Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, May 26, 2024

Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi whines that the @NYTimes is biased against Palestinians - even though they publish his own op-eds more than practically anyone

In recent months, a new newspaper has been created by an anti-Israel group of writers. Called "The New York War Crimes," it purports to publish what it considers news, and it says the New York Times is nothing but Zionist propaganda. The free print edition was seen often on campus anti-Israel encampments. (It does not reveal who actually pays for the printing.)

In its most recent edition, the newspaper featured an interview with Rashid Khalidi, professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. Khalidi described how the New York Times is in his view irredeemably biased against Palestinians. He says it is the New York Pravda, but at least Pravda made no pretense of objectivity. He says that it acts as a mouthpiece for Israeli propaganda. "Whatever is happening, a story gets released by Israel and fed to this outlet, such that this is the story that hits the front page — rather than whatever it is Israel wants to cover up."

This is completely opposite of the truth, of course. Researchers at Bar-Ilan University did a study of top New York Times headlines since October 7 and found that the overwhelming majority of the stories were empathetic to Palestinians and were critical of Israel far more than Hamas.

But Khalidi's criticism of the New York Times as biased against Palestinians is absurd from another perspective.

He has possibly published more op-eds in the New York Times about the Middle East than anyone who is not on the newspaper's payroll and not named Peter Beinart.

I count 12 op-eds that he has authored over the years, including one after October 7. That is a huge number. World leaders don't get as many opportunities for unfiltered writing to such a large audience as Rashid Khalidi.

In addition, he also wrote several mini-opinion pieces where he was solicited together with others on their thoughts about a specific story. He has written book reviews and his own books have been prominently reviewed in the newspaper. He is regularly interviewed by the newspaper, and quoted by columnists. Moreover, his writings are often recommended by the NYT as essential background material for people interested in the conflict. His name has been mentioned in 135 New York Times pieces.

I cannot think of anyone on either side of the conflict who has been treated with this much respect by the New York Times. If anyone is in a position of privilege in spouting anti-Israel propaganda at the New York Times, it is Rashid Khalidi.

His whining that the Times doesn't offer any pro-Palestinian views is ludicrous on its face. Given that he knows how often he is featured in that paper, this can only be regarded as intentional propaganda.

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!

This weekend there is a conference in Detroit entitled "People's Conference for Palestine."

One Saturday session called "Palestinian Resistance and the Path to LiberationPalestinian Resistance and the Path to Liberation" featured Abdaljawad Omar, an instructor in the Philosophy and Cultural Studies Department at Birzeit University. He spoke about several supposed myths about the Palestinian movement. During the fourth "myth" he exposed how much the hundreds of people in that session love October 7.

Omar explained how wonderful terrorism is, because, to his mind, the massacre of October 7 led to more political gains for Palestinians than anything else ever did (conveniently forgetting about Oslo, which brought them autonomy for the first time in their history.)

He said:

The fourth myth that I would like to also address is that resistance does not serve the Palestine image in the world and specifically armed resistance. One of the most pervasive attacks against all forms of resistance, especially armed resistance, is the claim that Palestinians use of armed resistance destroys the possibility of solidarity and tarnishes the images of our people. They say it diminishes our chances for support for our rightful cause. This narrative, echoed by even by some of our own intellectuals, must be addressed.

Firstly, without the events of October 7th regardless of our feelings about those events, the political possibilities we now witness would not exist. The rise of the student movement in the United States and North America and Europe, the demands for divestment and boycott of academic institutions, the recognition of the Palestinian State, the moves by the ICC and ICJ and the significant shifts in global opinion - none of these would have come to pass for 16 long years despite the Palestinian authorities cooperation with Israel. No single moment has opened so many doors of political possibility like the events that transpired after October 7th.

[Applause]

Secondly the discourse of Human Rights and victimhood can only evoke pity. Pity is a fragile and feeble foundation for building movements. Our strength does not lie in eliciting pity but in inspiring through various acts of resistance...Resistance, including armed resistance, inspires.... So resistance does not necessarily lead to a tarnished image for the Palestinians and the events in the past 6 months is is the biggest empirical testament to that.

The audience applauding his praise of October 7 is really all you need to know about how peace-loving the Palestinian solidarity movement is even in America.

The sad part is that he's not wrong. The violence, murders, rapes and abductions of Jews on of October 7 made Palestinians seemingly more popular than ever before.

That is more a testament to worldwide antisemitism than sudden popularity of Palestinians.

After all, if people were suddenly so interested in Palestinian human rights, they would be pressuring Egypt and Jordan to allow Palestinians in Gaza to flee if they choose to, and they would be protesting against Lebanese and Jordanian mistreatment of Palestinians. When Jews cannot be blamed, the interest in Palestinian rights and liberation dissolves.

But Omar is saying something beyond that. He's saying that the ends justify the means. The audience applause was for his justification of the horrific events of October 7.

This is as immoral a speech one can imagine. It is a call for more violence against Israeli Jews in the name of Palestinian liberation, and the more Jews killed and sexually assaulted, the better the results. The suicide bombings of the second intifada were not good enough - but the pogrom of October 7 was wonderful, and presumably an even more horrific act would be better still.

And the argument is not only immoral because of its naked incitement to attack more Jews. Gaza is devastated, thousands of Palestinian civilians are dead, yet to people like Omar and his audience, that is all worth it because it led to students at Columbia and judges in the Hague saying things that align with their anti-Israel politics.

We already know how little Hamas thinks about the people it was supposed to protect in Gaza. But the applause we hear shows that Hamas' treating Palestinians like human reactive armor and cannon fodder is supported by US Arabs and pro-Palestinian movement worldwide.

Think about what kind of a sick person and sick audience it takes to be willing to sacrifice so many of their own people for vague political gains.

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!

Reuters reports:

CAIRO, May 26 (Reuters) - A spokesman for Hamas' armed wing said on Sunday its fighters had captured Israeli soldiers during fighting in Jabalia in northern Gaza on Saturday, though the Israeli military denied the claim.

The Hamas armed wing spokesman did not say how many soldiers had been abducted and showed no proof of the claim.

"Our fighters lured a Zionist force into an ambush inside a tunnel ... The fighters withdrew after they left all members of the force dead, wounded, and captured," Abu Ubaida, the spokesman for Al Qassam Brigades, said in a recorded message broadcast by Al Jazeera early on Sunday.

The Israeli military on Sunday denied the claim by Hamas' armed wing.

"The IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) clarifies that there is no incident in which a soldier was abducted," the military said in a statement.

This sort of story is published often. Hamas makes a claim, the IDF denies it, and the reader is left to wonder which side is telling the truth.

But from the beginning of the war, whenever Hamas and the IDF claimed different things, has Hamas ever been found to be telling the truth and the IDF lying?

