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! |
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[She wrote] "What you're saying that any person (including babies, children, elderly, etc.) who lives in Israel within the green line is a colonizer who deserves to be massacred?" They responded, "I'm not saying they deserve to be massacred, just that Israelis are not simply civilians. Every single Israeli exists on land violently stolen from Palestinians within the lifetime of the average grandma. Simply just existing as an Israeli makes you a weapon of violence against Palestinians bc you are living on land that was stolen from them & their parents/grandparents, etc. If you don't want your baby killed in the process of people liberating their own land from their oppressors, maybe don't be one of their oppressors."I could feel hate and anger in those postings, which scared me, even though I had no idea whom I was dialoguing with. But I decided to continue trying. "But what if you happened to be born there and your entire family lived there?" I wrote, "Would you all be fair play to be murdered? Israel needs to end the war, leave the illegal settlements, end apartheid, and stop oppressing Palestinians. I'm not defending what they're doing. But to mark them all as colonizers (including within the green line) who are fair play to be murdered just because of where they were born is a step too far."
My persistence was in vain. They answered in bold letters, "They ARE all colonizers. So, to answer your question, yes. Nobody in Israel is unaware of what's happening; every person in that illegal apartheid state is 100% aware of what their living there means. There are no legal settlements bc Israel itself is not legal. These are mostly Europeans that colonized Palestine in the modern age. They don't just get to keep a little sliver for themselves. Palestine should be ruled by Palestinian ppl & if Israelis want to stay, they have to abide by Palestinian laws......Here's a tough one to digest for ppl raised under intense liberal propaganda. Sometimes justice is not peaceful. "
This conversation brought home how inadequate our terminology has become at capturing the essence of the current debates.Antisemitism is a term that emerged in the 19th century to refer to political and racial hatred of Jews. It reached its apogee under the Nazis, who believed Jews were a separate and evil human race that had to be exterminated. Since then, not only has racial science been debunked as pseudo-science, but Jews are far more likely to be described as a religious or ethnic group. Moreover, people who express antisemitic ideas often have Jewish friends.For example, pastor John Hagee, a popular televangelist who once said that God "sent Hitler to help Jews reach the promised land," is a friend of the State of Israel and was invited to speak at the rally against antisemitism in Washington in November 2023.Students in the pro-Palestine tent protests at Columbia University sang slogans that glorified Hamas and the killing of Israelis, yet welcomed Jewish students for a Passover seder. Nazis never would have joined a march against antisemitism or welcomed Jews in their tent to celebrate a Jewish holiday. These contradictions highlight why the term antisemitism generates so much confusion. How can a term that evokes the mass murder of all Jews without exception be used to label those who hate some Jews but not others?
Eliminationists derive their worldview from post-colonial theory and see the State of Israel in this framework. ....Eliminationists also understand racism and inequalities as the outcomes of the colonial and white supremacist structures persisting in our societies. Their life's goal is to fight for justice and against all racism and inequality, and they always include antisemitism among the racisms they fight.
To the extent that eliminationists call for the "removal" of the State of Israel, but not for harm against Jews as a racial or even ethnic group, they are not antisemitic. However, an ideology does not need to be antisemitic to be cruel and built on flawed intellectual foundations.
Cassen makes two major mistakes.
Her first mistake is by defining antisemitism as nothing less than Nazi-style demands for the death of every Jews on the planet. The Spanish Inquisition wasn't antisemitic because it wasn't racial - the Jews could convert to Christianity. The libel of Jews poisoning the wells during the Black Death was not antisemitic because it had no racial component. It means that Iran's former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who denies the Holocaust, or Hamas leaders, whose charter still calls for the murder of all Jews, could not be antisemitic since they met with members of Neturei Karta.
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! |
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Egypt has refused to coordinate with Israel on the entry of aid into Gaza from the Rafah Crossing due to Israel’s “unacceptable escalation,” Egypt’s state-affiliated Alqahera News satellite TV reported on Saturday, citing a senior official.The official also said that Egypt held Israel responsible for the deterioration of the situation in the Gaza Strip.
Although Israel has reopened Kerem Shalom and some fuel has gone into Gaza from there, humanitarian aid like food and medicines has not been allowed through the crossing since last Sunday, according to Scott Anderson, a senior official at UNRWA, the main U.N. agency that aids Gaza.One reason is that Egypt, where most of the aid for Gaza is collected and loaded, is resisting sending trucks toward Kerem Shalom, according to two U.S. officials and another Western official who are involved in the aid operation, as well as two Israeli officials.
