Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, May 07, 2024

Reports: Israel no longer opposed to releasing Marwan Barghouti - but Abbas is

The Jerusalem Post reported over the weekend:

Is Marwan Barghouti expected to be released soon from prison as part of the apparent hostage deal between Israel and Hamas? A Saturday report from Maariv citing the Saudi Asharq channel reported that Israel no longer opposes the release of Barghouti but insists on releasing him to Gaza and not to the West Bank.

It was also reported that Hamas is expected to demand his name on the list of the first phase of the deal.

Barghouti, former leader of the Tanzim, a militant faction of the Palestinian Fatah movement, was sentenced in 2004 by an Israeli court to five cumulative life sentences and 40 years in prison for terrorist acts in which five Israelis were murdered and many injured.

Releasing Barghouti would definitely shake things up. he is by far the most popular political figure for Palestinians - if there would ever be an election, he would win.

Which is why the reports that Abbas is against his release are probably true.

Senior Palestinian Authority (PA) officials have requested from mediators that Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti be excluded from a potential prisoner swap deal between Israel and Hamas, a source has told Middle East Eye.
A source familiar with the negotiations told MEE on Sunday that the request was made by Majid Faraj, the director of Palestinian general intelligence, and Hussein al-Sheikh, the secretary-general of the Palestine Liberation Organisation's (PLO) executive committee.
The source added that senior PA leaders believed Barghouti's release would threaten the leadership of PA President Mahmoud Abbas.
According to the source, the United States, one of three mediators involved in the indirect Gaza ceasefire negotiations, had reportedly agreed to remove Barghouti's name from any potential lists Hamas is expected to present.

If he is released, and Israel enforces his being only allowed to live in Gaza, it might backfire. Barghouti has had a Jekyll and Hyde personality; claiming to support peace and a two state solution while at the same time organizing terror attacks and saying he supports such attacks. From Gaza he would have plenty of influence, and that would weaken the PA just as much of not more than his being in Gaza. He might change the center of gravity of Palestinian leadership from the West Bank to Gaza, which would benefit Hamas.

If Hamss is destroyed, then it will be a Wild West situation.

Abbas is quite old although he is still appears fairly vigorous, but he cannot last that much longer. A Barghouti release would push up the open succession battle to now.

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!

05/06 Links Pt2: A somber Israel marks Yom Hashoah; The war against the Jewish story; A History Lesson for the Hillel-Haters

From Ian:

The war against the Jewish story

On the occasion of Yom HaShoah, which began yesterday evening, Yossi Klein Halevi isn’t calling for more or better Holocaust education, but for something else:

The ease with which anti-Zionists have managed to portray the Jewish state as genocidal, a successor to Nazi Germany, marks a historic failure of Holocaust education in the West. This moment requires a fundamental rethinking of the goals and methodology of Holocaust education. By overemphasizing the necessary universal lessons of the Holocaust, many educators too easily equated anti-Semitism with generic racism. The intention was noble: to render the Holocaust relevant to a new generation. But in the process, the essential lesson of the Holocaust—the uniqueness not only of the event itself but of the hatred that made it possible—was often lost.

Holocaust education was intended, in large part, to protect the Jewish people. . . . Yet the movement to turn Israel into the world’s criminal nation emerges from a generation that was raised with Holocaust consciousness, both in formal education and the arts. And this latest expression of the anti-Semitism of symbols is justified by some anti-Zionists as honoring “the lessons of the Holocaust.”

Unlike the Iranian regime, which clumsily tries to deny the historicity of the Holocaust, anti-Zionists in the West intuitively understand that coopting and inverting the Holocaust is a far more effective way of neutralizing its impact.

Johnathan Tobin: Yom Hashoah after Oct. 7: How Holocaust education failed

We keep being told that many of those who demonstrate in favor of an end to the current war that would leave Hamas alive and well—and able to make good on its promises to repeat the horrors of Oct. 7 again and again—are well-meaning and simply sympathetic to the suffering of Palestinians. But the objective of the movement these supposedly well-meaning people support is to strip the Jews of Israel—and Jews everywhere, for that matter—of the ability to defend themselves against Islamists for whom Oct. 7 is just a trailer for what they wish to do to every Jew on this planet.

Simply put, if you are demonstrating for Hamas’s survival, you are on the side of a group that wishes to repeat the Holocaust. No matter how well-intentioned you may claim to be, that makes you no different from those who viewed the Nazis, who had their own narrative of grievance, with equanimity.

The German people suffered terribly as a result of the war that they launched, yet today, those who claim to speak for humanitarian values believe that there can be no consequences for those who commit or condone (as is true for the overwhelming majority of Palestinians) the mass murder of Jews and that Jews who defend themselves against genocide are the Nazis. Would those who demonstrate against Jewish self-defense apply the same lessons to the Allies who, in order to liberate the Nazi death camps had to kill many people, including civilians?

By the same token, those who wish for universities and other institutions to engage in discriminatory commercial conduct that would divest from anything to do with Israel are not criticizing Israel’s policies or leaders, but supporting a contemporary version of Nazi boycotts of Jews.

It is also just as clear that the leftist/Islamist attack on Israel is also aimed at the West and the United States. This debate over the war against Hamas is not one about whether Israel or its government and military are perfect but about a struggle for the future of the West, much as was true of the war against the German Nazis. The Jews are, as they were during the Holocaust, the canaries in the coal mine, warning humanity of the dangers of tolerating genocidal hate.

As we remember the Shoah, rather than stick to our usual routine of memorialization, it’s time for decent people of all backgrounds and faiths to understand that the war on the Jews didn’t end with the defeat of the Nazis. It continues to this day under new slogans, flags and worse, with many of those who claim to stand for enlightened thought allowing the enablers of Jew-hatred to pose as advocates for human rights and the oppressed. Those lies must not be allowed to stand.

There should be no Holocaust Memorial Day observance without it being made clear that there can be no proper honor given to the Six Million slain by the Nazis without linking that struggle to those against the antisemites of our time. We must not tolerate those who shed crocodile tears for Jews murdered in the past while tolerating or even supporting policies that enable antisemitism in the present, envisioning Israel’s destruction and the continued slaughter of Jews. If we cannot understand that, then invocations to remember what happened or ensure that it is “never again” allowed in this world are nothing more than pointless and counterproductive virtue-signaling.

An Israeli survivor of the Holocaust and Oct. 7 says after the recent atrocities, we ‘held our heads high’

As for the connection people are drawing between the Oct. 7 attack and the Holocaust, Ben Yosef said that “over the decades, fate brings us all kinds of ups and downs, and that was one of the most difficult low points, but to compare the days of the Holocaust and Oct. 7 — it’s not the same.”

“In the time of the Holocaust, we were spread all over the world and when we were massacred, we couldn’t do anything. Today we are in our own country with our own army. The losses were tremendous, the shock was great — but we held our heads high,” she said.

