Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, April 01, 2024

04/01 Links Pt2: The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism; PA Religion Minister: Jews are “apes and pigs”; What Chuck Schumer Has Wrought; Ritchie Torres to 'Post': Israel is not alone

From Ian:

The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: An Interview with Andrew G. Bostom

Since the invasion of Israel by Hamas terrorists on October 7 and the massacre of around 1,200 people there, antisemitic, pro-Hamas marches have swept both majority-Muslim countries and Western nations.

In London, antisemitic hate crimes are up 1,350% according to police, and pro-Hamas protestors chanted, “Oh Jews, the army of Muhammad is coming.” In the Tunisian city of Al Hammah, hundreds of people were filmed setting fire to a synagogue. In Russia’s Muslim Dagestan region, hundreds of people stormed into the main airport and onto the landing field, chanting antisemitic slogans and seeking passengers arriving on a flight from Israel. In California, a Jewish dentist was killed, and two others injured in a shooting by a Muslim. In Chicago, a Jewish man was attacked by anti-Israel protesters at an October 7 documentary screening in the Logan Square. In Paris, a Jewish man was attacked outside a synagogue; and another was stabbed in Zurich.

In the Middle East, North Africa, and the Gulf Region, this genocidal hatred has resulted in the ethnic cleansing of Jews. Over 850,000 Jews were forced to leave their homes in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Morocco, and several other Arab countries in the 20 years following the re-establishment of Israel in 1948. Another major exodus of Jews took place from Iran in 1979-80, following the Islamic revolution. Jews had resided in those lands for over 2,500 years. The rising Muslim population in the West has imported the same—and exceedingly violent—Jew-hatred into Western nations. Antisemitic attacks and threats abound since Hamas ignited the war in Gaza by massacring and raping Israelis on October 7. To learn about the theological and historical roots of Muslim antisemitism, I interviewed a prominent specialist and researcher on Islam, its history and theology.

Dr. Andrew G. Bostom is a leading expert on the history and scriptures of Islam. He is the author of Sharia versus Freedom: The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism and the editor of both The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims and The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History. He has also published articles and commentary on Islam in The Washington Times, National Review Online, Revue Politique, FrontPageMagazine, American Thinker, and other print and online publications. More on Bostom’s work can be found at www.andrewbostom.org/blog/. What motivated you to write The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism?

Two specific discoveries motivated my research culminating in The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism.

First, since the end of the 12th century, Al Azhar University (and its mosque) have represented the apogee of Islamic religious education, which evolved into the de facto Vatican of Sunni Islam. Egyptian Sheikh Muhammad Al-Gameia, the Al-Azhar University representative in the U.S., and imam of the Islamic Cultural Center and Mosque of New York City at the time of the September 11, 2001, attacks, provided a very concrete and disturbing example of the authoritative Al-Azhar Islamic mindset exported to America. Within three days of the 9/11 jihad carnage, al-Gameia, who according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was “known for his moderate views,” sermonized, as the Tampa Bay Times reported, “calling for peace, healing, and love among people of all religions.” The good Sheikh struck an entirely different chord when he was interviewed for an Al-Azhar University website on October 4, 2001. Gameia returned to Egypt after September 11, 2001, alleging, without any substantiation, that he was being “harassed.” Gameia’s interview (original Arabic; extracts translated here) was rife with conspiratorial Islamic antisemitism, which riffed upon his invocation of what I would later come to understand are the central Quranic motifs of Jew-hatred, while equating Jews and Zionists. Al-Azhar’s representative to the U.S. melded this sacralized anti-Jewish bigotry to virulent calumnies against Americans and threats to the U.S.—whom he imagined as witless “dupes” of the Zionist Jews.

Second, in early 2005, when I was nearing completion of my initial book compendium, The Legacy of Jihad (specifically the section about jihad on the Indian subcontinent), I came across a remarkable comment by the Indian Sufi theologian Sirhindi (d. 1624). Typical of the mainstream Indian Muslim clerics of his era, Sirhindi was viscerally opposed to the reforms which characterized the latter ecumenical phase of Akbar’s 16th century reign (when Akbar became almost a Muslim-Hindu syncretist), particularly the abolition of the humiliating jizya (Quranic poll tax, as per Quran 9:29) upon the subjugated infidel Hindus. Sirhindi wrote, motivated by Akbar’s pro-Hindu reforms, that, “Whenever a Jew is killed, it is for the benefit of Islam.”

‘Elder of Ziyon’ doesn’t want readers to say, ‘I knew that already’

The Washington think tank Jewish Policy Center has called him an “essential” read half a dozen times, and the watchdog CAMERA UK said he is “indefatigable” and “one of the best pro-Israel bloggers out there.”

“Elder of Ziyon” is the pen name of a man who works in high tech and, for the past 20 years, has authored some 40,000 posts on a reader-supported, pro-Israel blog that goes by the same pseudonym. The site has received between 30,000 and 500,000 daily views, “Elder” told JNS.

The anonymous poster’s first entry was dated Aug. 15, 2004, and it ran five words, linking to an article in the Israeli press. Since then, “Elder”—whose identity is unknown to JNS—has reported longer-form material, including an investigation that led McGraw-Hill Education to pull the publication of a textbook he accused of anti-Israel propaganda.

In 2022, “Elder” self-published Protocols: Exposing Modern Antisemitism, which Gerald Steinberg, founder of NGO Monitor, called “the essential reference handbook” in “exposing the lies behind the modern embodiment of the infamous ‘Protocols.’”

“In tackling the broad range of hate campaigns, from manipulating the slogans of international law and human rights in the United Nations, to the fake media experts and the NGO anti-Zionist jihad, the new Protocols is a concise and fact-filled response,” Steinberg added.

“Elder” spoke with JNS some four-and-a-half months before the 20th anniversary of his blog, which remains on the platform Blogger, which launched in 1999 and which Google acquired in 2003.

“Maybe people are overwhelmed with the anti-Israel arguments. They’re overwhelmed with the sheer volume of hate that’s out there,” he told JNS. “I hope to be a place that they can go to get informed.”

Seth Mandel: What Chuck Schumer Has Wrought

Congratulations to Chuck Schumer, this year’s true April Fool. The predictably vile consequences of his public attacks on Israeli democracy are here, and no doubt there will be more coming.

