Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, April 12, 2024

04/12 Links Pt1: Israel expects Iranian attack within 48hrs; Hamas is at war with the Jews and Judaism; Iran and Hezbollah responsible for AMIA and Israel embassy bombings

From Ian:

UK Statistics Authority urged to review fabricated Gaza casualty figures

The UK Statistics Authority has been urged to review the Palestinian Casualty figures in the Gaza War after several analyses indicated that the figures have been fabricated.

UKLFI Charitable Trust (“UKLFI CT”) has written to Sir Robert Chote, Chair of the UK Statistics Authority, inviting it to assess the quality of the Palestinian casualty statistics. These statistics are produced by the Hamas controlled Ministry of Health, and then circulated by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) as well as other UN bodies.

Several analyses show that the Hamas produced figures have been fabricated, regarding both the totals and the breakdowns into men, women and children.[1] UKLFI CT is concerned that these unreliable statistics are invoked and relied upon to support allegations of serious violations of international humanitarian law and genocide by Israel.

Jonathan Turner, chief executive of UKLFI commented: “Credence given to these allegations is fuelling antisemitism on a major scale and is also liable to lead to incorrect decisions by public authorities on important issues.”

The Palestinian statistics are also deployed in a way that implies wrongly that all the Palestinian Arabs killed were civilians, as there is no reference to the number of Palestinian Arab combatants killed. The ratio of civilians to combatants killed is particularly relevant when assessing the proportionality of Israeli military actions and hence whether they are likely to have violated international humanitarian law.

The Israel Defence Forces estimated that 13,000 Palestinian Arab combatants had been killed by the end of February 2024. This indicates a ratio of civilian to combatant deaths of less than 1.5:1, even if the apparently fabricated total figures produced by the Gaza Health Ministry are used. This ratio is much lower than the usual ratio of civilian to combatant casualties in urban warfare, as indicated by a Report by the UN Secretary General which found that in urban armed conflicts worldwide in 2021, 89% of the casualties were civilians.

Furthermore, the Gaza Ministry of Health statistics do not distinguish the many Palestinians killed by Palestinian munitions (such as their own rockets that fall short in the Gaza Strip, as well as ground fire and explosive devices). These are included in the total deaths that are attributed to Israel.

FDD: Hamas-Run Gaza Health Ministry Admits to Flaws in Casualty Data

The Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health said on April 6 that it had “incomplete data” for 11,371 of the 33,091 Palestinian fatalities it claims to have documented. In a statistical report, the ministry notes that it considers an individual record to be incomplete if it is missing any of the following key data points: identity number, full name, date of birth, or date of death. The health ministry also released a report on April 3 that acknowledged the presence of incomplete data but did not define what it meant by “incomplete.” In that earlier report, the ministry acknowledged the incompleteness of 12,263 records. It is unclear why, after just three more days, the number fell to 11,371 — a decrease of more than 900 records.

Prior to its admissions of incomplete data, the health ministry asserted that the information in more than 15,000 fatality records had stemmed from “reliable media sources.” However, the ministry never identified the sources in question and Gaza has no independent media.

Hamas is at war with the Jews and Judaism

There are only two things you need to know to understand what is happening in the Middle East, and they both appear in the 1988 Hamas Charter.

First, Hamas is fighting for Islam and its war against Israel is a religious war. The charter states: “It is necessary to instill in the minds of the Muslim generations that the Palestinian problem is a religious problem and should be dealt with on this basis.”

Hamas asserts Islam’s claim to the territory of the Land of Israel; not the claim of any political organization, the Palestinians or anything else. “The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgement Day,” the charter states.

“This,” Hamas explains, “is the law governing the land of Palestine in the Islamic Sharia (law) and the same goes for any land the Muslims have conquered by force, because during the times of (Islamic) conquests, the Muslims consecrated these lands to Muslim generations till the Day of Judgement.”

Hamas also clearly states that its war for Islam is a war against Judaism: “Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious.”

In the eyes of Hamas, Jews are permitted to live only under Islamic oppression. This is what Hamas means when it says that it “strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine, for under the wing of Islam followers of all religions can coexist in security and safety where their lives, possessions and rights are concerned. In the absence of Islam, strife will be rife, oppression spreads, evil prevails and schisms and wars will break out.”

Under Islamic law, that “coexistence” is a system of religious apartheid in which all minorities are subjugated by the Muslim majority.

Thus, Hamas has an essential problem with Zionism: Zionism is the demand, the insistence, that Jews will not live under anyone. It is the insistence on Jewish independence and the maintenance of Jewish power to defend that independence.

Iran and Hezbollah responsible for AMIA and Israel embassy bombings, Argentina says

Iran and Hezbollah committed crimes against humanity and are responsible for the 1994 Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) and the 1992 Israeli embassy bombings, the Federal Court of Criminal Cassation said on Thursday in a ruling on an appeal of a 2019 decision on cases of corruption and cover-ups by law enforcement and intelligence officials.

The court said that the AMIA bombing "was organized, planned, financed and executed under the direction of the authorities of the Islamic State of Iran, within the framework of Islamic jihad, and with the main intervention of the political and military organization Hezbollah."

High-level Iranian officials and members of the diplomatic mission in Argentina were involved in the ordering of boths attacks, which according to the court fall under the Rome Statute as crimes against humanity for being widespread or systematic attacks against a civilian population.

The court reminded that Former Iranian Intelligence Minister Ali Fallahian, former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander Mohsen Rezaee, former IRGC Quds Force commander Ahmad Vadidi, former cultural affairs officer at the Iranian embassy in Argentina Moshen Rabbani, former diplomatic secretary Ahnmad Reza Ashgari, and alleged Hezbollah operatives Hussein Mounir Mouzannar, Salman Raouf Salman, and Farouk Abdul Hay Omairi have standing Interpol arrest warrants for suspected involvement in the bombing.

The court said that Former Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati former Iranian ambassador Hadi Soleimpenpour were also suspected of involvement but had immunity from the issuance Interpol warrants because they hold public office, and additional suspects fromer Hezbollah foreign intelligence chief Imad Fayez Moughnieh, Former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi, and alleged Hezbollah operative Alí Hussein Abdallah are dead.

The court said that Iran and its proxy Hezbollah were motivated by Islamic jihad against the west and its democratic values, and suggested possible political motivations to punish Argentina for not trading agreed upon materials and technology that could be used in its nuclear program.