Switzerland wins the Eurovision song contest while Israel ends up in fifth place overall.Don’t let the Eurovision boycotters win
Israel got an impressive 323 points from the televotes — the second-highest amount — and 52 points from the jury.
Croatia got the most points from the televote, 337, but Switzerland’s Nemo ran away with the win with their song “The Code.”
Eurovision Song Contest 2024 results
Switzerland: 591
Croatia: 547
Ukraine: 453
France: 445
Israel: 375
Ireland: 278
Thankfully, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which organises Eurovision, has resisted calls to ban Israel. However, it did force Israel to change the words of its song on the grounds that it was ‘political’. The original song was entitled ‘October Rain’, and was a moving lament for those murdered by Hamas last year. It has since been renamed ‘Hurricane’ and the lyrics have been rewritten.Hysterics for Hamas
Complaints that ‘October Rain’ was too political might have held a bit more water if Eurovision didn’t have a history of including political songs. A Greek entry in 1976 criticised Turkey’s 1974 invasion of Cyprus. Switzerland entered an anti-war song in 2023 in opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This year, the Dutch entry, ‘Europapa’, is a celebration of open borders within the European Union.
Some may be tempted to dismiss the efforts to banish Israel from Eurovision as trivial. It’s just a singing competition, they might say. But this boycott needs to be seen in the broader context of the BDS movement. Launched in 2005, its goal is to delegitimise and culturally isolate Israel. It targets academia, musical events, sport, theatre, visual arts and much more. In every case the goal is to purge all spheres of public life of Israeli involvement. So not only is BDS deeply intolerant of all things Israeli, it is also a movement against freedom of expression. Individual Israeli performers and competitors are targeted simply because of their national background.
The targets of the Israel boycotters range from big corporations and brands, such as Barclays and Zara, to iconic global events, such as the Olympics and of course Eurovision itself. The current anti-Israel student protests are part of the boycott-Israel movement, too. Their chief objective is to force universities to break all links with Israel.
For anyone with an understanding of anti-Semitism, this pervasive boycott campaign is driven by an all too familiar sentiment. Its main objective is to target, isolate and exclude Jews from wider society. They may not want to slaughter Jews, as Hamas explicitly says it wants to. But the boycotters would certainly like to erase all traces of the Jewish State from public life.
So while it might seem like a small thing, voting for Israel in Eurovision would be a great way of sticking two fingers up to those determined to turn Israel into a pariah state. We need to do all we can to resist this campaign to wipe Israel off the map.
The female voices rose high-pitched and shrill above the crowd:Hamas’s hostages: Who are the five remaining Americans still held by the terror group? Often overshadowed by the Israeli war in Gaza in response to last year’s Oct. 7 terrorist attacks, 133 surviving hostages are still held by Hamas. Five of them are Americans.
“Five, six, seven, eight, Israel is a terrorist state.”
“We don’t want no Zionists here, say it loud, say it clear.”
“Resistance is justified when people are occupied.”
The voices that answered them were also overwhelmingly female, emanating from hundreds of students chanting and marching around tents pitched in front of Columbia University’s neoclassical Butler Library, part of an effort in late April to prevent the university from uprooting the encampment.
The female tilt among anti-Israel student protesters is an underappreciated aspect of the pro-Hamas campus hysteria. True, when activists need muscle (to echo University of Missouri professor Melissa Click’s immortal call during the 2015 Black Lives Matter protests), males are mobilized to smash windows and doors or hurl projectiles at the police, for example. But the faces behind the masks and before the cameras are disproportionately female, as seen in this recent gem from the Princeton demonstrations.
Why the apparent gender gap? One possible reason is that women constitute majorities of both student bodies and the metastasizing student-services bureaucracies that cater to them. Another is the sex skew in majors. The hard sciences and economics, whose students are less likely to take days or weeks out from their classes to party (correction: “stand against genocide”) in cool North Face tents, are still majority male. The humanities and soft social sciences, the fields where you might even get extra credit for your intersectional activism, are majority female. (Not surprisingly, males have spearheaded recent efforts to guard the American flag against desecration.) In progressive movements, the default assumption now may be to elevate females ahead of males as leaders and spokesmen. But most important, the victim ideology that drives much of academia today, with its explicit enmity to objectivity and reason as white male constructs, has a female character.
