Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, March 28, 2024

Blood libel on campus: Haverford College hosts seminar saying Israel intentionally infects Palestinians with COVID-19

It is 1348 all over again.

Yesterday, anti-Zionist groups held a seminar at Haverford College that accused Israel of intentionally spreading COVID-19 as a tool of genocide to Palestinians.

Teach-in on Israel’s weaponization of COVID against Palestinians.

Join us to learn about how the Israeli state intentionally debilitates Palestinians through the spread of COVID and how we can resist COVID spread and the genocide against Palestinians

Just as with the Black Death, Jews are being accused of deliberately spreading disease - and this time it is being described as an intentional genocide, part of a planned effort to wipe out Palestinians altogether.

Only hours before the scheduled seminar, the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia called on Haverford College to condemn the event.

The event’s title dangerously and inaccurately implies that Israel spread coronavirus to advance its global control, repackaging a centuries-old antisemitic trope that Jews take advantage of global crises as a means for their own gain and advancement. In this case, the event’s narrative takes on a new form of the antisemitic blood libel trope, accusing Jews of committing ritual murder and perpetuating the harmful stereotype of Jews as evil and conniving.

Higher education institutions have a responsibility to establish college campuses as a space for free speech and critical thinking. However, it must be rooted in academic integrity rather than disinformation.

Haverford College and institutions of all sizes have a responsibility first and foremost to protect the safety of their students. This event and the tension on campus that has led to Jewish students and faculty being vulnerable and victimized constitutes a failure of leadership.

There have been no new reports of COVID infections among Palestinians since January 2023. The most recent death from COVID-19 I could find is September 2022.

Which makes this, in a sense, even worse than the accusation against Jews in the 14th century. The antisemites are making up deaths that aren't even happening and blaming them on Jews.

As we are seeing in Europe, this depraved and crazed antisemitism leads to violence. And no one is doing anything effective to fight it - on the contrary, as we see on this campus, there is no pushback from the administration altogether.

(h/t Andrew)

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

The "young men" who were killed in the West Bank

The official Palestinian Wafa news agency regularly reports on "young men" who are "martyred" in the West Bank.

Here's their photo of one of them according to Wafa:

Here's what he looks like on jihadist sites.

Walid al-Osta on Wafa:

Walid al-Osta according to jihadist sites:

(They don't look the same to me, but this is the name given.)

As usual, the Palestinian Authority is trying to pretend everyone is a civilian. Just like Hamas.

The story as reported by BICOM:

Three Palestinians were killed during an Israeli raid in Jenin yesterday. As troops looked to arrest wanted men, two gunmen were killed by a drone strike and a third by IDF fire after troops responded to his throwing an explosive device. During the raid, a vehicle containing primed explosives was safely destroyed, several Palestinians detained, and weapons seized.

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03/27 Links Pt2: Why Israel’s Critics Keep Changing the Rules; Holocaust Re-Revisionism; We are still haunted by ISIS

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Why Israel’s Critics Keep Changing the Rules

Compared to Israel’s November operation at Shifa, this one has attracted far less press attention (aside from the usual perfunctory stenographic work mainstream newspapers in America do for Hamas). One reason for this is that in November, Israel had to spend time searching the hospital after securing it and committing to the slow process of finding and neutralizing the tunnels. This meant the world spent weeks criticizing Israel before informed criticism was even possible, and then moved the goalposts every time Israel revealed a Hamas war crime in the hospital complex. It was a round of Calvinball. By the time the scope of Hamas’s use of the complex was made clear, the press had moved on.

This time, the press had no excuses even before the operation. Everyone already knows how Hamas turned a large hospital into a war zone. As well, the presence of senior Hamas military commanders makes even the attempt to spin this is an Israeli overreaction look ridiculous. Hamas has been caught in the act, which should theoretically be a headline-dominating story for days. There should be a tidal wave of condemnations from foreign ministries around the world and apologies from medical NGOs and media organizations for having—wittingly or unwittingly—aided a terrorist army’s unprecedented assault on international law and coopting journalists and doctors into undermining the safety and credibility of their peers in other conflict zones.

Ah, but that wouldn’t be Calvinball. The rules adjust, and Israel must adjust with them—and as soon as it does, the rules will change again.

“Israel’s opponents are erasing a remarkable, historic new standard Israel has set,” writes John Spencer, perhaps the leading expert in the field at the moment.

But of course they are; if there is no potential for a Hamas victory, even a public-relations one, there is no story. Israel’s critics should be overjoyed at the blueprint Jerusalem is providing for new and creative ways to protect civilians in urban warfare. But to Israel’s critics, international law isn’t stagnant; those were the laws of war in the last round of Calvinball. And hey, why is Israel’s army always fighting the last war, anyway?

The Accused

Hannah Arendt once called the Dreyfus affair a “dress rehearsal for the Holocaust.” For more than a decade, the saga of a Jewish military officer wrongfully convicted of treason riled turn-of-the-century France and foreshadowed the European horrors to come. Yet there has been a curious tendency by some historians to remove both Dreyfus and his Jewishness from the center of the story. In his authoritative new book, Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair, the historian Maurice Samuels rectifies this error, while challenging long-standing myths.

As Paul Johnson pointed out in his magisterial History of the Jews, the Dreyfus affair brought a “decisive end to an epoch of illusion in which assimilated western Jews had optimistically assumed that the process of their acceptance in European society was well under way and would shortly be completed.” It upended Jewish life, leading Jews as far away as the United States to ponder whether they would ever be truly accepted in the lands in which they were a tiny minority. It gave a shot in the arm to political Zionism and eventually mobilized much of the French left against anti-Semitism. And it led to years of political upheaval, toppling French governments and revealing divisions that, as Samuels notes, are still evident today.

Born in the Alsatian town of Mulhouse in 1859, Dreyfus grew up in an upper-class Jewish family. Alfred’s father, Raphael, made his fortune in the mill industry and was able to provide a comfortable life.

