the condition that her identity not be revealed, that there is “major corruption in the distribution of humanitarian aid,” and claimed that there were “thefts of it,” without accusing any party of that.

She added: "The aid is stolen immediately after entering (the Strip) or from the warehouses, by those responsible for distributing it, and not from the people."

In this context, a Gazan resident in Egypt, whose family is still in the Gaza Strip, spoke to Al-Hurra website, on the condition that her identity not be disclosed in order to preserve the safety of her family, that “a lot of support does not go to those who deserve it.”

She continued: "There are those who distribute aid to their relatives and do not give it to those who deserve it. Therefore, some have a surplus of support that they do not need. On the other hand, some do not have food to eat."

The black market isn't only for staples like flour, but even for necessities like tents that are being stolen!

[Another journalist said] "an Emirati tent is sold for 3,000 shekels (about 800 dollars) and a Qatari tent for 2,500 shekels (669 dollars)," noting that these tents "should go to the refugees who fled the northern Gaza Strip."

In this regard, Al-Ghazia, who lives in Egypt, said: “Tents that arrive in the Gaza Strip are sold as aid, and the prices vary according to the country that sent them, and they are supposed to be bought by people who have nothing.”

It is noteworthy that there are spread on social media what resemble advertisements for the sale of tents in the Gaza Strip, in which the tents are classified according to the country of origin.

The black market seems to be not only Hamas, but also gangs who are stealing the aid off of trucks. Hamas, however, wants a monopoly on the black market. Al Jazeera glowingly reports about a new Hamas-linked gang of masked, armed men called the People’s Protection Force who go to the markets, identify those who are selling goods at way above the market prices, warn them to reduce the prices, and if they refuse - Hamas confiscates the items and claims to sell them for the official market prices.

And if you believe that one, I have a pier in Gaza to sell you.

(h/t Irene)

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

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It took Hamas 22 months to admit Israel was right in how many terrorists were killed in Operation Cast Lead

A lot of Hamas apologists try to claim that Hamas has a track record of telling the truth in its casualty claims in previous wars. But that is not true.

Hamas didn't lie much about things it could not get away with, like total deaths, because there were NGOs on the ground counting. But they did lie about everything they could.

From Al Arabiya, January 19, 2009:

Hamas's armed wing said on Monday it lost only 48 fighters during Israel's 22-day operation in Gaza and vowed to fight on unless the Jewish state withdrew its forces from the Palestinian enclave.

"We announce to our people the martyrdom of 48 Qassam fighters,," Abu Obeida, spokesman for the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, said in a televised press conference.

Abu Obeida also claimed that Israel lost "at least 80 soldiers" in the fighting. The Jewish state listed 10 soldiers killed.

Israel had failed to achieve "any of the objectives it had set for the war ... and only killed hundreds of children, women and old people," [Abu Obeida said.]

It took 22 months for Hamas to admit Israel's numbers were correct. From Haaretz, November 9. 2010:

Hamas admitted last week that between 600 and 700 of its militants were killed during Operation Cast Lead – a figure consistent with that reported by the Israel Defense Forces.

The figure is several times higher than the previous number of fatalities that Hamas claimed it sustained during the operation.

Hamas military wing had previously claimed that only 49 of its militants were killed during the three-week operation that the IDF launched in December 2008. Israel had put the figure at 709.

As of a month ago, Israel says that it has killed some 12,000 terrorists so far. Hamas claims that 72% of those killed are women and children and very few are Hamas members. (They denied and denounced one Hamas spokesperson admitting to a news agency 6,000 Hamas members were killed.)

The current Al Qassam Brigades spokesman is the very same Abu Obeida!

Who has a better track record of telling the truth? And given this track record, why on Earth do reporters and NGOs still believe anything Hamas says and do everything but call Israel liars?

Because they choose to.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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03/10 Links: The Left shows its chilling true face by refusing to accept Jews feel intimidated; Mossad: Hamas ‘striving to ignite the region during Ramadan’

From Ian:

The Left shows its chilling true face by refusing to accept Jews feel intimidated

If it wasn’t bad enough that some on the Left have questioned whether the rapes, murders, beheadings and child killings of October 7 actually happened, now Jewish people who have said that they feel too intimidated to go into central London at the weekend during the pro-Palestinian protests are being similarly gaslit.

This week, the counter-extremism tsar Robin Simcox raised his own concerns about the effect of the marches on Jewish people, saying the demonstrations had turned London “into a no-go zone for Jews every weekend”.

Blaming the UK for developing a “permissive environment for radicalisation” which has seen extremism become “normalised,” he wrote in The Telegraph: “[Extremist] groups have gone unchallenged for too long, and have used their time well. They are now embedded and influential among communities.”

Simcox should know: he’s the Home Office’s independent adviser on counter-extremism. But if you don’t believe him, you only have to look at the results of surveys conducted since October 7, which reveal that Jewish people feel far less safe than they used to. We’ve heard from Jews who no longer feel comfortable wearing a Star of David in public and others who actively avoid London when the marches are on.

Five ways Israelis have changed, after 5 months of war

Five months after the surprise Hamas assault on Israel on Oct. 7, and Israel's punishing military response in Gaza, Israeli and Palestinian lives have been immeasurably changed.

The catastrophic conditions worsening daily in Gaza often overshadow the profound transformation Israelis have undergone.

The state of Israel's society is crucial to understanding where the conflict might lead. Here are five ways Israel has been transformed in the last five months of war.

1. Israelis' lives are on hold
Israelis remain in a state of suspended animation.

Following the Oct. 7 attack, 94,000 Israelis are still displaced, evacuated from their homes near the restive Gaza and Lebanon borders. Some 32,000 of them are still being put up in hotels across Israel, according to data from an internal Israeli government database provided to NPR.

It was only two weeks ago that Avidor Schwartzman, a survivor of the Oct. 7 attack, finally moved with his family from a room at the Shefayim Hotel, a resort north of Tel Aviv, to a new trailer park set up behind the hotel.

"It doesn't feel like home, but it feels a lot more like a home," he says.

Schwartzman's trailer is one of eight prefab homes lined up in two rows, built on sand, housing broken families from the same devastated kibbutz, Kfar Aza. They include a young woman whose father was killed on Oct. 7; a family with a hostage still held in Gaza; and Schwartzman, whose in-laws were killed.

"I wish I could just, you know, erase it from my mind," he says about the attack. "Not to wallow in everything, because there is so much sadness here, and so much grief."

New homes are being built for the displaced residents of Kfar Aza, at another kibbutz near their old home. But Schwartzman says some families refuse to leave this trailer park of sadness until Israel strikes a deal with Hamas to free its remaining captives, around 130 Israelis, many believed to be alive.