Schumer has long fashioned himself the shomer—Hebrew for “watchman,” a play on his last name—of Israel. But he has revealed himself instead to be more of a mashgiach, the man who officially certifies products as kosher. And he has been certifying the political version of porkchops and pepperoni.

“I’m 100% with Senator Schumer,” declared Jamaal Bowman, the Squad-adjacent Democrat who has built his brand around anti-Jewish incitement. “[Benjamin Netanyahu] needs to be removed. He is a blockade to a pathway to peace. And we need a ceasefire right now. That’s what we should be focused on, humanitarian aid, not weapons.”

Appearing on MSNBC yesterday, Bowman had more to say: “The majority of Gaza has already been destroyed through acts of collective punishment by this maniac, Benjamin Netanyahu.”

Bowman was last seen yelling on a New York street corner that Israeli women were lying about the rapes committed by Hamas terrorists. Previously, he had been cited after he was caught on camera pulling a fire alarm to prevent a congressional floor vote. So it’s possible that Bowman uses the term “maniac” as a compliment, that it’s his way of trying to find common ground with the Israeli prime minister.

There were even worse things said by people in Congress yesterday, more evidence that Schumer has helped to open the floodgates of Jew-baiting when he called for regime change in an allied country.

Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon posted yesterday: “On this Easter, let’s ponder Netanyahu’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza, which has killed more than 20,000 women and children, and his restriction of humanitarian aid, which has pushed Palestinians to the brink of famine.”

There is a long tradition of using Christian holy days like Easter to scapegoat the Jews for the world’s misfortunes. The Kishinev pogrom of 1903, the most infamous of its kind and the closest relation to Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, began stirring on Easter. Warsaw was the site of an Easter pogrom in 1940—presumably folks remember what happened next.

Times of Israel says:

The Israel Defense Forces withdrew early Monday from the Gaza City complex housing the Shifa Hospital, after a two-week raid in which the military said it detained or killed hundreds of terror suspects.

During the raid, which began March 18, the IDF said troops captured some 900 suspects, of whom more than 500 were confirmed to be terror operatives, and killed more than 200 gunmen. Among those killed and detained were top commanders in Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Valuable intelligence was also seized, the IDF said.

The Jerusalem Post adds:

Top officers do not even refer to Shifa as “Shifa Hospital” but as “the Shifa compound” to reflect their belief that it was not so much an abused hospital as a command center with some hospital camouflage built around it.
The three centers of gravity for the terrorists were the Qatar facility, the emergency room, and the childbirth center – though there were terrorists in every single one of the sprawling hospital’s buildings.
According to the IDF, they gave the mostly 6,200 civilians and terrorists at least two separate opportunities to surrender.
Hamas not only fired mortars at the IDF, in disregard of the harm to the hospital buildings, but also used patients and doctors as human shields.
The IDF said that Shayetet 13’s special training could be credited for the successful evacuation of the patients and doctors without them being harmed, even as they fought off the Hamas terrorists.
These patients and doctors were moved to a pre-setup field hospital.
Moreover, the IDF said that those terrorists who did not surrender fought very hard, and several of them exploded themselves with grenades to try to kill nearby IDF troops.

Hamas's Media Office, which the Health Ministry uses as a trusted source, gives a completely different picture. From their Telegram channel:

⭕ *The “Israeli” occupation commits a shocking crime against humanity by destroying, burning and bulldozing the Shifa Medical Complex and killing and arresting more than 700 Palestinian civilians and we demand the introduction of field hospitals to save the health situation
◼️ The “Israeli” occupation army withdrew from Al-Shifa Medical Complex at dawn today, two weeks after storming and occupying it completely, leaving widespread destruction and a terrible crime against humanity and against international law, as this destruction affected all aspects of the complex and the occupation deliberately destroyed, burned and demolished all buildings and departments without exception. In a clear crime that shames humanity.
◼️ The occupation army killed more than 400 martyrs inside and around the complex, and tried to hide its heinous crime by executing hundreds of civilians, the wounded, and the sick inside the walls of the Shifa Medical Complex by covering the bodies with piles of sand, bulldozing them, burying them, and mixing them with the floor of the complex. It also arrested more than 300 prisoners. 100 Palestinian civilians are missing as a result of the shocking crime of the occupation.

And most of the world believes the terrorists over Israel.

Including, apparently, the media.

By every possible measure the Shifa hospital operation has been a huge success. The two weeks of battles is testimony to the fact that Hamas and Islamic Jihad had returned there and fought hard.

And the world media is doing everything it can to not report that to you.

Hundreds of reporters all trying to find angles to make Israel look bad and Hamas look good. They ignore that terrorists turned the hospital into a major terror hub. They downplay that hundreds of terrorists were killed or captured in a hospital, in maternity wards and surgery centers. I don't think one major international media outlet has mentioned that using a hospital for military purposes is not only a war crime but also makes the hospital lose protection under international law.

It is perhaps the most egregious misreporting from a war that already has the Al Ahli debacle.

Until this Jerusalem Post article I wasn't aware that Israel set up a field hospital ahead of time just for the patients. (The Gaza Health Ministry mentions that the IDF evacuated many patients and doctors to an administrative building on the hospital campus, and claims that conditions there were horrific. My guess is that this is the field hospital that Israel set up for the enemy, which is pretty much unheard of in urban warfare history.)

Where are the journalists with any integrity?

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 Institute for the Study of War frames the war properly

From the Institute of the Study of War website:

Dr. Kimberly Kagan founded ISW in May 2007, as U.S. forces undertook a daring new counterinsurgency strategy to reverse the grim security situation on the ground in Iraq . Frustrated with the prevailing lack of accurate information documenting developments on the ground in Iraq and the detrimental effect of biased reporting on policymakers, Dr. Kagan established ISW to provide real-time, independent, and open-source analysis of ongoing military operations and insurgent attacks in Iraq.

Its board members include military experts like retired generals Jack Keane and David H. Petraeus.

It has daily updates from various hotspots around the world. It covers the activities that Israel is involved in in a much different way than we see in the media.

It frames it as part of the war between Iran's Axis of Resistance against the West.