Just about every day the Qassam Brigades publishes lurid stories that they killed several IDF soldiers. On the Israeli side, when a soldier if killed, the IDF admits it. When they deny it, Hamas cannot point to any evidence it was telling the truth.

In this case, the IDF announced a single soldier was critically wounded on Saturday in northern Gaza. Not an entire squad captured, wounded and killed.

Hamas' track record of telling the truth in these kinds of situations is abysmal.

So why do Reuters, and the New York Times, and all the other news media keep publishing Hamas' claims and Israeli denials as if they are equally valid?

Shouldn't the readers and viewers be told that Hamas has a very long track record of lying? Isn't that something that should be mentioned habitually as critical context for these sorts of stories? Or do Reuters and the others really believe that Israel might be covering up soldier deaths and kidnappings, the way Hamas claims?

It is another case where journalists pretend to be objective but in fact is giving lies the exact same weight as the truth, which is not journalism at all.

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!

05/25 Links: Did Tony Blinken Just Kill International Law?; Irish complain after ambassador shown footage of Oct 7th; Gaza are Protests Happening Mostly at Elite Colleges

From Ian:

Did Tony Blinken Just Kill International Law?

When the Soviet Union collapsed and the United States appeared to have no remaining rivals, many liberals thought their ambitions for international law were finally within reach. American lawyers flocked to the United Nations and filled the international legal industry, which grew tremendously as a series of treaties outlawed chemical weapons, established the ICC, and made symbolic agreements about global warming, among other things.

Not all Americans shared this enthusiasm. Republicans led by Henry Cabot Lodge torpedoed the League of Nations treaty because they did not want to cede American sovereignty to any international body. Others dismissed the idea of international law altogether: When he taught a survey of international politics at Harvard, Henry Kissinger brought in a guest speaker for the sessions on international law, explaining, "I do not wish to give a lecture about something that doesn’t exist." Many Americans have feared the intrusion of international busybodies into American affairs, and the Senate has not ratified most of these new treaties.

Few of these institutions have had much effect on the real world, but liberals held out hope that they could at least browbeat small countries into compliance while they waited for the Democrats to ratify these treaties. The ones that have created the most benefit tend to focus on mundane issues, like setting technological standards. The major exception was the World Trade Organization, which reduced global trade barriers and helped lift more than one billion people out of extreme poverty between 1990 and 2015. This system of relatively free global trade saved hundreds of millions of people from horrid conditions and was one of the glories of the old Pax Americana.

As America’s enemies gained strength, they exposed the weakness of the international legal regime. During the 1990s, international legal beagles mostly fretted about "rogue states" like North Korea and Iran violating international treaties about nuclear weapons. America’s stronger adversaries have recently gotten into the game too: China joined the WTO and systematically cheated on its trade commitments, driving many American manufacturers out of business. Russia protected Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad when Assad used chemical weapons on his own people, then used its own chemical weapons against dissidents in Europe and Ukrainians. Neither Beijing nor Moscow respects older conventions, such as territorial sovereignty. Beijing ignored a 2016 arbitration ruling that its territorial claims in the South China Sea were meritless, and Russia is subjugating as much of Ukraine as it can.

America’s adversaries make a mockery of international law, but they still think it has some value. China seeks to dominate international bodies that set technological standards, such as the International Telecommunication Union, even while Beijing and Moscow stymie Western initiatives in the Security Council.

Conservatives usually view international legal organizations with suspicion or boredom. When the ICC attempted to investigate American forces in Afghanistan even though the United States hadn’t ratified the treaty, the Trump administration sanctioned the officials involved in the attempted power grab.

But Blinken showed this week that even American liberals are souring on the international legal community. The Americans and Europeans who dominate many international bodies are likely to carry on their work. But without the backing of the liberals, who have long been their main supporters, it is not clear if anyone will notice.

American ICJ Judge Who Voted Against Israel Was Nominated by Biden for Top State Department Role

In an interview with Columbia Law School, Cleveland shared that her successful election could be attributed in part to her willingness to vote against American interests.

“Fundamentally, what the rest of the world wanted to see was that the US candidate to the court was independent from the US government, was interested in their individual countries, and understood their perspective,” Cleveland said. “They did not want a judge from a permanent member of the Security Council who would predictably vote for her own country’s interests.”

To win support from countries in the United Nations, Cleveland touted her history of standing against the US government’s positions on controversial issues.

“I have a long record of independence from the US government, since my very first case — as a student in a human rights clinic at Yale Law School — which was a lawsuit against the US government on behalf of Haitian refugees detained at Guantanamo,” she said.

On Friday, the ICJ issued a ruling demanding that Israel halt its military operations against the Hamas terrorist group in Rafah and allow for significantly more humanitarian aid to enter Gaza. Critics of the court have accused the ICJ, along with other major international organizations, of harboring substantial and unfair bias against Israel.

The order was adopted by the panel of 15 judges from around the world in a 13-2 vote, opposed by judges from Uganda and Israel itself.

If carried out, the ICJ ruling would effectively end Israel’s campaign to dismantle Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that launched the war in Gaza by invading southern Israel on Oct. 7, murdering 1,200 people, and kidnapping over 250 others as hostages.

However, Israeli officials have indicated the Jewish state will not comply with the ruling of the court, which has no enforcement powers.

WSJ: Here’s the real problem with the U.N.’s revised Gaza death toll

Yet this new framing obscures reality. The “identified” data has become increasingly incomplete over time, and 17.1 percent of the “identified” entries in the Health Ministry’s early-May release have missing or invalid IDs, ages, names or sex. Meanwhile, the “unidentified” entries are actually a rebranding of the data from the media reports methodology, a change made in April as outside scrutiny grew.

It is unusual for the United Nations, which normally uses a strict casualty verification standard, to report unverified casualty figures from involved parties. The United Nations stopped reporting the death toll in Syria between 2014 and 2021 amid verification difficulties, and it has not even attempted comprehensive casualty reporting in the Ethiopian civil war. In Sudan, the verified U.N. death toll is nearly exceeded by estimated fatalities from a single city.

A better approach for the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs would be to stop citing statistics from Hamas’s government media office, which lacks the capacity or authority to count casualties, and to distinguish between the three Health Ministry methodologies, while applying basic scrutiny to claims by all parties.

What can a partial and contested picture of the death toll, patched together through three methodologies of varying reliability, tell us? It cannot yield a civilian-combatant ratio, given the Health Ministry’s refusal to distinguish between the two and the likely undercounting of militants killed on the battlefield. It also cannot help assess the legality of individual Israeli strikes or operations. Nor is the claimed death toll a clear undercount: 40 percent of reported deaths derive from methodologies that do not involve physical identification of a body, creating likely overlap with those reported missing or under the rubble. The approach also cannot convey the enormous loss of life experienced by Gazans.

The data can give only broad indications: namely, that fighting-age men are overrepresented among the dead and that there has been a steady decline in the daily death toll, from an average of 341 in October to 56 in April.