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 shattered the family’s serene existence. The forces of Prussian minister Otto Von Bismarck defeated Napoleon III and France. A new nation, Imperial Germany, was declared at Versailles. And the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine were annexed by Germany. This amputation was a severe blow to the French psyche, which mourned the loss for the next half-century. It also made quite the impression on young Alfred, who watched enraged as Prussian troops entered Mulhouse. It spurred his desire for a career in the military.

At the time, it was not unusual for a French Jew of Dreyfus’s social and economic background to pursue such a calling. Indeed, as scholars such as Derek Penslar have highlighted, in the 19th century the armed forces of many European nations opened their ranks to Jewish officers. This was certainly true in France, which had played a historic role in emancipating Jews after the French Revolution. An ardent patriot, Dreyfus wanted to serve.

“The Dreyfus family,” Samuels notes, “had embraced French culture because it was socially advantageous, but they also felt a great loyalty to France for having been the first country to emancipate the Jews.”

Holocaust Re-Revisionism

What more can there possibly be to say about the Holocaust? Plenty, as Dan Stone demonstrates in The Holocaust: An Unfinished History, his sobering and meticulous exploration of aspects of the Shoah that have remained, until now, under-analyzed. And these aspects of the Holocaust are especially salient today, as the Nazis’ carefully orchestrated murderous program has been adopted and adapted by Hamas and other jihadist groups and abetted by their fellow travelers in the West.

“There are still major parts of the history of the Holocaust that have not been understood in the prevailing narrative,” writes Stone, a historian at the University of London and the director of the Holocaust Research Institute. These include a comprehensive genocidal ideology originating with and propagated by, but transcending, the Nazis themselves; the “ubiquity” of collaboration throughout Europe and North Africa; and the extraordinary nature of the trauma suffered by the survivors and the slaughtered alike.

The conspiracy that fed the genocidal instincts of the Nazis and their collaborators began and ended with Nazi race “science.” Stone writes, “To understand the drive for Lebensraum, the creation of a German empire in Europe in which the racial community could thrive, one has to grasp the overriding significance of race for the Nazis.” Invoking the historian Eric Voegelin, Stone contends that the fuzzy, mystical notion of race unified German philosophy, politics, and culture.

Specious as this racial theory was—even “pseudoscience” doesn’t do it justice—it galvanized both Nazi elites and everyday Germans young and old. “It is plain to all who are willing to see,” said Nazi culture minister Karl Weber in the mid-1930s, “that this philosophy involves a call to the younger generation to heroic living, for this reality of race is something which claims them, gives them a standard and orientates their whole life.” Jews became, simultaneously, subhumans who were unworthy of polluting the German gene pool and a collective global superpower that threatened German geopolitical interests.

This nascent worldview reached its first apotheosis on November 9, 1938, when the Kristallnacht pogrom erupted across greater Germany. Some 177 synagogues were burned down, 8,000 Jewish businesses were destroyed, 100 Jews were murdered, and 30,000 others were hauled off to proto-concentration camps in Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen. The attack, Stone reckons, evinced “an alarming degree of consensus and cooperation among local inhabitants” and signified a key turning point for what the Nazi race ideology endorsed—and what it could get away with.

The entire Nazi war machine, police and Wehrmacht included, began to dedicate itself to the mission of eradicating global Jewry. Stone’s research gives the lie to historical analyses that blamed only the SS and exonerated the regular German army. Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau, in his “Orders for Conduct in the East,” instructed the Wehrmacht in no uncertain terms to “liberate the German people once and for all from the Asiatic-Jewish danger.” That the SS’s focus on killing Jews was more single-minded than that of other military organs does little to excuse the latter.

More photos of weeds on the Temple Mount, 1872

The Getty Museum in Los Angeles just made thousands of old photos of the Holy Land available.

As I've documented before, the Temple Mount was filled with weeds - not exactly how one would expect a place of pilgrimage and holiness to hundreds of millions of Muslims to be treated.

1872:

1877:

I've seen weeds as late as 1960 on the holy spot - when Jordanians and "Palestinians" in Jerusalem had unfettered access to the site.

Back in 2009, I made a video on this phenomenon.

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!

Insane Communist Mental Health Professionals for Hamas

I saw another of the endless open letters from various groups expressing solidarity with "Palestinians" (meaning, Hamas):

Psychoanalysis in Solidarity with Gaza

We are members of psychoanalytic organisations in solidarity with our colleagues in Gaza, standing with Palestine against the genocide currently being waged by the Israeli state. This current onslaught, which has already resulted to date in the death of more than ten thousand people in Gaza, and many murders by settlers of Palestinians in the West Bank, is being conducted with the support of regimes in the global north that care nothing for human life. The Israeli state and those who deliberately abet it care nothing for those they portray as sub-human, and whom they tolerate, at best, as powerless victims.
...
...Our task is to resist the ideological and state offensive carried out against the Palestinians. We call on our colleagues to dissociate themselves from the war on Gaza, and to state unequivocally that they will speak and act for Palestine. This is no time to be silent. Yes to resistance.

This is not language of any mental health professional I know. In fact, the title isn't "Psychoanalysts for Gaza" but "Psychoanalysis" itself in solidarity - the entire field. They are not only arrogant but conceited as if they represent all psychoanalysis.

But then I looked at the group sponsoring it: The Red Clinic. Now it makes more sense. Their mission statement is insane:

The Red Clinic is a collective of communist mental health workers united for a radical psychotherapy, for the care of the oppressed, and for uniting the two in the service of communist politics. We aim to develop truly accessible and sustainable provision of psychotherapy for the working-class and the oppressed in the broadest senses of the terms, attentive to the interrelations between axes of oppression, and transcending national borders. This practice will work in tandem with our efforts to develop a novel theoretical basis for psychotherapy today, informed by Marxist, anti-racist, queer feminist, indigenous, decolonial and radical disability theories, learning from our collective experiences in theoretical application, and honing psychotherapy into a better weapon of the communist movement.