The site lists Axis of Resistance objectives for each arena:

Gaza:
Erode the will of the Israeli political establishment and public to sustain clearing operations in the Gaza Strip
Reestablish Hamas as the governing authority in the Gaza Strip

West Bank:
Establish the West Bank as a viable front against Israel

Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights:
Deter Israel from conducting a ground operation into Lebanon
Prepare for an expanded and protracted conflict with Israel in the near term
Expel the United States from Syria

Surprisingly, it doesn't list objectives of the Houthis, but it does cover their activities as well as those of Syrian pro-Iranian forces as part of the same Axis of Resistance forces.

Seeing the war as part of a multi-front war by Iran against Israel and the West is more accurate than this being considered an "Israel-Hamas war." While it is true that Hamas may have attacked on October 7 on its own, it generally follows the dictates and strategy of Iran.

ISW updates its maps daily.

Reading this after following the media - and even the Israeli media - is a breath of fresh air. They report incidents that don't make it into the news or that get buried. They give references to Hamas sources. Everything is transparent and there is no agenda beyond having accurate information to relay to US decision-makers.

From what I can tell so far, this is an essential site to understand what is happening and the larger context without the layers of spin and politics that most news media has.

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!

04/01 Links Pt1: IDF announces 600th soldier killed in action; Hamas hides casualties, blames failed rocket launches on Israel; Drone attack from Iraq damages building in Eilat

From Ian:

NGO Monitor: Analysis of the Human Rights Watch/Oxfam Allegations of "Israeli Forces' Conduct in Gaza"

As seen in the following report, the joint HRW-Oxfam document “Israeli Forces’ Conduct in Gaza – March 19, 2024” (formally, a submission under National Security Memorandum 20, regarding compliance with requirements on the use of US military assistance) reflects a fundamental and consistent lack of rigor, credibility and verifiability.1 Under the thin facade of analysis, HRW and Oxfam have published a prosecutorial diatribe that dispenses with the practice of presenting and weighing information from and perspectives of all the main actors and sources before reaching a conclusion.

Many of the claims of Israeli violations are ostensibly substantiated by “evidence” sourced to these same NGOs – 18 or 37 footnotes are self-references to previous HRW and Oxfam statements. These and the other references quote from the Gaza Health Ministry (GHM – controlled by Hamas); UN agencies including UNRWA, OCHA and the World Health Organization (WHO), which themselves lack credibility and which reference the same sources; unverifiable claims by anonymous “eyewitnesses” in Gaza; journalists and media platforms, such as Al Jazeera and CNN, which also cite UN agencies and anonymous “eyewitnesses”; and amorphous technical analyses. On this basis, HRW and Oxfam repeatedly claim to have “verified” various allegations regarding IDF responses to the October 7 atrocities, when in fact, no credible verification took place or was even possible. Contrasting and often more credible evidence is systematically erased, further highlighting the ideological and partisan objectives of this publication, in contrast to accurate and credible fact-finding.

Two of the central accusations in this document are the allegations that 1) Israel is deliberately and unjustifiably hampering the delivery of humanitarian and medical aid to Gaza – which HRW and Oxfam falsely declare to be an “unnecessarily complex inspection process” (Items 6 to 11 in appendix), thereby constituting “collective punishment,”2 and 2) that the IDF’s military actions in Gaza hospitals are arbitrary and unjustified. Notably, the “evidence” to support these allegations explicitly ignores numerous sources and facts constituting actual and monstrous war crimes committed by Hamas against Israeli civilians that do not fit this narrative – in particular, the massive diversion of aid, including for the construction of hundreds of kilometers of massive fortifications below schools, residences, medical facilities, etc,; the large-scale exploitation of hospitals for terror; and the manufacture and use of tens of thousands of rockets and missiles that target Israeli civilians. 3

In addition, assertions using the language of international humanitarian law (IHL) consist primarily of the authors’ political opinions. In a number of instances, they “conclude” that a particular IDF strike took place for which they did not discern a military purpose, repeating the fiction that NGO staffers have access to the real-time battlefield information available to Israeli military commanders, as well as the ability to ascertain their decision making processes. Similarly, the use by NGO political advocates of terms such as “disproportionate force” is entirely subjective and lacking in consistent criteria.4

In examining this document, as well as previous reports and the record of partisan political advocacy activities of HRW and Oxfam, it becomes clear that the objective of this document is to impede and disrupt cooperation between the US and Israel in counter-terrorism operations, particularly the brutal atrocities of October 7. Any citations from and references that give credibility to the allegations vilifying Israel, including in government documents, media platforms, and academic publications, would reinforce the unvirtuous circle of using unverifiable and politically motivated NGO claims as “evidence” to further defame and disrupt IDF responses to terror atrocities.

Will Arabists finally kill the US-Israel relationship?

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his merry band of Arabists must feel like they’re on the cusp of Nirvana as they prod President Joe Biden to ignore his instinct to protect Israel and destroy the special relationship nurtured over the last 75 years. In the tradition of the Arab world, they have played the long game, never giving up the hope that, Inshallah, the partition could be reversed.

Loy Henderson failed. George Marshall failed. John Foster Dulles failed. Wouldn’t you know that it would be Blinken, a Jew, who could be responsible for the unraveling of an alliance rooted in shared values and interests? The Arabists (who also inhabit other departments and include National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan) are trotting out all the shopworn arguments that proved erroneous in the past but are now finding acceptance in the lynch-mob atmosphere. They insist that our relationship with Israel is undermining our national interest, damaging relations with the Arabs, allowing the Soviets (I mean, Russians) to gain strength, impeding peace, provoking terrorist attacks on our troops, and only they know what is best for Israel.

Their case is as spurious today as it ever was. As President Dwight Eisenhower learned after listening too long to Dulles, forcing Israel to withdraw from the Sinai and pinning his hopes on Saudi Arabia for defending American interests in the region, only Israel shares our interests (though they are not always perfectly aligned) and will act on them.

Just as the Arabists wrongly predicted relations with the Arabs would deteriorate as ties with Israel grew more robust, the opposite occurred. Even now, the Abraham Accords are holding firm. Putting their interests ahead of the national interest, the Arabists are trying to sabotage normalization with the Saudis by linking it to a two-state solution that the Israelis, Palestinians, and certainly, the Saudis (and the Jordanians) don’t want. They will never admit that their vision of a Palestinian state is not only unwanted but untenable.