Ben Yosef took part in a project initiated by the Israel office of Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, called “Sharing Memories,” in which influencers upload videos of Holocaust survivors telling their stories. This year Meta Israel is highlighting survivors who were in Israel’s south on Oct. 7. The participants are mostly Israelis, so the videos are mostly in Hebrew, but actor Michael Rapaport produced content in English; they have an aggregate following of over 7.2 million people on Instagram. The project will raise funds for Israeli NGO Latet to provide essential needs to impoverished survivors, and the clips were available to watch on the VOD service of one of Israel’s biggest cable companies, Yes TV, starting on Sunday night.

Hamas murdered several Holocaust survivors on Oct. 7, including some of the 15 elderly people found dead in the street in Sderot, where they were waiting to board a bus to the Dead Sea. One of them was Moshe Ridler, 91, the oldest resident of Kibbutz Holit, who escaped a concentration camp when he was 11 years old.

The eldest of the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza, Shlomo Mantzur, 86, is a survivor of the Farhud, the 1941 pogrom against Jews in Baghdad, inspired partly by Nazi influence in Iraq. Farhud survivors are recognized as Holocaust survivors under Israeli law.

In the Farhud, Shlomo’s sister, Hadassa Lazar, told a Knesset committee earlier this year, the Iraqis “murdered, raped, tortured babies, kidnapped, decapitated… It was the Kristallnacht of Iraqi Jewry and the world was silent. Shlomo saw things that stayed with him his whole life. We used to think ‘never again’ – it did not occur to us that such things could happen again when we have a sovereign state.”

Some of the other hostages have close relatives who are Holocaust survivors, including Michael Kuperstein, 82, the grandfather of Bar Kuperstein, 22, who was kidnapped from the Nova music festival, and Tsili Wenkert, 82, whose grandson, Omer Wenkert, was taken from the festival and appeared in a hostage video released in January. Bella Chaim is the grandmother of Yotam Chaim, who was kidnapped to Gaza and accidentally killed by IDF soldiers. Ruth Haran, 89, had seven relatives kidnapped and three murdered; her grandson-in-law Tal is still being held hostage in Gaza and her daughter Sharon, daughter-in-law Shoshan, grandchildren Noam and Adi, and great-grandchildren Neve and Yahel were kidnapped by Hamas and released in November.

Haran, who was born in Romania and spent years fleeing the Nazis, survived the Oct. 7 attack on Kibbutz Be’eri and said that “people who survived the massacre talked about death, murder, women raped and the destruction of our community. The whole trauma of being a Holocaust survivor came back to me…As a Holocaust survivor, I know how to deal with pain, but this time I don’t know how to cope.”

NATO described Hamas' human shield strategy in 2014

NATO's Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence wrote a clear-headed description of Hamas' strategy of using human shields in a white paper in 2014.

Here's the executive summary:

Hamas, an Islamist militant group and the de facto governing authority of the Gaza Strip, has been using human shields in conflicts with Israel since 2007. According to the Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the war crime of using human shields encompasses “utilizing the presence of a civilian or other protected person to render certain points, areas, or military forces immune from military operations.” Hamas has launched rockets, positioned military-related infrastructure-hubs and routes, and engaged the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) from, or in proximity to, residential and commercial areas.

The strategic logic of human shields has two components. It is based on an awareness of Israel’s desire to minimise collateral damage, and of Western public opinion’s sensitivity towards civilian casualties. If the IDF uses lethal force and causes an increase in civilian casualties, Hamas can utilise that as a lawfare tool: it can accuse Israel of committing war crimes, which could result in the imposition of a wide array of sanctions. Alternatively, if the IDF limits its use of military force in Gaza to avoid collateral damage, Hamas will be less susceptible to Israeli attacks, and thereby able to protect its assets while continuing to fight. Moreover, despite the Israeli public’s high level of support for the Israeli political and military leadership during operations, civilian casualties are one of the friction points between Israeli left-wing and right-wing supporters, with the former questioning the outcomes of the operation.

This is as good a summary of the current war as could have been written ten years ago. The only major thing missing is how Hamas built its extensive tunnel infrastructure since then, but the tunnels are based on the exact same logic: nearly all of them were built under heavily populated areas, making every single civilian in Gaza a human shield.

There is no ambivalence by the military experts at NATO that this is Hamas strategy. They don't try to find excuses like "Gaza is so small, what choice do they have?"

The paper doesn't have great solutions, and what they do suggest Israel has tried, but latent antisemitism means that too many people suspect that Israel doesn't tell the truth.

 The use of human shields can be considered an example of ‘lawfare’ – i.e. the use of the legal system against an enemy by damaging or delegitimising them, tying up their time or winning a public relations victory.
 Even if a targeted strike may be justifable from a legal perspective, first impressions frame the narrative. Public opinion tends to be influenced more by images depicting the suffering of innocent civilians than by well-thought-out legal arguments.
 National governments should be able to publicly justify their position, and reveal their adversary’s use of civilians in combat. This can only be accomplished by thoroughly documenting incidents, preparing supportive messages, and working across multiple channels to convey those narratives.
 Priority should be given to information activities aimed at the very civilians who are used as human shields, in order to undermine the adversary and convince civilians to actively or passively refuse to serve as human shields. Such activities need to be coherent, consistent and coordinated.

(h/t Scott)

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!

A continuation of a series about the many, many logical fallacies that we hear in anti-Israel arguments. When academics or supposedly wise pundits engage in these fallacies, it shows that they do not have any real arguments. Part 1 here.

16. Big Lie technique. "Israel is an apartheid state." "Israel is committing genocide in Gaza." "Most Palestinians are against terrorism." "Most Palestinians support a two state solution." "Hamas has shown flexibility in its demands." "Israel is the obstacle to peace." "There were no rapes on October 7." "Israel bombed the Al Ahli hospital." "Fatah is moderate." etc. etc.

17. Blind Loyalty fallacy: "I don't know enough about history or current events, but everyone else on campus/my favorite professor says Israel is evil."

18. Blood is Thicker than Water fallacy: "As a Muslim (or Arab,) I support Palestinians no matter what they do."

19. Brainwashing: "There is only one solution, Intifada Revolution" chants repeated over and over. Or this:

20. Calling "Cards": "Zionists on campus are playing the antisemitism card."

21. Circular reasoning: "We know Israel is so evil, it has been trying to wipe out Palestinians for 80 years. Israel is performing genocide, which proves Israel is evil."

22. Complex Question or Loaded Question: "Why do you support Israel's genocide of Palestinians?"

23. Confirmation Bias: "I read about a study that says all Ashkenazi Jews come from Europe; that proves they cannot be real Jews." "All the evidence Amnesty/HRW gathered proves Israel is an apartheid state" without mentioning all the counter-evidence they ignored.