It is not just the evacuated, the survivors and the hostages whose lives are on hold.

"On Oct. 7, something cracked, or maybe broke, in the Israeli psyche," Schwartzman says. "Even those that weren't there, just saw it on TV, they are still there."

2. Israelis believe the world has turned its back on them
As global attention has turned to Israel's military campaign in Gaza, many Israelis are on a parallel warpath: to convince the world they are victims, not aggressors.

Israel's foreign minister accuses the United Nations of minimizing the accounts of sexual violence deployed during the Oct. 7 attacks, and has recalled Israel's U.N. ambassador in protest.

Young Israeli influencers are on the offensive on the social media battlefield. Shiraz Shukrun, 25, an Instagram promoter of shampoo, Vaseline and beer to more than half a million followers on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, volunteers with the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, posting videos about Oct. 7.

"I find that I'm way angrier than before. I feel like so many people are against us," she says, referring to #FreePalestine hashtags and social media posts justifying the Hamas attack. "Only Israelis know how other Israelis feel. No one will never know how we feel."

"Many Still Had Expressions of Pain on Their Faces"

Sheri Mendez is part of a volunteer unit within the Military Rabbinate. "In 2010, the IDF decided, as more women joined combat units, to establish a small female unit for the eventuality, God forbid, that a female soldier is killed," she said. "They accompany the identification process and burial preparations." She received an emergency call-up order on Oct. 7. Arriving at the Camp Shura base, she said, "The initial shock was from the quantity. Body bags lined both sides of the corridor, whole trucks arrived with more bodies. We couldn't believe the numbers. The second shock was from the level of brutality and horrors we saw." "We were with those young women in the room preparing them for burial. Our goal was to give them their last respects. We opened the body bags....It was a special room for women by women....Some of the bodies arrived in very poor condition, but we took our time to handle them in a way that honored them. We knew we were likely the last people to be with these women. It was deeply sad; they could have been our daughters, brutally murdered."

"Many still had expressions of pain on their faces. Their fists were clenched, their mouths sometimes open, and some were missing body parts. We saw women shot in the head, shot in the torso. It was horrifying to witness. You could tell these women did not die an easy death."

Five months later, the horrors do not fade for Mendez. However, what pains her most is the world's denial of the massacre and the atrocities of Oct. 7. "I am a daughter of Holocaust survivors, raised on the testimonies of what happened to most of our family....The world doubts something we all saw with our own eyes....These women can't speak; only those of us who saw it can speak for them....That's why I continue to talk about what happened there, in those days, for them."

UN deliberately laundering its Gaza casualty statistics to make them appear to not come from Hamas

In January, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs stopped reporting the Hamas claims that 70% of casualties in Gaza were women and children. It had been relying on Hamas' Ministry of Health statistics, and that ministry had stopped reporting on women and children allegedly killed in December.

On Friday, UN-OCHA resumed its claims of the number of women and children killed. And it proves beyond any doubt that it cannot be trusted to report anything.

Here is the graphic from its latest report:

It says the source for 13,000 children killed is "GMO," which sounds a lot like an acronym for a respected international organization.

It isn't.

It stands for "Gaza Media Office," meaning a Hamas Telegram channel with zero accountability and zero credibility. It comes from terrorists who celebrate the murders of Israeli women and children.

But its source for women killed is even more deceptive.

It says the source is UN Women, I found the UN Women report that said that, as of March 1, over 9,000 women had been killed in Gaza.

An estimated 9,000 women have been reportedly killed by Israeli forces in Gaza to date. This figure is likely an underestimate, as many more women are reported to be dead under the rubble[2].

Footnote 2?

[2] Source: UN Women’s calculation estimates are based on OCHA reported numbers.

So OCHA's source is UN Women, and UN Women's source is...OCHA!

This gives an idea of how deceptive the UN is when it comes to finding ways to accuse Israel of crimes.

In the end, both of those numbers originally come from the same Gaza Media Office.

What about the "7,000 reported missing or under the rubble"?

That number has been tossed around since November. Its source?

Again, the Hamas Gaza Media Office!

Is it even remotely plausible that none of the 7,000 bodies supposedly under the rubble have been recovered? Moreover, is it plausible that Hamas even has a means to calculate the number of missing people to begin with?

Hamas makes up the numbers out of thin air. It has no evidence, no proof, no methodology, nothing to back up these numbers, not even a human being who reporters can question. The statistics are as fictional as the "471" people Hamas claims were killed at Al Ahli Hospital in October.

The UN is laundering its casualty statistics to make them appear not to have originated with a murderous, rapist terror group. World media and other NGOs now can say that statistics that have been literally made up by Hamas are verified by the UN.

And a Hamas blood libel now has the imprimatur of the UN, not to mention the President of the United States.

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Amnesty has been silent on October 7 sexual assaults, while HRW doesn't quite believe them

It's been over five months since the horrific October 7 attacks. The two leading human rights organizations, In those five months, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have not admitted or condemned any reports of rape or sexual assault.

Amnesty hasn't said a single word on the topic.

It wrote about the October 7 attacks on the day itself, condemning both Hamas and Israel equally, and saying that the "root causes" of the "escalation" were all from Israel.

Five days later, it issued its only report on the massacre so far which again mentioned "Israeli war crimes" nearly as prominently as the details of the Hamas attack.

Almost unbelievably, at the end of that sole report saying Haams committed war crimes,, Amnesty adds an italicized postscript to assure readers - don't worry, we haven't become pro-Israel, and we'll be publishing lots of anti-Israel reports to come:

Amnesty International is an impartial human rights organization and seeks to ensure that all parties to an armed conflict comply with international humanitarian law and international human rights law. Accordingly, in future briefings, Amnesty International will be investigating Israel’s military action in the Gaza Strip to determine whether it is complying with the rules of international humanitarian law, including by taking necessary precautions to minimize harm to civilians and civilian objects and refraining from unlawful attacks and from collective punishment of the civilian population, as required under international law. Amnesty International will also continue to monitor the activities of Hamas and Palestinian armed groups.

I could not find this kind of caveat at the end of any other Amnesty report among thousands on its site.

That was over 150 days ago, and we have not heard a word since then on these further "investigations" they promised in October on Hamas. Meanwhile, Amnesty has published dozens of press releases condemning Israel.

Not once has it even hinted that it is researching rapes and sexual assaults by Hamas and other armed groups on October 7.

Human Rights Watch did mention the reports of sexual assault, peripherally, in an interview with an HRW researcher who visited Israel for three weeks following the attacks about gathering evidence. That report says:

There have been harrowing reports of sexual violence and other forms of gender-based violence committed during the attacks. Were you able to verify those?