As crimes against humanity, double jeopardy did not apply in the petition filed by friends and families of the victims of the attacks, AMIA, the Justice Ministry, and police officers who were wrongly detained by the suspects who were falsely implicated by the officials involved in the cover-up.

Former AMIA investigator Judge Juan Jose Galeano, former State Intelligence Secretariat director (SIDE) Hugo Alfredo Anzorreguy, SIDE deputy director Juan Carlos Anchezar, Department for the Protection of Constitutional Order (DPOC) Police chief Carlos Antonio Castaneda were found to have tampered with evidence and covered up the true culprits of the crime. Galeano was given four years prison, Anzorreguy 4 years and 6 months, and Anchezar and Castaneda three years prison.

Golf clubs with Hebrew names are becoming VERY hot this week

Golf aficionados are excited over a new golf club that they only became aware of this week - with a Hebrew name.

From GolfWeek:

Bryson DeChambeau, who opened with a 7-under 65 in the first round of the Masters at Augusta National Golf Club, is playing with a custom set of single-length irons made by little-known clubmaker Avoda that are made by 3-D printing and weren’t approved by the USGA until Monday. With no hesitation, DeChambeau inserted them in the bag at the Masters.

Avoda is a Hebrew word with multiple meanings, one of which is precision. According to Avoda’s website, the company makes two different types of irons, one-length irons like the clubs DeChambeau played when he was sponsored by Cobra, and combo-length irons.

Well, "avoda" does not mean precision - it means labor, or work - but the clubs have a Hebrew word printed on them, "diyuk/דיוק," which does mean "precision."

You can even buy their caps with the Hebrew word:

I don't have too much information on Avoda Golf. .Its owner, Tom Bailey, has previously worked alongside DeChambeau’s coach, Mike Schy. He started this company to help pay for his own golf habit. DeChambeau helped design the club, Bailey's brother turned it into a CAD drawing to have it custom 3-D printed, and the USGA only approved the club for use this week.

Apparently, DeChambeau has played better this week than he has in years.

I have no idea if Bailey is Jewish or how he came up with the names.

But it is sort of cool to see Hebrew on golf clubs.

(h/t Dan)

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!

Egyptian media antisemitism just keeps on coming

Youm7 is the most popular news site in Egypt, with 60 million views a month.

It has a general interest article about the Seven Most Dangerous Books Ever Written.

One of them is the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which they highly recommend:

This is classified as one of the most dangerous books that appeared in world history. It is the book The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or the Jewish Danger to the World, as it has caused a global uproar in the West since the appearance of the Russian edition in 1905. No one can fully appreciate it except by patiently studying the entire Protocols, word for word. He must gain insight, be an expert in the currents of history and the norms of society, and be familiar with the events of Jewish and world history, especially the current events and the Jewish fingers behind them, and then be an expert in knowing historical trends and human nature. This is what the writer did in this book, as he revealed the infernal Jewish conspiracy that aims to. foment corruption and disintegration of the world to subject it all to the benefit of the Jews and their control to the exclusion of all other human beings.

Over at El Balad, Major General Muhammad Al-Ghobari discusses current events on a TV show, and mentions that "The Jews are always working to distort religious beliefs and break the established beliefs in countries hostile to them, "

Which could have come out of the Protocols, come to think of it.

At the similarly named El Balad News, Karima Abu Al-Enein helpfully gives a primer on "Hasbara:"

I've seen this term "Hasbara" in Hebrew a lot, so I searched for its meaning and found that it means the doctrine of making lies. I was not surprised by its meaning in Hebrew, as everything that is Hebrew is known for its skill in lying, distortion, denial, and incitement, and history is the best witness to that. This term existed in Zionist thought before the declaration of their ill-fated state in 1948.

Israel's peace partner, Again and again. And not a bit of pushback against Egyptian antisemitism within or without Egypt.

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!

Hezbollah mouthpiece Al Madayeen reports:

Another win for the BDS movement has been recorded after Samsung Next, the innovation sector of the Korean tech giant, Samsung, announced shutting down its operations in "Tel Aviv", occupied Palestine.

Samsung Next, which has invested in some 70 Israeli start-ups so far, is the latest to join the list of companies that have left the Israeli tech sector, accounting for 50% of exports. According to the BDS movement, in 2023, investment in Israeli tech firms dropped by 56% as opposed to that in 2022.

Here is what BDS doesn't want you to know:

Samsung will continue investing in Israeli companies, just from overseas. As their email to employees announcing the decision says,

Israel remains an attractive market for Samsung Next, and the existing relationships with partners and portfolio companies will remain unchanged. ...Although our physical presence in Israel will cease, we remain committed to investing in the region and encouraging referrals from builders and founders.

Samsung Next has no presence in any other countries besides the US and South Korea, so this appears to be a consolidation.

Here's what else BDS doesn't want you to know: The lower investment in tech firms in 2023 was a worldwide phenomenon, not just for Israel.

And yet another thing the BDS movement doesn't want you to know: Since October 7, Israel's high tech sector has still gotten lots of new business. As Startup Nation General reports:

Private investment rounds: There were 220 private investment rounds announced since October 7th, with an estimated $3.1 billion raised.
M&As: The sum of M&As since October 7th is $3.7 billion. There were two very large M&A deals finalized with total acquisition amounts nearing $1 billion. Additionally, nine acquisition deals of over $100 million were finalized, six of which were in the security technology sector.
New Funds: Since October 7th, over 20 new funds have been established, raising a total of $1.7 billion.

Reports of the death of Israel's tech economy are highly exaggerated.

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!

Hamas admitting Haniyeh's sons were killed is part of their cognitive war

Hamas finally admitted, for the first time since October, that adult males linked to the group have died in Gaza.

Up until now, Hamas has only spoken about dead women, children, aid workers and journalists. Since the first days of the war, even though Israel has killed many major Hamas figures, the terror group has remained silent about them. (They admit those killed in Lebanon.)

But with the killing of three of Ismail Haniyeh's sons this week, now Hamas is publicizing the deaths.

The reason is the same as why Hamas is silent about the thousands of terrorists Israel has killed. Because from the beginning, Hamas has waged a cognitive war, one that has been as wildly successful as its kinetic war has been a failure.

The media, NGOs and international politicians never understood this war, and for the most part they have been willing pawns - if not combatants - for Hamas.