24. Default Bias: "Israel cannot stop Palestinian terror/'resistance' so it must learn to accept it."

25: Nihilism: "Everything is Israel's fault. Dismantle it."

26. Defensiveness: " I supported Hamas' pragmatism and how they appeared to care about Gazans. After October 7, I still support Hamas' decision to start a war that destroyed Gazan's lives."

27. Deliberate Ignorance: "Why am I protesting Israel? Don't ask me, ask one of the leaders."

28. Diminished Responsibility: "After decades of occupation, what else can you expect from Palestinians?"

29. Disciplinary Blinders: "Modern Middle East studies discount the idea that there was ever a powerful Jewish kingdom in the region, so we can ignore recent archaeological evidence to the contrary."

30. Dog-Whistle Politics: "She's a Zionist. Enough said."

Lots more coming.

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!

05/06 Links Pt1: Genocide Enablers; Why the Left failed on October 7; Hamas says it has accepted Egyptian cease-fire proposal; Alternatives to Replace UNRWA Immediately

From Ian:

Genocide Enablers

The man who ignored the information which arguably could have saved nearly a million lives was Kofi Annan, then U.N. under-secretary general for peacekeeping operations. Annan told PBS in 2004 that he ordered Dallaire to share his intelligence with the genocide’s architects because “sometimes it is a very good deterrent” to inform rogue states that “we know what you are up to”—as if such a tactic has ever worked before or since. Not surprisingly, during Belgian government investigations into the Hutus’ murder of Belgian peacekeeping soldiers, Annan blocked Dallaire from testifying, and declined to testify himself.

Annan made another telling remark in the PBS interview. Pointing the finger at Security Council members, the former secretary general noted that, although these states had even better intelligence than his office, he knew the “mood in the council”: The members, Annan said, were not going to say, “We are going to send in the brigade” or “send reinforcements to General Dallaire.” While clearly self-serving, Annan’s remark is a reminder of the complicity of the so-called “international community,” including the U.S., which, at the time, did not wish to even utter the word “genocide.” “If we use the word ‘genocide’ and are seen as doing nothing,” Susan Rice, then director for international organizations and peacekeeping at the National Security Council, said, “what will be the effect on the November [congressional] election?”

The author who later excoriated Rice for this comment was none other than Samantha Power, who, two decades later, would nevertheless join Rice in government as ambassador to the U.N., when the Obama administration was abetting the mass slaughter in Syria. In her current role as USAID administrator, Power, in order to advance the Biden administration’s obscene policy of “surging” aid to Gaza, has falsely claimed that Israel is causing a “famine.”

Annan’s boss during the genocide, then-Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, was the one responsible for covertly selling the Rwandan government much of their weapons stockpile in the first place. That $26 million worth of weapons, approved by Boutros-Ghali while still Egyptian foreign minister in 1990, made up a large part of the supplies the U.N. blocked Dallaire from seizing. Boutros-Ghali later dismissed Dallaire’s original fax as merely one among many “alarming reports from the field,” thus not worth serious consideration at the time. Once the genocide was in full flood, however, all Boutros-Ghali and Annan allowed Dallaire to do was attempt to negotiate an impossible cease-fire between the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front and the very government slaughtering their kin. Though he admitted to PBS in 2004 that “I failed in Rwanda,” he never truly took personal responsibility. When he traveled to Rwanda in 1995 and reluctantly visited the site of the barbaric Nyarubuye church massacre, he toured the untouched mounds of putrefied innocents for 18 minutes, told the living to be of good courage, and then left.

Current U.N. secretary general, Antonio Guterres, did something arguably worse 28 years later. Barely two weeks after Oct. 7, he appeared to give subtle justification to Hamas’ own Nyarubuye massacre of Jews, saying that it “did not happen in a vacuum.”

Still, perhaps the most stunning correlation between the U.N.’s abetment of genocide in Rwanda and in Israel 30 years later is its insistence upon “humanitarian” support for mass murderers and their civilian accomplices. A less-remembered side effect of the Rwandan civil war was the exodus of around a million Hutus into Tanzania and Zaire, whom the U.N. and international community aided lavishly. Many of these refugees were known at the time to have either supported the genocide’s aims or personally been part of the Interahamwe death squads, but they were given food, medicine, and shelter anyway. The thousands of killers among them became community leaders within the refugee camps and then, when the genocide was over, returned to their villages to live in sight of those few who had survived their butchery.

Today, the U.N. demands that Israel supply food, medicine, and shelter to people who passionately support Hamas and their genocidal exploits. Under severe U.S. pressure—including threats of stopping arms supplies, sanctions, and support for ICC prosecution of Israeli officials and IDF soldiers—Israel has been forced to oblige, even though they know that Hamas will steal the aid for itself, as it habitually does. The Biden administration has even begun constructing a $320 million pier to supply the terror group’s enclave, and is demanding Israel protect the aid convoys replenishing its enemy.

Nevertheless, there is one difference between the U.N.’s perfidy in Rwanda and hostility toward Israel. In Rwanda, the U.N.—even while often refusing to use the word—did understand that Hutus were, in fact, committing genocide against Tutsis. Today, however, the same U.N. actually accuses the victims of an act of genocide of being the murderers, while blessing the act’s perpetrators as the true victims.

It is only fitting, then, that one U.N. official reportedly described pointless cease-fire talks between the RPF and Hutu killers as “rather like wanting Hitler to reach a cease-fire with the Jews.” No observation could better encapsulate three decades of moral depravity dressed up as idealistic decency.

The women cheering on Hamas rapists are an insult to feminism

For all the loathing she received on social media, Karen was harmless. Her successor is not. This woman throngs university campuses, leading protests, wrapped up in keffiyehs and a face covering, passionately crying out for what she calls freedom fighters and their “just war” against Zionist apartheid, genocide and occupation, and the general existence of the Jewish state.

What she is doing – perfectly explicitly in many cases – is teeny-bopping for Hamas, as girls used to yell and scream for the Beatles. It’s truly chilling. In the sick world of too many pro-Hamas, pro-Palestine women protesting, the acts of sexual violence carried out by Hamas on October 7 are Zionist fabrications, designed to further deepen the Israeli stranglehold on Palestinian self-determination and freedom. Others know perfectly well that the rape, torture and abductions happened, but seem to think it’s all wonderfully noble “resistance”.

A sick irony lives in the fact that these protest babes, ardent, self-righteous, self-avowed progressives, are cheering on terrorists who, when not raping women, insist on a brutal patriarchal society.

Do these women really want an Isis-style caliphate? Do they want rape and the threat of murder as an instrument of control as the framework for society in which all must live? Or do they only want these things for the “Zionists”?

Perhaps they don’t really know what they’re wishing for, but they should be careful nonetheless. They might just get it.