There you have it: psychotherapy is a weapon of the communist movement that supports murdering Jews in the name of "resistance."

Meaning, they are really screwed up people who care more about spreading communism than mental health and we want to spread their own psychoses to their patients.

Many of their online seminars are centered around "Palestine," but this one where they advocate abolishing the family altogether pretty much sums up how unbalanced these "mental health professionals" are.

This idea, which comes straight from The Communist Manifesto, is more prevalent than you think.

The far Left is freaking insane. And the moderate Left tolerates this sickness and evil as just another opinion.

(h/t Phyllis)

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!

03/27 Links Pt1: What Would Victory Mean in Gaza?; Glick: US Gaslights Israel At The UN; Gaza Fatality Data Has Become Completely Unreliable

From Ian:

What Would Victory Mean in Gaza?

Decision/victory is the only optimal outcome of a military campaign. In the last three decades, deterrence has become the desired outcome of an IDF military campaign, while decision/victory has essentially disappeared as the primary goal. This pushing aside of victory and centralization of deterrence was largely due to the limitations the State of Israel and the IDF placed on themselves regarding the use of force.

The goals of these limitations were to reduce casualties among IDF soldiers; reduce civilian losses from rockets hitting the home front; reduce enemy collateral damage; reduce international criticism of Israel over its military conduct; and avoid the need to provide a civil response to the needs of a local enemy population.

Israel's belief that it can rely on intermittent deterrence operations was painfully shattered on Oct. 7. It took a severe blow to national security to force a review of the security doctrine and a rediscovery of the concept of victory/decision. It was quickly understood that victory/decision is required in the current campaign and probably also in future campaigns.

Tactical victory is not about killing all opposing military soldiers or terrorist operatives, but about breaking their ability to fight as a combatant framework. In the current war, operational victory does not mean the threat of guerrilla warfare and terrorism has been removed from Gaza, but that Hamas' ability to cause damage, especially to the Israeli civilian home front, is declining dramatically.

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy's ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. It is achieved by continuing military operations in order to weaken the enemy's guerrilla warfare and terrorism capabilities until they either stop completely or are reduced to the scale of individual events. Grand victory in Gaza would mean a years' long process until the creation of fundamental change. A civilian authority would be established with an effective police force and the capacity for civil, economic and law enforcement governance. The population would implement a basic approach of coexistence with Israel. Yet such a process does not yet appear practical or feasible.

This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. But the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel.

WSJ: U.S. Pushes to Shape Israel’s Rafah Operation, Not Stop It

In two days of meetings between the Israeli defense chief and senior officials in the White House and Pentagon, discussions on Israel’s planned military operation in southern Gaza focused not on how to stop it, but on how to protect civilians during its rollout.

The businesslike tone of the talks was a departure from previous weeks, when top U.S. officials bluntly warned Israel against an all-out offensive on Rafah—where more than a million displaced Palestinians have taken refuge—while Israel’s prime minister defiantly vowed to press ahead.

Rafah has been at the center of a growing rift between Israeli and U.S. political leaders. Those tensions boiled over on Monday, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu canceled a visit to Washington by top aides to discuss U.S. concerns over the planned offensive on Rafah, where Hamas fighters are making a final stand. The tit-for-tat move was in response to the U.S. abstaining from a United Nations Security Council resolution that called for an immediate cease-fire while also demanding the release of hostages.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, however, proceeded with his meetings at the White House and Pentagon on Monday and Tuesday, which had been previously scheduled. Gallant is part of Israel’s three-member war cabinet that includes Netanyahu and Benny Gantz, the prime minister’s chief political rival.

While President Biden’s relationship with Netanyahu has frayed, the channel between U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gallant remains strong. Since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, the two defense chiefs have met several times and talked by phone about 40 times.

In Gallant’s closed-door meetings in Washington, a more pragmatic conversation began to emerge in which the discussions were on conducting a phased operation to reduce the potential harm to civilians while still ensuring that Israel dismantles Hamas’s four battalions in Rafah.

“I think there is an understanding we have to dismantle Hamas,” Gallant said, following his White House meetings.

At a Tuesday meeting at the Pentagon, Austin pressed his Israeli counterpart to ensure that effective arrangements were in place to protect civilians before an Israeli military operation is mounted to attack the Hamas fighters there.

“There is a sequence,” a U.S. defense official said. “The military aspect of the operation should not proceed until the humanitarian aspects have been fully addressed.”

Both sides also agreed that the Hamas battalions in Rafah must be dislodged so that the militants cannot attempt a comeback or continue to smuggle weapons into the enclave, which are prerequisites for ending the war and paving the way for a new political authority in Gaza. And that means trying to find ways to work with Israel on its Rafah strategy, for lack of better options.

Washington Denies a Bedrock of Warfighting

The Biden administration recently pressed Ukraine to halt attacks on Russian oil refineries. Ukrainian strikes on refineries and tankers in the Black Sea have contributed to a rise in the global oil price, and specifically of oil products, especially diesel. Almost the last thing the Biden administration wants in an election year is higher fuel prices and associated inflation in other goods and services. But in acting to halt rising oil prices, Washington is undermining the Ukrainian war effort. Denying energy supplies to the adversary in war has long been a bedrock of military strategy. Washington’s policy toward adversary fuel supplies is likely to lengthen the Ukraine-Russia war, as well as the Gaza war.

With oil and fuel product prices rising, Washington has now slammed the brakes on Ukraine’s effective strategies, effectively constraining Ukraine at a time that the war with Russia is likely to escalate soon. This is not the first time the administration has blocked an ally’s effort to choke off its enemy’s energy supplies. In the war in Gaza, the U.S. has demanded that Israel not only desist from disrupting such supplies but actually provide energy to Hamas. As a result, Hamas has been able to sustain tunnel warfare, which depends on liquid fuels. The provision of fuel to Hamas fighters enabled them to continue waging war from underground, prolonging the conflict and thereby endangering the lives of even more civilians in both Gaza and Israel.