For example, Hamas announces over 13,000 children killed. It is a lie. UNICEF repeats the lie, adding as an aside "according to Gaza authorities." The media then repeats it, adding "according to UNICEF." Then other media and politicians and NGOs repeat it in turn, without citing a source. In this way a lie becomes accepted as the truth and Hamas wins a huge victory in world public opinion.

If Israel is only killing civilians, and no terrorists, it must be a supremely immoral war.

So what is different about Haniyeh's sons?

First of all, Hamas is denying that Haniyeh's sons are members of the Al Qassam Brigades. They are treating them like innocent civilians themselves. That's their story to the international community..

But Hamas saw in this incident an opportunity to shore up its support among Palestinians who are upset at Hamas leadership living in luxury in Doha and Turkey. They are now publishing articles and posting videos about how Haniyeh's sons remaining in Gaza is proof of Palestinian steadfastness in their attachment to the land and Haniyeh's willingness to sacrifice for the cause.

Clearly, Hamas doesn't want the world to know about the thousands of Gazans desperate to leave. And when Hamas sends the head of the health ministry to Egypt, it is to go on TV and spread more lies about Israel.

Hamas media are also emphasizing Haniyeh's apparent stoicism upon hearing the news, which they say is meant to deny evil Zionist satisfaction that they caused him pain.

Finally, Hamas later claimed that the same airstrike also killed four (or more) of Haniyeh's grandchildren. This seems unlikely considering the size of the car they were in.

The media has shown an eagerness to accept everything Hamas says at face value. Hamas knew this going into the war - there is an unstated rule that anything Israelis say are to be treated as probable lies so Hamas accusations get a pass from news organizations.

Remember that October 7's success, from Hamas' perspective, was by fooling Israel into thinking that they cared about the lives and welfare of the people under their control, making Israel think that it was in Hamas' interest to keep things calm. Hamas deception and cynicism about caring about their own people is what started this war.

News organizations have under-reported about Hamas' cognitive war. Because, all too often, they are willing participants.

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!

I don't often see Al Jazeera in my surveys of Arab media antisemitism. Usually they are careful to only say they are against Zionists, not Jews. But a new op-ed, written by Egyptian writer and editor Anwar Al-Hawary, lets the mask slip.

The article surveys the history of Zionism and justifies European antisemitism, distinguishing it from normal European xenophobia.

He says that persecution of Jews by Europeans in the 19th century was nothing special - European colonialists oppressed lots of people around the world.

But the difference between Jews and non-Jews - among the peoples who were subjected to European violence in the nineteenth century - was not in the persecution itself, nor its type, nor its size, nor its extent. The difference was in a fundamental idea: The Jews are the only people who have experience, coexistence, and mixing with Europe, for several centuries, Jews and Europe were not strangers to each other from across borders. This coexistence gave the Jews sophistication in dealing with Europe. The Jews excelled in making money, just as they excelled in science, the arts, philosophy, music, and literature. They also excelled in the skill of social organization. They also excelled in the game of political communication, exerting pressure, influencing, and gravitating towards power, wealth, and influence.

Even in light of persecution, the Jews were an influential and powerful force that provoked envy, hatred, and provocation. The strength of the Jews was one of the reasons for the violence directed against them, while the weakness of other peoples was the motivation behind Europe’s audacity to conquer the world.

The Jews have always been a force of danger and influence everywhere they have a presence, even when they were without a state, even when they were subjected to persecution from the middle of the nineteenth century in Tsarist Russia, to approximately the middle of the twentieth century in Nazi Germany. In these hundred years, the Jews had an ability that was not available to any people other than them, the ability to deal with several empires, and even to toy with them, and to play them against each other. They played with the money they had and the experience in managing it, they played with the superior personalities they had, they played with the connections and instinct they had for espionage, conspiracy, and plotting.

The last hundred years witnessed the development of the influence of the Jews within America, and then their influence on its policy in the Middle East. America was in many ways trying to balance between the Jews and the Arabs, but it always failed under the influence of the Jews’ control over the financial circles, the press, and the media, and their financing of the presidential and congressional elections, and it will continue. This situation is until the Americans discover what the British have already discovered: the idea of Israel is a lost cause.

I bet that Al Jazeera and Al-Hawary doesn't even consider it to be antisemitic at all. They would say that they are complimenting the Jews on their resourcefulness and political savvy. But this is fundamentally what the Protocols of the Elders of Zion says: that Jews collude to gain power at the expense of everyone else.

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!

04/11 Links Pt2: Douglas Murray: 'One truth can puncture a thousand lies'; America’s elite universities failing Jewish students; Amnesty is now a morally bankrupt, worthless sham

From Ian:

Douglas Murray: 'One truth can puncture a thousand lies'

Author and journalist Douglas Murray, who received an award of appreciation from the president of Israel and the Minister of Diaspora Affairs on Wednesday, visited the Arutz Sheva - Israel National News studio in Jerusalem to discuss the event.

“I was deeply moved and honored. I don't do it for awards or anything. It was enormously moving to be honored for my work. I don't see myself as a PR soldier, just as a writer and as a journalist. I think it's very important to see things with your own eyes, and that's always been my policy as a writer. That's all I've tried to do. I guessed early on that the world would spend very little time concentrating on the massacre. The next day people were celebrating the massacre in Times Square in New York. I thought right then that I've got to get there as soon as I can because I thought they'll move on to Israel's response.”

He discussed how that has happened in the USA: “I think Biden has been really supportive, even when he has said things that are critical. He has continued arms supplies, for instance. As the IDF has been more and more successful in ridding Gaza of Hamas, the narrative has changed.”

Although advocacy is difficult, he doesn’t see himself quitting. “I think I would do what I do even if I didn't think I was making a difference, but as it happens, I think I am. My belief has always been that one truth can puncture a thousand lies. In the age of social media, that theory is being put to the test in real-time. A lot of the media has an agenda now. That's their right. I'd like Israel to win this conflict, some of them would like Hamas to win, some of them would just like Israel to lose.”

Murray denounces the focus on Israel. “None of these newspapers covered the far greater death toll that has been going on for the last decade in Yemen and Syria. Why are they so obsessed with this one? It's their opportunity to hold on to something that gives a feeling of crisis, but they have arsonist and firefighter reversed here. Many may talk about the history of the conflict, but that only proves it more.”

