Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, June 11, 2024

"Kill another Zionist now!" No pushback from the Left on open calls to murder Jews

Throughout the past eight months, we have seen anti-Israel protesters insist that they are not pro-Hamas, or do not support October 7, and that they simply want a ceasefire and an end to the war. Many mention that they are Jewish themselves and insist that they are against antisemitism.

But if they only want peace, why are they silent when the people on their side actively call for murdering Jews?

These aren't isolated individuals. In yesterday's action in New York outside an exhibit that memorializes October. 7 Nova Music Festival victims, the protesters literally said they support Hamas and had a banner saying "Long Live October 7."

When they say "Intifada Revolution," they are most certainly not interpreting "intifada" as a benign call for peace.

The rally in Washington on Saturday has similar messages of support for, and calling for more, murders of Jews.

This group chanted "Kill another Zionist now." It was a public incitement to murder most Jews, and it passed with no comment from the university protesters and others who insist that they are only anti-war and support the Palestinian people, not Hamas.

So where the hell are all those people who insisted that they only want peace and a ceasefire? Why are they not in the forefront of condemning these explicit calls for violence, murder and the literal genocide of Jews?

Why are Zionists and pro-Israel media the only ones posting these images and videos?

And the silence is not only from the supposedly majority of protesters. While the liberal J-Street does not support Hamas, I have not seen one statement from J-Street condemning these public displays of supporting terror from people who they agree with politically.

The rhetoric from the radicals is getting more and more violent, the calls to murder Jews and support Hamas' genocidal aims becoming more and more explicit. The reason they feel comfortable calling for the genocide of Jews is because their allies on the Left are silent, and the mainstream news media simply doesn't think that this incitement to murder is worth covering.

As long as the mainstream Left remain silent and condone the wannabe terrorists in their ranks, things will keep getting worse. The media will wait for them to actually murder Jews before they even pretend to notice that this is happening. And the "moderate" university protesters are proving either that they are hypocrites or that they secretly support the murder of Jews.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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Lebanon's Naharnet asks, "Is all-out Israel-Hezbollah war inevitable?Is all-out Israel-Hezbollah war inevitable?"

It interviews supposed experts who generally agree that Israe land Hezbollah do not want a full war. But what they don't say is that the current low-level conflict keeps escalating - whenever one sidee goes even slightly beyond a previous line, the other side responds in kind.

Hezbollah is introducing new weapons, and new tactics. Israel has been getting more aggressive in response, especially after last week's wildfires.

More Hezbollah members have been killed in this fighting than in the entire 2006 Second Lebanon War.

Everyone knows that no one wants a war, but the escalations do not have an "off" button, with the possible exception of a ceasefire in Gaza. Last week alone Hezbollah attacked Israel 52 times - more than seven attacks a day. Things are only getting worse.

But there is a better way way to avoid war, and the key players are the people of Lebanon.

As I've argued previously, if the Lebanese people would stage a large (or just very loud) public protest against war with Israel - you know, a real peace protest - that would get publicity in the mainstream media, Hezbollah would have a ladder to climb down from their tree.

The terror group claims to represent the Lebanese people. It is all a lie, but they base their legitimacy on that lie. If ordinary Lebanese people would protest Hezbollah, specifically, and call for a ceasefire with Israel, it would be difficult for Hezbollah to dismiss it as Zionist propaganda.

The Lebanese people are the biggest losers in any escalation. They should rise up and ensure that the escalation never happens.

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!

06/10 Links Pt2: UNSC approves US ceasefire res; The ICC’s Brazen Anti-Israel Bias; The racism of never blaming Hamas for anything; The BBC is an Orwellian, Kafkaesque nightmare

From Ian:

Brendan O'Neill: The racism of never blaming Hamas for anything

We really are living in an era of moral inversion. Every day there is a sinister twisting of the truth to suit the ideological prejudices of those who loathe Israel. Hamas hides the hostages it seized from the Nova music festival in a densely populated civilian area, and yet it’s Israel that is accused of being ‘perfidious’. Hamas purposely puts its Jewish victims among the women and children of a crowded refugee camp, and yet it’s Israel that is accused of wearing a ‘humanitarian camouflage’. Hamas was founded with the express intention of murdering Jews, an intention it gave brute force to on 7 October with its slaughter of a thousand Israelis, and yet it’s Israel that is damned as ‘genocidal’. The racist hostage-takers are reimagined as victims, the liberators of the hostages as criminals. It is one Kafkaesque lie after another.