In both cases Washington has imposed conditions on its allies that fly in the face of one of the cardinal principles of military strategy: disrupt an enemy’s energy supplies to cripple its forces. Allowing adversaries access to fuel extends a conflict and leads to more deaths as well as delays the conclusion of hostilities. Washington needs to let Ukraine and Israel finish the job, or indeed stop the wars. But hamstringing American partners is the worse option, since it extends the wars.

Bernard-Henri Levy: What If the U.S. Helps Hamas Win?

Let's imagine that Israel yields to the pressure, refrains from entering Rafah to finish off Hamas' four surviving battalions, and agrees to the general cease-fire of indeterminate duration that the U.S. administration seems to push. If that came to pass, Hamas would declare victory - on the verge of defeat, then the next minute revived. These criminals against humanity would emerge from their tunnels triumphant.

The Arab street would view Hamas terrorists as resistance fighters. In the West Bank, Hamas would quickly eclipse the corrupt and ineffective Palestinian Authority, whose image would pale next to the aura of martyrdom and endurance in which Hamas would cloak itself.

After that, none of the experts' extravagant plans for an international stabilization force, an interim Arab authority, or a technocratic government presiding over the reconstruction of Gaza would stand long against the return of this group of criminals adorned with the most heroic of virtues. Hamas would set the ideological and political agenda, and hope for peace harbored by moderates on both sides will be dead.

In December, the New York Times quoted an "expert:"

“Under international humanitarian law, the place where you evacuate people to must, by law have sufficient resources for their survival — medical facilities, food and water,” said James Elder, a spokesman for the United Nations Children’s Fund.

“That is absolutely not the case,” he said.

Other anti-Israel sites ran with his words, saying that Israel asking Gazans to evacuate is a "crime against humanity."

There is no such law mentioned in any IHL database I could find.

Perversely, it is Israel's adherence to international humanitarian law that is being called a violation of IHL.

The most relevant rule is IHL Rule 24: "Each party to the conflict must, to the extent feasible, remove civilian persons and objects under its control from the vicinity of military objectives." This is related to Rule 20: "Each party to the conflict must give effective advance warning of attacks which may affect the civilian population, unless circumstances do not permit."

The entire point of the rule is to save civilian lives. Evacuations from the area where there is a military target isn't against humanitarian law - it is an obligation!

The alternatives are to bomb the civilians or to end a war anytime terrorists use civilians as human shields. Neither of those are international humanitarian law. Israelis doing exactly what is required under IHL, to the letter. That makes people like James Elder angry because they want IHL to be handcuffs on only one side.

Nothing in IHL says that a war must stop if the civilians cannot go to a place that has proper medical facilities and food ready for them. If that were the case, then Hamas can stop the war anytime it wants by ensuring that food and medical aid is only available right on top of their weapons caches and tunnels.

Which is exactly what Hamas tries to do!

UNICEF's seeming concern for international humanitarian law begins and ends with lying about Israeli obligations. But they are totally silent about Hamas. And many IHL rules are flaunted by Hamas every single day.

Rule 22: "The parties to the conflict must take all feasible precautions to protect the civilian population and civilian objects under their control against the effects of attacks."

Hamas does the opposite.

Rule 23: "Each party to the conflict must, to the extent feasible, avoid locating military objectives within or near densely populated areas."

Hamas does the opposite.

Rule 96. "The taking of hostages is prohibited."

Hamas does the opposite.

Rule 97. "The use of human shields is prohibited."

Hamas does the opposite.

In all of James Elder's X timeline, he has not once condemned Hamas for any of these violations, all of which directly affect children. In fact, he has not mentioned Hamas at all. He waited until several days after October 7 to say anything, because that way he could "all lives matter" the child victims in Israel and call for a "ceasefire" to stop Israel from defending itself.

This is immorality masquerading as concern for civilians. It is an effectively pro-Hamas, pro-terror position by people who pretend to be on the side of human rights and morality.

Read every section of international humanitarian law, in the original, and not the fictional version that people like James Elder pretend to quote. Every single relevant section is being done scrupulously by Israel, and every single relevant section is being brazenly violated by Hamas.

How many NGOs and news media ever point that out?

(h/t Richard Landes)

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!

New Ramadan series depicts Theodor Herzl as Teddy Roosevelt (video)

Every Ramadan, Arab TV networks vie for viewers with many TV miniseries being shown. Not a few of them have antisemitic or anti-Israel themes.

This year, the most prominent one, which debuted last night, is called Meliha. It is about a family that fled Gaza during the second intifada to western Egypt and their journey to return to Gaza when Libya fell apart.

I don't know if the series directly discusses the current war, but its ads sure use the war to try to attract viewers.

The introduction to the series gives a short and very absurd summary of how Jews came to Palestine in the early 1900s. It is pretty much in line with standard Arab histories: a myth that Jews lived in peace with Muslims and Christians, and that Zionism was a European plot to get rid of their Jews as well as act as a colonial bulwark against Arab barbarians. Jews have no history in the land and no possible reason to move there. (The series appears to be available on Netflix in some Arab countries, so this might be why explicit antisemitism is muted and instead projected to only Europe.)

The videos accompanying this narration have little to do with the words spoken: World War II planes are superimposed on World War I narration, a clip of the Kotel after 1967 pretending to be what it looked like before 1900.

But the craziest and funniest part is the depictions of "Herzl." Every single photo of Theodor Herzl is in fact Teddy (Theodore) Roosevelt!

Here is the intro to the series, with the English subtitles.

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!