Student protests have always been hilariously self-dramatizing, but the current outbreak is particularly maudlin, in keeping with female self-pity. “The university would rather see us dead than divest,” said a member of the all-female press representatives of UCLA’s solidarity encampment on X. The university police and the Los Angeles Police Department “would rather watch us be killed than protect us.” (The academic Left, including these anti-Zionists, opposes police presence on campus; UCLA chancellor Gene Block apologized in June 2020 after the LAPD lawfully mustered on university property during the George Floyd race riots.) Command of language is not a strong point of these student emissaries. “There needs to be an addressment (sic) of U.S. imperialism and its ties to the [University of California] system,” said another UCLA encampment spokeswoman.
It was not too long ago when administrators started bringing in therapy dogs to campus libraries and dining halls to help a female-heavy student body cope with psychic distress, especially after the election of Donald Trump. “Trigger warnings” were implemented to protect female students from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and other great works of literature. Campus discourse and its media echo chamber rang with accounts of the mental-health crisis on campus, whose alleged sufferers were overwhelmingly female.
Watch the full interview: https://t.co/CEbOnNZNCL
— Campaign Against Antisemitism (@antisemitism) May 10, 2024
Or listen to the audio at https://t.co/DaUOzc1iYx. Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and more.
@taliaraab took to the streets of NYC to ask Americans if they know about the American hostages being held in Gaza. Their answers will surprise you! #hostages #gaza #hamas #bringthemhome 🎗️ pic.twitter.com/HOuj89qQhN
— Gabby Klein (@GabbyKlein1) May 7, 2024
Thankfully, some students are bravely challenging the protesters. One third-year Cambridge student held an Israeli flag aloft just across the road from those blocking Peter Thiel’s talk.South Africa asks World Court to order Israel to withdraw from Rafah
But what about those in charge of our universities? When students behave like toddlers, refusing food, demanding hot-water bottles and yelling ‘genocide’, where are the adults? Far from condemning the actions of the students, over 300 members of staff at Oxford University have signed an open letter in support of the protesters. It describes their camp in grandiose terms as ‘a public-facing global education project’. One signatory is Vernal Scott, Oxford’s head of equality and diversity. Last month, Scott made headlines after he publicly praised the Belgian authorities for trying to close down the National Conservatism Conference in Brussels. This support for free speech sounds hollow when it comes from those only interested in hearing views they endorse.
When a high-profile senior manager and hundreds of academics take a public stance on an issue, their view risks becoming, by default, the institutional position. It is only a small step away from saying ‘The university thinks…’. When it is clear what ‘the university thinks’, then academic freedom is rendered meaningless. Anyone who thinks differently knows they are putting their neck on the line if they challenge the consensus. At universities, where the Transgender Pride flag is flown from buildings, toilets are gender-neutral and staff training is provided by activist groups such as Gendered Intelligence, gender-critical feminists know they may technically have academic freedom, but also that expressing gender-critical views will come at a high price.
Earlier today, university leaders went to Downing Street to meet with the UK prime minister to discuss how to balance supporting free speech while preventing harassment of Jewish students. Good. But the fact that this meeting was even necessary shows that many university managers need reminding not just that academic freedom is important, but also what it actually entails.
Academic freedom demands tolerance. It calls on us to allow viewpoints we disagree with to be heard and to use our intellectual muscles to challenge ideas we find offensive. However, academic freedom does not give protesters the right to shout down or silence other people, physically bar people from buildings or intimidate students into staying away from campus. Defending academic freedom means stopping students from engaging in these activities.
Academic freedom also means students and scholars have the right to question every intellectual, moral and political orthodoxy. For this reason, adopting an institutional position on an issue is not an expression of academic freedom, but rather a means of restricting it.
In a university that truly values academic freedom, students should have the right to protest. But this is a limited right. It stops when other people’s freedom of speech, freedom of movement and right to disengage from politics and pursue scholarship are curtailed. It is good that Rishi Sunak is meeting vice-chancellors. But there is much further to go if we are to truly defend academic freedom.