Outside of Syria, where it has a naval base, Russia has made no inroads with the Arab states. What it has done is strengthen ties to Iran thanks to the U.S. State Department’s appeasement of the mullahs. The Arabists want to blame Israel for attacks on U.S. forces by Iran-backed militias because they will never accept that radical Islamists don’t care about Israel; they want to destroy the West to build a global caliphate. Iranians were chanting “Death to America” long before Oct. 7. ISIS, Al-Qaeda and the other jihadis would attack us if Israel disappeared.

Biden is holding the relationship together by his fingernails, as evidenced by his moving from vetoing egregious U.N. resolutions to abstaining from them. Supporting the next one will be one sign that the Arabists have won. Others will be cutting or conditioning aid to Israel while funding the terrorists of the Palestinian Authority and making more concessions to Iran.

The Abraham Accords will probably survive

Six months into the Gaza war and world opinion – widely in support of Israel’s initial onslaught on Hamas following the horrendous events of October 7 – has steadily hardened and turned.

Appeals for a pause in the fighting have grown ever more strident, culminating in the resolution passed on March 25 by the UN Security Council calling for an immediate ceasefire.

The resolution, while also demanding the immediate and unconditional release of all the hostages held by Hamas, did not link the ceasefire call to the hostage release. In short, the UN is instructing Israel to stop fighting Hamas, giving it time to revive and regroup and leaving it free to continue bombarding Israel with rockets and drones.

Security Council members knew, of course, that demanding Hamas release all its hostages was simply virtue signaling, since it is quite unenforceable. Hamas is a terrorist organization, unbeholden to the UN or anyone else.

Arab street opinion and the self-interest of Arab sovereign states rarely coincide. The Abraham Accords were initially sold to a skeptical Arab public on the grounds that they would give rich Arab countries unprecedented financial leverage on Israel, and would eventually improve conditions for the Palestinians.

Months into a conflict that has cost thousands of lives, polls of Arab opinion indicate overwhelming support for Hamas. Regardless, Abraham Accord regimes, convinced that the benefits from the accords override other considerations, are sidelining public opinion.

The New York Daily News reports:

Three protesters were arrested after they crashed the Easter Vigil Mass at Manhattan’s iconic St. Patrick’s Cathedral, police said Sunday.

Protesters with the group XR NYC Palestine Solidarity held a banner reading “SILENCE = DEATH” before they were shoved away by church officials, video posted on X shows.

The protesters’ chants of ‘Free, free Palestine!’ echoed through the cathedral as they were shoved outside.

The protesters are affiliated Extinction Rebellion (XR), which has for years used flashy civil disobedience to call attention to the fight against climate change.

“War, occupation and industrial pollution are poisoning the soil, air, and water in Gaza and all over the planet, destroying the earth’s capacity to sustain life, said Gregory Schwedock, an XR NYC Palestine Solidarity activist arrested inside the cathedral. “This destruction is called ‘Ecocide.’”

To the progressive Left, Israel is guilty of violating every trendy social justice issue. So why not accuse it os "ecocide" as well?

They aren't the first, of course. The anti-Israel group Forensics Architecture wrote up an entire report on Israel's "ecocide" of Gaza for Land Day last week.

Also last week, The Guardian wrote, "Researchers and environmental organisations say the destruction will have enormous effects on Gaza’s ecosystems and biodiversity. The scale and potential long-term impact of the damage have led to calls for it to be regarded as “ecocide” and investigated as a possible war crime."

Only one problem: "Ecocide" is not a war crime. There are plenty of people who are trying to get it added to the Rome Statute, but it isn't there.

Given that Israel is accused of lots of "war crimes" that are not war crimes, why not make up a new one?

As usual, the double standards are blatant. When waging a war, the environment is a secondary consideration, although even under existing laws it has importance - actions that cause people to not have adequate access to water or sanitation would need to be weighed against military necessity, and this would happen even if ecocide is added as a major crime under the Rome Statute.

But we saw a few years ago that Hamas and its allies deliberately and consciously sent incendiary devices over the Gaza border, specifically to set forest fires. Those fires destroyed ecosystems in the area.

And in fact Arabs have been setting fires to Jewish-owned forests and crops since the 1920s. There were waves of such attacks in the 1930s.

No one called this "ecocide" even though the attacks were wanton, deliberate attempts to destroy the environment.

So why the double standard? Perhaps the reason can be found in a 2010 forest fire reported by YNet:

Six foreign nationals and Palestinians set fires alight near the West Bank settlement of Bat Ayin in the Gush Etzion bloc. Police said the suspects were taken in for questioning on suspicion of arson and illegal congregation.

Settlers said that at about 11 am they saw fires on lands they said belonged to Bat Ayin. Security sources said it was apparently land whose ownership is not regulated.

Dov Mark, land supervisor for the Gush Etzion Council, said such acts have taken place a number of times. "This is a known Palestinian method to take over state land," he said. "With the support of anarchists, who usually come from abroad, they come to an area of natural woodland which has never been cultivated, burn it on purpose and at the same time plant trees. It's all supposed to alter the reality on the ground."

The same types of people who claim to care about "ecocide" are the ones who purposefully set fires on Jewish lands.

There is only one consistent position from these so-called "progressives" - they hate proud Jews.

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!

Oxford's Dictionary of Law Enforcement says "Perfidious killing or wounding is a war crime under the Statute of the International Criminal Court whereby the perpetrator kills or wounds the victim by taking advantage of the victim's belief that he is in a state of protection under international law....Guerrilla fighters dressed in civilian clothes would always be guilty of perfidious killing or wounding by pretending to have civilian status, but they are not guilty if they carry their weapons openly."

Throughout the war, Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists have been wearing civilian clothing and almost never carry their weapons openly. Instead, they have pre-positioned weapons throughout the Gaza Strip in civilian areas and use these caches as necessary, and then pretending to be civilians after they put the weapons back away.

Hamas videos consistently show that their members are exclusively wearing civilian clothing.

Today, Hamas released a video of terrorists shooting mortars. They hide the mortars underground and bring them out when they want to fire them.

Every single shooter is in civilian clothing.

Here's the full video.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad's videos of them shooting at Israeli tanks also invariably show their members wearing civilian clothes. When they are killed, "human rights" groups consider them civilians unless the weapons are right next to them.

Another recent video shows additional crimes: the mortar is being shot from an urban area, and it had been hidden by a blanket so it wasn't carried there openly as per international law.

Now, try to find a single mention, let alone condemnation, of these war crimes by any NGO or mainstream media outlet.