From a report by the UN Secretary General to the UN Security Council in 2022:

The conduct of hostilities in urban and other populated areas increased the risks of death and injury for civilians, particularly when fighting involved the use of explosive weapons. In 2021, 1,234 incidents involving the use of explosive weapons were recorded in populated areas in 21 States affected by conflict, resulting in 10,184 victims. Of these, 89 per cent were civilians, compared with 10 per cent in other [non-urban] areas.

This came from a British NGO called Action on Armed Violence. For other wars, it is probably accurate.

Unfortunately, their methodology in counting casualties in the current Gaza war weighs towards assuming all casualties are civilians.

They count 14,009 civilian deaths from explosives in Gaza between October 7 and March 20, but they admit that they are reporting nearly all of those deaths as civilian since terrorist deaths are rarely reported.

This figure refers to the number of reported civilians killed or injured by explosive weapon use in Gaza since 07 October 2023, gathered using incident-specific English language media reporting. ...Where a specific breakdown of civilians and combatants was not provided, casualties are reported as civilians with the caveat that combatants may be included in the toll.

Apparently they are basing their numbers on UN-OCHA daily reports where they repeat Ministry of Health reports of specific deadly airstrikes. Those are the only somewhat detailed English-language daily reports I am aware of. OCHA doesn' t investigate to see if there were military targets inside or underneath the houses that are bombed.

But the methodology appears to be sound in other wars, assuming credible English language reporting, which is reasonable given that overreporting civilian casualties has no military value as it does for Hamas, and where military casualties are not silenced as Hamas does.

Which means that if Israel's estimate of 13,000 terrorist killed is even remotely close to true, Israel is doing an unprecedented job of minimizing civilian deaths in urban warfare.

(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!

03/26 Links Pt2: UN Human Rights Council ‘promotes Jew-hatred, Hamas, atrocity denial’; Hostage Uriel Baruch murdered by Hamas

From Ian:

Lies of Hamas and antisemites bear fruit at UN

Like a house of cards, the artifice of lies built by Hamas and its supporters has begun to crumble.

A few weeks ago, statistician Abraham Wyner published a report in Tablet Magazine conclusively proving that Hamas is lying about the casualty figures in Gaza. The deaths reported by the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry rose in a ridiculously linear fashion on a day-by-day basis that is virtually impossible in a real war. In addition, given Hamas’s acknowledgment that at least 6,000 of its fighters have been killed, its claim that 70% of the casualties in Gaza have been women and children is impossible unless male civilians are being miraculously spared. The extent of this lie is apparent when the true casualty numbers for terrorists and combatants killed in Gaza are taken into account, over 13,000.

Yesterday, former Al Jazeera director Yasser Abu Hilala admitted that the accusations that IDF soldiers raped women during the recent operation at the al-Shifa Hospital were fabricated.

"It was revealed through Hamas investigations that the story of the rape of women in Shifa Hospital was fabricated," Hilala wrote, adding that "The woman who spoke about rape justified her exaggeration and incorrect talk by saying that the goal was to arouse the nation’s fervor and brotherhood!"

Anti-Israel forces have made up rape allegations against Israel whole-cloth in order to distract from and excuse the well-documented mass rapes committed by Hamas terrorists on October 7 and the reports that the hostages still held in Gaza face constant sexual assaults and abuse from their captors.

However, the same day that the rape allegations against Israel collapsed, the constant stream of lies against Israel bore fruit as the Biden Administration caved to the pressure from those who spread these lies and refused to use its veto power against a UN Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire during the month of Ramadan.

This resolution is merely declarative and creates no legal obligations, but it will still make everything worse. Hamas will be further convinced that its strategy of intentionally causing the deaths of its own people and constantly lying to inflate the number of civilian deaths is working and should continue, and it will be encouraged to dig in its heels and refuse any deal to see the hostages released in exchange for a temporary ceasefire. It will be seen as further evidence of Israel’s wrongdoing by those around the world who support Hamas’s genocidal goals, giving a tailwind to the antisemites making life more dangerous for Jews everywhere.

Ironically, hours after this shameful betrayal at the UN, the American government stated that it knows the accusations of Israeli war crimes are lies. Addressing Israel’s compliance with an executive order signed by President Biden last month mandating that recipients of US military aid demonstrate that they are complying with international law, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said that “We have not found them (the Israelis) to be in violation, either when it comes to the conduct of the war or the provision of humanitarian assistance.”

Western Guilt

The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz,” runs a bizarre quip ascribed to the Israeli psychiatrist Zvi Rex. To deconstruct it, consult Dr. Freud. “A convenient way to dispatch guilt,” he might expound, “is to project it onto your victim” — like a schoolyard bully who huffs that the fight started when the other guy hit back.

Guilt-swapping is precisely what Hamas’s cheerleaders around the world did even before Israel struck back after October 7. Hamas had tortured, raped, and murdered 1,200 Israelis. Instead of condolences, Israel reaped a global orgy of antisemitism, be it masked or overt, that also engulfed Jews everywhere, especially university students (demonstrating that higher education is no antidote for frenzy). It was a perfect reversal of cause and effect.

To plumb the Freudian mechanism, go back to postwar Germany, whose Nazi precursor had committed the crime of all crimes. After total defeat and “reeducation,” antisemitism was out. Democracy established strong roots, and philosemitism became the creed of the land. The government paid billions in restitution to the survivors of the Holocaust and the young state of Israel. At Yad Vashem, German officials from the president down would bow their head to the 6 million dead. The arms trade flourished; German-made U-boats are now one leg of Israel’s nuclear triad.

Yet the moral burden stuck, and so Schuldabwehr — “repelling guilt” — crept into contrition and atonement. By the first intifada, in 1987, Germans were telling themselves: “Israel is doing to the Palestinians what we did to the Jews.” “They are conducting a Vernichtungskrieg” — Nazispeak for a war of annihilation. “Gaza is like the Warsaw Ghetto.” “Haven’t the Jews learned from the past?” Auschwitz, then, was a kind of reform school.