A core criticism of Israeli conduct is that it has inflicted a high civilian death toll — the numbers have featured prominently in the news media, in remarks by international leaders, in arguments before the International Court of Justice and in criticism from the U.S. government. Yet the methodologies employed by the Hamas-run organizations compiling the information have been subjected to remarkably little scrutiny.

Exercising caution is essential when dealing with claims made about death tolls in any conflict, particularly claims made by warring parties. That means being transparent in acknowledging flaws in the available data and methodologies; failure to do so inevitably leads to suspicion that the data is being employed with a political goal in mind. The United Nations, government officials, media outlets and policy analysts have an obligation to employ the same professionalism and diligence regarding the war in Gaza that they have applied in other conflicts.

05/24 Links Pt2: A Contemptible Response to Anti-Semitism; Boycott, Divest, and Sanction Columbia; How Israel lost the elites and won the people - a Eurovision story

From Ian:

How Israel lost the elites and won the people - a Eurovision story

Eurovision celebrates diversity, so it was not surprising to see thousands of Islamists gain interest in the contest this year. Thousands of passionate keffiyeh-clad fans took the street in Malmo days before the contest, singing their own songs of Intifada and other golden living dreams of vision. So moved was the crowd by the music, that Israeli performer Eden Golan had to be escorted in and out of the arena by a convoy of hundreds of police officers and advised not to leave her hotel room during her entire stay. Eden was booed at every rehearsal. The Irish contestant, draped in a keffiyeh that matched their facial tattoos, proudly reported that they cried when Israel qualified for the final. The Greek participant pretended to sleep when Eden spoke at the press conference, and the Dutch singer covered his face and mocked her, in one of several last straws that ended in his disqualification hours before showtime. But perhaps the most egregious of all is when a member of the press asked Eden if she felt it was irresponsible for her to be there, given the danger her participation poses to everyone else (she answered diplomatically like the princess that she is). Bambi Thug, the demon from Ireland

The smirkers, the hissers, those who asked Eden to delete a video they had just taken – it’s unclear how many of them were true believers and how many just thought they were reading the room. As any public figure who posted something along the lines of “thoughts and prayers” on October 7 can tell you, the online mob will set you straight about the Middle East. If enough people bully you into bullying someone else, best to go along with the crowd. If hundreds of people scream loud enough, discount the thousands who choose to remain silent. And all of it maybe would have been ignored, if the Israeli song wasn’t really, really good. “Hurricane” (deadname: October Rain) is a banger, and Eden completely killed it on stage, despite the unprecedented booing at the final. Yet when it was time to announce the jury votes, those are the votes by the panel of experts from each nation, many of the countries didn’t even include Israel in their rankings. They may have liked the song, but really, who wants to deal with those nasty Instagram comments? Avoidance is the safest bet for an intact follower count.

When the jury portion of the show had culminated with Israel at a disappointing 12 out of 26, Israelis began to close out our tabs, but refused to lose hope. And then came the popular vote, the unwashed Eurovision masses. The people of Europe had spoken, anonymously and without fear of retribution. A shocking 15 countries awarded Israel the maximum number of points, launching it into the very respectable 5th place overall, and 2nd among all televoters, an upset not seen since (insert sports metaphor here)

Were the good people of Switzerland paying homage to Theodore Herzl? Was the Swedish vote an affront to Islamist extremism? Was San Marino moved by Eden’s bravery against all odds? We may never know why people voted the way they did (though some antisemites on X have theories), but one thing has been clear throughout the years – Eurovision fans like a good performance and a appreciate an underdog. We threw our espresso martinis in the air and hugged strangers in rainbow flag yarmulkas. We were in lockstep with the world again. The ugly duckling had transformed into a beautiful, socially acceptable swan.

I walked home with my head held high. The loud hateful voices were drowned out, and the room people thought they were reading – well, turns out they were in the wrong room. My joy only lasted a few minutes1. It was not lost on me that nothing has changed - 133 hostages are still being held by Hamas in Gaza. My country is fighting an existential war, increasingly alone. And my other country, the United States, is torn between caving in to the bullies and standing up for what’s right. Perhaps we’d all be better off caring less about what people think, and more about what they do. As Eden says (do you really think this piece won’t end with a cheesy lyric?): “Take it all, and leave the world behind”.

Seth Mandel: A Contemptible Response to Anti-Semitism

Scott and Bonamici both gave quite contemptible performances, complaining about holding the hearings (i.e., doing their job) while remaining militantly unwilling to condemn anti-Semitism without diluting it with “and Islamophobia.” Courtney, however, seemed to be acting in good faith.

For example, Courtney voted in favor of the Antisemitism Awareness Act earlier this month, which assists the Education Department with identifying Title VI-related civil-rights violations concerning anti-Semitism on campus. Courtney, then, can at least lay claim to consistency. Not so Bonamici and Scott, who voted against the Antisemitism Awareness Act.

Whatever Bonamici and Scott are worried about, it isn’t Title VI enforcement. In fact, responding to a plea for civil rights enforcement from Jewish students by demanding more cash has a certain “Your money or your life” ring to it. Is this a protection racket?

Bonamici is particularly hostile to doing her job. Instead of having hearings and investigating the problem, she wants Congress to “work with experts on anti-Semitism, legal scholars with expertise in the area, people knowledgeable in the field who can help us determine what the government response can and should be to the increase in anti-Semitism and racial hostility on campuses.”

First of all, the “anti-Semitism and” does not go unnoticed there. Second, “anti-Semitism experts” already told you what to do about it. They said vote for the Antisemitism Awareness Act. You, Suzanne Bonamici, chose not to follow their advice. Third, the “government response” is to hold these hearings as part of their investigative process. Suzanne Bonamici may not be doing very much with her time, but committee chair Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) has been pairing the hearings with a comprehensive document dive to find out what has been going on at these campuses for years now, and those investigations have informed the subsequent hearings.

“Give us more money” is not an answer here. Neither is anything called “the anti-Semitism police.” Universities are teaching their students blood libels and then encouraging those same students’ physical expression of that anti-Semitism. They are doing so with public money. If that doesn’t bother you, you might be morally unfit to serve in Congress. If it bothers you that it bothers others, the areas of public life for which you are morally unfit expands exponentially.

Christopher Rufo: Boycott, Divest, and Sanction Columbia

The real scandal is that the university has long since relinquished its role as the responsible authority. There should be no sympathy for President Shafik and other administrators, who have perpetuated a colossal double standard: teaching students how to conduct a radical left-wing protest, and then arresting them as soon as they did exactly what their university had encouraged them to do.

In any conflict, people naturally want to pick a side. Sometimes, however, no one is worthy of support.