Why the Left failed on October 7

A sentence I never imagined I’d write: I now think Jeremy Corbyn did Jews in Britain a favour. His time as Labour leader, between 2015 and 2020, was an extremely weird one for British Jews, but eye-opening all the same: I now think it prepared many of us for the Left’s reaction to October 7, whereas American Jews seemed far more surprised. The gaslighting (the attack didn’t happen), the defences (if it did, Jews deserved it), the hectoring moral superiority (how can you care about that when this is so much more important?): all that we saw after October 7, we had seen under Corbyn.

Now is not the place to rehash the many examples of Corbyn’s jaw-dropping attitudes towards Jews, never mind Israel, ideas some of us naively thought had died out with Stalin. Those are specific to Corbyn, whose political relevance is now, thankfully, in the past. But two general truths emerged from that era that would prove extremely relevant after October 7.

The first was how little people across the Left cared when Jews pointed out the obvious antisemitism they saw in the Labour Party. In 2018, 86% of British Jews said they believed Corbyn was antisemitic; and still the Left supported him, and still The Guardian backed him in the 2019 general election. Would they — good Lefties one and all — have done this if the vast majority of another minority said they believed Corbyn was bigoted against them? Would the Left have supported an Islamophobic leader in 2018? A homophobic one? A racist one? It’s hard to imagine. “What are Jews so scared of? It’s not like Corbyn’s going to bring back pogroms,” a prominent figure on the Left asked me. I briefly amused myself by imagining a response: “Why are black people so against the Tories? It’s not like they’ll bring back lynching.” But I stayed schtum. The Left doesn’t care about antisemitism if they deem it inconvenient to their cause. They just call it “anti-Zionism” and carry on, and that was — it turned out — a good lesson to learn.

There was another lesson, too. When Corbyn was pushed out of Labour in 2020, I dismissed him as a useful idiot, which was right. I also dismissed him as a blip, an aberration, one I needn’t think about again, which was wrong. Because then October 7 happened. I realised that the Corbyn era had opened a Pandora’s box and some ghosts cannot be controlled.

Antisemitism found a new point of entry through identity politics, which argues that in order to see the world clearly, we need to divide it up into particular group identities, specifically racial and sexual identities, and quantify the degrees of their oppression. As Yascha Mounk writes in The Identity Trap, adherents of identity politics believe that, in the name of fairness, liberal democracies need to jettison universal values such as free speech and respect for diverse opinions — values long championed by the Jewish Diaspora. Instead, we should now see everyone through the prisms of race and sexual orientation and treat them differently, depending on their identity group and how much oppression they have historically suffered.

To make this simplistic ideology even more simple, identity politics divides the world into two racial categories: “white” (defined as colonising oppressors) and “people of colour” (the oppressed). This is how the Left pivoted from talking about class to talking about race. It is also why antisemitism is thriving again on university campuses, as supporters of identity politics combine with activists for black and Muslim causes, who see Jews as ultra-white and therefore oppressive. And to be clear, those activists aren’t necessarily Black or Muslim themselves; in fact, as multiple students have told me, they are often white, but see supporting these causes — and trashing Israel and Jews — as a means of proving their allyship and exonerating themselves from white guilt.

Middle East Eye, a UK-based web newspaper reportedly funded by Qatar, reports that Egypt has been creating an alliance to help stop any influx of Palestinians who want to escape Gaza in case of an Israeli invasion of Rafah:

Egypt’s military intelligence has held meetings with Sinai tribes in recent weeks to discuss their potential role in the event of an Israeli invasion of Rafah in southern Gaza, Middle East Eye can reveal.

At the meetings, Egyptian intelligence officers said they estimated a Palestinian influx of between 50,000 and 250,000 people towards Sinai if Israel carries out a ground operation in the Palestinian Rafah.

The meetings were held prior to the controversial creation of an alliance of tribal groups at the Egyptian side of Rafah, led by the influential pro-government businessman and militia leader Ibrahim al-Organi.

According to three Sinai tribal sources and one Egyptian security source, in the weeks leading up to the event, a number of meetings were held in North Sinai between senior members of Bedouin tribes, officers from the Secret Service apparatus in the military intelligence (known internally as Group 55), and others from the Second Field Army.

The main topic of these meetings was the possibility of the influx of a large number of residents of the Gaza Strip due to a potential Israeli military operation in the Palestinian city of Rafah, which now hosts about 1.5 million displaced Palestinians.

All sources spoke on condition of anonymity fearing reprisals from the Egyptian army.

According to three people who attended these meetings, the army and intelligence officers emphasised the necessity of assisting the armed forces and security agencies in “monitoring any infiltration of Palestinians” towards the villages and centres of North Sinai should this displacement occur, and warned against harbouring any of them and immediately reporting any movement of unfamiliar individuals in the areas close to the border.

According to the three Sinai sources, during meetings between Group 55 and Sinai tribal leaders, a number of attendees said it would be difficult to comply with official demands to prevent the entry of Palestinians into Sinai and report any movements across the borders, even with promises that the government would accommodate all displaced individuals. They highlighted their familial ties and relationships with people in the Gaza Strip, particularly Rafah, stating that it would be against their honour and Bedouin and tribal traditions to refuse hospitality and reception to them.

Egypt tries hard to say that they want Gazans to stay put fo rthe good of all Palestinians, but n Arabs seem to buy it. At the same time, no one wants to say otherwise out loud at the risk of being accused of being a Zionist.

One story later in the article sheds some new light on what some Gazans thought of "occupation:"

During one of his meetings with the tribes, General Shousha shared an anecdote with the participants, asking them not to publish it, dating back to 2005 when the Egyptian border was breached by large numbers of people from Gaza following the Israeli withdrawal from the Strip. At that time, he was the commander of the border guard forces.

Hold on: Israel withdrew from Gaza and a large number of Palestinians fled to Egypt? Even before Hamas took over the sector?

Why?

Apparently, they felt that Israeli "occupation" was far preferable to any Palestinian self-rule.

This is the sort of story that gets suppressed by the media because it doesn't follow the narrative. As a result, politicians make decisions based on incomplete information.

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!

An analysis of where @RutgersU caved to the demands of protesters

As part of the agreement to dismantle the anti-Israel encampment at Rutgers, the university gave in to a number of protester demands.

In general, as I've argued, any concession to students violating policy is an invitation to further and more extreme violations down the road, and I believe that any concessions sends a wrong message. In this case, some of the concessions are problematic and a couple of them are window dressing. even so, the optics is that the protesters achieved complete victory, which is the wrong message to give.

Here are the protester demands and Rutgers' responses, followed by my comments:

1. Divest from any firm or corporation materially participating in, benefitting from, or otherwise supporting the state of Israel's settler colonialism, apartheid, and genocide of Palestine and the Palestinian people, in accordance with the principles for divestment listed in University policy 40.2.14.