It’s vitally important to investigate sexual violence, and in doing so, we also need to work carefully to avoid causing further harm. Around the world, Human Rights Watch adopts an approach that centers on the needs and rights of survivors, witnesses, and the families of victims, and attempts as best we can to avoid retraumatization. That’s one of the complexities we deal with in all of our work, and it is especially critical when documenting sexual violence.

We have reviewed statements from people who say they witnessed cases of rape and other forms of gender-based violence. And some first responders we spoke to described seeing women’s bodies in conditions or circumstances that could be consistent with sexual violence.

However, there is a lack of forensic evidence that makes it much harder to know the scale and nature of the abuses. We have not interviewed anyone who is a survivor of sexual violence committed during the attacks on October 7.

We are still monitoring and assessing any information that’s being reported. There may be sexual violence victims who were killed, and, as it is often the case with sexual violence, survivors who may not be ready or may have chosen not to divulge information about their experiences for reasons that could include trauma and stigma. In the past month, news media have published interviews in which several survivors of the attacks described witnessing rape. A careful, independent, survivor-centered, and credible investigation of all reports of sexual violence – and other forms of gender-based and other violence – on October 7 is urgently needed. Sexual and gender-based violence during armed conflict are war crimes.

In short, HRW is discounting all the evidence that exists - including a New York Times report published a month before this interview and tons of evidence from rescue workers and pathologists - and saying that it has not verified the information.

If you would get all your news from Amnesty and HRW, you would barely know that anything happened on October 7, and at any rate, whatever happened was clearly trivial compared to what Israel did before and afterwards. And you would think that any reports of sexual assault are either lies or unverified rumors.

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!

Remember Marc Garlasco, the former Human Rights Watch "senior military analyst" who was suspended and forced to resign when his hobby of avidly collecting Nazi memorabilia and bragging about how "cool" they are was exposed by a group of bloggers, myself included?

He has bounced from job to job. In December, PBS interviewed him as saying that Israeli non-guided bombs were inaccurate, while a real expert in air defense said he didn't know what he was talking about.

Now Garlasco has a new job - at the US Department of Defense.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Garlasco is now a Division Chief at the DoD, "promoting civilian harm mitigation and response for the US military" based out of Washington, DC. He started in January.

It seems likely that Garlasco was hired in conjunction with the DoD Instruction 3000.1 published in December, to "establish policy, assigns responsibilities, and provide procedures for civilian harm mitigation and response (CHMR)."

This guy is the best they could find?

(h/t Irene)

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!

03/09 Links: Mossad: Hamas toughening demands for hostage deal, seeks Ramadan escalation; Families of Hostages Receive ‘Sign of Life’

From Ian:

Dermer to JNS, Part I: ‘We are sending Hamas to dustbin of history’

Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer is a member of Israel’s small five-member war cabinet, a team that includes three high-ranking generals and Israel’s longest-serving prime minister. Dermer himself never served in the Israel Defense Forces. Further, Dermer is an unelected official who was appointed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu due to years of longstanding trust.

Dermer was a longtime senior adviser to the prime minister before being appointed as ambassador to the United States, where he served for eight years. He is widely considered to be among Israel’s most gifted diplomats and a master strategist. He was a key architect and negotiator of the 2020 Abraham Accords normalization agreements with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan.

Senior diplomats in other countries know that when they are speaking to Dermer, they are speaking with someone who has the prime minister’s full backing to execute matters on his behalf, and they understand that he knows the prime minister’s thinking better than anyone else. In many ways, Dermer is Israel’s unofficial vice premier.

As Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs, Dermer was tasked with three primary portfolios: to expand the regional circle of peace, including normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia, the seat of Sunni Islam; to counter Iran and prevent the Shi’ite Islamic Republic from completing the development of illicit nuclear weapons; and to manage Israel’s diplomatic relationship with the United States. This in addition to any other projects he and the prime minister deem to be of major strategic importance.

Each of Dermer’s portfolios has played a major role in the lead-up to the Hamas terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7 and its aftermath. As a minister, member of the war cabinet, and trusted adviser, Dermer is one of the key strategists navigating a complex war that includes multiple military and diplomatic fronts, and endless challenges. And despite all of the domestic and international criticism relentlessly hurled at Netanyahu, most Israelis are satisfied with the prime minister’s handling of the war and the pressures associated with it.

This week, JNS sat with Dermer at the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv, ahead of a stormy cabinet meeting, and conducted a wide-ranging, deep dive into the strategic challenges Israel is facing.

Dermer to JNS, Part II: ‘Anybody talking about Palestinian state right now is living on another planet’

Perhaps one of the biggest surprises of the war has been the overbearing calls for a pathway to Palestinian statehood in the aftermath of the worst terror massacre in Israel’s history.

In the 1993, Israel entered into the ill-fated Oslo Accords designed to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a two-state solution. While Israel is a relatively tiny country, without much land to give, the Jewish state was prepared to cede strategic tracts in exchange for quiet coexistence with its Palestinian neighbors. The formula, simple enough for a child to understand, was called “land for peace.”

The accords called for the establishment of a provisional Palestinian Authority, to be led by thrice-exiled arch-terrorist PLO leader Yasser Arafat.

Many argued that the accords were doomed to fail. The P.A. never prepared its people for coexistence, continuously inciting its public to violence on television and school textbooks, and naming public squares after terrorists. To this day, the government provides stipends to terrorists sitting in Israeli jails, as well as to families of terrorists killed while in the act of attempting first-degree murder on Israelis. The terror financing scheme is dubbed “pay for slay.”

In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew 8,500 Jewish residents and all military infrastructure in the Gaza Strip.

The Strip, the control of which was handed over to the P.A., was the pilot project for an independent Palestinian entity. Within two years, control of the Strip was wrestled away by Hamas. Since then, Israel has suffered countless attacks, including the firing of more than 50,000 rockets at Israel, the building of a 500-mile-long underground terror tunnel infrastructure, the kidnapping of Israeli citizens, and the worst massacre in Israel’s history on Oct. 7.

The massacre proved Israeli fears correct—that an independent Palestinian state would be a launchpad for continuous terror and an existential threat to the Jewish state. And yet the international community is now doubling down on calls for Palestinian statehood, regardless of the Palestinians’ inability to deliver Israel peace in exchange for the land it seeks.

In Part II of an exclusive interview with JNS, Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs and member of a five-man war cabinet, Ron Dermer discusses plans for “the day after” the war in the Gaza Strip; the need for deradicalization of the Palestinian society; and why Palestinian statehood in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7 would be a “historic mistake.”

Josh Frydenberg: It’s in Australia’s interest for Hamas to be decisively defeated

Hamas’ intentions are clear. Their stated objective is to achieve the destruction of Israel. To state the blindingly obvious, this leaves no room for negotiation or compromise.