Israeli actions are put under a microscope and things that are absolutely legal under international law are elevated to crimes against humanity, while recognized terrorist groups get a pass when the evidence is in their own videos.

All it would take would be a single report by Human Rights Watch or Amnesty to point these things out and Hamas would be shamed into changing its tactics. They know all of this. And they deliberately decide not to write about it.

Because they are on Hamas' 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!

Egypt's Meliha Ramadan TV series says Judaism supports murdering children

Each episode of the Egyptian Meliha Ramadan series being shown now begins with a short Arab history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. These short videos are being discussed in Arab media.

The version I am seeing with English subtitles feature a Netflix logo, but I have not confirmed they are indeed shown on Netflix in Arab countries. The directors is being careful not to place any explicit antisemitism as other Ramadan series have traditionally had, so they keep their platform. But they slipped a little in anyway.

In episode 4, the grandfather tells his grandson that Israel murdered hundreds of civilians in Gaza in 1956. The grandson then asks, "Don't they care about children? Don't they care about elders?"

The grandfather answers, "That's their belief, my son.. A religious and military belief."

That is a blood libel, no different from the classic "Jews drink the blood of gentile children" libel. But it was said subtly enough to make it past Netflix oversight.

The series also tries to make Egypt look like it was a defender of Palestinians throughout the decades, which is not at all true. Gaza was originally Egypt's open-air prison for all Palestinians in Egypt, and Egypt used Palestinians as cannon fodder for fedayeen attacks into Israel.

Just like today, Egypt did everything it could to bar Palestinians from entering Egypt proper.

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!

Lebanese nun tells dozens of children that not supporting Hezbollah is traitorous

From Naharnet:

The nun stood in front of a group of young students at a Lebanese Christian school and asked them to pray for the "men of the resistance" in southern Lebanon who she said were defending the country.

The men to whom nun Maya Ziadeh was referring are members of the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah, which has been clashing with Israel across a volatile border for nearly six months, becoming a critical regional player as the Israel-Hamas war persists in Gaza.

A video capturing Ziadeh's comments was widely circulated online earlier this month, outraging some who accused her of "brainwashing" the children and imposing her political views. Others rallied to her support, commending her stance as courageous and honorable.

Ziadeh called for praying for the "children, people and mothers of the south and ... for the men of the resistance," describing those who fail to do so as "traitors," a characterization that many found troubling, especially given the young age of her audience.

Blog Baladi reports that she lost her job, and that this is the proper response:

We should never wish harm on other Lebanese or side with any foreign power over our own, but that doesn’t mean we should agree with each other’s political choices or else be labeled as traitors. No one in his right mind should support a military group ruling the country, imposing its decisions on us all and taking us on deadly adventures without bearing any of the consequences.

The video shows that she was speaking in front of around 80 children.

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!

03/31 Links: Benny Morris: "Hamas Must Be Destroyed"; Israel is fighting a humane ground war - just ask experts; How Israel Wins the Postwar

From Ian:

Israeli Historian Benny Morris: "Hamas Must Be Destroyed"

Israeli historian Benny Morris, 75, was foremost among the "New Historians" who shook Israel with their revisionist accounts of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Yet in the year 2000, when Prime Minister Ehud Barak and President Bill Clinton offered a two-state solution and Yasser Arafat rejected it, Morris said in an interview, "I thought this was a terrible decision by the Palestinians, and I wrote that."

When the Palestinians, in response to the offer of peace and statehood, then launched a wave of terrorism and suicide bombings unlike any before, Morris disapproved of that, too. "People always forgive the Palestinians, who don't take responsibility," he says. "It's accepted that they are the victim and therefore can do whatever they like."

"As we [Israelis] see it, we are surrounded by the Muslim world, organized in some way by Iran, and the West is turning its back on us. So we see ourselves as the underdog. Now, the Palestinians are the underdog, and the underdog is always right, even if it does the wrong things, like Oct. 7. They were joyous in the West Bank and Gaza when 1,200 Jews were killed and 250 were taken hostage....It was a sick ideology and sick people carrying out murder and rape in the name of that ideology."

Morris stresses the costs of that Palestinian decision. "There was never destruction like what has happened in Gaza over the past five months in any of Israel's wars. Israel conquered the West Bank [in 1967] with almost no houses being destroyed, and the same applies in '56 in Gaza, and the same applies in '48." Probably, Palestinian nationalists "will look back to Oct. 7 as a sort of minor victory over Zionism and disregard the casualties which they paid as a result."

"Not only has each of their big decisions made life worse for their people, but they ensure that each time the idea of a two-state solution is proposed, less of Palestine is offered to them....Each time they're given less of Palestine as a result of being defeated in their efforts to get all of Palestine."

"Israelis today don't want to look at the two-state solution. Most Israelis fear Hamas would take over the West Bank" - a fear amply justified by Hamas' popularity - "and that it would be a springboard for attacks on Israel, as Gaza was."

"The Israeli public, myself included, thinks that we've begun the job and we must finish the job. We must destroy Hamas, and that will include taking Rafah....Hamas must be destroyed after what it did. We can't allow that on our border, in addition to having Hizbullah on our northern border and Iran."

Israel is fighting a humane ground war - just ask experts

Rather than swallowing such easily disprovable claims, it would be better to rely upon the verifiable evidence of experts like John Spencer, the world’s foremost authority on urban warfare. Chair of urban warfare studies at the United State Military Academy at West Point, he served as an infantryman for 25 years, including two combat tours in Iraq. Israel, he says, protects civilians more effectively than anyone else in the history of warfare.

Spencer recently visited Israel and Gaza – including the IDF’s civilian harm mitigation unit – to observe the facts on the ground. “All available evidence shows that Israel has followed the laws of war, legal obligations, best practices in civilian harm mitigation and still found a way to reduce civilian casualties to historically low levels,” he concluded.

Warfighting is an ugly business and soldiers are soldiers. But overall, the IDF’s actions have been deeply humane, Spencer said, moving civilians out of harm’s way to an unprecedented extent and deploying “technologies never used anywhere in the world” to preserve life. This has included 70,000 telephone calls, 13 million text messages and 15 million voicemails warning people to evacuate by designated routes to safe areas.