A request from the Endowment Justice Collective to divest from companies doing business in Israel was received on April 2, 2024, and is undergoing the review process that is outlined in the university’s investment policy. The University President and the Chairman of the Joint Committee on Investments will meet with no more than five student representatives to discuss the divestment request provided the end of encampment.

In this case, the request for divestment was done in accordance with university policy before the encampment began. That is the proper way to do it. The meeting with the protesters to discuss it after the encampment ends does not seem to be problematic.

2. Terminate its partnership with Tel Aviv University including in the HELIX Innovation Hub.

Agreements with global partners are a matter of scholarly inquiry.

This is a flat-out "no."

3. Accept at least 10 displaced Gazan students to study at Rutgers University on scholarship.

Rutgers University has a close partnership with Scholar Connections and will work with a committee of students, faculty, and staff to implement support for 10 displaced Palestinian students to finish their education at Rutgers.

The only problem with this is that it was agreed to as a concession to policy violators. It is ironic, though, that the protesters are asking for support for those who they would have preferred to remain in Gaza.

4. Provide resources for Palestinian and Arab students in the form of an Arab Cultural Center on each Rutgers campus.

We will develop a plan for the creation of an Arab Cultural Center with designated physical space and a hiring plan for administrators and staff by the start of Fall 2024 semester at New Brunswick.

Who will fund this? What is the purpose of these centers? Will they allow freedom of expression? Will they be allowed to explicitly support Hamas terror? There are more questions here than answers, so it is difficult to know how problematic this might be.

5. Establish a Memorandum of Understanding to establish a long-term educational and collaboration partnership with Birzeit University, Ramallah, Palestine -- in accordance with precedent set by William Paterson University

Rutgers-New Brunswick will revisit and follow up on the relationship established in 2022 with Birzeit University to explore avenues of research collaboration and scholarly exchange, and the feasibility of student exchange and/or study abroad through RU Global Studies

This is completely unacceptable. Birzeit University students perennially elect Hamas groups in student elections, the university is proud that it has terrorists among its alumni, it censors speech from its own faculty, and in every sense it is pro-terror and antisemitic. Rutgers should never consider any link whatsoever with a pro-terror university.

6. Name "Palestine" and "Palestinians" in all future communications related to Israeli aggressions in Palestine (as opposed to "Middle East" "Gaza region" etc.), and release a statement from the Office of the President acknowledging the ongoing genocide against Palestinians, its impact on the Palestinian community at our university, and advocating for a ceasefire.

The Chancellor will continue to name Palestine, Palestinians, and Gaza in future communications.

This sounds like a "no."

7. Hire senior administrators with cultural competency and knowledge about Arabs, Palestinians, Muslims, anti-Palestinian racism, and Islamophobia.

Rutgers–New Brunswick will work to develop training sessions on anti-Palestinian, antiArab, and anti-Muslim racism for all RU administrators & staff. We also commit to the hiring of a senior administrator who has cultural competency in and with Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian communities in the Division of Diversity, Inclusion, and Community.

This looks like a backdoor way to entrench antisemitism at Rutgers. It makes the assumption that there is Islamophobia at Rutgers, and who engages in such activities? Jews!

Rutgers should explicitly say that anyone they hire must not have antisemitic or anti-Zionist biases.

8. Hire additional professors specializing in Palestine studies and Middle East studies, institute a center for Palestine studies, and establish a path to departmentalization for Middle East studies.

The Office of the Chancellor will convene a working group to conduct a feasibility study for the creation of a Department of Middle East Studies and hire faculty. The first task of the committee is to identify gaps in the current faculty and make recommendations.

In theory, this is not problematic; in fact, it is, as most Middle East studies departments are virulently anti-Israel and most are antisemitic, teaching slanders about Israeli Jews. Any such department must be carefully set up so as not to just contribute to more hate on campus. There is no indication that Rutgers is even thinking about that.

9. Display the flags of occupied peoples - including but not limited to Palestinians, Kurds, and Kashmiris - in all areas displaying international flags across the Rutgers campuses.

The Office of the Chancellor will take stock of flags that are displayed across Rutgers New Brunswick campus, and ensure appropriate representation of students enrolled in academic and other spaces.

This could easily be a slippery slope. Would Rutgers display the older Iranian flag for Iranian dissidents who don't accept the current regime? Would it display "flags" for hundreds of native American tribes? Would it display Hamas or PFLP flags for those who oppose the Palestinian Authority? Once a clear policy to only display national flags is changed to where any self-defined group can insist on representation, it could turn to chaos - and it could easily turn into a hostile environment for Jews and others.

10. Provide full amnesty for all students, student groups, faculty, and staff penalized for exercising their First Amendment right to protest Rutgers University's support for Israeli human rights violations, and voice support for faculty and staff who have been publicly targeted for exercising their academic freedom.

No member of the Rutgers–New Brunswick community-including faculty, staff, graduate students, undergraduate students, or alumni-found to have been involved in the encampment or related activity will face retaliation from the University, including termination of employment or reduction in compensation. Retaliation shall be defined as any adverse action outside of normal business practices taken for the sole reason that the individual was involved in the encampment activities. Individual students who have been involved in any activities related to the encampment or support of the encampment, including presence in the encampment area, remain subject to the procedures of the Code of Student Conduct as communicated by the Office of Student Conduct. The commitment to end the encampment through this agreement will be considered a favorable mitigating factor in the resolution of those matters. This agreement further recognizes that reports of bias, harassment or discrimination must continue to be investigated by the appropriate offices. This agreement does not pertain to Code of Student Conduct violations that occur or come to be known after this agreement, nor shall the review and resolution of any such individual conduct matters alter or invalidate this agreement.

This sounds like a polite "no." Rutgers is saying that merely attending the encampment would not result in any punishment, but any violation of policies still could. This can be read as saying that the organizers could be subject to disciplinary action, as well as anyone who intimidated Jewish students.

The devil is in the details, of course. Rutgers is not showing that it learned any lessons when it blocked a planned kosher barbeque at the same location as where the encampment was, forcing it to move:

Rutgers University refused to let a Jewish group hold a pro-Israel barbecue on the campus’ Vorhees Mall, despite allowing pro-terror protesters to camp there for days, emails obtained by The Post claim.

Rutgers Associate Dean of Students Kerri Willson refused to allow the Jewish students to gather at the spot, saying no events could be held on campus after the last day of classes on Monday, April 29 — despite allowing the encampment to drag on until May 2.

The Kosher cookout was set to mark the end of a grueling semester for Jewish students at Rutgers, which has seen pro-Hamas students plaster a pro-Israel student’s picture all over their dorm; spray paint pictures of Palestinian terrorists on campus sidewalks; and scream “Hitler would have loved you” at Jewish students.