Where is Hamas in all the political rage over what happened in Nuseirat? It has been invisibilised, scrubbed from the narrative so that the blame might be heaped on Israel alone. Hamas merits not one mention in Francesca Albanese’s angry doggerel. Does she not know that Hamas started the Battle of Nuseirat, by firing its lethal weaponry at the IDF from amid the civilian hordes? Or perhaps she doesn’t care? You have to go beyond the headlines about Israel ‘killing 274 Palestinians’ to discover that the IDF came ‘under heavy fire’ and ‘fought intense gun battles’ with Hamas militants. To describe an army’s response to the bullets and missiles of terrorists as ‘genocidal’ is an unconscionable manipulation of language for cynical political ends.

The truth is this: Hamas is responsible for every death in Nuseirat. It will be literally responsible for some of them, unless we are expected to believe that you can fire grenades and mortar rounds in an area teeming with civilians without one of the deadly loads going anywhere near an innocent. And it is morally responsible for all of it, for all the suffering we saw on Saturday amid the joy of the four Israelis being liberated from the confinement of the anti-Semites. For the simple reason that it is the author of this hellish war, the instigator of it. Hamas and Hamas alone brought war to Nuseirat.

What the Battle of Nuseirat really exposes is not Israel’s ‘genocidal intent’ but Hamas’s evil. That Hamas placed the four hostages in a crowded civilian area confirms its callous disregard for Palestinians as well as Israelis. That it started a bloody battle with the IDF even as women were shopping and children were playing confirms its terroristic indifference to the injury and loss of innocent life. That it prioritised trying to hurt the IDF and keep a hold of the hostages over and above keeping the civilians of Nuseirat safe from harm confirms how zealous, how unhinged, its anti-Israel, anti-Jewish doctrine has become. This is a movement that prizes killing a Jew more highly than saving a Palestinian. Its cruelty is unparalleled in the modern era.

And yet, all of this is whitewashed. Hamas’s ‘intent’ is rarely mentioned, its ruthlessness rarely commented on, its moral responsibility never even broached. Instead the anti-Israel set infantilises Hamas and holds up Israel as the only true, conscious actor in this conflict. There is bigotry here, even something like racism. There’s the racism of blaming the Jews for everything but also the racism of blaming Palestinians for nothing, as if they are children, not truly answerable for their wrongs.

But Hamas are not children. They are anti-Semitic warmongers. They started this war that has been a calamity for Israelis and Palestinians alike, and they refuse to end it by returning all the hostages. It will be a good day for the Jewish State, the Palestinian people and the world when this barbarous movement is brought to an end.

Sharansky Sees the Return of Marxism

Natan Sharansky interviewed by Ariel Whitman (Globes)

Natan Sharansky is a symbol of Jewish national pride. Sharansky, born in Donetsk, Ukraine, was the spokesman for the human rights movement, a prisoner of Zion, and a leader of the struggle for the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate to Israel. He served nine years in the Gulag.

Asked about Oct. 7, he said, "We were deeply invested in incorrect concepts. For me, it all started back with Oslo. I said then that the idea of our bringing a dictator [Arafat] to the Palestinians who would make peace with us - because we would make him a dictator by giving him a lot of money - did not make sense. It's just the reverse: the dictator would need us as enemies, and therefore would not make peace with us."

"The Jews feel they are part of the liberal world, and the liberal world thinks the progressives are their partners. For years, I wrote...that one day, the liberals would realize they were not partners."