Giant speakers have been dropped by parachute that begin broadcasting warnings once they touch the ground. Military maps have been handed out and tracking technology has been used to keep people safe. “Ironically, the careful approach Israel has taken may have actually led to more destruction,” Spencer pointed out, since by assisting Hamas it likely prolonged the war.

The credible casualty figures stand testament to these efforts. Gaining exact data is impossible, but the true ratio, Spencer concluded, is about 1 combatant to 1.5 civilians. By comparison, when Britain, the US and other allies destroyed Islamic State in Mosul in 2016-17, the ratio was about 1 to 2.5; and according to the UN and the EU, the global average is 1 to 9. “Given Hamas’s likely inflation of the death count, the real figure could be closer to 1 to 1,” Spencer wrote. “Either way, the number would be historically low for modern urban warfare.”

What madness has possessed us? We would never dream of trusting data from the Kremlin or Islamic State. The statistics coming out of Gaza are obviously bogus. A paper by three distinguished academics, published this week, found that “the casualty figures concerning women and children are statistically impossible”, at one point even involving “the statistical equivalent of the resurrection of over a thousand men”. The 70 per cent figure has been decisively debunked.

Yet this very misinformation is still used by the UN, White House and the media. The BBC even relied upon it to supposedly disprove Israel’s claims to the contrary. “The BBC ‘factcheckers’ and other western media could easily have determined this for themselves, using publicly available information,” the academics lamented.

The illusory truth is all around us. How shameful. It is incumbent on people of conscience to dispel it whenever we can.

Ruthie Blum: Bashing Bibi helps Hamas

In the first place, every move by Netanyahu and his government since that Black Sabbath nearly six months ago has been made with the hostages in mind. Indeed, much of the prosecution of the war in Gaza is based on fear of killing captives in the process of destroying Hamas.

Such a calculation was taken for granted from the very beginning by Israel Defense Forces soldiers, many of whom have fallen in battle, leaving their bereft families begging Netanyahu not to let those heroic deaths be in vain.

Secondly, through a combination of military pressure and the War Cabinet’s willingness to compromise, Netanyahu succeeded in securing the release of 112 hostages—in addition to three others saved by the IDF in rescue operations.

Third, anti-Netanyahu rallies for the “immediate release” of the hostages—as though Bibi has them handcuffed in his basement—serve only to encourage Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar to harden his already untenable stance.

His goal, after all, is remaining in power. You know, to rebuild his subterranean empire and arsenal with which to perform as many repeats of Oct. 7 as possible.

Fourth, Netanyahu’s brother, Yoni, was killed in the 1976 Entebbe Raid, a commando mission to free more than 100 Israeli and Jewish hostages held by Palestinian and West German hijackers of a flight from Israel to France. To suggest, let alone scream into a megaphone, that he is indifferent to the suffering of those in Hamas clutches is outrageous.

Thankfully, most of the hostage families do not agree with the view or tactics of their activist counterparts. Those who showed up on Saturday were relatives of 20 captives out of a total of 134.

But they came by their methods honestly, so to speak, with a little help from PR hack (aka “political strategist”) Ronen Tzur. Tzur, a veteran “anybody but Bibi” mover and shaker, took it upon himself to head the campaign on behalf of the hostage families.

He tried to use the perch as a platform for his anti-Netanyahu agenda. But his plan ultimately backfired.

While Egypt pretends to support Palestinians, its actions show the opposite.

We already know that Egypt has built a huge wall to keep Gazans from fleeing to Egypt and has rejected any possibility of giving refuge to desperate Gazans who want to leave. But its hate for Palestinians also extends to the patients it has allowed to be treated on Egyptian soil.

Ultra Palestine reports:

Testimonies of Gazans show that patients and their companions are subjected to continuous humiliation and are deprived of the most basic rights. The testimony of "A.K.," who is accompanying her mother to be treated for cancer, explains the severity of these restrictions, as she indicates that she stayed with her mother inside the ambulance on the Egyptian side of the crossing for eight hours before moving to the hospital, which left them extremely exhausted, and when she asked the officials why they used the excuse of sorting out the names of patients.

At her first request to leave the hospital, the security officer was late in coming for two hours, and “when I asked for a security woman to accompany me and not a man, the response was that there were no women, so I asked for a woman working in the hospital to accompany me, and this was approved. But the security man kept walking behind me as if I was a dangerous and unwanted person, and I also felt that I was living in a prison and not a hospital, as the door of the department was locked with a key and we were not allowed to approach it.”

In an interview with Ultra Palestine, another woman who was being treated for an eye injury said that the ambulance was delayed 12 hours before moving from the Rafah crossing towards Cairo, which doubled the feeling of pain in her injured eye.

She added: "After we arrived at the hospital, I asked for a SIM card to communicate with my family, but my request was rejected on the grounds that I did not have a passport. After insisting, security provided me with a special SIM card that only receives calls, and there is no internet service either."

She continued in a tone of amazement, "I do not know what danger a sick woman who sees with only one eye could pose to the security of Egypt, that we are treated like prisoners who go to the hospital to receive treatment." The woman indicated that security prohibited her and her accompanying daughter from leaving the hospital to buy their needs, which forced her to request some of their special needs from one of her relatives residing in Egypt.

The injured woman says, “If someone who is not a first-degree relative visits me, security will remain with him at the moment of the visit, and in the event of a first-degree relative visiting me, security limits the duration of the visit to 10 minutes only.”

The only stories I could find about Palestinians in Egyptian hospitals in the Western media are about the heroism of Egyptian doctors, not the policies that keep them imprisoned.

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Weapons recovered from Shifa's maternity ward

So far, Israel's surprise raid at Shifa Hospital has been an amazing success. Hundreds of terrorists killed, hundreds more detained, few if any patients hurt by the IDF, incredible intelligence gathered, and caches of weapons found all that prove that Hamas and Islamic Jihad had turned the hospital into a command and control center again. Israel provided photos of the weapons, videos of the battles, even videos of terrorists admitting the hospital was used as their military hub.

CNN's Nadeen Ebrahim, Sana Noor Haq, Khader Al Za'anoun and Abeer Salman reported about Shifa last Thursday. The article does not even mention the IDF videos, the interrogations or other proofs for its statements, and it gives Palestinian denials of the undeniable equal weight to the IDF statements:

Israeli forces began their most recent operation there on March 18, saying they are conducting “precise operational activities against terrorists” located at Al-Shifa – a statement also echoed in November’s raid.