Hamas may have launched its jihad attack under the false flag of freedom, but in reality what it has achieved is the opposite of that. It has damaged the Palestinian cause and its legitimate claim for self-determination. Israel’s war is with Hamas, not the Palestinian people who are now suffering greatly as a result of Hamas’ terrorist attack.

At a regional level, Hamas’ survival would also embolden its sponsor, Iran, and send a message to other proxies in the region that terrorism pays. It would guarantee that the Houthis and Hezbollah would continue with their provocations – provocations that have already seen more than 10 per cent of the world’s seaborne trade which passes through the Red Sea disrupted and the prospect of an all-out war in Lebanon become more likely. The momentum of the Abraham accords, which have already brought so much hope and promise to the region, will be dealt a severe blow.

The alignment between Israel and its Muslim neighbours stems in part from a common interest in countering the nefarious influence of Iran. A weakened Israel will have less chance of encouraging Saudi Arabia to normalise ties and the follow the path paved by the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan.

At a global level, anything less than a crushing defeat for Hamas will strengthen the hand of those, including Vladimir Putin’s Russia, who are aggressively seeking to undermine the US-led global order. An international order that has delivered stability and prosperity for close to 80 years, benefiting many including Australia.

We need America to remain strong so that it can provide the leadership and resources we need in our part of the world. As the conflict in Gaza continues into its sixth month the focus will rightly be on ensuring the hostages are returned, humanitarian aid delivered and civilians protected.

But in doing so we must not lose sight of the need for Hamas to be comprehensively defeated. If we don’t support the advancement of this critical strategic objective, our national interest will be harmed.

Most Australians would never have heard of Kibbutz Be’eri as it is thousands of kilometres from our shores. But Israel’s ability to respond effectively to the atrocities committed there on October 7 very much matters to us here at home.

Boris Johnson: Anti-Semitism on our streets. A brutal dictator menacing his neighbours. We must heed the lesson of the 1930s... democracy is always more fragile than we think

Looking at the state of the world today, it is tempting to blame it all on a kind of collective amnesia. There are not many people alive who can remember the 1930s.

There aren’t many people who can remember the Europe of the dictators. People have forgotten the demands of Adolf Hitler — how he would endlessly use the alleged sufferings of German-speaking communities as a pretext for invasion of other countries.

There aren’t many of us who can remember the pre-war culture of casual anti-Semitism that was to be found in so many supposedly civilised European cities.

We know about it generally from watching documentaries, or films, or from reading books. But for the vast majority of the population it is not something that chimes in the memory. We don’t personally hear the echoes and the alarm bells that should be going off in our mind — because we no longer viscerally remember this stuff, and where it can lead.

It must be amnesia, because otherwise it is hard to explain how we fail to draw the comparisons between Hitler and Putin — both of them with their narrative of betrayal and the alleged injustices suffered by the speakers of his own language; both of them with their bogus interpretation of history; both of them claiming that they are committed to peace, and then using barbaric violence to further their demands; both of them habitual liars.

It must be a kind of mass amnesia about the horrors of the 1930s, because otherwise it is hard to explain how we can tolerate the upsurge in anti-Semitism — not just in continental Europe, this time, but also on the streets of our own capital.

We have Jewish people sitting peacefully on the Tube and told that ‘your religion kills people’.

We have SS signs daubed on the walls of synagogues.

We have students jeering at Jewish Society stalls at universities and we have huge crowds demonstrating, week in, week out, in major European capitals — including London — and calling for the homeland for the Jews to be wiped out, ‘from the river to the sea’.

According to the Community Security Trust, there has been a massive increase in anti-Semitic incidents of all kinds. So in the face of this memory loss — this weird senior moment on the part of humanity — let us remember where this all leads.

Look back at the 1930s, and remember the denouement of that low, dishonest decade. The 1930s climaxed with an appalling global conflict that cost millions of lives; they ended with the gas chambers and the Holocaust.

03/08 Links Pt2: The Hostage President; Biden's Push for Two-State Solution Rewards Terrorism; Hamas terror attack exposes Al Jazeera for what it really is

From Ian:

European Jew-hatred too deep to identify ‘even after years of therapy,’ Douglas Murray says

Traveling in the Arab world, the British journalist Douglas Murray has found “fanatical obsessives” who know something about Israel but still criticize the Jewish state. And then there are those who peddle “counterfactual history,” he told JNS.

“For instance, Egyptians think they won the war in 1973. Smart, Egyptian, young professionals will think that they won the war in 1973,” Murray told JNS, of the Yom Kippur War, during an interview in Toronto on Feb. 28 prior to his remarks at a Tafsik event.

“I had to break it to a friend in Cairo once that they lost badly. He said, ‘Really. I thought we whipped their ass?’” Murray said. “I said, ‘No, they whipped your ass. Seriously.’”

Since Oct. 7, Murray, 44, a best-selling author and associate editor of The Spectator, has done a lot of explaining about Israel on television—often on Piers Morgan’s show—and at speaking engagements. The Anglican-turned atheist’s largest social-media following includes many pro-Israel accounts that regularly share video footage of him denouncing Hamas, defending Israel and debating antisemitic guests.

Knesset member Danny Danon, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, has called Murray a “great friend of Israel and of the Jewish people.”

“We need a special designation for those bravely standing with Jews and Israel in facing the greatest surge of Jew-hatred in decades. Let’s call them ‘Heroic Friends of the Jewish People,’” wrote former American Jewish Committee CEO David Harris, now vice chair of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy. “My first candidate is Douglas Murray.”

Murray told JNS that many people aim to distance themselves from the Jewish state “because they don’t want Israel to be their problem.”

“Maybe if we come up with a perfect argument,” he said. “Maybe if we inform people about the history, and broadly speaking, you’re talking about trying to educate or inform people who are not educated or informed.”

Most anti-Israel people aren’t informed about the Peel Commission or the Balfour Declaration, according to Murray. “You’re talking about people who have never heard of any of these things,” he said.

“Among non-Muslims in the West, there’s a lot of ignorance, too. They fall into this psychopathy, in which they knowingly or unknowingly, usually unknowingly, desperately want to be able to accuse Jews of something,” Murray added. “That motivates them, and, of course, it makes them think that they’re good people.”

Bethany Mandel: Hamas terror attack exposes Al Jazeera for what it really is

In the wake of the attacks on Israel October 7, the role that the media network Al Jazeera has played cannot be understated. It is an arm of the regime in Qatar, which serves as a safe haven and benefactor for Hamas, which perpetrated the largest massacre of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust.