He notes other oddities about the war: “It's a very uncommon situation for one side to be fighting and also nourishing their opponents. It's an extraordinary testament to this country, but it's highly unusual. I can think of no other conflicts that I've covered or seen or read about in which that's the case. It's also an uncommon situation in war for one side to not only want the death of its enemies but also wish that its enemies should kill its own people. Israel must both fight this enemy and supply them. There's no doubting the appalling suffering of many of the citizens in Gaza, but that's what happens if you start a war.”

Melanie Phillips: The surreal echo chamber of lies

It is the people of Israel, not just Netanyahu, who are demanding that the IDF defeat Hamas. It is the people of Israel, not just Netanyahu, to whom the American proposal for the Palestinian Authority to run post-war Gaza is unthinkable. Because it’s the people of Israel who have now seen, in the most horrific way possible, that there is no Palestinian Arab entity that can be trusted not to slaughter them again and again.

The West’s second major error is failing to realize that this is not just Israel against Hamas or Iran. Israel is on the front line of the war being waged by the Islamic world against the West.

The West doesn’t get this because it doesn’t understand Islam. Nor, astonishing as this may seem, do the Israelis. Their failure to grasp Hamas’s true intentions lies in their failure to understand the implacable nature of Islamic Jew-hatred.

In a notable interview in Israel Hayom, Professor Moshe Sharon, an adviser on Arab affairs to several Israeli governments, observed that Islam has abhorred the Jews from the time of Islam’s creation, an animosity that is “a continuing sentiment stretching across time from that period until the ‘end of days.’” Islam’s overall objective, he said, is to take over the world. It is enjoying a considerable degree of success in pursuing this goal—in Europe, Canada and America.

None of these countries, however, is prepared even to admit this, let alone do anything about it.

With the IDF pulling most of its troops out of Gaza, commentators both inside and outside Israel are claiming that the Rafah offensive has been abandoned, the war is effectively over and Israel has lost. Netanyahu and top military brass insist that, on the contrary, Rafah will indeed be taken and the war will be won.

Israelis are braced for whatever is to come. Despite the Greek chorus of doom from the Israeli media and despite the despicable manipulation of some of the desperate families of hostages by activists determined to bring Netanyahu down at the expense of Israel losing the war, the spirit of the vast majority of Israelis remains heroically unbowed.

Israel will survive. At its current rate, the West will not.

But in these terrible times, what is very hard indeed for Jews to take is the devastating feeling of being so mercilessly abandoned by a world that has become a surreal echo chamber of murderous lies.

America’s elite universities failing Jewish students, per ADL report

America’s elite universities are failing to address Jew-hatred on campus, according to a new tracker released by the Anti-Defamation League on Thursday.

The ADL’s Campus Antisemitism Report Card awarded nine of America’s 10 top-ranked universities an “F” or “D” grade, including failing marks for Harvard University, Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Duke University was the lone top-10 school to earn a respectable “B” for “better than most.”

Many of America’s best universities are not doing enough for their Jewish students, said Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national president of the ADL.

“Every campus should get an ‘A.’ That’s not grade inflation. That’s the minimum that every group on every campus expects,” Greenblatt stated. “Like all students, Jewish students deserve to feel safe and supported on campus. They deserve a learning environment free from antisemitism and hate, but that hasn’t been the experience with antisemitism running rampant on campus since even before Oct. 7.”

The ADL selected the 85 public and private schools to rank both from Hillel International’s list of campuses with the highest percentages of Jewish students and from the top-ranked schools in U.S. News & World Report.

It then assessed the universities by reviewing administrative policies on antisemitism; cataloging antisemitic and anti-Zionist activity; and measuring the extent to which they foster Jewish life on campus.

The nonprofit then surveyed 160 Jewish college students about how they would weigh criteria, including whether or not the college offered kosher dining options or had taken an official position against the BDS movement to boycott Israel. The ADL gave the colleges a chance to respond both pre- and post-assessment.

Only two of the 85 schools graded got an “A”: Waltham, Mass.-based Brandeis University and Elon University, in North Carolina. A dozen schools received an “F.”

Several university leaders begin cracking down on anti-Israel disruptions on campus

Six months after anti-Israel activity began to dominate many college campuses in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks — with minimal action taken by college presidents to quell rising levels of antisemitism — administrators at schools such as Pomona, Columbia and Vanderbilt have taken a harder line in recent weeks. As a result, Jewish leaders are wondering whether these three schools’ tougher responses could represent the leading edge of a trend that takes root across the country.

Jacob Baime, CEO of the Israel on Campus Coalition, told Jewish Insider that other universities will only take similar action if they are pressured to do so. “The suspension of anti-Israel activists at schools like Vanderbilt University is a step in the right direction in addressing the campus climate,” Baime said.

In a statement to Pomona College on Friday, the school’s president, Gabrielle Starr, warned that “any participants in today’s events… who turn out to be Pomona students, are subject to immediate suspension. Students from the other Claremont Colleges will be banned from Pomona’s campus and subject to discipline on their own campuses.”

“I don’t see this as a victory and I don’t know if it’s going to change anything in the future,” Ayelet Kleinerman, a fourth-year Pomona student from Israel who founded the group Haverim Claremont in 2022, told JI. “There is a lot of backlash here from students, faculty and community members on the outside,” she continued. “So we will have to wait and see how things unfold, but when people are arrested I don’t see it as a victory — it’s sad that we got to a situation in the first place where police needed to be called. We shouldn’t have gotten to this in the first place.”

Kleinerman, who started Haverim as a way for Jewish and non-Jewish students to connect and learn about antisemitism — something she felt was missing from on-campus groups in the past — said the climate on campus for Jewish students since Oct. 7 “has been hard and intimidating, [filled] with a lot of [anti-Israel] protests.”

For months, Jewish students and alumni from the Claremont Consortium— Pomona College, Scripps College, Claremont McKenna College, Harvey Mudd College, and Pitzer College (known as the 5Cs), have urged administrators to take action in response to what they called in a Nov. 6 email “harassment of Jewish Students at Pomona College.”