Columbia’s Intifada is one such conflict. The students are obviously in the wrong, promoting anti-Semitism, destroying property, and using violent methods to achieve dubious political aims. The faculty are a disaster: their ideologies are anathema to scholarly detachment and their re-enactments of 1968 are childish and nihilistic. And the administration is complicit in the entire drama. Bollinger established the conditions for this disaster, and Shafik did nothing to change them—she saw the light only after it was blinding her.

The only exception in the Columbia mess is the New York Police Department. The NYPD demonstrated remarkable discipline and competence in dismantling the violent protests and removing student activists from Hamilton Hall. They went in with the capacity for overwhelming force, but practiced impressive restraint, denying the protesters what they wanted: dramatic televisual images of the police violently assaulting the students. The police, too, had studied the lessons of 1968—and refused to participate in its reenactment.

We don’t have to choose a side, but this does not mean that those of us on the outside have no influence. In recent years, Columbia has received approximately $1 billion in annual federal funding—meaning the American taxpayer is funding the Ivy League Intifada.

Congress could change this dynamic tomorrow. Rather than subsidize left-wing activism and pseudo-scholarship, congressional representatives could strip funding from Columbia and other Ivy League universities, impose severe restrictions on discriminatory DEI departments, and restrict all future support for left-wing ideological programs such as “decolonization” and “post-colonial theory.” This is within the purview of Congress, and in the best interest of the American people.

Ultimately, Minouche Shafik is just a symbol. She presides over an institution that is not under her control. The faster that Congress can change the structural conditions that underpin these institutions, the better. Rather than boycott, divest, and sanction Israel, Congress should boycott, divest, and sanction the Ivy League.

Now, there’s an activist campaign the American public could easily support.

To The Intercept, calling Zionists "Babylon swine" and telling them to "go back to Yiddish land" is simply "criticism of Zionism."

The Intercept has an article about academics who lost their jobs because, they claim, of their support for Palestinians or their criticism of Israel. They are never antisemitic, never hateful, never let go for any valid cause, according to the article.

Here's one of their examples:

“I was fired after 18 years as a professor of Latin American and Caribbean studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice,” Danny Shaw said. He was told last month by administrators at the college, which is part of the public City University of New York system, that he would not be reappointed to his longtime adjunct position. Shaw’s colleagues had moved to reappoint him but were overruled by John Jay President Karol Mason, according to an open letter from the economics department.

On his X account in mid-October, in the wake of stridently bellicose remarks from Israeli officials, Shaw wrote in a now-deleted post that Zionism “is beyond a mental illness; it’s a genocidal disease.” The target was unambiguously Zionist ideology and its adherents, not Jews for being Jewish. The speech is also clearly within the bounds of First Amendment protections. It was, of course, decried as antisemitic.

Let's see what Shaw actually wrote:

“These Zi^nists are straight Babylon swine. We need to protest their neighborhoods...Why are you racist arrogant bullies?...Zionism is beyond a mental illness; it’s genocidal disease."

Three of the four sentences are reprehensible lies, but are quite within the bounds of free speech.

The second sentence, however, cannot be read as anything other than incitement to harass Jews. What else could a Zionist neighborhood be? Do Republicans protest random Democratic neighborhoods, or vice versa, without a specific person or organization in mind? The only time I can recall a demonstration at a neighborhood itself was the neo-Nazis marching in Skokie, Illinois in 1977.

I'm a little less clear ont he "Babylon swine" reference, but since Jew were exiled to Babylon, it doesn't seem to be referring to anyone but Jews.

And then you can add a little more context to see if Shaw means "Jews" when he says "Zionists." As the ADL reports, and no one I can see denies,

At a Sunday, October 15, 2023, rally, Shaw reportedly shouted, “Zionism is a trap. Go back to your true history. Go back to Yiddish land!"

The guy is an antisemite, full stop.

Now, was he "fired"? No. His contract was not renewed. Just as would happen if an adjunct professor was heard saying and writing pro-slavery statements. The First amendment has nothing to do with it. It is not a freedom of speech issue - a college ha the right not to renew a contract for any reason or no reason whatsoever. Here, the reason is clear: Shaw is a disgusting, hateful bigot who should not be in a position to teach or influence students.

And The Intercept is whitewashing his antisemitism and incitement to violence.

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!

05/24 Links Pt1: IDF: 'Rafah op. doesn't contradict ICJ ruling, we will continue,'; Netanyahu requests release of 43-minute Hamas atrocity film; Three US soldiers hurt on pier

From Ian:

'Rafah op. doesn't contradict ICJ ruling, we will continue,' Israel says

The IDF intends to push on with its military operation in Rafah to defeat Hamas, Minister-without-portfolio Benny Gantz told US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday, after the International Court of Justice’s demand that it halt any campaign in that area to destroy the Palestinian people.

“The State of Israel is committed to continue fighting to return its hostages and promise the security of its citizens - wherever and whenever necessary - including in Rafah,” Gantz said in a statement he issued late Friday after the ICJ ruling.

Gantz is both a former Defense Minister and IDF Chief-of-Staff and is a member of Israel’s small war cabinet. Both in his statement to the public and in his conversation with Blinken he stressed the importance of continuing the campaign to defeat Hamas and to ensure the return of the remaining 125 hostages kidnapped on October 7 and held in Gaza.

The National Security Council and the Foreign Ministry also stressed Israel's intention to continue with its Rafah operation, noting that the military campaign was designed to target Hamas, not Palestinian civilians.

It noted that the order issued by the ICJ, in which it stated that Israel must “halt its military offensive and any other actions in the Rafah Governate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

The Israeli declaration said that the IDF has not and will not carry out military activity in the Rafah area that would destroy the Palestinian people, and was in compliance with international law.

“Israel will continue its efforts to allow humanitarian aid to enter the Gaza Strip and act, in accordance with the law, to reduce as much as possible the damage to the civilian population in the Gaza Strip,” the declaration stated.

“Israel will continue to keep the Rafah crossing open, allow continuous humanitarian aid to enter from the Egyptian side of the crossing, and prevent terrorist organizations from controlling the crossing.”

Israel in its statement took issue with the larger context of the ICJ ruling, which was issued as the tribunal is adjudicating South Africa’s claim that it is committing genocide against the Palestinian people and is therefore in violation of the 1948 genocide convention.

It stressed that “the accusations of South Africa against Israel at the ICJ in The Hague regarding "genocide" are false, outrageous and disgusting.” Hamas and PA applaud ICJ decision

Hamas and the Palestinian Authority welcomed the ICJ ruling. Hamas official Basem Naim said, “We believe it is not enough since the occupation aggression across the Gaza Strip and especially in northern Gaza is just as brutal and dangerous.

"We call upon the UN Security Council to immediately implement this demand by the World Court into practical measures to compel the Zionist enemy to implement the decision.”

Palestinian Authority spokesperson Nabil Abu Rudeineh said, the ruling “represents an international consensus on the demand to stop the all-out war on Gaza.”