South Africa has asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to order Israel to withdraw from Rafah as part of additional emergency measures over the war in Gaza, the UN’s top court said on Friday.Prominent legal blog: Anti-IHRA statement from 1,000 Jewish professors ‘bizarre, ultimately dishonest’
In the ongoing case brought by South Africa, which accuses Israel of acts of genocide against Palestinians, the World Court in January ordered Israel to refrain from any acts that could fall under the Genocide Convention and to ensure its troops commit no genocidal acts against Palestinians.
Israel did not immediately respond to requests for comment. It has previously said it is acting in accordance with international law in Gaza, has called South Africa’s genocide case baseless, and accused Pretoria of acting as “the legal arm of Hamas.”
In filings published on Friday, South Africa is seeking additional emergency measures in light of the ongoing military action in Rafah, which it calls the “last refuge” for Palestinians in Gaza. Israel says the operation in the southern city is crucial to defeating the remaining Hamas battalions holding out there.
South Africa asked the court to order that Israel cease the Rafah offensive and allow unimpeded access to Gaza for UN officials, organizations providing humanitarian aid, and journalists and investigators.
According to South Africa, Israel’s military operation is killing the Palestinians of Gaza while at the same time starving them by denying them humanitarian aid to enter.
“Those who have survived so far are facing imminent death now, and an order from the Court is needed to ensure their survival,” South Africa’s filing said.
A statement signed by more than 1,000 Jewish professors denouncing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s working definition of antisemitism for “conflating antisemitism with legitimate criticism of Israel” is “bizarre and ultimately dishonest,” David Bernstein wrote on the popular legal blog The Volokh Conspiracy.
Bernstein, a university professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School and executive director of its Liberty and Law Center, wrote that much of the opposition to the Antisemitism Awareness Act over its codification of the IHRA definition “has been hysterical and counterfactual.”
“If one had hoped an academic letter would be more reality-based, one would be disappointed,” he wrote.
The 1,000-plus faculty members say that the IHRA definition considers criticism of Israel to be necessarily antisemitic.
“The IHRA definition of antisemitism, however, never says that criticism of Israel, etc., is ‘in and of itself’ antisemitic. Indeed, it specifically says ‘criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic,’” Bernstein writes.
“Not only have Jewish critics of Israel, indeed Jews who don’t think Israel should exist, not been silenced, it seems like they never shut up,” he added. “The latter group is a tiny fringe of the Jewish community, but they appear disproportionately in both mainstream and social media.”
Bernstein added that he expects “very little from the academy these days,” so he’s not surprised to see so many signatories of “this (at best) hyperbolic letter.”
“I am at least a little disappointed to see some prominent law professors on the list,” he added. “But maybe I should reduce my expectations of the legal academy, too.”
To Biden — and many leaders of other countries — the destruction of Hamas is simply not a realistic goal. The group’s fighters are in deep, fortified tunnels that could take months if not years to eliminate, U.S. intelligence officials say.
Even if Israel killed most remaining fighters, new ones would emerge.
Not only might the benefits of trying to wipe out Hamas be small, but the costs seem large, U.S. officials believe. The hostages Hamas still holds — who are likely being kept alongside the group’s leaders — could die. And the humanitarian toll in Rafah, where many Gazan refugees have fled, could be horrific. “Smashing into Rafah,” a Biden aide said yesterday, “will not get to that sustainable and enduring defeat of Hamas.”
Already, Israel’s initial operation in Rafah has had costs. After Israeli forces took over one side of a border crossing with Egypt, Egyptian officials temporarily closed the crossing, preventing aid from entering, U.S. officials say. Egypt — which has long blocked Gazans from entering, partly out of fear of Hamas — worries that a battle for Rafah could lead to an unstoppable flow of refugees.
An invasion could cause rifts beyond Egypt, too. Saudi Arabia has previously signaled an interest in a diplomatic deal with Israel, which could solidify Israel’s position as part of an anti-Iran alliance alongside Arab countries and the U.S. But a surge in civilian deaths in Gaza could make it hard for Saudi Arabia to justify any deal. (Thomas Friedman, the Times Opinion columnist, has argued that Israel must choose between Rafah and Riyadh, the Saudi capital.)
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! |
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What a difference a day makes.Bret Stephans: President Biden Just Made His Biggest Blunder
On Tuesday President Biden was speaking at the Holocaust Memorial Museum commemoration at the Capitol in Washington.
There he drew a direct comparison between the events of the Holocaust and the attacks on Israel of October 7th.