In a new report from the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Yigal Carmon outlines how the Qatari-owned media empire promotes Islamist terror worldwide. That cooperation between Hamas and Al Jazeera is no more clearly evident than how it covered the attacks of October 7.

The network aired "exclusive" clips of the attacks, and Carmon explains, "This footage could only have been obtained from Hamas itself. The Al Jazeera reporter abandoned any pretense of neutrality, proclaiming gleefully that "the settler walls… collapsed… along with the iron image of the arrogant occupation army."

Within the rules and regulations to obtain press credentials at the United States House of Representatives, it is said, "they will not act as an agent for, or be employed by the Federal, or any State, local or foreign government or representatives thereof." These are generally the rules for any press credentials across government, in the U.S. Senate, White House, etc.

And yet, Al Jazeera retains this access, and in 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice required that the media network register as a foreign agent in accordance with Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) laws.

Former Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen outlined why in a report prepared for Congress, explaining that the network "repeatedly undermines U.S. interests in the region by supporting extremist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Al-Qaeda, and [the] Al-Nusrah [Front]. […] Moreover, Qatar uses its state-owned, state-funded, state-directed and state-controlled Al Jazeera Media Network to project this vision to the U.S. public."

Since October 7, and the ensuing conflict, Al Jazeera has plainly been operating as an official mouthpiece for Hamas. In his report for MEMRI, Carmon explains, "Since October 7, Al-Jazeera has been airing official military announcements and threats by Hamas spokesmen – as well as by other terror organizations – on an almost daily basis, serving as a semi-official amplifier of Hamas messaging, often featuring outlandish claims of military successes by the group."

Seth Mandel: The Hostage President

Biden also made sure to remind the chamber and those watching at home that Americans reject bigotry, “give hate no safe harbor.” Indeed, he said, “Hate, anger, revenge, retribution are among the oldest of ideas. But you can’t lead America with ancient ideas that only take us back.”

It all sounded like a prelude to a discussion about the specific and undeniable prejudice dominating American institutions and the public square. But, as my colleague Abe Greenwald noted on today’s Commentary podcast, there was no mention of the tidal wave of anti-Semitism currently washing away the credibility and legitimacy of mainstream institutions—not even in the typical formulation in which it is balanced with Islamophobia, though there is no chilling epidemic of the latter. It is surely relevant to the state of our union that Jewish college students are subject to a more openly aggressive version of the bigotry they would have faced a century ago at those same universities, that street violence against Jews has become a regular occurrence, that the Jewish singer Matisyahu has had to hire extra staff and security to perform after two of his recent shows were canceled over venue workers’ discomfort with Jews, and that in the America of 2024 a bar in Salt Lake City can hang a sign that says “No Zionists Allowed”—as have campus shops and other establishments.

The president succeeded last night in showing vigor and emotional range and improvisational aplomb. So we can only conclude that all of the above didn’t make it into his speech for the sole reason that he and his staff didn’t want to talk about it.

Just like his brief drive from the White House to the Capitol before the speech, Joe Biden had to take a detour around the traditional route he might have taken had he been permitted to do so by his party’s considerable anti-Zionist freakshow contingent. The president is engaged in an ongoing hostage negotiation with his own party, and he is the hostage. Mr. President, blink twice if no one’s bringing you ice cream.

The floating pier plan will fail. Here's why.

During the State of the Union address, President Biden stated:

Tonight, I’m directing the U.S. military to lead an emergency mission to establish a temporary pier in the Mediterranean on the coast of Gaza that can receive large shipments carrying food, water, medicine and temporary shelters.

No U.S. boots will be on the ground. A temporary pier will enable a massive increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance getting into Gaza every day.

And Israel must do its part. Israel must allow more aid into Gaza and ensure humanitarian workers aren’t caught in the crossfire. They’re announcing they’re going to have a crossing to northern Gaza.

The Gaza pier plan will not work.

The problem with aid distribution is that Hamas keeps trying to disrupt it so Israel would be blamed for the resultant suffering. They are hijacking aid, shooting into crowds, instigating riots and in general trying to make it look like Israel cannot keep the peace the way Hamas could.

Bringing the aid into Gaza has not been the primary problem; getting it to the people safely has been. It is a lot easier to disrupt delivery than to do the logistics of distribution.

The IDF is good at logistics but this is an entirely different problem. Hamas is turning even food distribution into a military action where civilians must be protected from their own purported people who can pop up from tunnels and shoot at them to start the next stampede easier than they can shoot the IDF.

The World Food Programme acknowledges the danger, which is why it was forced to stop doing it themselves.

On Sunday, as WFP started the route towards Gaza City, the convoy was surrounded by crowds of hungry people close to the Wadi Gaza checkpoint. First fending off multiple attempts by people trying to climb aboard our trucks, then facing gunfire once we entered Gaza City, our team was able to distribute a small quantity of the food along the way. On Monday, the second convoy’s journey north faced complete chaos and violence due to the collapse of civil order. Several trucks were looted between Khan Younes and Deir al Balah and a truck driver was beaten. The remaining flour was spontaneously distributed off the trucks in Gaza city, amidst high tension and explosive anger.

There have been rumors about an Egyptian truck driver beaten to death trying to bring in aid.

It isn't only Hamas trying to frustrate aid to Gazans. The Palestinian Authority already rejected the plan to bring in goods by ship when Cyprus and Israel agreed to that plan in December.

It is insane that the IDF, which is doing everything possible to feed Gazans under these circumstances, is routinely portrayed as the devil in news stories and NGO reports.

Logistics is not as exciting as combat, but they are what makes things happen. It takes time and a lot of people to build a program like this where Hamas doesn't take all the aid for itself.

Apparently, it isn't even easy to airdrop food by parachute without killing people. If such a comparatively simple task is fatal, how much more difficult is it to transport and distribute food safely to millions of people?

If only there were reporters who could actually dig into the complexity of the problem - but there aren't.

And one has to wonder why.

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!

03/08 Links Pt1: The war in the Middle East has barely begun; Biden's Bridge to Nowhere; Silence from women in UN is 'deafening'

From Ian:

Douglas Murray: The war in the Middle East has barely begun

Which brings me to my second unreported fact. And I hope you’ve had your breakfast before digesting this.

I was on the Lebanon border 18 years ago, during the 2006 war with Israel. I well remember the shelling and the firing. Seeing the activity there in recent months (where it is much more heated than either side wants to admit) has persuaded me of something. The war in the Middle East has not yet begun. Or at least what we have seen in Gaza is merely an opening skirmish.

No country could cope with significant swaths of its population being permanently displaced from their homes. But what the world outside the region seems not to realise is that Gaza is a sideshow. The real showdown in the region will be with Tehran.