‘Hamas responsible for prolonging Gaza war’

Hamas started the war with Israel and is responsible for perpetuating the conflict by refusing to lay down arms and release the hostages, Israel Defense Forces Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said on Thursday.

“Hamas started this war on Oct. 7. Hamas is choosing right now to continue this war by refusing to release our hostages, continuing to attack Israel and vowing to continue to do so as long as it can,” said Hagari in a rare English-language video statement.

While the IDF is doing everything it can to cause “minimal harm to those Gazan civilians Hamas is hiding behind,” the Palestinian terrorist group wants noncombatants to get caught in the crossfire, stated Hagari.

“We’re protecting Gazan civilians in Rafah from being a layer of protection for Hamas, by encouraging them to temporarily evacuate to humanitarian areas like we’ve done with around one million civilians in Rafah until now, who have moved out of harm’s way,” he said of the IDF’s ongoing military operation in the terrorist stronghold along the border with Egypt.

“We’re not smashing into Rafah; we’re operating carefully and precisely,” Hagari reiterated. “The IDF is committed to operating in accordance with international law and will continue to keep that commitment.”

Israel took control of the Gaza side of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt on May 7, as tanks from the 401st Armored Brigade rolled right up to the station.

A day earlier, Jerusalem’s War Cabinet decided unanimously to “continue the operation in Rafah to exert military pressure on Hamas in order to promote the release of our hostages and the other goals of the war.”

The Rafah operation, which Israel estimates will last some two months, is being carried out in phases as opposed to a full-scale invasion. The phased nature of the operation allows for it to be paused should a hostage release deal be reached between Israel and Hamas.

Hagari said of the battle in Gaza’s southernmost city, “Hamas is in Rafah; Hamas has been holding our hostages in Rafah, which is why our forces are maneuvering in Rafah. We’re doing this in a targeted and precise way.”

Can Hamas Be Defeated?

Opponents of the IDF’s campaign in Gaza often appeal to two related arguments: that Hamas is rooted in a set of ideas and thus cannot be defeated militarily, and that the destruction in Gaza only further radicalizes Palestinians, thus increasing the threat to Israel. Rejecting both lines of thinking, Ghaith al-Omar writes:

What makes Hamas and similar militant organizations effective is not their ideologies but their ability to act on them. For Hamas, the sustained capacity to use violence was key to helping it build political power. Back in the 1990s, Hamas’s popularity was at its lowest point, as most Palestinians believed that liberation could be achieved by peaceful and diplomatic means. Its use of violence derailed that concept, but it established Hamas as a political alternative.

Ever since, the use of force and violence has been an integral part of Hamas’s strategy. . . . Indeed, one lesson from October 7 is that while Hamas maintains its military and violent capabilities, it will remain capable of shaping the political reality. To be defeated, Hamas must be denied that. This can only be done through the use of force.

Any illusions that Palestinian and Israeli societies can now trust one another or even develop a level of coexistence anytime soon should be laid to rest. If it can ever be reached, such an outcome is at best a generational endeavor. . . . Hamas triggered war and still insists that it would do it all again given the chance, so it will be hard-pressed to garner a following from Palestinians in Gaza who suffered so horribly for its decision.

Here are the things the International Court of Justice today instructed Israel to do, besides reiterating its January ruling:

Immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.

Israel is not doing anything to bring about physical destruction of Palestinians.

Here's a statistic you may find interesting: There are more Gazans alive today then there were on October 6. About 180 babies are born every day in Gaza, which is an increase of 41,850 since October 7, higher than even the most exaggerated estimates of deaths.

The ICJ is instructing Israel to stop doing something it never did, never intended to do and never would do.

Maintain open the Rafah crossing for unhindered provision at scale of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance;

Israel is willing and able to open Rafah. There happens to be another country on the other side, Egypt, that adamantly insists on keeping Rafah closed for political reasons.

The ICJ is instructing Israel to do something that it fully agrees with but is dependent on others who refuse to.

Here's another fun fact: Egypt is not mentioned once in today's ruling.

Take effective measures to ensure the unimpeded access to the Gaza Strip of any commission of inquiry, fact-finding mission or other investigative body mandated by competent organs of the United Nations to investigate allegations of genocide;

Israel is responsible for the security of any investigator wanting to enter Gaza. That means Israel cannot legally allow them to enter any areas that the IDF cannot guarantee they will be safe - which is still nearly all of Gaza. You can't have it both ways, giving Israel the responsibility to protect these missions coming in from the Israeli side while allowing them to go to areas where they could be killed. It is still an active war zone.

The ICJ is instructing Israel to do something that, practically speaking, is impossible under international law.

In all three cases, the ICJ instructions are based on circumstances in Gaza that do not exist in reality.

Which does not make the ICJ look like they are a serious court.

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Exclusive Interview With Dr. Irwin J. Mansdorf On The Psychological Effects Of Language In The Gaza War (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

Irwin J. (Yitzchak) Mansdorf, Ph.D., is a fellow at the Jerusalem Center of Public Affairs specializing in political psychology and a member of the emergency division of IDF Homefront Command. Earlier this month, the JCPA published his article, “Both Sides” and “Innocent Civilians”: The Psychological Effect of Language in the Gaza War on their website.

Dr. Irwin J. Mansdorf

I asked Dr. Mansdorf about his article.
His responses are lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

Generally, when people talk about Israel and the Arabs, they talk about "the cycle of violence," indicating that both sides are equally responsible and no one side should be blamed. You write about how "the both sides argument" is used when discussing the Gaza War. How is that different? Why do people use "the both sides argument"?

The expression "cycle of violence" is a perfect example of a "both sides" mentality. Instead of assigning responsibility for "violence," it perpetuates a myth of "action-reaction-action-reaction." It is similar to the chicken and egg analogy. Since we are never told what came first, who started, who is persisting, and who refuses to end, it appears "both sides" are to blame.

You write that this argument is "a cognitively inconsistent mantra." How so?

Saying "both sides" are responsible is fine if it is true. Otherwise, it is illogical to contend that the victim is the same as the aggressor. In Palestinian circles, there is no "both sides." Palestinian culture and its Western supporters clearly place responsibility and guilt upon the Israeli side, whom they accuse of being colonialists and hence, automatically in the wrong. When some Westerners use "both sides," they are adopting a philosophy that holds that blame is never black and white. Since that is patently false, and sometimes there is right and wrong, the automatic assumption of a "what seems fair" argument splitting blame does not meet the test of logical consistency.

Another commonly used phrase is "innocent civilians." How is that phrase used and what are the underlying assumptions?

A "civilian" may or may not be "innocent." The tendency in much of the media is to again automatically assign "innocence" to all civilians, regardless of whether or not they actually are innocent. A civilian who harbors terrorists, feeds them, covers for them, and believes in their mission carries responsibility for their actions.