"The whole post-modern ideology that divides the world into oppressed and oppressor is neo-Marxism in its most primitive form. In the studies of critical race theories - which have become the Koran of the progressives - if you replace race with class, you get the ideology of the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union."

"There, too, the whole war is between one good side and one bad side, between the proletariat and the capitalists. The capitalists are always wrong and should not be given freedom of speech - aside from those who are considered politically correct. And the capitalist world should be destroyed completely, and a just world will be built on this. It is very sad that Marxism has come back after such a huge failure."

Col Kemp: Spain is now Europe’s most despicable nation

Spain’s hard-Left pile-on against Israel is a foretaste of dangerous things to come under a Labour government in Britain. Madrid is the latest capital to join South Africa’s obscene accusation of genocide at the International Court of Justice. This twisted charge comes straight out of the Soviet playbook which denounced the Jewish state for the same alleged crime in the 1970s. It is intended to taunt and vilify a country that was built to a large extent by survivors of an actual genocide, and is today fighting against a terrorist army whose very charter calls for the genocide of the Jews and the destruction of Israel.

Indeed, Hamas demands ‘the full and complete liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea’, meaning the replacement of the State of Israel by an Islamic state. These words, often heard from the mouth of Yahya Sinwar, the terrorist leader who planned and led Hamas’s slaughter on October 7, were precisely echoed the other day by Spain’s deputy prime minister Yolanda Díaz when she herself said ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’.

It is a sign of the depths to which Pedro Sanchez’s government has descended that one of his ministers should be repeating such slogans.

Here in Britain we can expect similar levels of depravity if Labour wins the election in July. The party manifesto is set to include recognising a Palestinian state, in the wake of Spain’s decision to do so along with other European governments. This has been hailed as vindication of its ‘resistance’. But what has Palestinian ‘resistance’ entailed so far? The murder, torture, rape and abduction of Israelis. Just yesterday, Israeli hostages were freed in a reminder of Hamas’ brutality and vindication of Israel’s continued operations in Gaza.

Labour recognition of a Palestinian state will achieve nothing whatsoever beyond mollifying anti-Israel voters and rewarding terrorism. It certainly won’t bring any progress towards the two-state solution Starmer says he wants, something that can only be brought about by agreement between Israel and Hamas.

But it will have immense costs. Contrary to any hope Starmer might have that appeasing Hamas in this way might lead to peace, it will in fact further embolden them to fight on, extending the bloodshed and reducing the prospects for any ceasefire negotiations, including the release of hostages. After all, why should Hamas make any concessions while the international community is piling the pressure on Israel to stop fighting?

06/10 Links Pt1: Israel Triumphs as Hamastan Comes to D.C.; Heroism and the Biden Brainless Trust; The world doesn't get to choose how Israel rescues its hostages

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The Hostage Rescue and the Truth About This War

After the hostage rescue, plenty of Palestinian partisans lodged specious complaints about the death toll caused when Hamas tried to execute the hostages and their rescuers on their way out of Nuseirat. But so did a few figures who represent institutions on which mainstream media confer a special legitimacy. One was Ben Saul—the UN special rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism and a professor of international law in Australia.

Professor Saul had this to say: “Israel’s rescue of four hostages in Gaza: (1) may have been illegally launched in anticipation that civilian casualties would be excessive, and (2) reportedly involved the additional war crime of perfidy — disguising some forces as protected civilians.”

Ah yes, the war crime of perfidy. If the Israelis aren’t stopped soon, we may see an escalation to chicanery. There’s no telling what skullduggery awaits the people of Gaza.

This is one of my favorite rules of international conflict. The full rule is defined thus: “Rule 65. Killing, injuring or capturing an adversary by resort to perfidy is prohibited.” In case that isn’t clear enough for you, the International Criminal Court explains that the crime, specifically, involves “killing or wounding treacherously individuals belonging to the hostile nation or army.”

The idea seems to be that Israel committed treacherously perfidious wounding in its mission. And there’s a compelling case against them: Instead of shooting their way in to the apartments holding hostages, they lied about being locals.