The IDF had returned in force to Al-Shifa despite Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in January announcing that the most intensive phase of operations in northern Gaza was complete.

Speaking to his troops in a video shared by the Defense Ministry, Gallant on March 26 hailed the operation, saying the hospital was reached “in a flash” and that Hamas operatives still holed up at the hospital “are considering their future: surrender or death.”

Throughout its 11-day operation, the Israeli military this month said it had detained hundreds of Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants in and around the hospital, killing dozens of others.

Around Al-Shifa, the IDF said in an update Wednesday, “approximately 200 terrorists have been eliminated in the area of the hospital since the beginning of the activity.” The IDF also claimed that “terrorists fired at IDF troops from within and outside of the ER (emergency room) building at the Shifa Hospital.”

CNN is unable to verify these numbers.

Israel has for years claimed that Hamas fighters are sheltering in mosques, hospitals and other civilian places to avoid Israeli attacks. Hamas has repeatedly denied the claims.

Israeli officials have echoed the accusations since October 7, and following their first raid in November escorted CNN into Gaza to see a newly exposed tunnel shaft discovered at the compound of Al-Shifa Hospital.

The evidence did not establish without a doubt that there was a Hamas command center underneath the hospital as Israel had claimed.

Of course, since CNN's tour, more evidence has been uncovered - US intelligence confirmed that the hospital was used by Hamas and the New York Times reported that the tunnels underneath were much more extensive than what CNN has reported in November.

The CNN article, by contrast, emphasizes the false ideas that Israel's November raid was a failure, that it nearly destroyed the hospital's infrastructure then, that no evidence was found in November that Shifa was an important terror hub. It ignores the videos of terrorists admitting that everything Israel says about Shifa is true.

CNN takes pains to cast doubt on literally everything the IDF says. Yet it expresses no such reservations on Hamas claims or any Palestinian claims of torture, patients dying, and other allegations of war crimes by the IDF:

Residents of the area around Al-Shifa told CNN there was heavy firing in the vicinity. One family said their home was shelled, and that children – some still alive – were buried under the rubble.

Unlike IDF statements, those claims are quoted without any caveats or mentions that CNN cannot verify them.

There is only one Palestinian witness who CNN does express doubt about. Buried in the middle of the many paragraphs accusing Israel of war crimes, the article says:

Targeting hospitals in wartime is prohibited under international law, but those standards change if enemy combatants are using the facility to attack an enemy.

One eyewitness said that, on the eve of the raid, they spotted hundreds of Hamas and Islamic Jihad members inside the hospital.

The eyewitness, who spoke to CNN on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, estimated about 400 to 500 Hamas and Islamic Jihad members and their families arrived at the hospital in mid-March. Some of them appeared to be members of Hamas’ political branch, while others were armed militants.

The eyewitness said some of the militants were carrying guns inside the hospital.

CNN is unable to independently verify the numbers due to lack of reporting access to the strip, and has asked the Gaza health ministry for comment.

Immediately afterwards, the article reverts to quoting Palestinians at length about alleged torture of innocent civilians, doctors who fear for the health of patients still in the hospital without any evidence that they have been affected by the raid, and international condemnation by the World Health Organization.

The extended time that Israel is taking at Shifa is not evidence that the IDF is trying to keep patients safe while rooting out hundreds of armed terrorists hiding inside the hospital itself but instead as evidence that the IDF doesn't know what it's doing.

Compare this with how France 24 covered the raid. While the article also denigrates the IDF as well, it quoted experts that confirmed the IDF claims that the raid was a tactical success and that Hamas was using the hospital as a major military hub:

"The actual operation was a tactical success," confirms Veronika Poniscjakova, a specialist in international security issues and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the University of Portsmouth in the UK. The Israeli army “let Hamas think that they would attack elsewhere – in the central refugee camps of the Strip – and when Hamas returned to Shifa, the Israelis closed in on them", and took many prisoners, according to Ahron Bregman, a specialist in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at King's College London.

The Israeli action enabled Israel to recover “extremely valuable intelligence” about their enemy, as suggested by the images and videos of the interrogations that the Israeli army has made public, notes Omri Brinner, an analyst and specialist in Middle East geopolitics at the International Team for the Study of Security (ITSS) in Verona, Italy.

[I]n the current offensive, "the Israelis have been far more sophisticated in the way they are presenting this operation" and "they are using a much more precise way to message to the world that the threat inside the complex is real and credible," says Clive Jones, a specialist in Israel and the Middle East at Durham University in the UK. The army is using drone footage of gun battles and photos of the discovery of weapons caches to "try to convince international opinion that they had legitimate reasons for returning to fight in this hospital", adds Jones.

Israel also needs to prove it has the ability to carry out this type of highly sensitive operation with as few civilian casualties as possible. The precedent of the US-Iraq war in 2003 shows that “as soon as an army leaves an area, insurgents seek to return", says Bregman. This view is shared by other analysts. "We can expect Hamas to do the same thing in other hospitals, but also in schools or refugee camps where there are civilian populations", notes Shahin Modarres, an independent expert on international security and the Middle East.

By taking its time in the Al Shifa operation, the Israeli army is “signaling to Hamas that it will target it even if it harbours in places considered safe havens, such as hospitals, UNRWA compounds, mosques and schools”, says Brinner. At the same time, it's trying to prove to the international community that it knows how to do it” with a level of restraint.

This level of analysis - albeit superficial - is completely lacking in the CNN piece.

This is just one example of how CNN's coverage of the war is undeniably biased against Israel.

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Today's insane Arab media antisemitism quotes "Talmud 37"

In Jordan's Al Ghad newspaper, Aladdin Abu Zeina write part 2 of his series "The ideological foundations of genocidal Zionist thought."

Perhaps one of the best references for reading the Jewish theological mind is provided by the prominent Jewish academic, Professor Israel Shahak, in his important book, “Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years” The content of this book gains special importance because it comes from a Jew - an “insider” - who is supposed to escape the accusation of “anti-Jewishness” directed at non-Jewish researchers. But he did not escape the charge of “anti-Semitism” because he fearlessly wrote about the horrific details that the Zionist colonial establishment invokes from the religious texts that Jews must hide from the “gentiles.” For example, Talmud 37 states, “To communicate anything to the goyim (non-Jews) about our religious relations is equivalent to killing all the Jews, for if the goyim knew what we teach about them, they would kill us openly."