The 2006 conflict came to a halt because the UN Security Council passed a resolution – 1701 – which assured peace with the promise that Hezbollah would not be permitted to rebuild its arsenal on Israel’s border. Since people are very keen on UN resolutions, it mystifies me that they never bothered to enforce this one. Perhaps it is the case that the UN needn’t abide by all its resolutions.

If you stand in a deserted town like Metula, right on the Lebanon border, you can see Hezbollah outposts everywhere, including observation posts. The other week I went into a hotel there that had been bombed the day before, and was told to get out because Hezbollah could see that my cameraman and I had gone in and they were likely to shell it again. Camera footage from the day before showed a UN ‘peacekeeping’ vehicle leave its base along the border. Hezbollah fired off a barrage of rockets into Israel – as they do with some regularity – and the UN vehicle simply did a U-turn and returned to base. That isn’t peacekeeping – it’s war-watching. So since the international community doesn’t abide by its own resolutions and has allowed Hezbollah to re-arm, it seems that it will be left to Israel to do what is needed to allow its citizens to return home. And that’s not possible solely from the air.

I hate to be the harbinger of bad news, or war. But the Middle East war has not begun. Everything so far has been a prelude.

The Transfer of War into Enemy Territory to Remove the Threat of Invasion into Israel

Until the 1980s, the occupation of territory and transfer of the war into enemy territory for the purpose of removing the threat of invasion into Israel were central components in the IDF's perception of warfare. Later, the holding of conquered territory that contained an enemy population prepared to conduct guerrilla warfare was perceived as a liability rather than an advantage.

Ever since the Second Lebanon War in 2006, the IDF has immediately withdrawn from every territory it conquered, forfeiting any achievement provided by the occupation of territory.

Yet, occupying territory serves multiple purposes on all levels of warfare. On the tactical level, it can be used to capture advantageous positions from the enemy. On the operational level, it can disrupt enemy formations. On the strategic level, the enemy's capital can be occupied for the purpose of regime change.

Losing territory is a painful loss for Israel's enemies. Hamas in Gaza wants to "return" to Jaffa, Ashdod, Ashkelon, and indeed the rest of Israel. Hizbullah is fighting for the Galilee foothills. Territory remains as important to Israel's enemies as it ever was. Therefore, Israel's holding of enemy territory constitutes a serious loss for those enemies.

Holding territory is also a bargaining chip in diplomatic negotiations. This was the case with Egypt and Syria in the agreements on the separation of forces at the end of the Yom Kippur War, and later in the framework of the peace agreement with Egypt.

Residents should not be allowed to return to captured territory until Israel's desired diplomatic arrangement is achieved, even if this means the IDF maintains a security zone for months or years in the enemy's territory.

Preventing the return of the population is not for the purpose of punishing them. Rather, it is for the same reason that they were evacuated before the war: to minimize the chances of their being harmed. Territory captured during ground combat will remain largely destroyed and will lack any basic electricity or water infrastructure, and it will be filled with ruins and explosive remnants. Fighting is also likely to continue to occur in the area, even if only sporadically.

First Lady Michal Herzog: Silence from women in UN is 'deafening'

Sexual violence against women – and men as well – in Israel has been ignored systemically on an international level since the war against Hamas broke out on Oct. 7.

Slowly but surely since then, the evidence has been mounting that could no longer be ignored, forcing international human rights and women’s organizations to recognize the suffering that Israelis of the South endured.

Israeli women have been at the forefront of presenting the realities of the Oct. 7 atrocities on the global stage, and no one has been a more prominent advocate for Israeli women than First Lady Michal Herzog.

“The relentless work that Israeli women and Jewish women around the world are doing is having an effect, and it’s causing some change in the way human rights organizations, especially the UN, look at what happened on Oct. 7,” Herzog told the Magazine in an interview at the President’s Residence on the occasion of International Women’s Day, which is marked today.

“It took eight weeks for UN Women to put one phrase of condemnation together – and not a very deep condemnation,” she said.

The interview was conducted prior to the report released this Monday by Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict Pramila Patten, who confirmed that she and her team had received conclusive evidence pointing to sexual violence, torture, rape, and necrophilia against Israelis on Oct. 7.

At the time, Herzog had expressed confidence in the report’s revealing, as it ended up doing, the truth about the Oct. 7 massacre.

Michelle Goldberg writes in the New York Times:

We Need to Talk About This Republican Candidate’s Antisemitism

Mark Robinson, the Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina, has for some reason not bothered to take down his old Facebook posts about the Jews.

“There is a REASON the liberal media fills the airwaves with programs about the NAZI and the ‘6 million Jews’ they murdered,” Robinson, the state’s lieutenant governor, wrote in one 2017 post. (The reason was left unsaid, but the scare quotes spoke loudly.) He regularly argued on Facebook that focusing on the evils of Nazism obscured the greater danger: the one represented by the Democratic Party. “George Soros is alive. Adolf Hitler is dead,” he wrote in one post, and in another, “Who do you think has been pushing this Nazi boogeyman narrative all these years?”

In 2018, Robinson, who is Black, offered some thoughts about what he seemed to see as a Jewish plot behind the hit movie “Black Panther.” The title character, he wrote, was “created by an agnostic Jew and put to film by satanic Marxist,” calling the movie “trash” that was “created to pull the shekels” from the pockets of Black people, whom he referred to using a Yiddish slur. ["shvartze" - EoZ.] He has refused to apologize for these statements, though he called them “poorly worded” and has denied that he’s antisemitic.

None of this appears to have hurt Robinson with the Republican electorate in North Carolina, where on Tuesday he won nearly 65 percent of the vote in the gubernatorial primary.

I looked at Robinson's posts she mentions and others. He's nuts. And he has a lot in common with the antisemites of the Left.

Like the "progressive" antisemites, Robinson associates Jews with what he hates the most.While the Left eagerly links Jews ("Zionists') with racism and colonialism, Robinson breezily associates Jews with the Hollywood and communism he hates.

In this 2017 post: "The 1977 version of 'Roots' is one of the most vile things EVER filmed. It is nothing but Hollywood trash that depicts the ignorance and brutality of the goyim, and the helplessness and weakness of the shvartze."

He has been accused of Holocaust denial. I haven't seen outright denial. He uses the Holocaust as a rhetorical device to attack thing he believes are worse. He says that communism is at least as bad as Nazism, and to make his point he has minimized the Holocaust and Hitler's crimes. Robinson even approvingly featured an alleged quote of Hitler's about having pride in one's own race.

These examples, and others, should disqualify him from being supported as a candidate.