How does "the both sides argument," which assumes "an air of fairness," lead to the contrary claim where Israel particularly is blamed, in this case being accused of genocide? Why is it so difficult for the West to see Israelis as "innocent civilians"

In the eyes of many, Israel is a colonial power and its citizens are thus "settler-colonialists." That makes them responsible for taking land that rightfully belongs to the indigenous people, namely the Palestinians. Those who follow this thinking do not have a "both sides" philosophy but rather come down on the wrong end of the right-wrong formula. This happened because they adopted a false ideology related to a wrongly presumed colonial identity of Israel, which assigns guilt, and blame and thus negates innocence.

What is the problem of defining Gazans as "innocent civilians"?

Some Gazans may be innocent. But those who subscribe to the Hamas philosophy related to Jews cannot be said to be fully "innocent." In many homes in Gaza, ammunition, escape tunnels, along with literature of hate and racism against Jews were found. This does not take away Israel's responsibility under international law and moral behavior to protect these civilians, regardless of their personal identification with the enemy, as long as they do not become active participants in attacks on Israelis or Israeli soldiers. For example, on October 7th, there is video documentation of "ordinary" Gazans storming into Israel along with the Hamas terrorists and looting Israeli communities and homes. Many were also seen taking part in the kidnapping and spiriting of Israeli hostages back into Gaza. These are not the actions of "innocents" even though they wore no uniform.

Is there a difference between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority that would indicate a difference between Gazans and West Bank Arabs as "innocent civilians"?

The Palestinian Authority is no different from Hamas in its goals, although some of their methods may differ. The PA funds terrorism, incentivizes people to carry out terror attacks, rewards them when they do, and teaches--through an educational system that demonizes Jews--that Israel has no place in the region and Jews have no real history in the land.

You mention that after WWII, the Allies instituted a "denazification" program in Germany and the US had the Japanese extensively reform their education program. What would be a possible approach to reforming the Gazans?

Every culture needs to be treated in ways that respect the mores and ways of that particular culture. In developing a program for the Palestinian population, the particular religious, social, and cultural mores that would support leaving terror behind and moving towards coexistence and cooperation would be embellished. A model for this can be found in the Gulf States which entered into the "Abraham Accord" agreements with Israel. They developed model educational systems that promote peace and cooperation and removed all references that negatively are associated with Jews and Israel.

You write "Legal requirements should not be confused with moral standards." Can you elaborate on that?

Despite the questionable "innocence" of many Palestinian civilians, and their clearly immoral behavior, Israel carries a legal responsibility to protect them if they act as noncombatants. Israel's moral code would similarly be consistent with this and at times go further than required under the law to protect civilians (e.g., providing advanced warning of attacks, actively moving civilians out of danger zones, providing more humanitarian aid than required, etc.)

Read “Both Sides” and “Innocent Civilians”: The Psychological Effect of Language in the Gaza War

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The Gaza health ministry keeps two sets of books. The media is only interested in one of them.

From the start of the war, the Gaza Ministry of Health has been maintaining two separate, contradictory sets of statistics on the "martyrs" of Gaza.

One started out as daily video briefings and then became press releases on their Facebook and other social media. Those statistics were identical to the ones released by the Gaza Media Office of Hamas.

The other one was a far more detailed report that had been issued every few days for months. The most recent one was 45 pages long.

Those two sets of statistics contradict each other.

The health ministry tried very hard to reconcile the two in the detailed report. During April, it divided up the "martyrs" into three categories: those who were counted directly from hospital visits, those who were reported by families of the victims that were deemed credible, and the amorphous category of "martyrs who do not have complete data."

On the last detailed report, the ministry described these categories this way:

The cumulative number of martyrs since the beginning of the aggression has reached 34,654 martyrs, of whom 24,691 have complete data with the Ministry of Health (20,976 are listed in the Ministry of Health’s records and 3,715 have been reported by their families), in addition to 9,963 martyrs who do not have complete data.

The last category is largely fictional. On every report, the difference between the "complete data" and "incomplete data" deaths magically added up to exactly what the Hamas media office claimed that day. Yet the media office would also claim 72% of the victims were women and children, while the detailed MoH statistics showed that they only counted about 51% women and children - and even if every single one of the "martyrs who do not have complete data" were women and children, a statistical impossibility, it still wouldn't add up to 72%.

In other words, the Hamas media office makes up numbers every day, and the health ministry has no choice but to report them so as not to call their bosses liars.

That became increasingly impossible over time as independent researchers started pointing out that the two sets of books were irreconcilable and Hamas must be lying. This called into question the oft-cited total that Hamas made up of 10,000 more "martyrs" than had actually been counted.

So the health ministry stopped reporting the detailed statistics publicly. Their last report was released on May 3. They now only parrot the Hamas media office numbers and no longer embarrass Hamas with their other report that contradicts Hamas numbers.

Like crooked accountants, the health ministry maintains two sets of books, and one of them is now secret.

The media has never been interested in the the "verified" MoH statistics. They have only reported on the higher media office number repeated by the MoH, thereby giving it more authority, even though the MoH knows it is lying when it parrots the Hamas numbers. For example, today's New York Times repeats its boilerplate statement, "The situation in Gaza remains dire. More than 34,000 people have died and more than 77,000 have been wounded, according to health authorities in the territory."

The existence of two sets of books is public knowledge. The old detailed reports are still available for any news organization to read for themselves and see for themselves that the two sets of numbers are irreconcilable.

Yet, for all the thousands of articles on the Gaza war, no major media organization is interested in this clear case of how Hamas is manipulating them with false statistics. They simply ascribe the highest casualty counts to "health authorities" who are knowingly, provably lying.

Reuters recently looked at the issue, and only briefly alluded to the inconsistencies, falsely claiming the "incomplete data" 10,000 were actual bodies that had been counted, based on a PA health ministry statement. Instead of looking at the actual numbers to see the contradictions, it airly reported:

In May the ministry updated its breakdown of the fatalities to be based only on the 24,686 bodies it said had been fully identified, and not on the more-than 10,000 bodies it said have not yet been identified.
When it made this change, the numbers appeared significantly less, prompting Israel to raise further questions over the figures.

This didn't happen in May - they had been keeping this other set of books for months. The Gaza MoH never claimed it had 10,000 bodies, or else it would have broken down them by gender and age

Reuters is not interested in the truth.

------

I am not even discussing the thousands of alleged "martyrs" whose names the MoH released with missing or impossible IDs. Which means that even the 24,000 number is exaggerated, by as many as 4,000 people.

If Israel's estimate of killing 14,000 militants is accurate, that means one of two things:

1. The 14,000 dead are included in the 20,000 - which would make civilians only 30% of the total casualties, which would be astonishing.

2. As in previous wars, Hamas is not admitting its own dead during the war, which would mean that there are indeed 34,000 killed of whom 14,000 are jihadists, which is still a very low civilian to militant ration for any urban war.