“We are particularly alarmed by the administration’s acquiescence in the face of gross violations of College policy and applicable law,” the letter, signed by a group of 5C alumni said, pointing to several incidents at Pomona, including a demonstration on Oct. 20 when “Claremont Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace held a rally at Pomona’s Smith Campus Center with several hundred attendees. At that rally, SJP and JVP members assembled, at the Smith Campus Center (a shared space intended for use by all College students), a display honoring the Hamas terrorists responsible for the genocidal attacks of October 7.”

There was news in Israel today:

Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world, will normalize ties with Israel in exchange for Jerusalem’s approval of its request to join the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), following three months of discreet negotiations between the two countries and the organization, Ynet learned on Thursday.

"I am pleased to announce the Council has officially agreed to the clear and explicit early conditions according to which Indonesia must establish diplomatic relations with all OECD member countries before any decision is made to admit it to the OECD,” OECD Secretary-General Mathias Cormann wrote in a letter issued two weeks ago to Foreign Minister Israel Katz and approves by Indonesia beforehand.

Most Indonesian media ignored the story, but an Indonesian business publication seemed to welcome it, calling it "exciting:"

Membership in the OECD is believed to have a positive influence on the Indonesian economy because it can increase investment from OECD countries by up to 0.37% and increase GDP by up to 0.94%. For this reason, Indonesia prefers not to be included in the BRICS group of countries pioneered by China. BRICS is an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (South Africa).

But then it said that the country's foreign ministry denied the whole thing:

Meanwhile, the Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs dismissed the issue that Indonesia would normalize diplomatic relations with Israel so that it could be accepted as an OECD member. "I emphasize that up to now, there are no plans to open diplomatic relations with Israel, especially in the midst of the current situation of Israeli atrocities in Gaza," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Lalu Muhamad Iqbal in his statement on Thursday evening. He emphasized that Indonesia's position has not changed and remains firmly in support of Palestinian independence within the framework of a two-state solution. "Indonesia will always be consistent and be at the forefront of defending the rights of the Palestinian people," he said. Regarding Indonesia's membership in the OECD, Iqbal said that the process would take quite a long 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!

04/11 Links Pt1: New Video showing Hamas capturing IDF women ‘worse than what we imagined’; Israel to normalise relations with Indonesia; The Stunning Hypocrisy of Blinken and Power

From Ian:

New video showing Hamas capturing IDF women ‘worse than what we imagined’

Newly emerged video shot by Hamas terrorists showing the capture of female Israeli soldiers on the Gaza border has been described as “hard to watch” by Israeli media.

In the video, parts of which have not been shared with the public, Hamas terrorists are initially seen with five female IDF spotters, with two more later added.

“We will exchange you for our people,” the terrorists say.

Another terrorist forces one of the soldiers to show him how to dial a Gaza number from her cell phone. The terrorists later put the soldiers into stolen Israel Defense Forces vehicles for transport to Gaza.

Shira Albag, the mother of the kidnapped soldier Liri Albag, 19, watched it several weeks ago.

“I watched the video. They showed it to us three weeks ago. The IDF spokesman called us and showed us a video from the day of the kidnapping, something we had not seen and did not know about.

“We all only imagined what happened to the girls on Oct. 7, and unfortunately this video proved to us that it was even worse than we imagined,” she said.

According to a recent report by the Times, a number of new female IDF recruits have refused to serve as observer soldiers out of fear that “what happened to them could happen to me,” as one young Israeli recruit, Romi Fisher, told the Times.

At least 15 female soldiers were killed at Gaza border army bases on October 7 with roughly six others taken as hostages by Hamas, including Liri, who was reportedly working her third shift as an observer soldier when she was kidnapped.

Israel to normalise relations with Indonesia

Israel is set to normalise relations with Indonesia, the largest Muslim-majority country in the world, Ynet reported on Thursday.

The move comes after three months of secret talks between Jerusalem and Jakarta. In exchange for establishing diplomatic ties with the Jewish state, Jerusalem will reportedly lift its opposition to Indonesia becoming the 39th member of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

OECD Secretary-General Mathias Cormann sent a letter to Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz around two weeks ago, with Jakarta approving the wording.

“I am happy to announce that the Council has officially agreed to the early, clear and explicit condition that Indonesia maintain diplomatic relations with all members of the organisation before any decision to accept [it in] the OECD,” the letter states.

“Moreover, any future decision to accept Indonesia as a member of the organisation will require unanimous agreement among all the members, including Israel. I am convinced that this provides you with security on this important point,” the letter continues.

In a reply letter that Katz sent on Wednesday night and which was seen by Ynet, the minister wrote that “I share your expectation that this process will be a change for Indonesia, as I expect a positive change in its policy towards Israel, and in particular a renunciation of the discriminatory policy towards Israel, towards the establishment of full diplomatic relations between the parties.”

Indonesia has spoken out against Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza and supported South Africa’s lawsuit at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide. However, on Tuesday an Indonesian aircraft participated in an airdrop of humanitarian aid into Gaza, marking the first time that an Indonesian aircraft has flown through Israeli airspace.

Indonesia was one of the Muslim-majority countries that Jerusalem was working to add to the Abraham Accords in the months before the Hamas-led invasion of October 7.

Stephen Pollard: How Israel secured diplomatic relations with Indonesia

The Jewish Insider report was clearly correct. But the principal reason for Indonesia’s change of heart since 2020 is based almost entirely on Indonesia’s self-interest – and is far more prosaic than the era-changing vision of the Abraham Accords and. Indonesia is set to begin formal diplomatic relations with Israel because of one acronym: OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development).

Indonesia has been trying to join the OECD for the past few years but in recent months, as its progress towards membership has speeded up, an obstacle emerged. New members require the approval of all 38 existing members – one of which is Israel.

Israel appears to have used this requirement to secure something of a diplomatic triumph. It has been reported that OECD secretary general Mathias Cormann had initially made clear to Israel that it expected it "not to object" to Indonesia’s application to join, but Israel refused – a stance hardened by Indonesia’s criticism of the Gaza war and its moves against Israel at the ICJ in The Hague.

Israeli foreign minister Israel Katz is said in response to the OECD to have demanded that Indonesia show a “gesture of goodwill”. Fearing that the long-planned membership of Indonesia would be blocked by Israel, the OECD secretary general agreed to insist that diplomatic relations were established.

This was not quite the demand it might seem, however, as negotiations towards such an agreement had been proceeding for some months, with both sides anticipating a successful outcome before October 7 derailed everything.