Israel Shahak was an antisemite but he didn't make up quotes. Abu Zeina quotes a famously fabricated "Talmud" citation.

If course, there is no such place as "Talmud 37."

That fake quote is usually attributed to something called "Libbre David 37." It is certainly not part of the Talmud. As far as anyone can tell, no such book was ever written.

The truth is the opposite - Jews are not allowed to lie about the Talmud of Jewish Law, as Rabbi Gil Student pointed out in his extensive debunking of fake Talmud quotes.

It is probably not the source, but the earliest I could find this fake quote was almost exactly a hundred years ago.

The May 20, 1924 edition of an anti-religious and antisemitic periodical called The American Standard gave a somewhat more extensive version of this fake quote, and then repeated it on January 1, 1925:

In the January edition, they also quote the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.

But an earlier source seems to be from a book written in Russian and then translated to French in 1924, titled "Emperor Nicholas I and the Jews - Essays on the Russian Revolution in its Relations with the Universal Activity of Contemporary Judaism" by Alexander Dmitrievich Netchvolodoff, who headed the Imperial Russian Army and was a proponent of theories of Judeo-Bolshevism and Judeo-Masonry. He was one of the translators of the first French edition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This is possibly where the American Standard got this fake quote, although it may have been around much longer.

What's old is new again. This book was republished in Russia in 2015 as being relevant to understand the "pro-Israel lobby" in the US.

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03/30 Links: The Psychology of Palestinian Distortions and Deceptions; Mixed messages coming from US on Israel weapons sales

From Ian:

JCPA: The Psychology of Palestinian Distortions and Deceptions

Global opinion has moved from outrage at Hamas on October 7, 2023, to criticism of Israel just months later. How? A Palestinian strategy manipulates perception to distort and present an alternate reality.

While the Hamas of October 7 was a vicious terror organization, the passage of time has shifted perception to “innocent Palestinians” who are “victims,” consistent with the ongoing Palestinian chronicle of victimization used as a central motif in their national narrative.

Facts and accurate information will not always effectively counter misinformation based on previous perceptions created by Palestinian sources. The “primacy effect,” where first impressions persist, plays a psychological role.

Palestinians distort reality by providing material for perceptions that feed a cognitive set that promotes favoring perceived victims who are presented as suffering, with images of casualties, poor housing conditions, lack of food, and emotional distress.

Western thinking that elicits sympathy for victims and absolves them of responsibility feeds into the deception strategy of Palestinian terror.

While contextual reality is the basis for accurate information, Palestinians distort this by using civilians as psychological human shields in a cognitive war.

Countering with the “truth” is likely ineffective unless the “truth” is framed in a context that appeals to the same cognitive framework of “fairness” and victim appeal that Palestinians have been using.

While sterile “counter-narratives” are ineffective, research suggests that adding emotive imagery and personalization can help change perceptions and reality.

Jonathan Tobin: Israel’s global isolation is caused by antisemitism, not bad policies

Sadly, nothing will make Israel be loved by the world. The Jewish state cannot be “rebranded” to associate itself solely with its stellar economy, scientific accomplishments, or the beauty of its scenery or the genius of its people. The only formula for Jewish survival is the one that Zionist statesman and thinker Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote about in his 1923 essay “The Iron Wall,” in which he preached that only when the Arab world realizes that it can’t defeat the Jews can peace be possible.

It should be remembered that the alliance with the United States, which is Israel’s greatest diplomatic asset, was not a gift given to the Jews by a benevolent American government in 1948. There was no alliance with Washington until after Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, when it demonstrated its military strength and acquired the strategic depth that made its survival not quite so precarious.

That belief in Israel’s dominance was also what impelled some Arab states to give up the fight leading to peace deals like the 2020 Abraham Accords. However, if Hamas is allowed to emerge from the war it started by breaching Israel’s defenses not only alive but crowned as the victor, antisemites will not merely be encouraged. They will think that for all of its strength and accomplishments, the Jewish state that Jabotinsky envisioned lacks that iron wall that it still needs.

Those who care about Israel must take these lessons to heart and realize that the only solution to its current situation is for Jerusalem to ignore its critics and push through to victory, no matter how difficult that might be in terms of its military and diplomatic challenges. Only by clearly beating the Hamas criminals, as well as their many supporters and enablers, can circumstances ease a little. Anything less and a nightmare scenario envisioned by antisemitic foes—in which Israel truly becomes a pariah state—will be the inevitable result.

Lawmakers urge sanctions on International Court of Justice president

A bipartisan group of House lawmakers urged the State Department on Thursday to consider placing sanctions on the recently elected president of the International Court of Justice over his alleged anti-Israel bias if he does not recuse himself from the two Israel-related cases before the court.

“Judge [Nawaf] Salam’s clear and well-documented record of bias against the Jewish state and persistent violations of the ICJ charter make it abundantly clear that he will not be a fair and neutral arbiter in these cases,” nine lawmakers said in a letter to Secretary of State Tony Blinken on Thursday, calling the Lebanese jurist “wholly unfit” to hear the cases.

Salam, the letter notes, was Lebanon’s ambassador to the United Nations for a decade, during which time he voted against Israel on numerous issues and posted statements criticizing Israel. It also notes that he finished second in Lebanon’s prime ministership elections in 2019 and 2022, while he was on the court, which the letter describes as another breach of ICJ rules, although it acknowledges he was never a formally declared candidate.

The lawmakers said Salam is violating the charter by refusing to recuse himself from the Israel-related cases. They said his continued participation in ICJ rulings on Israel “underscor[es] the need for further action to secure Judge Salam’s recusal in compliance with the ICJ charter.” They called on the administration to restrict his travel to the U.S. and explore other sanctions if he does not recuse himself.

The letter also criticizes the ICJ cases against Israel more broadly, warning “one or more politically-motivated rulings against Israel will set a precedent that poses an international challenge to all states’ legitimate defense against terrorism” and threaten potential prospects for peace.

The letter was signed by Reps. Ronny Jackson (R-TX), Brad Sherman (D-CA), Guy Reschenthaler (R-PA), Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), Keith Self (R-TX), Andrew Garbarino (R-NY), Bill Posey (R-FL), Neal Dunn (R-FL) and Anthony D’Esposito (R-NY).