And that is the main reason for caution at Rutgers' response: what statement is Rutgers making to ensure the safety of its Jewish students, the students who followed the rules and didn't violate policies in their own protests of Hamas?

The only test that Rutgers needs to pass is to ensure the campus is as safe for Jewish students as it was before October 7. Anything less than that is a victory for the antisemites - and it is a victory that Rutgers chooses to allow.

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Mass rally inside and outside Madison Square Garden against the Holocaust, July 31, 1944

The best evidence that even the college students who joined the anti-Israel encampments don't really believe that there is a genocide in Gaza comes from the students themselves.

These camps were not places of anguish, but parties.

I write from the encampment, where students and faculty gather in hopeful clusters and echoes of laughter cut through the night. (Harvard)

About 70 tents are spread around U-Yard and H Street that range from single-person sleepers to 10-person tents. Around the encampment, people are sitting in circles, a pair played chess and another group watched a movie on a laptop. The sounds of quiet conversation and laughter traveled through the air. (GWU)

The encampment had a wonderful environment with food, friends, and laughter. (MIT)

Light chatter and frequent laughter echo across Cannon Green, where 40 protestors remain camped for the night. (Princeton)

Around 5:35 p.m., participants in the encampment opened a circle in the middle of South Lawn. A group of students danced an Indian folk dance with neon pink and yellow sticks. Onlookers cheered, clapped, and whistled in support of the dancers, with some shaking tambourines and playing drums. (Columbia)

Or the University of Chicago "protest" where the students apparently went way beyond laughter and dance in requesting dental dams, Plan B and HIV tests.

Sex for Palestine. That will save Gazans!

Compare with the protests seen in the 1940s against real genocide.

December 1942, Palestine:

The week of mourning for the Jewish victims massacred by the Nazis in occupied Europe concluded in Palestine last night with a huge demonstration in Tel Aviv culminating in a bonfire on Habimah Square at which a crowd of more than 100,000 persons burnt the Nazi swastika and an effigy of Hitler.

In Jerusalem thousands of Jewish children marched to the Wailing Wall while their parents crowded the synagogues and rocited prayers for the Jews of Europe. Work stopped in all Jewish establishments except those engaged in manufacturing war materials. Black candles were lit in the old Bukharian synagogue, while aged Kabbalists gathered in their house of prayer in the old city and proclaimed anathemas upon Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, Himmler and other Nazi leaders.

In Safed, Jews donned yellow Mogen Dovid badges. Jewish women in Safed and Tiberias marched in spontaneous demonstrations to holy graves there and lit candles on the tombstones. Similar mourning demonstrations are reported from all over the country.

December 1942, USA:

The Jewish Labor Committee today announced that it has decided to issue a call to all Jewish workers throughout the country except, those in factories engaged in war industry – to suspend work in order to demonstrate organized Jewish labor’s protest against the Nazi wholesale murder of Jews in Europe. An emergency meeting of the executive of the Jewish Labor Committee will be held on Tuesday to consider the latest reports of the Nazi massacres of Jews.
At a conference of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of America and Canada held in New York, it was decided to proclaim Wednesday, December 2, as a day of mourning in the United States, in accordance with a similar decision adopted by the Rabbinate in Palestine. The Union will issue an appeal to all Jewish enterprises throughout the country to join in the mourning by closing their businesses on Wednesday for a half-hour.

February 1943:

The members of the Workmen’s Circle, a Jewish labor fraternal organization, will gather simultaneously in 100 meeting places in Greater New York tomorrow to voice the protest of Jewish Labor against the Nazi butchery of Jews in Europe.

The protest meetings which have been called jointly by the Workmen’s Circle and the Jewish Labor Committee will mark a “Day of Protest and Mourning” proclaimed by the national executive committee of the Workmen’s Circle in the name of its 75,000 members in the United States. Similar protest demonstrations will take place tomorrow throughout the country.

March 1943:

More than 75,000 Jews and Christians attempted to enter Madison Square Garden last night three hours before the opening of the demonstration against the Nazi extermination of Jews, the New York police authorities estimated today. In addition to the 20,000 who succeeded in entering, thousands stood outside the building listening to the speeches which were conveyed from the platform through loud speakers while tens of thousands of people at home heard the proceedings which were broadcast over a nation-wide hook-up.

July 31, 1944:

The differences couldn't be more striking.

For a real genocide, there was sadness, anger, organization, desperation, and the knowledge that every single day of inaction by the Allies meant thousands more murdered. The 1940s protesters begged to get the Jews out of Europe by any means possible to save their lives.Vast sums of money were raised to help any Jews caught in the maelstrom. They didn't feel it was necessary to deface government buildings, destroy property or hold rallies without permits.

For the fake "genocide" that is really an excuse for public antisemitism, there is laughter, dance and semi-public sex - and not a finger lifted to actually help Gazans escape from where they are supposedly being targeted for complete annihilation. The privileged students who pay some $90,000 tuition each year didn't raise any significant funds for Gazans but instead solicited donations for their own protests.

Deep down, everyone knows that almost none of these students felt that they were helping Palestinians in any way. They were there to denounce the Jewish state, not to help any Gazan who might not have adequate food or shelter, let alone any Gazan who is trying to raise funds to pay bribes to escape to Egypt.

Gazans? Who gives a damn about Gazans? Send the laughing students more dental dams!

This is why the very use of the word "genocide" against Israel is a perverted slander and an act of unbridled bigotry and antisemitism. The accusation gives todays' protesters an excuse to party, not a compulsion to save a single Palestinian life.

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Logical fallacies that Israel haters use, part 1

I expect most anti-Israel voices to be idiotic, just as I expect more antisemites to be idiots.

But especially since October 7, we have seen lots of academics making arguments against Israel that violate basic logical fallacies. One would think that educated people, especially those who teach students, would be embarrassed to say these arguments out loud.

From a master list of logical fallacies found at the University of Texas- El Paso website:

1. Token Endorsement fallacy: "We cannot be antisemitic because we have some Jews who agree with us."

2.Affective fallacy: "I feel Israel is wrong, so it must be true."

3. Alternative Truth fallacy: "Palestinians have their narrative and it is just as valid as any other."

4. Appeal to Closure fallacy: "Israel must concede land because otherwise the conflict will never end."

5. Appeal to Heaven fallacy: "The Hadith says that the last hour won't come before the Muslims would fight the Jews and the Muslims will kill them."

6. Appeal to Pity fallacy: "Palestinians are weaker than Israel so we must support them.." "Palestinians are suffering so they must be right."

7. Appeal to Tradition fallacy: "Jews prospered in the Diaspora and therefore they should properly stay there."

8. Appeasement fallacy: "Divest from Israeli companies and the student protesters will stop destroying the campus."

9. Argument from Consequences fallacy: "Israel cannot possibly have any legal right to the West Bank because then Palestinians will have nowhere to go."