Freud might muse: “Such parallels betray projection. Culpability continued to chafe, and, eventually, Germans sought relief by shifting it onto the victims.” Steeped in the Torah, Freud would add: “Three thousand years before I set up my couch, the Jews invented the scapegoat in Leviticus who ‘shall bear all their iniquities to a barren region; and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness.’” But he would explain: “Such displacement, as I call it, spelled vast moral progress — no more human sacrifice to appease the Gods.”

There is no such advance in our days as we run through the third iteration of Jew-hatred.

The first chapter was written by Christianity. Jews were charged with killing God’s son, desecrating the Host, and committing ritual murder. A bitter Jewish joke makes the point. When a little girl was killed just before Passover, the shtetl’s Jews cowered in the shul awaiting an imminent massacre. Suddenly, the rabbi barges in, jubilating, “I have wonderful news. The girl was not Christian, but Jewish.”

The second chapter was authored by Hitler, who went from faith to race, fingering Jews as cosmic enemies of Germany and the world. Once, Jews poisoned the wells; now it is the bloodstream of the Aryans. They had to be quashed like super-deadly bugs.

Chapter 3 unfolds as we speak. “From the river to the sea,” a classic Palestinian refrain, sounds like a geographic reference, but its thrust is ethnic cleansing and extinction. Chanting this mantra, the crowds on Western campuses and squares haven’t read the 1988 charter of its leading exponent, Hamas, which in the name of Allah orders Muslims to kill Jews wherever they hide. Nor do the infuriated know the venom continually oozing from the language of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Tehran. “Israel remains a foreign body,” thundered Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah years ago, as if cribbing from Mein Kampf. Before the International Criminal Court, Israel stands accused of Nazi-like “genocide.” Hamas official Ghazi Hamad: “We must remove that country, because it constitutes a . . . catastrophe for the Arab and Islamic nation.” As for the October 7 massacre, we will do it “again and again.” And “everything is justified.”

Far Right and Far Left Converge — Against the Jews

An extremist distributes a flier about “Zionists infiltrating the media.” A political activist tweets, “Nothing is creepier than Zionism.” A pundit writes about “the dirty tactics of Zionist censorship.”

Can you tell which of these haters is coming from the political right, and which from the political left? The world of antisemitism has become so muddled that it’s almost impossible to tell one from the other.

Consider: One of these three haters was recently arrested for painting the slogan “White Power” on synagogues. One co-chaired the Women’s March on Washington. One is a former New York Times correspondent and speechwriter for Ralph Nader. Can you tell which one is which?

One of the three is a Presbyterian minister. One is a devout Muslim. One owns a Ku Klux Klan robe. Still can’t tell who’s who?

Although these three bigots come from very different places on the political and religious spectrums, they have managed to find something in common: hatred of Jews, thinly disguised as hatred of “Zionists.”

Among the most troubling phenomena of our time is the extent to which antisemitism has become interchangeable among individuals who hold starkly differing views on other issues, from abortion to immigration to civil rights. Yet they all hate Jews.

There is no simple explanation for this because there is no simple explanation for antisemitism. Some bigots hate Jews for religious reasons, some for political reasons. Some focus their ire on Jewish philanthropists, some focus on Jews in the media, some focus on the Jewish state.

And sometimes they focus their hate on each other. In the 1930s, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union both violently persecuted their Jewish citizens, even as the two regimes went back and forth between being enemies and being allies. The Germans oppressed Jews and Judaism in the name of Aryan racial purity, the Soviets oppressed them in the name of working-class solidarity. Even when Hitler and Stalin hated each other, they never stopped hating Jews.

Leafing through the American Communist press in the 1930s is a ride on an intellectual roller-coaster. U.S. Communists dutifully followed the Soviet line, regularly and passionately denouncing Nazi Germany—until the Soviets signed a nonaggression pact with the Nazis in August 1939, at which point the American far left suddenly declared that the British, the French, and “the capitalist press” were the real enemy, to cite an editorial which appeared in that month’s issue of Young Communist Review. Two years later, Hitler tore up the pact and America’s Communists returned to being anti-Nazi. All the while, Jews and Judaism remained in the crosshairs of both Marxism and Nazism.

New report: Online antisemitism has soared since October 7. (But we all knew that.)

The Online Hate Prevention Institute (Australia) and Online Hate Task Force (Belgium) have released a 220-page report detailing how much antisemitism has exploded since October 7.

Antisemitism surged following the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, 2023. Antisemitism on social media incited offline incidents including hate crimes, reflected the hostile offline environment, and promoted a social acceptability of antisemitism normalised this hostility. This report provides a vital in-depth analysis of online antisemitism in the months after the October 7 attack. It empirically compares the year leading up to the attack with what followed. It provides examples showing the nature of the harm.

The report is based on 160 hours of monitoring by experts, 16 hours on each of 10 platforms: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X (Twitter), YouTube, Telegram, LinkedIn, Gab, Reddit, and BitChute. The data has been categorised using 27 subcategories of antisemitism, and summarised into 4 major categories: traditional antisemitism, Israel related antisemitism, problematic Holocaust related content, and incitement to violence. The systematic collection process with the same amount of time spent gathering data for each platform results in a rate of collection and sample size that reflects how prevalent antisemitism was on each platform. This is compared to work using the same methodology over the year leading up to October 7.

Instead of counting the entire amount of antisemitic posts, they chose a sampling method of ten hours per platform, and from that they can obtain a fair comparison between platforms and within platforms before October 7 and afterwards.

To me, the most surprising result was LinkedIn, which had practically no antisemitism before October 7 and became a huge purveyor since then, mostly Israel-related antisemitism.

We hear about antisemitism on TikTok but it is the least bad in number of new antisemitic posts. (It is very bad at taking them down.)

And, no, this survey does not count criticism of Israel as being antisemitic. Their "Israel related antisemitism" on LinkedIn includes things like these:

And like this one on Telegram:

No one, besides antisemites, would call these legitimate criticism of Israel.