Of course, the silliness of “you can’t trick the enemy in war” aside, the Israelis were not on a kill mission but a rescue mission. And, yes, they fired back when Hamas terrorists tried to kill the civilians they were rescuing.

Lesson: The global class of “UN international law experts” is a figment.

John Podhoretz: Heroism and the Biden Brainless Trust

It was a clarifying weekend both in the Middle East and in Washington. Clarifying in the first place because Israel got some of its mojo back in the staggering rescue of the four hostages in broad daylight from separate buildings in the Nuseirat refugee camp—which is technically under UN control, let us not forget. And one of those buildings was an UN refugee school. In other words, the UN was being used as a hostage prison. So we had four Israelis being used as slaves and household workers in territory controlled by the the world’s “peacekeepers.”

Those of us who have long advocated literally blowing up the UN buildings in Turtle Bay in Manhattan—one of the first covers of the long-defunct magazine Insight, which I edited beginning in 1985, depicted the UN tower being dismantled, so that’s how long ago this idea has been percolating—now have renewed reason to press our case. The UN pays no taxes. Tear it down and there’s a huge development site in the most desirable spot in the city that could return billions in lost revenue. Meanwhile, the UN could be relocated to someplace that could use its commerce and doesn’t mind how it sheds blood and treasure in the name of Israel-hatred, like Lagos or South Sudan, and where there are no boutiques for the wives of monstrous dictators to buy stuff marked up especially for them. Rid my city of this organization that employs out-and-out neo-Nazis like UN “special rapporteur” Francesca Albanese, a person (I hesitate even to call her a person) whose views on Israel might cause Josef Goebbels to say, “Well, now you go a little far.” Not to mention one of the world’s greatest villains at the moment, UN General Secretary Guterres, a man who demonstrates the way in which a lifelong commitment to socialism now practically requires all-but-open Jew-hatred to maintain its purity as an ideological calling.

So that was Clarifying Moment #1. Clarifying Moment #2 was Israel getting itself off its back foot after a series of weeks (months) in which its people were losing heart, patience, trust, and the ability to see that the goal of destroying Hamas could ever be achieved. Part of the expression of this loss of drive was the default return to Israel’s own lousy politics, which saw its apotheosis in the decision of the dummkopf of the Israeli middle, Benny Gantz, fulfilling his pledge to exit the war cabinet and government (obviously at the behest of the Americans who began the drumbeat for Bibi Netanyahu’s ouster, like Chuck Schumer, who now cannot appear before a Jewish audience without being rightly and deservedly booed for his declaration of “Am Yisrael Naw Dog” on the Senate floor a few weeks ago).

Gantz is, to be charitable, not the sharpest stick in the drawer—indeed, Ted Baxter of the Mary Tyler Moore Show would beat him on The Price Is Right— but quitting ON THE DAY OF THE HOSTAGE RELEASE rather than waiting another 36 hours or something so that the country could at least have a few minutes to celebrate shows off the parlous political skills that will likely see him failing yet again whenever elections do actually take place.

Forget Gantz’s narischkeit, and the dumbfounding New York Times headline that read “Israel’s Euphoria Over Hostage Release May Be Fleeting”—a clear case of the wish being father to the thought, since the New York Times doesn’t want Israel to experience any euphoria, ever, unless perhaps it were to support “gender-affirming surgery” for two month-olds. Israel has had a moment here to see that it hasn’t lost the spirit of Entebbe, and it came just when it needed to come, and they will have their euphoria even if the NYT’s Joe Kahn would rather they sit shiva for his corrupted and contaminated news desk.

When Hostages Come Home

It’s hard to describe what it is like to be Israeli after October 7.

Around the world we are condemned for a war we did not start and did not seek. Even the rescue mission is spun in the press as Israeli overreaction, and one BBC commentator asked an IDF spokesperson whether the Israeli military should have warned the neighborhood in advance of. . . a sting operation.