That is not my comparison. It was President Biden’s. Talking about the phrase “Never Again” he said:
“Here we are not 75 years later but just seven and a half months later, and people are already forgetting. They’re already forgetting that Hamas unleashed this terror. It was Hamas who brutalized Israelis. It was Hamas who took and continues to hold hostages. I have not forgotten, nor have you. And we will not forget.”
As I say, what a difference a day makes.
Within hours the same President who uttered those words was attempting to prevent Israel’s victory in Gaza. By withholding arms shipments to Israel Biden made it clear that he does not want Israel to achieve its military objectives in the final battle of Rafah.
Opponents of the war have briefed for months about the need for a pause or a ceasefire. But there has been an effective pause for months as Israel has waited for this push into Hamas’s final stronghold.
It is believed that Rafah is the place where the remaining Israeli hostages are being held, and the place where Yahya Sinwar — the mastermind of the October 7th attacks — is hiding.
Most likely surrounded by “the best” hostages — which to his sick mind would include the remaining child captives.
“Never again” indeed.
If the Israeli army does not destroy Hamas in Rafah then the war is effectively for nothing, and all the pain and grief on all sides might as well not have occurred.
As I have said before, there is no point in putting out 80% of a fire. Until the Israeli army can clear Hamas out of Rafah the fire of Gaza is not out.
But Biden seems to be bowing to pressure from some of his own base. As someone joked a few months back, Biden does indeed want to focus on a two-state solution, but the two states are Minnesota and Michigan.
He is desperate to chase the few tens of thousands of voters who might turn on him because they care about Hamas more than they care about America.
The munitions cutoff helps Hamas.Jake Wallis Simons: The West is proving that Islamist terrorism works
The tragedy in Gaza is fundamentally the result of Hamas’s decisions: to start the war in the most brutal way possible; to fight it behind and beneath civilians; to attack the border crossings through which humanitarian aid is delivered; and to hold on cruelly to Israel’s 132 remaining hostages, living or dead. Whatever else the arms cutoff might accomplish when it comes to Israel, it is both a propaganda coup and a tactical victory for Hamas that validates its decision to treat its own people as human shields. And it emboldens Hamas to continue playing for time — especially in the hostage negotiations — with the idea that the longer it holds out, the likelier it is to survive.
It doesn’t end the war. It prolongs it.
No Israeli government, even one led by someone more moderate than Benjamin Netanyahu, is going to leave Gaza with Hamas still in control of any part of the territory. If the Biden administration has ideas about how to do that without dislodging it from Rafah, we have yet to hear of them.
That means that, one way or the other, Israel is going in, if not with bombs — and the administration is also considering barring precision-guidance kits — then with far-less accurate 120-millimeter tank shells and 5.56-millimeter bullets. Other than putting Israeli troops at greater risk, does the Biden administration really think the toll for Palestinians will be less after weeks or months of house-to-house combat?
It diminishes Israel’s deterrent power and is a recipe for a wider war.
One of the reasons Israel isn’t yet fighting a full-blown war to its north is that Hezbollah has so far been deterred from a full-scale attack, not least from fears of having its arsenal of an estimated 150,000 rockets and missiles decimated by the Israeli Air Force. But what if the Lebanese terrorist group looks at reports of Israeli munitions’ shortages and decides that now would be an opportune time to strike?
If that were to happen, the loss of civilian life in Tel Aviv, Haifa and other Israeli cities could be immense. Biden would have no choice but to authorize a massive airlift of munitions to Israel — reversing this week’s decision. And the United States might have to even more directly support Israel militarily.
What would be the worst foreign policy message imaginable? There are many contenders, but the frontrunner has to be simply that “terrorism works”. Once this lesson has been learnt, the door will be open to years of violence against us. It’s called appeasement, and history has taught us where it leads.
If you, like me, are concerned by the rise of Islamist extremism around the world, the danger it poses to Jewish communities everywhere, and the way it threatens both the firmness of liberal values and our national security, the inconstancy of Western support for Israel in its mission to destroy Hamas – including here in Britain – should fill you with dread.
Most voters want our country to stand up for democracy, not capitulate to the terrorist forces rising to menace it in the most brutal manner imaginable. Why can’t our leaders express without equivocation that backing Israel in its fight to destroy Hamas completely was, and is, the right thing to do? Why do they stay silent, giving succour to our enemies.