Reports suggest that this normalisation of relations would have been agreed last autumn. A Memorandum of Understanding which is said to have included a commitment towards Indonesia joining the Abraham Accords process was signed in September.

But whilst this new diplomatic process has come as a surprise to many, there have been long been economic ties. The exact amount of trade is impossible to quantify as much of it is via third countries, but it is estimated by one analyst as “the high end of hundreds of millions of dollars a year”, most of which is said to be Indonesian agri-tech exports - and there has been an Israel-Indonesia Chamber of Commerce in Tel Aviv since 2009.

Teen's Room Proves Rich Archaeological Trove During Passover Cleaning (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

Efrat, April 14 - A local mother alerted the Israel Antiquities Authority today upon discovering what could only be ancient treasures under the detritus and dust in her adolescent son's domicile, the Jerusalem Post reported today.

Hannah Cohen, 42, contacted the IAA shortly after beginning the task of cleaning Adir Cohen's room in advance of the Passover holiday, which begins Monday evening next week. "The moment I saw the amount of dust accumulated on the furniture and some of the other stuff in the room, I knew I had to call in some experts. I didn't want to disturb anything of value," she told the Post.

Cohen disclosed that she repeatedly admonished Adir to clean his room over the last year. "Might as well have been asking Palestinian terrorists not to rape and murder," she lamented with a shake of the head.

Antiquities Authority representatives declined to say whether any of the objects from the bedroom qualify as artifacts. "It is certainly too early to announce anything," cautioned IAA spokesman T. Peshesray. "We do not wish to make any premature pronouncements, not least because it would invite scavengers and unwelcome guests unlikely to show proper care and reverence for the site. We do not want them poking around where other finds might still await discovery. Also, Mrs. Cohen will chew their ears off, and not just about leaving the room a mess. So it's for everyone's benefit that we make our investigations first, and, only once we are certain of the provenance of various artifacts, notify that public whether we have found anything of note."

In a separate phone call, Hannah Cohen described the process that led her to contact the IAA. "I wasn't prepared for the bardak I found," she recalled, using a word for turmoil, adopted into informal Hebrew from Russian, that literally translates as "whorehouse on fire." "The food wrappers and dirty dishes were bad enough. But do you know the last time he changed his bedsheets? Probably sometime during the Mameluk era (1260-1516). I might have to throw them out."

"Don't even get me started on the laundry and dirt," she continued, clearly not in need of someone to get her started. "It was the dirt and dust that made me think of calling the Antiquities Authority in the first place. I know this place was clean a year ago, but you wouldn't know it from looking at it now. I swear, that boy and his stuff attract dirt at a hundred times the normal dust accumulation rate. The Ark of the Covenant could be under there somewhere, if it weren't in some Nevada warehouse."

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!

Prominent Egyptian Al Azhar preacher says Jews will be "slaughtered like cows."

Remember the "Red Cow" that Arab media claimed would be slaughtered on Eid al Adha this week ahead of the destruction of Al Aqsa mosque?

After the date came and went with nothing happening, the same media went silent. I cannot find one that says that their confident predictions didn't pan out, just as the hundreds of previous predictions of the imminent destruction of Al Aqsa over the past century have all been false.

But one story on Tuesday ahead of the alleged disaster that never happened is noteworthy.

Dr. Muhammad Ali is an Islamic preacher at Egypt's prestigious Al Azhar. He had hundreds of thousands of followers on social media and has been interviewed countless times on Egyptian TV.

He was interviewed by Cairo24 about the Red Cow story, and his response was to curse all Jews.

The Jews distorted the Torah, and among what was written by their hands was a lot of talk about the Battle of Armageddon and the Red Cow. ... God Almighty says: “Woe to those who write the book with their own hands and then say, ‘This is from God.’ "

The Prophet, may God’s prayers and peace be upon him, said: “Woe to the valley in Hell, into which the infidel will fall forty falls before he reaches its bottom.” Ibn Abbas said, “So woe to them”: the torment is upon them... and the torment is coming upon them inevitably according to the text of the Book of God and the Sunnah of His Messenger, may God’s prayers and peace be upon him, the day will come that the stone and tree will speak and say: 'O Muslim, O servant of God, this is a Jew behind me, so come and kill him.' They will be killed and slaughtered like the slaughter of cows. This is the promise of my Lord and the promise of His Messenger, and it is coming inevitably. "

Someone call the International Criminal Court. Prominent Egyptians are publicly calling for the genocide of all 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!

The Gaza health ministry statistics show that hundreds of "martyrs" came back to life over the past weekend

The Telegram channel of the Gaza health ministry releases a detailed, 40+ page document every few days to describe in detail all of their statistics.

As we've been reporting, they have kept three tallies of the deceased: the ones that they count directly who have been brought to hospitals they can verify, the ones that "trusted media sources" (meaning Hamas) tells them to count (which are over 90% women and children,) and the ones that they have received from relatives filling in an online form. Over the last few reports, they have been downplaying the Hamas numbers and giving detailed reports only of the other two categories, which add up to some 21,000 people.

That document no longer claims that 72% of the dead are women and children. Of the ones they count, about 54% are women and children.

Something interesting happened between the April 4 and April 7 reports: hundreds of supposedly verified "martyrs" from the online forms miraculously came back to life.

The total number of verified deceased went from 21,720 on Thursday to 21,317 on Sunday - 403 people were no longer dead.

The ministry claims to go through a verification process of the online forms, and they don't count any that do not have complete information including identity number, full name, gender, date of birth and date of death. The number that they counted from those forms went down from 2,786 to 2,367 - meaning they disqualified 419 of the forms that had been "verified" three days before.

Also significantly, the number of those they count in hospitals only went up by only 16 in those three days - from 18,934 to 18,950. That's a lot less than the increase in numbers they issue every day in their press releases. In those three days, they added 138 total dead, meaning that while they reduced the numbers they could count, they added 541 new dead from the unverifiable Hamas sources.

I am willing to be charitable and say that the people who work on these detailed reports are conscientious and really trying to do their jobs. It clearly take many hours to compile those reports. They researched more about those who were input by relatives and found duplicates or bogus entries and removed them.

Yet at the same time, their bosses at the ministry highlight the larger, unverified numbers that include the nearly 12,000 that only came from Hamas.

Significantly, even their daily totals no longer claim 72% of the "martyrs" are women and children, although various UN agencies still repeat those as if they are accurate.