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The ICC partially based its "experts report" on "confidential material" - which can ONLY mean anti-Israel propaganda that cannot be refuted.

The ICC "Report of the Panel of Experts in International Law" has an interesting paragraph:

The Panel has operated pro bono and independently. It has unanimously reached all of the views contained in this Report. It will set out its key reasoning below, but notes that it cannot disclose any material that is currently confidential.

What confidential material could they possibly have?

After all, in Gaza, the only news that comes out is from Hamas media, people quoting Hamas media, and Palestinian stringers for news media and NGOs who are either supporters of or frightened of Hamas.

This panel of "experts" did not send anyone to Gaza. It relied on two major sources of information.

One was public news sources, Hamas press releases, Gaza health ministry statements, NGO reports, and similar.

The other is submissions from the public at large.. Anyone in the world could submit "evidence."

And in fact, there is at least one site dedicated to soliciting and submitting anti-Israel material to the ICC:

The "Justiceforall" site encourages everyone and anyone - not just Palestinians - to submit whatever evidence they have. Or pretend to have. Or made up. Or Photoshopped. Or created with AI.

The Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has opened a digital platform to enable people to submit complaints online to the ICC with the option to add pictures and videos that show the crimes of the Israeli occupiers against them for the court to consider them and to take a stance against Israel. Those with information relevant to current events in Israel and Palestine are asked to provide submissions. Information submitted under this portal should relate to alleged crimes within the jurisdiction of the ICC, namely War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity, Genocide, or Aggression.

Anyone can submit information through the portal. You do not necessarily need to be a victim or witness of the alleged crimes within the jurisdiction of the ICC listed above. Information can also be submitted collectively or through an organization (for example an NGO, your masjid, a church), as long as there is an identifiable sender.

This is a concerted campaign to flood the ICC with "evidence." It was publicized in anti-Israel social media groups.

How much of those submissions came from any verifiable source? How much of it was biased? How many submissions included Pallywood photos and videos, or photos from other conflicts, and said they were from Gaza?

We don't know. Because they are "confidential." Any submission by a pro-Israel source about the war in Gaza would be public information, since the IDF is transparent with what is happening.

So virtually all of the "confidential" evidence that we cannot review will be, by definition, anti-Israel. And as such, it is not evidence that Israel could defend itself against until a potential trial, by which time the damage has already been done. It is unlikely that anyone submitted to the court "we think the other side will accuse Israel of X, therefore here is the rebuttal" - you need to know the accusation before you can answer it.

In this way, anti-Israel activists could - and clearly did - stack the deck. The ICC "experts" are not experts in verification of facts, or investigating the social media posts of the submitters to detect a pattern of lies or bias or looseness with the facts. If a Gazan is shot near an aid truck, they don't know if it was from Gaza gunmen or Israel, but you can be sure they will only blame Israel and the ICC has no mechanism to verify or discount their testimony.

To give a simplistic example, many people might have submitted "evidence" that Israel bombed the Al Ahli hospital. Pro-Israel people would probably not have submitted evidence that it was a misfired rocket by Islamic Jihad and that the death toll was highly exaggerated, as the news media reported.. If the prosecutors only saw the fake evidence from the haters, and there were few or no evidence to the contrary, and the prosecutors were not familiar with the case, then that would become - under ICC rules - evidence for Israeli war crimes.

Multiply that by a thousand, or ten thousand. Hamas issues reports that are filled with obvious lies every day, that probably got submitted in different forms many times. At best, the IDF's own statements might be submitted (or solicited) once. The "experts" do no have the skill to investigate the facts, and they would tend to believe the majority fo submissions - even if they did not have an anti-Israel bias of their own to begin with,

There is normally very good reason why submissions should be confidential. Whistleblowers under a cruel regime would want to ensure that their submission never becomes public which could endanger their lives. .But that same mechanism to protect witnesses can be subverted to submit tons of bogus "evidence" that will be considered credible by default.

In short, the ICC submissions process is inherently biased when one side uses lies and propaganda as an essential part of their war strategy.

(h/t Irene)

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05/23 Links Pt2: How the Hamas pogrom galvanized Israel’s enemies; Tunnel with hostages' bodies was under an UNRWA building; The Washington Post’s protocols

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: How the Hamas pogrom galvanized Israel’s enemies

Britain’s foreign secretary, David Cameron, is a conservative in this mold. In recent months, he has accused Israel of killing too many civilians in Gaza, of deliberately obstructing the supply of humanitarian aid and of not abiding by international law. He has threatened to cut off the United Kingdom’s (very small) supply of arms to Israel and even implied that the country might unilaterally declare a Palestinian state.

This week, however, there was an abrupt change of tone. In the House of Lords, Cameron not only roundly condemned the ICC prosecutor’s move. He also softened his approach to Israel. Urged again to suspend arms export licenses, he noted that just a few days after the last time he was asked to do so, Iran attacked Israel “with a hail of over 140 cruise missiles”.

Cameron isn’t an ideologue. With woolly liberal ideals largely uninformed by factual evidence, he has generally gone with the flow of fashionable consensus. Now, however, he may be starting to realize that things are rather more complicated than he had assumed.

He has apparently been taken aback by the fierce reaction to his softer tone from within the Foreign Office, where his officials are viscerally hostile to Israel and are currently demanding that the government throw it to the wolves.

Moreover, in the wake of the U.N.’s drastic reduction of its Hamas-dictated and falsely inflated numbers of Gazan civilians killed in the war, Cameron has begun to realize that the evidence he was given by his officials that fueled his threats against Israel was fabricated.

Whether this signals a more general shift towards Israel by Britain’s foreign secretary is now almost irrelevant. For unless the Conservative Party somehow reverses the near-universal contempt in which the public currently holds it, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer will become prime minister on July 5.

Although he is falling over himself to reassure the Jewish community that he has now cut out the antisemitism in the party associated with his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, few British Jews believe him. Starmer may have purged Labour of the most egregious offenders, but too many members of parliament and others in the party remain viscerally anti-Israel.

Starmer will also be keen to appease the Muslim community, which presages a harsher attitude towards Israel and may also mean an unwillingness to tackle extremist imams or Muslim antisemitism. The main problem, however, is that support for the Palestinian cause serves as the defining foreign-policy issue for progressive circles. This support drives Jew-hatred and a wish to destroy Israel.

That’s because Palestinianism is itself driven by Islamic Jew-hatred and is constructed entirely on the desire to annihilate Israel, erase the history of the Jewish people in the land and appropriate it for itself.

And that’s why the belief in the “two-state solution” is itself such a lethal error. Its premise is that the “Middle East conflict” is a dispute over the division of the land between two peoples with legitimate claims to that land. But that is simply wrong. The “conflict” is, in fact, a war of extermination waged by the Palestinian Arabs against Israel’s existence, in which a state of Palestine is to be a final solution to the existence of the Jewish homeland.