Instead, seven months on from October 7, Western politicians seem intent on pursuing what Ronald Reagan called the “utopian solution of peace without victory”. As he put it during the Cold War: “They call their policy ‘accommodation’ and they say if we only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he’ll forget his evil ways and learn to love us.” Of course, the opposite is true.
On the 50th anniversary of the 1973 war, the resistance in Gaza launched a surprise operation against the Zionist enemy which disrupted the very foundation of Zionist settler society....Referred to as Operation Towfan Al-Aqsa (Al-Aqsa Flood), the resistance has taken occupation soldiers hostage, fired thousands of rockets, taken over Israeli military vehicles, and gained control over illegal Israeli settlements....What we are witnessing now is a heightened stage of the Palestinian struggle–through tearing down colonial infrastructure and liberating our colonized land from illegal settlements.
Settlers are not “civilians” in the sense of international law, because they are military assets used to ensure continued control over stolen Palestinian land.
I've earned my right to speak my mind, and I'm not going to tolerate what I think is silliness, childishness, and a lot of leftist posturing.
I mean we have to be honest, and I loathe the disingenuous. They don't want Israel. They think they are being very clever; they call it their "three-tier":o We want the end of the occupation,
o We want the right of return
o We want equal rights for Arabs in Israel.And they think they are very clever because they know the result of implementing all three is what, what is the result? You know and I know what is the result. There's no Israel!
Israel says no, the BDS movement is not really talking about rights. They're talking about how they want to destroy Israel. And, in fact, I think Israel is right; I think that's true. I'm not going to lie. But this kind of duplicity and disingenuous by BDS, "Oh, we're agnostic about Israel." No, you're not agnostic! You don't want it! Then just say it!But they know full well: If you say it, you don't have a prayer reaching a broad public. Because that's where the public is right now. I support the BDS. But I said it will never reach a broad public until and unless they're explicit on their goal. And their goal has to include the recognition of Israel or it's a nonstarter...They won't mention it because they know it will split the movement. Cause there's a large segment of the movement that wants to eliminate Israel.
A CAPS/Harris survey finds 80% of Americans side with Israel against Hamas. Pollster Mark Penn told the Hill that figure has “not budged” since campus protests began. Seventy-eight percent say Hamas must be removed from running Gaza; 67% say Israel is trying to avoid casualties; a majority in every group 35 and up says a cease-fire should happen only after Hamas has released hostages and been removed from power. Few Americans feel a connection to indulged college students directing invectives at Jews and erecting “intifada halls.”
[He] advised the protesters to reconsider the use of slogans that can be used against them. Finkelstein went to Columbia to praise the students for raising public consciousness about the Palestinian cause but he advised them “to adjust to the new political reality that there are large numbers of people, probably a majority, who are potentially receptive to your message.”
Norman Finkelstein at Columbia (YouTube screencap) |
Once Finkelstein has finished speaking, a protester took the microphone and led a chant of “from the river to the sea”.
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! |
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The current pandemic of vicious antisemitism targeting both Israel and Diaspora Jews has prompted many to wonder what can be done to tackle a deranged prejudice that is frighteningly out of control.Seth Mandel: The Post-Biden Flood Is Already Here
It has also prompted many to wonder yet again why Israel is so ineffective at putting its case across.
I raised this a few days ago with Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs Amichai Chikli. A combative member of the Likud Party, Chikli has socially conservative views that have caused Diaspora hackles to rise. This reaction is myopic. His thinking is sharp, coherent and insightful.
What did he make of the antisemitism and incitement in the anti-Israel encampments on campuses in America and Britain and at the massive street demonstrations over the Gaza war?
While acknowledging the involvement of the hard-left and several revolutionary anti-West and pro-Palestinian funders, Chikli stressed the role played by Islamic radicals.
Unlike Muslims who don’t have imperialist aspirations, Islamists treat Islam as a political movement whose aim is to impose Islamic rule across the world. This is the philosophy of the Muslim Brotherhood, which developed in the early decades of the last century and in the late 1980s spawned Hamas.
For Chikli, this is the link not just between Gaza and the demonstrations and encampments but with the progressive Islamization of the West.
The Brotherhood, he said, is a diffused, decentralized movement. It’s not controlled by one body. It operates through mosques, community centers, charities and welfare services. Its subversive agenda is therefore difficult to pin down. But it certainly exists.