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!

More proof Israel tells the truth and Hamas, and NGOs, and Gaza Health Ministry all lie

Last year, Defense for Children International/Palestine reported:

The IDF disputed the accusation:

The Israel Defense Forces believes at least four Palestinians killed during the latest round of fighting in the Gaza Strip, including children, died as a result of explosions caused by failed rocket launches by Palestinian terror operatives and not due to Israeli strikes.

According to military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, of the 507 rockets launched by Palestinian Islamic Jihad at Israel as of Thursday morning, around 110 fell short in the Gaza Strip.

In one of the incidents, on Wednesday evening, 16-year-old Rami Shadi Hamdan and 51-year-old Ahmed Muhammad a-Shabaki were killed when a failed rocket slammed into a residential area of Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza, according to IDF estimates.

In another case late Wednesday, 10-year-old Layan Bilal Mohammad Abdullah Mdoukh and 16-year-old Yazan Jawdat Fathi Elayyan were killed in Gaza City in a similarly failed rocket launch, according to military assessments.

IDF Arabic spokesperson Avichai Adraee made a video recently that shows that recovered documents in Gaza show that Hamas knows the truth.

Here's another case.

Adraee notes that in 2022, 15-year old Fatima Obeid was killed by an Islamic Jihad rocket that Gaza authorities blamed on Israel.

We have video of the rocket as it exploded. You can see it somersaulting in freefall.

An internal Hamas document found by Israel recently lists the people killed in the 2022 conflict in northern Gaza by terror rockets. Fatima is #11.

But Fatima was listed by the Gaza Health Ministry, subject of so many academic papers saying it is trustworthy, as being killed by Israel - #49 here.

Mondoweiss still says that these 12 people in the north that even Hamas admits were killed by Islamic Jihad were killed by Israel. They published this weeks after I and others put together evidence that many of the dead from that mini-war were killed by terror rockets.

Another Hamas document was uncovered that showed that Islamic Jihad was quite aware that its own rockets killed those 12 people in August 2022, but they deliberately chose to hide the truth "to support the resistance" and claim that the civilian deaths came from Israel, not them.

This isn't merely knee--jerk denial. This is a planned policy of deception, to lie to the world to make them blame Israel for people killed by Islamic Jihad. And the Gaza Health Ministry was complicit.

(h/t Yoel)

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!

04/10 Links Pt2: Will the world admit it was wrong?; From Stalin to Hamas: The Return of the Left that Doesn’t Learn?

From Ian:

Phyllis Chesler: Will the world admit it was wrong?

The dense fog of war will clear after Israel has finally destroyed every last Hamas tunnel loaded with weaponry and the fact-based truth about Hamas and Iran’s war against Israel becomes transparent. When that happens, I wonder about those people who believe that Israel deserved Oct. 7 because they have swallowed the lie that Israel is not only an “oppressor, apartheid entity” but a nation that thirsted for “revenge” and allegedly went on to deliberately target women and children, cause famine and commit a “genocide”? Will they finally admit they were wrong?

I doubt it. They are unlikely to accept that the crimes attributed to Israel are Hamas and Iran’s crimes. Nor that diabolic paranoids and indoctrinated haters are essentially confessing their own crimes when they project them onto their victims.

People may always refuse to understand that accidents happen in war and most other countries—Muslim armies, American armies, British armies, Russian and Chinese armies—have caused far more civilian deaths in a single war than Israel has caused over 80 years of war.

In Hitler’s era, it was only the Nazis, the preexisting Jew-haters in Europe and Muslim lands, who brayed for the death of the Jews or minimized and denied what was happening to the Jews.

Now almost the entire world has spewed that bloodthirsty cry. Mobs are in the streets everywhere, cheering Hamas’s barbarism. Never has Israel been in such danger before.

What will the world say, if it says anything, when its allegations have been proven completely false? Will they still insist that they did not know, that no one told them?

Many, of course, will claim that they were right all along. Like Holocaust deniers, they will assert that whatever facts Israel presents are lies and disinformation.

Once again, Israel stands almost alone, accused of crimes it never committed. At this point, no matter how much Israel tries to do the right thing, it will never be credited for it. Thus, Israel must do whatever it takes to survive against the most fiendish odds.

Seth Mandel: The New Rednecks

Also in 2021, academics John Bitzan and Clay Routledge surveyed a thousand students at more than 70 U.S. colleges and found that a third had a positive view of socialism while only a quarter said the same about capitalism. But don’t worry—the students apparently don’t know what socialism is. So it’s not that they’re evil gulag goons, it’s that they are idiots who will blindly follow the crowd to save themselves the trouble of having to think. Reminder: That’s the good news.

All that should put the eruption of anti-Semitism on campuses in context. After Hamas’s Oct. 7 rampage started the current war, college students were polled on how to characterize the attacks. More than ten percent said they were justified resistance. But I don’t know if that’s better or worse than the one in five who “describe it as something else other than an act of terrorism or resistance.” Perhaps they see it as interpretive dance?

My personal favorite was what happened when Berkeley political-science professor Ron Hassner hired a firm to survey U.S. college students on the genocidal slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Most of those polled said they supported the slogan, but fewer than half could name the river and the sea referenced in the line. “Some of the alternative answers were the Nile and the Euphrates, the Caribbean, the Dead Sea (which is a lake) and the Atlantic,” Hassner reported.

That’s not all these sparkling young minds didn’t know. About 10 percent of those who supported the chant thought Yasser Arafat was the first president of Israel. A quarter of them denied the existence of the Oslo Accords, one of the most thoroughly documented signing ceremonies in modern times, the photos and videos of which are harder to avoid than they are to find.

Of course, these students are young. They’ll have their whole lives after college to get an education. Meantime, once you’ve seen a third billboard for the Ivies, might be time to turn around and go home.

From Stalin to Hamas: The Return of the Left that Doesn’t Learn?

An Interview with Mitchell Cohen
Mitchell Cohen is co-editor emeritus of Dissent in New York and professor emeritus of political science at Bernard Baruch College of the City University of New York. His books include Zion and State: Nation, Class, and the Shaping of Modern Israel and The Politics of Opera. He was interviewed in late February. A version of this interview is to appear in Spanish.