10. Argument from Incredulity fallacy: "We are supposed to believe that Jews have rights in the land because the God of the Bible says so?"

11. Argument from Inertia fallacy: "Jews weren't allowed to pray on the Temple Mount for centuries so we must keep the status quo."

12. Argument from Motives (reverse) fallacy: "Too many Palestinian men beat their wives and children, but it is understandable because they live under occupation."

13. Argumentum ad Baculum: "We can silence Zionist voices by bullying them and anyone who wants to listen to them."

14. Hyperbole Bias: "Israel has wreaked more destruction on Gaza than any war in history." "Israelis are worse than Nazis."

15. Bandwagon Fallacy: "We are on the right side of history!" "Most young people now support Palestinians."

There are lots more where these come from. This will probably be a four or five part series.

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Read all about it here!

05/05 Links: Netanyahu to Holocaust survivors: If need be, Israel will stand alone; The Indelible Stain of Antisemitism: The Failure of ‘Jew-Washing’

From Ian:

Ruthie Blum: Never again?

Sadly, the obligatory Holocaust Remembrance Day mantra rings hollow in the wake of the Simchat Torah bloodbath. With 132 hostages still languishing in Hamas captivity, a ground operation in Rafah repeatedly postponed and an explosion of antisemitism around the world, it seems that a genuine renewal of the vow—not simply a chanting of the mantra—is in order.

Nevertheless, in “Oct. 6 mode,” Halevi went on to reiterate it.

“Never again will the Star of David be a mark of shame,” he declared. “Instead [it is] a symbol that proudly flies on the nation’s flag. Never again will we be a scattered, homeless and persecuted people in exile, [but rather] a strong and independent people united in its land and homeland. Never again will we be a nation without a force to protect it, but…[one] whose ranks include heroes and heroines who stand tall and proud, fighting shoulder to shoulder as part of the IDF.”

All true, but utterly out of place in the midst of a battle that even our closest ally, the United States, is preventing us from executing properly, let alone winning. The words are especially jarring in view of the way in which Washington is forcing Jerusalem to engage in “negotiations” with Hamas’s Hitler in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, for a “ceasefire” that doesn’t necessarily include the release of all the hostages.

Halevi ended his missive by paying homage to those who perished at the hands of the “German inferno” and the survivors who “mustered the rest of their strength to take part in establishing a state for the Jewish people.” It’s in their name, he said, that the IDF continues to stand strong.

Invoking the “just war” being fought right now—peculiarly against a vanishing perpetrator—he said that the memory of those Jews should be the “source of our strength and a reminder of the importance of maintaining a protective force for our people.”

Yes, he concluded, “We shoulder the responsibility to continue fighting for the freedom of the people of Israel and to ensure: Never Again!”

Whether he will be as forthcoming during a post-war investigation about “shouldering the responsibility” for the Oct. 7 fiasco—the victims of which included Holocaust survivors and their families—remains to be seen. But what became painfully clear seven months ago is that the mass slaughter of Jews can and did happen again.

Netanyahu to Holocaust survivors: If need be, Israel will stand alone

In a meeting ahead of Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Day, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told survivors of the Shoah that the Jewish state would stand alone if necessary to defend its very existence.

“If we need to stand alone, we will stand alone,” Netanyahu told the Holocaust survivors gathered at his office in Jerusalem on Thursday. “If it is possible to recruit the nations of the world, how much the better. But if we do not defend ourselves, nobody will defend us,” he added.

The premier’s remarks came during an annual event where Israel’s government leaders meet with the Shoah survivors selected to light torches at the official state ceremony on May 5 marking Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

This year’s torch lighters include Itzhak Kabilio and Michael Bar-On. Netanyahu referenced comments from the survivors highlighting the reality that Israel is the sole guarantor of the Jewish people’s safety.

“Izi [Itzhak Kabilio] said here: ‘The State of Israel is the one and only sanctuary of the Jewish people.’ This is so correct,” he stated. “And Michael said: ‘We cannot rely on the nations of the world who make promises.’”

The Israeli leader then cited the examples of former U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill during World War II, arguing that even those powerful figures failed to take critical action to try to save Jewish lives during the Holocaust.

“Great leaders like Roosevelt, who was told what was happening at Auschwitz and Birkenau and in the [other] death camps. They told him and he knew. His answer was that he would be not prepared to lose a single pilot and he also refused to accept the Jews,” Netanyahu said. “Churchill, who I greatly admire, tried to involve his army, but his army rebelled against him.”

Israel marks first post-Oct. 7 Holocaust Remembrance Day

Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day began at Sundown on Sunday, with the official state opening ceremony taking place at 8 p.m. in Warsaw Ghetto Square, Yad Vashem, on the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem.

Israel’s President Isaac Herzog and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were both set to deliver remarks at the ceremony. Yad Vashem Chairman Dani Dayan will light the memorial torch, and Haim Noy was selected to speak on behalf of the survivors, including Yitzhak Perlmutter, who was chosen to recite the El Maleh Rahamim prayer for the souls of the martyrs.

During the ceremony, Holocaust survivors Pnina Hefer, Allegra Gutta, Arie Eitani, Raisa Brodsky, Michael Bar-On and Izi Kabilio will each light torches.

The live broadcast will include simultaneous translation into English and Hebrew as well as French, Spanish, German, and Russian. Additionally, Yad Vashem will offer simultaneous translation in Arabic available on the Yad Vashem YouTube Channel in Arabic. The live feed will also be accessible via Facebook (only live in English and Hebrew).

“This evening we will honor the memory of our six million brothers and sisters who were murdered in the Holocaust,” Netanyahu stated in remarks issued ahead of Holocaust Remembrance Day.

“Last Thursday, my wife, Sara, and I met with the Holocaust survivors who will light the memorial torches this evening. We met with 96-year-old Izi Kabilio, a Holocaust survivor, from Yugoslavia. He told us about the horrors he, his family and his friends endured,” said the premier.

He continued, “Izi told us: ‘Today, the State of Israel is the one and only haven for the Jewish people.’

Experts had estimated tens of thousands of deaths in Gaza by now that never happened. Why does no one call them out?

In February, a group of experts from Johns Hopkins University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine analyzed the data from Gaza - mostly based on Hamas sources - and determined what they felt were the likely number of excess deaths in Gaza over the following six months, based on three scenarios: immediate ceasefire, status quo and escalation.

They were nice enough to break up the projections into two three-month chunks - meaning that we can see what their estimates of deaths would be from February 7 to today, May 6, and we can compare it with what the same Gaza authorities claim today.

As of February 7, Hamas claimed 27,708 deaths. Today, they claim 34,622, an increase of 6,914 from then.

Here are the estimates from the experts for the same time period:

If you assume that we have kept the status quo - there has been no ceasefire since February 7, and the IDF continues to attack Hamas - we see that the experts estimated over four times the number of excess deaths than the Ministry of Health has reported (including the ten thousand phantom deaths that the MoH now calls "incomplete data.")