Online antisemitism is often the spark for "real world" antisemitic acts.

The report includes lots of specific recommendations for social media platforms individually and collectively. It is an impressive study.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

The White House is publicly accepting Hamas disinformation and reinforcing it (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

“If Hamas truly believes that the people, the Palestinian people are suffering, then why would they want to take this aid and use it for themselves to support their terrorist organization? One would hope that this aid will get to the people that are most deserving and in need.”
Pentagon spokesman Pat Ryder when asked how the US was going to ensure humanitarian aid reaches civilians and not Hamas.

Did Ryder really acknowledge that Hamas is a terrorist organization and then in the same breath expect that those terrorists would happily share humanitarian aid with the rest of Gaza? We shouldn't be all that surprised. Remember, this is the same administration where Biden himself wholeheartedly accepts -- and repeats -- the Hamas claim that 30,000 Gazans have died so far.

The Biden administration, like most of the West, has fallen for the Hamas propaganda -- hook, line, and sinker. That is the point made in a recent YNet article, The US sees situation in Gaza through Hamas' optics:

Hamas uses the suffering of the people in Gaza for its propaganda purposes and for pressuring Israel. The fact that the U.S. has fallen for this Hamas tactic is no less than shocking. It only reinforces Hamas’ incentive to use the civilian population as a human shield since this strategy works - it is more harmful to Israel than it is to Hamas.

Of course, we can make the argument that the Biden administration is not fooled by Hamas at all -- they are merely undercutting Israel because this is an election year and the powers that be are afraid of losing votes. But that interpretation doesn't make Biden look any better.

Either way, the administration is publicly accepting Hamas disinformation and reinforcing it. That only strengthens the terrorists in their strategy and encourages them to hold out while putting lives and the future of Gaza at stake. Biden says he wants stability, but his actions have the opposite effect.

The destruction of Hamas terrorists is not a stated goal. The foreign policy is even more wishy-washy.

For that matter, in the recent UN Security Council Resolution 2728, there is no linkage between a cease-fire and the release of the hostages. Hamas wins again.

The resolution fails to explicitly tie humanitarian aid to the release of hostages. The resolution merely puts the two issues side by side.

During Monday's Press Briefing, Matt Lee of the Associated Press pushed State Department Spokesperson, Matthew Miller on this point:

QUESTION: So last week when you guys presented your resolution at the UN, there were complaints from people who said that it delinked the ceasefire from the release of hostages, and U.S. officials were rather vociferous in saying that that is not the case. However, what you guys abstained on today does appear to delink them. Is that your understanding of —

MR MILLER: So we don’t believe it delinks them. You see in the same paragraph it – the resolution calling for both a ceasefire and the release of hostages. It’s not the exact language that we would have put forward, obviously, because the language that we would put forward is the language that we did put forward last week, but it is language that is consistent with our policy to call for both a ceasefire and the release of hostages, and that’s why we did not exercise a veto today.

As I said, we did have concerns about the lack of other provisions in the resolution, but as it pertains to a ceasefire and the release of hostages, both the things that we called for were there in the resolution.

A few moments later, Miller admits this resolution is toothless since it is non-binding. Matt Lee asks the obvious question:

QUESTION: So what’s the point?

MR MILLER: Well —

QUESTION: Why did you —

MR MILLER: — you could ask that —

QUESTION: Why did you abstain? Why didn’t you veto?

MR MILLER: We didn’t veto because we thought the language in it was consistent with something that – the language as it relates to the ceasefire and release of hostages was consistent with the longstanding United States position.

QUESTION: So you don’t believe anything is going to happen as a result of the passage of this resolution.

MR MILLER: So I think that separate and apart from this resolution, we have active, ongoing negotiations to try to achieve what this resolution calls for, which is the – an immediate ceasefire and the release of hostages. I don’t – I can’t say that this – this resolution is going to have any impact on those negotiations.

Matt Lee

This whole drama leading up to passing a resolution for a cease-fire has all been for nothing. That fact leads to Lee's obvious question:

If that’s the case, what the hell is the point of the UN or the UN Security Council?

Miller admits the US is not looking to the UN to get things done. It is looking to negotiate in Qatar. That would be the same Qatar that supports Hamas and plays host to Hamas leaders. This is not exactly neutral territory.

Is it any wonder that Hamas has shown no inclination to surrender and is willing -- and confident -- in its strategy to sit and wait?

I recall that during the Iranian hostage crisis during the Carter administration, some suggested that the Iranians would not have dared to try taking Russians hostage -- such was the fear that the Soviet Union inspired.

That was then.

The ISIS massacre at the concert hall shows that those days are over. Ukraine's ability to hold out against Putin has seen to that.

The West will blame Israel for the Hamas massacre and for unrest in the Middle East. But it is becoming increasingly clear that the weakness and indecision of the once powerful "superpowers" is seen as an invitation to Islamists to renew and expand their jihad.

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!

03/26 Links Pt1: Melanie Phillips: Israel alone Weep for America; Israel Has Created a New Standard for Urban Warfare. Why Will No One Admit It?

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Israel alone Weep for America

America is punishing Israel for a catastrophe that the Biden administration itself facilitated. The atrocities of October 7 that started the war took place because Hamas’s patron, Iran, correctly perceived that America would ultimately abandon Israel rather than itself get stuck in. If the Biden administration hadn’t shown such weakness in defending the interests of the free world from Afghanistan to Yemen and Iraq and Ukraine, Hamas would not have been unleashed on October 7.

After the war started, despite the two aircraft carriers the US dispatched to the region, the Biden administration responded to continued attacks by Iranian proxies — even against its own interests — with a mere limp wrist. It has done nothing to deter Iran’s proxy army Hezbollah from bombarding northern Israel from Lebanon with hundreds of rockets and anti-tank missiles.