Goldberg brings other examples of Republican tolerance of antisemitism:

[E]ven if you believe that the Michigan Democrat Rashida Tlaib’s use of the anti-Zionist slogan “from the river to the sea” is obviously antisemitic — I don’t — it’s worth asking why it received so much more coverage than Robinson’s apparent Holocaust denial, or for that matter, the promotion of antisemitic websites and social media posts by Republican congressmen like Arizona’s Paul Gosar and Georgia’s Mike Collins.

The examples given do indicate antisemitism. Gosar's campaign newsletter linked to an likely Kremlin-funded antisemitic website that wrote an article about him titled "Congressman: Jewish warmongers Nuland & Blinken ‘Are Dangers Fools Who Can Get Us All Killed,’” taking out the word "Jewish" indicating that this was no innocent mistake. Collins slyly noted the Jewishness of a Washington Post reporter who wrote a stupid article minimizing urban crime.

Another accusation Goldberg made, about how CPAC supposedly tolerated neo-Nazis, was not as convincing. The neo-Nazis came to CPAC, some paid and some not, and mingled with the delegates and tried to spread their poison. That is like a serial killer taking a photo with a First Lady and pretending that she approves of his crimes.

And Goldberg's spin, that Republican tolerance of antisemitism is worse than that of Democrats, is similarly unconvincing. They are different in form but the same in fact: on each side, the desire to promote their own political ambitions makes them blind to the antisemitism by their allies. You will have to look long and hard to find a prominent member of either side saying, unequivocally, that antisemitism by their own side is unacceptable and will be rejected.

But she's right about the fact that there has not been nearly as much publicity over Gosar's and Collins' flirtations with hate as with Tlaib's and Ilhan Omar's. Antisemitism is noxious on both sides of the aisle and too many people are afraid to call it out. or willing to minimize it, when it happens on their side.

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 parrots Hamas propaganda in State of the Union speech

During President Biden's State of the Union address last night, he said:

This war has taken a greater toll on innocent civilians than all previous wars in Gaza combined. More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of whom are not Hamas.

Biden just confirmed and validated the biggest Hamas lie about the war.

There is no source for the "30,000" number besides Hamas. None whatsoever. And we know Hamas lied about the death tolls of various specific events during the war, especially those that were blamed on Israel but were actually done by terrorists.

Abraham Wyner, Professor of Statistics and Data Science at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, wrote an article in Tablet this week that showed how unlikely the casualty figures from the Gaza health ministry are from a statistical viewpoint, looking at the first weeks of the war when the ministry broke down the alleged women and children casualties.

On the days with many women casualties there should be large numbers of children casualties, and on the days when just a few women are reported to have been killed, just a few children should be reported. This relationship can be measured and quantified by the R-square (R2 ) statistic that measures how correlated the daily casualty count for women is with the daily casualty count for children. If the numbers were real, we would expect R2 to be substantively larger than 0, tending closer to 1.0. But R2 is .017 which is statistically and substantively not different from 0.

The daily number of children reported to have been killed is totally unrelated to the number of women reported. The R2 is .017 and the relationship is statistically and substantively insignificant.

This lack of correlation is the second circumstantial piece of evidence suggesting the numbers are not real. But there is more. The daily number of women casualties should be highly correlated with the number of non-women and non-children (i.e., men) reported. Again, this is expected because of the nature of battle. The ebbs and flows of the bombings and attacks by Israel should cause the daily count to move together. But that is not what the data show. Not only is there not a positive correlation, there is a strong negative correlation, which makes no sense at all and establishes the third piece of evidence that the numbers are not real.

...Another red flag... is that if 70% of the casualties are women and children and 25% of the population is adult male, then either Israel is not successfully eliminating Hamas fighters or adult male casualty counts are extremely low. This by itself strongly suggests that the numbers are at a minimum grossly inaccurate and quite probably outright faked.

Biden's speech was vetted by layers of staffers. Not one of them had a problem with Biden's statement. This shows how insidious propaganda is.

Biden has validated Hamas lies. Newspapers will no longer feel compelled to add "according to Hamas' health ministry" when they quote statistics - the President of the United States accepts them as true, so who will argue?

The speech was a huge win for Hamas. And the sad part is that no one is overly concerned about that fact that the leader of the free world accepts and parrots the words of a terrorist organization.

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!

Horrors! British University Jewish Chaplaincy wants to hire Zionist rabbis!

Middle East Eye has an expose on how intolerant the organization in charge of British university rabbis supposedly is:

A chaplaincy service used by British universities to provide pastoral support for Jewish students requires its chaplains to be pro-active advocates for Israel, Middle East Eye can reveal.

The University Jewish Chaplaincy (UJC) is a registered charity that operates in dozens of universities across the UK. It provides chaplains and chaplaincy couples and says they are “there for Jewish students of all backgrounds and affiliations”.

The UJC is also currently advising ministers on new guidelines the government has promised to deliver on tackling antisemitism in higher education.

But in job descriptions on its website for vacant chaplaincy posts in Brighton, Bristol and Glasgow the UJC listed being a "pro-active Israel advocate" among essential requirements for candidates.

Noted anti-Israel professor Neve Gordon is shocked....shocked - that rabbis are expected to be sympathetic with the political opinions of most Jews.

Neve Gordon, a professor of human rights law at London's Queen Mary University and vice president of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (Brismes), questioned how a chaplain expected to advocate for Israel could provide pastoral support to all Jewish students on campuses.

“In these job advertisements, there is a conflation with being Jewish and being an advocate of Israel, which by no means reflects the position of many Jews in the UK,” said Gordon, who is Israeli.

Gordon said he had recently met at another university with a Jewish student group supportive of Palestinian rights who said they did not feel that their views were taken into account by the Jewish student society.

“If a chaplain conceives of their role as an advocate of Israel, that chaplain will not only be unable to represent many Jewish students and staff across campuses in the UK but will be advocating a position that undermines some of their core values."

And how, exactly, would the vast majority of Jewish students who are Zionists feel if their chaplain was an anti-Zionist? Apparently Gordon's concern for Jewish students' feelings only extends the ones who are least likely to attend events at Jewish groups.

(Also, Gordon is knowingly deceptive. He conflates the job of the chaplain with the entire Jewish student societies. The chaplain doesn't choose what programming to approve, for example.)

Now, let's look at the entire list of requirements for those jobs, the list that upsets anti-Zionist Jews so much (the page was taken down, this is from an archive copy:)

Why isn't Gordon upset that Orthodox ordination is required? By his logic, doesn't that exclude the majority non-Orthodox students from feeling comfortable?

And the chaplain needs to be sensitive to halacha! Why not hire chaplains who violate Shabbat? Why are they so intolerant???