The failure of America, Britain and Europe to acknowledge this war of extermination has led to their sanitizing, incentivizing and funding Palestinian terrorism. Without this backing, the Palestinian cause and its terrorist strategy would not exist.

The requested arrest warrants and the performative posturing over “Palestine” are all part of the pincer movement of genocidal terror, brainwashed street insurrection and “human rights” lawfare aimed at the destruction of Israel. And this infernal process only exists because for decades, Britain, America and Europe have willed it so.

Seth Mandel: Hamas Has Exposed a Sickness in Western Society

Indeed, there is something very dark bubbling up to the surface of society these days. The people who latched on to semantics in the video translation look absolutely insane. Not strange, not silly, not eccentric, not unpleasant. Actually insane. The fact that some of these people teach in universities is a dirty trick committed against humanity itself.

Then today the Daily Mail released a video of an Israeli intelligence officer’s interrogation of two Hamas fighters captured on October 7, a father-and-son duo. The father describes, in detail, raping one of the Israeli women he encountered while murdering innocents that day. Then his son says this: “My father raped her, then I did and then my cousin did and then we left, but my father killed the woman after we finished raping her.”

I’m sure the same folks are out there trying to find a missing punctuation mark in the translation.

Why are people, some of whom are educators or otherwise part of the intellectual class, out here shredding their souls with a cheese grater? Why? I think one answer is that the only way to make Israel the bad guy here while still being able to sleep at night is to pretend Hamas doesn’t exist. Everything the civilized world has said about Hamas is true. Its barbarism has no limiting principle. And it does nothing but promise to continue carrying out these family rape-and-murder outings the way other people might take their kids to the renaissance fair on a lazy weekend.

There is simply no argument against the immediacy of Israel’s obligation to destroy Hamas.

At some point, we in the West are going to have to grapple seriously with the fact that, yes, the protesters and their faculty supporters are pro-Hamas, just as they say they are. The same is true of a shockingly important segment of the national political media. It’s even true of the odd politician here and there.

It is not true of the majority of this country, no matter what one might think reading the New York Times or watching the BBC. And our best chance at keeping it that way is by being brutally honest about the depths to which some in our society have sunk.

The Viciousness of the Left’s Turn against Israel

Naturally, neither the Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchez nor his political ally and compatriot Josep Borrell—who was as quick to express his sorrow over the death of the Iranian president as he has been to condemn Israel for war crimes on flimsy evidence—would admit any hostility toward Jews. These two socialists would instead fall back on the rhetoric of progressive internationalism, and their defenders would rush in to complain of the “weaponization of anti-Semitism” to stifle any criticism of Israel. Susie Linfield, a scholar of leftwing anti-Zionism, has some thoughts on this matter:
There is . . . something almost laughable—though also deeply irritating—about the increasingly talmudic debate over whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. [The magazine] n+1 published an open letter signed by many leftist Jewish writers, insisting that the two “anti’s” aren’t the same. But they couldn’t bring themselves even to mention the Hamas attacks by name, instead putting forth a sort of wimpy “all lives matter” line. So let’s stipulate: no, anti-Zionism isn’t always anti-Semitism. You’re not an anti-Semite? Mazel tov! Unfortunately, the political positions of many self-professed anti-Zionists are atrocious nonetheless.

And what’s so weird about all this is that in the aftermath of October 7, it’s become crystal clear that anti-Zionism is often anti-Semitism, and deeply so. The loathing, the resentment, the vilification of Jews is viscerally palpable in so many of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations, articles, statements. The n+1 statement was titled “A Dangerous Conflation.” It seems to me that what’s dangerous is the vicious, unhinged anti-Semitism that is circulating all over the world and all over this country, including in its elite spaces.

This is one of the many striking passages in an interview with Linfield by Robert Boyers for the left-leaning journal Salmagundi. Boyers, although admirably open-minded, comes to the conversation with the assumptions of someone steeped in progressive assumptions about the Israel-Palestinian conflict, for which Linfield has little patience. For instance, to the insistence that the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel (BDS) isn’t anti-Semitic even if “some BDS supporters envision a total undoing of the Zionist project,” Linfield responds:
What does it mean to “totally undo” a national project—in this case, one that saved millions of Jewish lives? Who the hell is BDS to undo a national project? Are there other national projects on its hit list—France? Bangladesh? China? Why is eliminationism considered a valid “project”—a progressive project!—when it comes to the state of the Jewish people? What will the “total undoing” of Israel look like? We know the answer: it will look like October 7.

Pallywood Actors, Directors Still Not Convincing Enough For Major Film Studios (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Rafah, May 23 - Video production specialists in the Gaza Strip whose work focuses on the staging of heartstring-tugging, rage-inducing clips of innocent Palestinians killed, injured, or otherwise harmed by alleged Israeli attacks have yet to produce material with enough verisimilitude for the entertainment industry to take them seriously as marketable creators, motion picture industry insiders disclosed today.

Actors, directors, producers, and effects specialists in the Gaza Strip noted with frustration Thursday that their ongoing efforts to create content to buttress Palestinian claims of genocide and war crimes by Israel, while resonant in the media and online spaces, have failed for far to impress Hollywood, where executives and casting experts see the Gaza propaganda material as amateurish, failing to convince the viewer that it represents anything real to which they can relate.

"I spend hours each day staging these scenes of carnage," lamented crisis actor Saleh Aljafarawi. "I've played and filmed myself as a rendered homeless by bombing; as a surgeon treating people injured in Israeli bombing; as a corpse; as distributor of much-needed food and medicine to suffering children; as a child receiving distributed food and medicine; and a dozen other roles. I think my acting was top-notch. Certainly my sponsors in Hamas think my performances were good enough to keep paying me to make them. It's a but of a slap in the face to have those creative efforts shot down as 'amateurish' by a bunch of West Coast suits."

"I should have remembered the Jews control Hollywood," he spat.

Editors, cameramen, makeup artists, and other contributors to the "Pallywood" phenomenon voiced similar disappointment. "I love Gaza, I would never leave Gaza," insisted filmmaker Edwood Saïd. "I stay here to I can show the world our story, how beautiful this place was as an open-air concentration camp under blockade where we were all starving, before Israel came in and made it into an open-air concentration camp where we're all starving. I would never leave. And Hollywood won't let me, because apparently my art 'isn't convincing enough' or 'doesn't meet the most rudimentary levels of realism.' Total BS. This was going to be my ticket out of here. Did you know Hamas charges like five thousand dollars to let you out?"

Hollywood decision-makers defended their assessment of Pallywood as unpromising. "Maybe if it were animated," suggested a Universal Studios vice president. "That's approximately the intellectual level of the productions we've seen. In children's programming no one much cares how unrealistic the depictions are and caricature is the name of the game."

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