Documents from Israel’s civil command of Gaza in the late 1980s, said Chikli, observed that the greatest threat came from these Brotherhood groups, but they were small and difficult to erase because they were spreading throughout society. Today, the Brotherhood links Gaza to Minnesota and Michigan, London and Leeds.
We learn this, said Chikli, from their identical language, ideology and texts. The spiritual guru of Hamas, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, was based in Qatar, which today remains Hamas’s patron and funder. It was Qaradawi who said Muslims don’t need to fight to dominate Europe because Sharia law would come to dominate British society in any case.
It’s true that Biden is the last Democrat of his kind and therefore this moment always seemed close at hand. But every political battle that Biden won against his party had a measurable effect on the power balance between the radicals and the moderates. To abandon that fight is to surrender to the barbarians at the gate, ensuring the post-Biden transition is not only imminent and irreversible (in the near term, at least) but chaotic, authoritarian, and baldly anti-Semitic.Bret Stephens: A Thank-You Note to the Campus Protesters
Even if you believe the battle to be all but lost you still go down fighting. The alternative is to live as a cog or a figurehead without honor. Exhaustion is not a crime. But surrender is a choice.
One of the few beliefs shared across the partisan divide is this: après Biden, le deluge. After Biden, the radicals prophesied and the moderates feared, comes the flood. It is both bitterly appropriate and bone-chilling that this moment would come at a time when the “flood” metaphor is the animating call-to-arms of America’s domestic extremists.
Al-Aqsa Flood was the name of the pogrom that started all this, when Hamas murdered and raped and tortured its way through more than a thousand innocents, including children and the elderly, and then took hundreds hostage.
It was this barbarism that lit a fire under progressive and Islamist demonstrators in the West. Left-wing protest culture had never been so inspired as it was when witnessing the most depraved human behavior possible. Cosplaying trust-fund radicals got high from seeing civilization at its low. The post-October 7 protest movement that sprang forth from hell named itself after the Hamas operation: “Flood [x] For Gaza” became the template for the months of protests, in major cities and across college campuses, in celebration of the Hamas attacks. The conscious decision to name themselves after a campaign of child murder and sexual torture was the first but by no means the last indication that what we were seeing was not an antiwar movement but the wildfire spread of homegrown extremism.
And this is who Biden has surrendered his policy to. The argument in Biden’s favor was always that as long as he was in office, at least, he could stem the tide. But now the difference between Biden being president and some other Democrat being president is negligible. We are, functionally, after Biden. And the flood is here.
Dear anti-Israel campus protesters: Supporters of Israel like me have reasons to give thanks to militant anti-Zionists like you, who demonized anyone who supports Israel's right to exist - which includes a vast majority of Jews - as modern-day Nazis?
For every student who became ardently pro-Palestinian during the protests, another one, perhaps a Jewish student with previously indifferent feelings about Israel, finally saw the connection between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. For every professor who lent support, you've lost a fair-minded liberal with your Maoist-style sloganeering and your arrogant disdain for the genuine fears of some of your Jewish peers.
And for every commencement ceremony whose cancellation you've effectively forced, or which you intend to spoil, thousands of apolitical students have taken an intense and permanent distaste to you and everything you stand for. In short, the game you're playing is paying bigger dividends for my side than it is for yours.
I am a Zionist for the most personal of reasons: because I see Israel as an insurance policy for every Jewish family, including mine, which has endured persecution and exile in the past and understands that we may not be safe forever in our host countries. That kind of insurance is one Jews can't afford to lose. What happened on Oct. 8 - the moment your protests began - gave me a glimpse into what America might yet become for Jews if people like you were to gain real power.
I get that many if not most of you see yourselves as dedicated idealists who want to end suffering for Palestinians. There are ways you could do that without making common cause with people who hate Jews, want to kill us and often do. You are my daily reminder of what my Zionism is for, about and against.
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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! |
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Buy EoZ's book, PROTOCOLS: EXPOSING MODERN ANTISEMITISM
If you want real peace, don't insist on a divided Jerusalem, @USAmbIsrael
The Apartheid charge, the Abraham Accords and the "right side of history"
With Palestinians, there is no need to exaggerate: they really support murdering random Jews
Great news for Yom HaShoah! There are no antisemites!