Two seconds of thought gives the answer to both requirements of Orthodoxy and Zionist. A religious chaplain can understand the needs of students who are both religious and non-religious; a Zionist rabbi can be sensitive to the needs of students who are both Zionist and non-Zionist. An anti-Zionist chaplain - whether from Neturei Karta or from the Reconstructionist movement - could not possibly be an effective role model for Zionist students just as an anti-religious chaplain could not possibly minister to religious Jewish students.

The religious chaplain, and the Zionist chaplain, are more likely to be respectful of those they disagree with than the anti-religious, anti-ZIonist chaplain is likely to be.

Indeed, the requirements mandate that the chaplain is inclusive, non-judgmental, and open to secular events on campus.

It is like a Jewish organization requiring that its facilities are kosher - while most Jews do not keep kosher, it is more respectful to all to insist that the building does. This is what inclusiveness means.

People who scream that Zionists are complicit in apartheid, genocide and other crimes are not being inclusive and tolerant of their fellow Jews. Gordon si using a faux concern for tolerance to push an intolerant agenca.

It is a shame that this needs to be pointed out.

People like Gordon and Jewish Voice for Peace members deceptively pretend that their concerns are for the well-being of others when in fact they are trying to marginalize, exclude and demonize those who disagree with them, This ends up becoming incitement to and actual violence, as we are seeing more and more.

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!

03/07 Links Pt2: The Pro-Hamas Activists Come for the ‘Jew-Lovers’; It's time to make Judea and Samaria great again; The Song of the Israel-Hamas War

From Ian:

The menacing truth about the ‘boycott Israel’ campaigns

This all speaks to an incredibly conspiratorial mindset in which Jews supposedly dominate the world through their control of international finance (a view propagated by Hitler in Mein Kampf, as well as by many other anti-Semites). Indeed, for European anti-Semites in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the international networks associated with finance – and indeed modernity itself – were seen as somehow Jewish in character. From this unhinged premise, they drew the conclusion that Jews somehow needed to be purged. That Jews should be sacked from senior positions, that Jewish businesses should be boycotted. Eventually the full genocidal conclusions of this approach were drawn out in the Nazis’ Final Solution.

Today, activists focus on those who are Israeli or are deemed to have Israeli connections. In the form of Israel, Jews are once again perceived to be the epitome of evil in the world. And once again they are faced with a political movement, in this case Hamas, which openly pledges to destroy them. This murderous Islamist group has plenty of support in the West, too.

Amid the calls to boycott Israel, to erase all trace of Israel from culture, sport and beyond, it is hard not to be reminded of the horribly prophetic words of 19th-century German writer Heinrich Heine: ‘Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.’ When, in 1933, the Nazis actually started burning books, many were written by Jewish authors, including Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud and Franz Kafka. Just a few years later, the Nazis started incinerating actual Jews.

The warning signs are there right now. We need to see the increasingly strident calls to boycott Israel, to erase its presence, for what they are. A threat to Jews everywhere.

Seth Mandel: The Pro-Hamas Activists Come for the ‘Jew-Lovers’

Lest anyone try to claim this is about Israel-related books or authors—as if that would be acceptable either—the piece reports out the story of Gillian Freedman, a 67-year-old Jewish woman who, along with her husband, owns and operates a small farm in rural Bedfordshire. Freedman wrote a book titled Jews Milk Goats, about maintaining a Jewish life while living on a farm.

Pretty wholesome stuff, right? Well, not to the magazine editor who spiked a review of the book on the grounds that Jews are too controversial now. This quote from that editor, sent to the columnist who wrote the review, is among the better descriptions of our post-Oct. 7 reality you’ll find: “In the current, rather febrile, atmosphere I think we need to give a wide berth to anything which references Jewish people and Judaism. It just isn’t worth the hassle that will ensue.”

Nowhere in there does it say anything about Israel or Zionism. Because none of this is now or ever was about the democratic politics of a country in the Middle East. But that last line explains why it’s been so easy for mainstream cultural, educational, and political institutions throughout the enlightened West to simply close the door on anything or anyone Jewish. It just isn’t worth the hassle.

This is why the pro-Hamas demonstrators and activists do what they do. Because they can’t say “don’t serve Jews.” But they can and will make your life hell if you serve Jews.

If you live in Europe, as all the subjects of this particular story do, you know this doesn’t stop at a negative Yelp review. Why risk being labeled “Jew-lovers” or “Jew-lackeys,” as the Germans used to phrase it? It just isn’t worth the hassle.

The hassle, if it isn’t clear by now, is the point. The entire strategy of alienating Jews from polite society relies on cowardice. What few Americans and Brits realize is that their major publishing houses are already in line. They didn’t have to be pushed very far. Indeed, the speed with which the machinery of Jew-baiting came together after Oct. 7 is a reminder that old habits die hard. And there are few habits older than this.

Antisemitism as Anti-Europeanism by Proxy

This all goes to show how unpredictable history is and how quickly constellations change. The Left is now forced to pick the side of Hamas, not because they really hate Jews or care about Palestinians, but because they need to double down on their own beliefs and avoid giving in to the critique of their political foes by admitting that the multicultural project in Europe has failed completely. Nor do they wish to admit that the relations between Israel and Gaza presage the future of Europeans and Muslims in Europe.

Left-wing progressives are happy to reinforce the link between what they see as Jewish imperialism and European rightism, in the same way that the Right—instead of defending Europeanism and nationhood—considers it expedient to portray their cause as a fight against antisemitism. For example, it is quite clear that the march against antisemitism in London on Sunday was as much a march for Britain as it was for Israel, with Union Jacks flying and “God Save the King” echoing over the crowds. As self-described conservative Chris Rose put it on X, the event was “a complete contrast to the anti-West hate marches with people who sympathise with our enemies.” Still, organizing such marches without the pretext of protesting antisemitism would be quite taboo.

It may seem tragically poetic that it is in the conflict between Israel and Hamas that an awakening of Europe might occur. However, in the end, confidence by proxy is no confidence at all. At best, it is a mere beginning. But a beginning of what? Clearly Europeans are now waking up to the fact that mass immigration isn’t leading to a multicultural utopia, and that in the face of incontrovertible evidence there are still well-established forces in Europe unwilling to roll back their destructive policies. These forces will, to the bitter end and at whatever cost, see right-wing populism, Jewish imperialism, and European ‘whiteness’ as the real threats, and they will ally with any anti-Western group in their anti-colonial struggle.

Those who care about the future of Europe and their own nations are therefore correct to defend Israel, but that will not be enough. Europeans need to shake off their feelings of demoralization and defeat. They must win over the establishment on their side regardless of the situation in the Middle East, and they must openly declare that their cause is ultimately not about the fate of Israel, but the fate of Europe. In the end, the rhetoric of anti-antisemitism cannot prove sufficient to the challenges at hand.