If you only count their projections from deaths from traumatic injury - meaning, directly from Israeli fire - the numbers are still way, way above what even Hamas claims today for the past three months.

Their estimates of the number of people who would die from epidemics ranged from 0-30,540. The actual number is zero.

Now, when the study was released, it received plenty of attention from mainstream media. Now when we see that the projections are nowhere near the reality by anyone's numbers, no one bothers to correct the reports.

Even though the people behind the report created an entire website for it, they have not updated the website with newere numbers - because that would show that they were wrong. So the website of these supposedly unbiased researchers is frozen in amber, including the raw data they keep on GitHub.

As we've seen a number of times in this war, the supposed experts are quick to find reasons to believe Hamas numbers and very reluctant to correct their wrong data when the truth is found to not conform with their assumptions of Israeli evil. I have tried to contact a few of them, such as a Columbia professor who wrote in Newsweek with confidence that 30,000 had been killed in Gaza, asking specific questions about apparent problems in their methodology - and not one has bothered answering me.

This is not how scholars are supposed to work. They are supposed to admit mistakes, or at least defend their methods from any reasonable objection.

But instead these supposed academics, scholars and experts stubbornly stick to their increasingly untenable analyses, and then hope everyone forgets about it.

Bias and science do not mix. These supposedly objective data scientists and statisticians, relying on bad data to estimate even worse projections, are not issuing corrections or mea culpas. Which makes them worse than journalists who at least sometimes are forced to make corrections.

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Ninety members of the faculty of Connecticut College have signed a letter of "solidarity with student protestors" nationwide that not only ignores facts, and not only explicitly lies about Israel, but it even spreads the antisemitic slur that Jews engage in "Jewish supremacy."

The college has 187 full-time and 67 part-time faculty members, meaning that up to nearly half of the faculty there signed this letter.

Every paragraph includes lies and ignorance:

Institutions of higher education have never been apolitical spaces, and choosing to remain neutral in the face of a genocide is, itself, a political position.

There is no genocide by any definition of the term - except the attempted genocide by Hamas.

Criminalizing students for peaceful protest demonstrates these institutions’ deplorable commitment to the repression of academic inquiry and the shackling of critical thought.

If students are violating university policies, refusing to leave when requested, making areas of campus no-go zones for other students including Jews who support Israel, this is no longer peaceful protest. No one has a problem with peaceful protest.

The criminalization of nonviolent student protesters constitutes a willful and cynical flouting of the mission of universities as speech havens, where the strong protections of academic freedom must apply and be upheld.

Not a word about the suppression of free speech of Jewish students, of the intimidation of Jews on campus, of the violent attacks that some Jews have suffered. These teachers, in other words, don't give a damn about free speech except the speech they agree with, which means they don't care about free speech.

Divestment is a tried and true political strategy. Faculty play a crucial role in supporting student demands for universities and colleges to divest from companies supporting Israeli state violence, genocide, apartheid, and occupation.

For a letter from academics, there isn't even a pretense of evidence for the accusations. Like all good propagandists, they lie about "genocide" and "apartheid" and "occupation" as if these are established truths.

We also stand in solidarity with Israeli organizations and activists who oppose Israeli apartheid and Jewish supremacy such as Shoresh.

I had never heard of Shoresh, and for good reason: it was just founded after October 7 and it is not an Israeli organization at all, but a tiny group of a few ex-Israelis who live in the US. it was profiled by Al Jazeera in March, and that is about it. It doesn't have a webpage, just a page on Action Network where they describe themselves as pretty much an ex-Israeli JVP: "We offer a leftist vision for radical change between the river and the sea" where Palestinians would have a right to "return" but Jews would have no national rights. No names of the leaders, no official statements, no mention of where funding comes from, nothing. The very faculty that claims to care about transparency in college investments has no problems with propping up an alleged organization that is completely opaque.

But like JVP and Neturei Karta, they serve a purpose: to shield today's bigots from charges of bigotry. "See? I'm not antisemitic when I say there is 'Jewish supremacy!' I have an organization of Jewish Israeli expats who agree with me!"

There is no pushback I can find at Connecticut College except a single article in the campus newspaper by Professor Andrew Pessin condemning this letter. Besides the points I make, he emphasizes that a letter like this by itself chills the free speech of those who attend these people's classes:

In general I believe it is inappropriate for a mob of faculty to promote their opinions to you this way. There is a bullying process that goes into acquiring signatures that is inconducive to free and open inquiry. This document may also make some of you uncomfortable, and feel unsafe in the classrooms of those who signed it. Are these professors looking at their Jewish students, thinking about those Jews and their evil Jewish supremacy? How could you object to or protest this statement, and expect to prosper in that professor’s class, under the threat of the professor’s grade? For that reason alone I register my objection to it.

The rot in today's higher education is far worse than we knew before October 7.

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

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Latest Hamas lie that the UN parrots: "Israel booby-trapping cans of food to kill kids"

Last week, UN-OCHA reported in their Flash Update #160 for the Gaza war:

On 29 April, the Government Media Office (GMO) reported that a 14-year-old boy was seriously injured, and sustained limb amputations, after opening a booby-trapped can of food found while looking for his belongings in his house that had been shelled by Israeli forces in Khan Younis. The GMO indicated that many people have been recently injured due to the explosion of booby-trapped canned goods, urging the population to exercise maximum care.

This is an obvious lie and an absurd antisemitic libel.

The GMO is Hamas, and they already have a seven month track record of making things up. But OCHA's mentioning it allows other media to quote the lie as if the UN is the one accepting the absurd allegations.

The UN is, as it has for months, launders Hamas lies to make them appear legitimate.

After OCHA published the accusation someone had second thoughts. But instead of pointing out that Hamas has a track record of making similarly slanderous accusations that have been proven false afterwards, they merely appended, "Booby traps are not a threat UN specialized agencies have documented in Gaza."

The rumor seems to have started in January. The Times of Gaza tweeted, "Israeli jets dropped explosives disguised as cans of food to lure in displaced people facing starvation in southern Gaza." Quds News Network added to the lie, saying "Two children, one man, and one woman were killed by the fake cans."

Of course, no names are given.

France24 debunked that video, as have others. The objects shown were fuses meant to explode mines but by themselves they were not dangerous, and they were not "disguised as cans of food." In fact, they are so small that no one would think they contained food.

So now Hamas has brushed off the lie and published it, and OCHA happily parrots whatever Hamas says, with the weak caveat of quoting the "Government Media Office" which sounds official but is some Hamas guy on Telegram.

Hamas lies every single day, and the media either ignores the lies or repeats them - but almost never points out the pattern of provable lies from that source that we have seen since October 7.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!