It could have stopped the war in its tracks by telling Hamas’s protector Qatar that, unless it instructed Hamas to release the hostages and surrender, the US would end their profitable relationship and treat Qatar instead as a global pariah. Instead, the US is not only feeding Israel to its mortal enemies; by failing to use its muscle to end this war, it is also facilitating Hamas’s war crimes against the civilians of Gaza by using snuff movies of their distress to incite hysterical hatred of Israel in the west.

Biden and Cameron fail to acknowledge that Israel is fighting in this manner because it has no choice. With Hamas almost entirely underground, Israel cannot get at it in any other way. If it doesn’t defeat Hamas, Israel will continue to face genocidal attack. Only by defeating Hamas and killing or capturing its Gaza leader, Yahya Sinwar, does Israel have any chance of getting any of the hostages back. Only by defeating Hamas does Israel have any chance of avoiding an infinitely more terrible all-out war with Hezbollah.

This is the rupture with America that some of us have seen coming for a very long time. But the US and UK don’t realise what they have now done. This isn’t just about Israel. It’s also about them.

The October 7 pogrom was a clear inflection point for the west. Would it support Israel in the battle for civilisation against barbarism? Now we have the answer.

But there’s a deeper question. The UK is busily destroying itself by making a bonfire of its historic culture and values. Its public administration has all but collapsed, its indigenous people are dying out and it has lost control of its borders.

In the US vicious culture wars are raging, there are unbridgeable political and social divisions, its elites have torn up its historic global mission of exceptionalism — and it has also lost control of its border.

Do the US and UK actually want to survive, or are they now in a death spiral?

Throughout centuries of persecution, the Jewish people have survived against impossible odds — while every civilisation that has tried to destroy them has disappeared. Whatever horrors lie ahead, Israel will survive. The same certainty cannot apply to Britain and America. Today has demonstrated that they don’t even know how to do so.

Richard Goldberg: Bring them home . . . or not — Biden just sold out Israeli hostages at the United Nations

Against the backdrop of a hostage negotiation in which Hamas remains maximalist in demands and the arrival of Israel’s defense minister in Washington to meet with senior White House officials, the United States needed to veto any Security Council resolution that could further embolden the terrorist group.

Biden chose a different path: abstaining on a resolution that decoupled a demand for a cease-fire from a demand for the release of hostages, thus severely undercutting Israel at the hostage-negotiating table.

The resolution had other severe flaws that demanded a US veto.

It made no mention of Oct. 7 or Hamas, let alone note Hamas is a terrorist organization, as if the world woke up one day in a vacuum outraged to find Israel at war in Gaza and Palestinian civilians in distress.

Why Israel is at war, who Israel is targeting and who is to blame for civilian suffering are unimportant questions for a resolution that simply says Israel must lay down its arms and hope a terrorist group that savaged 1,200 people and took 250 hostages will care what the Security Council demands.

These outrageous omissions, however, were no longer automatic triggers for a US veto.

During his recent State of the Union address, the president pledged to the families of Hamas-held hostages, which include American citizens, that “we will not rest until we bring their loved ones home.”

Apparently that vow did not include vetoing resolutions that disconnect demands for hostage releases from any potential cease-fire — reducing the odds of bringing them home.

The State Department claimed Monday the resolution reflected the administration’s “principled position that any ceasefire text must be paired with text on the release of the hostages.”

But that explanation itself reflects how far Biden policy has shifted. No longer must a cease-fire be conditioned on the release of hostages; the two demands must only appear next to each other for optics.

On a policy level, the two demands now exist independently — meaning America supports a cease-fire even without the release of hostages.

Israeli strength backed by American political support is needed to bring hostages home, defeat Hamas in Gaza and deter Iranian threats throughout the Middle East.

To counter the perception of an Israel crumbling under American pressure, Jerusalem must respond with reaffirmed determination to destroy Hamas on the battlefield.

And members of Congress should reaffirm their support for that objective, including a potential operation in Rafah.

Hamas scored a political victory with Biden’s help.

Israel must now fight that much harder to reverse the damage — with or without Biden’s approval.

John Spencer: Israel Has Created a New Standard for Urban Warfare. Why Will No One Admit It?

In its operation at Shifa hospital in Gaza to root out Hamas terrorists, the Israel Defense Forces took unique precautions to protect the innocent. Doctors accompanied the forces to help Palestinian patients if needed. The IDF also brought in food, water and medical supplies for the civilians inside.

I've never known an army to take such measures to attend to the enemy's civilian population, especially while simultaneously combating the enemy in the very same buildings. In fact, Israel has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history - above and beyond what international law requires and more than the U.S. did in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The international community, and increasingly the U.S., barely acknowledges these measures while repeatedly excoriating the IDF for not doing enough to protect civilians - even as it confronts a ruthless terror organization holding its citizens hostage.

The predominant Western theory of executing wars seeks to shatter an enemy with surprising, overwhelming force and speed. No warnings to the civilian population or time to evacuate cities is given. Yet Israel has abandoned this established playbook in order to prevent civilian harm.

The Hamas-supplied estimate of over 31,000 deaths in Gaza does not acknowledge a single combatant death (nor any deaths due to the misfiring of its own rockets or other friendly fire). The IDF estimates it has killed about 13,000 Hamas operatives, a number I believe credible because I believe the armed forces of a democratic American ally over a terrorist regime. That means 18,000 civilians have died in Gaza, a ratio of 1 combatant to 1.5 civilians - a number that would be historically low for modern urban warfare.

The Israeli stock market has gained 9% since October 7, although it has not done as well as the US markets

The Tel Aviv stock market plummeted immediately after October 7, but it has recovered since then, posting a respectable 9% gain since its close on October 5.

The gains are not as impressive as those of the Dow Jones Industrial Average or Nasdaq, which have gone up 17.6% and 22% since October 6 respectively.

But it appears that investors are not betting against Israel's economic recovery in the face of a war that has taken many critical people away from their jobs for months at a time.

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!