The Western Left, the Israeli Right and the Delegitimisation of the Jewish State
Question: Efforts to delegitimise the Jewish state are at full and loud throttle since Israel’s response to the October 7 massacres. This is taking place both the diplomatic and the intellectual worlds. In 2007 you seem to have perceived an earlier phase of this phenomenon in “Anti-Semitism and the Left that Doesn’t Learn,” your widely discussed article in Dissent. In it you pointed to a particular problem coming from the “liberal and left intelligentsia in the United States and Europe.” Are we now seeing the same thing in 2024? Are there new dimensions to it?

Mitchell Cohen: The attack on Israel’s legitimacy has intensified but it is part of a larger story. Opposition to Zionism within the left goes back to the founding of Zionism, although there has been real sympathy too. The current situation has long and short-term contexts. I wrote that article a few years after the UN’s Durban conference of 2001, which unleashed a wave of attacks on Israel for racism. But the problem also descends from decades of political developments, one of which was the assassination of Israeli premier Yitzhak Rabin by a rightwing Jewish zealot in 1995.

That murder also targeted the Oslo Accords, the best chance since 1949 for an Israeli-Palestinian peace and the signing of which put anti-Zionism on the defensive. Oslo’s foes gained mounting strength in the later 1990s. One was the Israeli right-wing led by Netanyahu, which always sought to blur reckless, ultra-nationalist goals with real security questions. The other was Hamas, whose bombing campaign in the spring after Rabin‘s murder played an essential role in electing Netanyahu. Hamas has always opposed compromise and its ultimate purposes have been to displace secular Palestinian nationalists with Islamists and to replace Israel with a Muslim state including the West Bank, Gaza and what is now Israel proper. In 2000, at Camp David, Ehud Barak offered a far-reaching compromise to Palestinians but Arafat did not accept it and the Second Intifada began. In this context an anti-Zionist campaign in the intellectual world was ushered along from Durban.

Israeli foreign policy has been dominated for almost three decades – with some interludes – by Netanyahu. One, and it is only one, staggering bungle was to allow Hamas to be strengthened in Gaza in order to weaken the Palestinian Authority and thereby to thwart Israeli-Palestinian compromise. It played, finally, into Hamas’s already blood-stained hands, as 7 October showed. This wasn’t just shortsightedness but fits into a long-standing pattern in the history of the Zionist rightwing, which I explored in my book Zion and State (Columbia University Press). That pattern consists in very consequential errors of political judgement based on a resentment-filled, misbegotten ideological orientation. It contrasts sharply to the social democrats of Mapai (Israel Workers’ Party) which, led by David Ben Gurion, dominated the struggle for Israeli statehood. Crucial decisions made by Ben-Gurion and Mapai were almost always measured and perceptive. Nowadays anti-Zionists seek to rewrite Israel’s history, demonising the Jewish state as a creation of Western imperialism – this is an historically spurious charge – by excising the role of the left in creating Israel. At the same time they dance around or excuse the fact that Palestinian nationalists allied themselves to Hitler and Mussolini.

To answer your question more fully, we must take into account what has happened within a highly visible part of the intelligentsia in recent decades. There has been in the university and intellectual worlds a rise in what is called ‘post-modernism’ and the like, which made it a point of turning many things upside down through selective use of history and ideological language games. Ironically, this even includes part of this intelligentsia’s own history. Edward Said complained that he could not convince Jean-Paul Sartre, who was not a post-modernist but an intellectual hero of the left and Michel Foucault, who was a seminal post-modern influence, of his position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They understood something he didn’t – or didn’t want to understand.

Anti-Zionism is part of a larger intellectual crack-up on the left with distant roots. There is now a kind of meeting point between simplistic post-modernism and simplistic anti-imperialism. This conjuncture can be called ‘the anti-imperialism of fools,’ a phrase that echoes the famous criticism of antisemitism on the left in the late 19th century by socialist August Bebel. When some on the left tried to blame ‘Jewish capitalists’ for Europe’s woes, he called it ‘the antisemitism of fools.’ Formulations of both the antisemitism of fools and anti-imperialism of fools depend on intellectual twisting and turning until somehow, no matter what, blame is ascribed to, respectively, Jews and Zionists. Ominously, that ascription is often there before the twisting and turning.

Matti Friedman: Why I Got a Gun

The decision to expand private gun ownership is certain to have unintended consequences, and not just because the number of guns will mean more accidents, homicides, and armed extremists. At the shooting range where I got my license, it was clear that some of the new owners were hardly competent to use a weapon in the sterile condition of the range, let alone in an actual attack where we would have to make life-or-death decisions in a matter of seconds while beset by adrenaline and fear. Those with combat training have a chance, though no guarantee of success. When I came home with my new license and a Glock 43X, I told my kids that if they’re ever near a shooting attack they need to lie down flat and wait until it’s over—the main danger being less the terrorist than other Israelis who will open fire and hit something other than their target.

One incident in particular has become a case in point. On November 30, two Palestinians from Sur Baher, a Jerusalem neighborhood near mine, began shooting Jews waiting at a bus stop, murdering three of them before a lawyer named Yuval Castelman, who happened to be passing by, jumped out of his car with his handgun. He engaged the terrorists with admirable bravery—only to be mistaken for a terrorist himself and killed by an army reservist exercising something between bad judgment and criminal negligence. Guns solve some problems and create many others. It’s hard to say how we’ll remember all of this in a decade or two.

But even in the weeks of my work on this essay, an Israeli with a handgun managed to kill a terrorist, another Palestinian from Jerusalem, who was shooting innocent people on a road in southern Israel, two of whom died. That was on February 16. On March 14, a noncommissioned officer waiting in line at an Aroma café didn’t notice the Palestinian kid in a black sweatshirt who lunged at his neck with a knife—but did manage to draw his handgun and shoot the assailant, preventing more fatalities, before he bled to death.

A friend from America told me recently that every Jewish person he knows has a contingency plan, sometimes secret or scarcely admitted even to themselves, for where to hide or escape if things get really bad in the diaspora—the kind of thought borne of a good education in Jewish history mixed with a close read of current events, like aggressive protests outside synagogues, shots fired at Jewish schools, and the growing fever about “Zionists.”

Mulling this, I asked friends here in Israel if they had a similar plan. No one did. Zionism has clearly failed to change everything in the Jewish condition, but it seems to have changed that, for what it’s worth. I don’t know anyone preparing a hideout. But I do know a remarkable number of people with a new Glock.