Meantime, at home, we are uncertain. Uncertain about how this ever could have happened—and about the leaders who allowed it to. Especially our prime minister, who has refused to take responsibility for the massive failure that occurred that terrible day. It was stark, then, on Saturday, when Netanyahu showed up to be embraced by the success of the rescue mission but has not reached out to any of the families of the dozens of hostages who were killed in captivity.

By the end of the weekend, Benny Gantz and his party withdrew from the wartime coalition government and called for early elections. “Netanyahu prevents us from getting a real victory,” he said. “This is why we are leaving the government with a heavy heart but a full heart.”

All of this is happening as the unofficial war at Israel’s northern border heats up with constant rocket barrages fired by Hezbollah. Every young mother in my apartment building—I am one of them—has a husband who will most likely get called up to serve, again, against an enemy far mightier than the one we’ve faced in Gaza. When will that happen? We don’t know. We cannot sleep from the worry.

But if there is one thing we are certain of, it is this: we live in a country of heroes. We live in a country in which strangers feel like family. A country in which other men and women will sacrifice their lives to liberate us, to bring us home.

In this case, it took 246 days.

Noa Argmani’s mother has terminal brain cancer. Her dying wish was to see her daughter, who arrived at her hospital bedside that very afternoon. Almog Meir Jan’s father died hours before Almog was liberated, apparently of a broken heart. Arnon Zamora was buried on Sunday in Jerusalem, and thousands lined the streets. At the funeral, Aviram Meir, the uncle of rescued hostage Almog Meir Jan, addressed the Zamora family: “The blood of your children is mixed with ours. This is an unbreakable bond.”

One hundred and twenty hostages remain captive in Gaza.

This shouldn't be surprising, but unfortunately it is.

Al Sumaria, an Iraqi satellite TV channel, has an article on Iraqi falafel, which is somewhat different from most of the others we've seen.

The well-known Iraqi writer, Ahmed Saadawi, reviewed the main factors for the emergence of the Iraqi falafel sandwich, which came after a long journey in which multiple cultures, countries, and religions participated.

Al-Saadawi said in a blog post seen by Al-Sumaria News that the Iraqi Jews are credited with being the first to introduce “umba” sauce in the 1940s, which is a mixture of fenugreek seeds with some spices, noting that “the Iraqi umba Today it is different from Hindi, as it is an Iraqi invention.”

He explained that "the umba was a complete meal placed on its own in the samoon [which is a type of Georgian or Armenian bread that was transported by immigrants from these countries to Iraq], until Palestinians displaced from the 1948 war came, and some of them opened a falafel restaurant on Al --Rashid Street, and it was somewhere between the Jewish umba, the Palestinian falafel, and the Georgian samoon bread, the Iraqi falafel was born.”

I assume they mean amba, which is a fermented mango-based sauce with vinegar, salt, turmeric, chilies and fenugreek. Wikipedia says, "According to the legend, amba was developed in the 19th century by members of the Sassoon family of Bombay, India, who were Baghdadi Jews."

(Apologies if you know all this, I am not such a foodie.)

It is highly unusual for any Arab source to attribute anything culinary to Jews; usually the narrative is that the Jews stole all cuisine from the Arabs.

Samoon is not a pocket bread like falafel, but it can be sliced open and the falafel and vegetables placed inside. The Palestinians in Iraq got the idea of idea of eating falafel inside bread from the Jews in British Mandate Palestine who innovated falafel in pita.

I will have to try some amba, from Israel, naturally.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

The "perfidious Jew" is an old Christian antisemitic trope, and today's media still believes it

I have written about they hypocrisy of those who are accusing Israel accusing Israel of "perfidy" in the dramatic rescue operation on Saturday and how they almost never use that same accusation against Hamas or other previous examples of hostage rescue that involved the rescuers using ruses to disguise themselves as civilians or humanitarian workers or journalists.

For centuries, Catholics on Good Friday prayed at Mass on Good Friday:

Let us pray also for the perfidious Jews [perfidis Judaeis]: that Almighty God may remove the veil from their hearts; so that they too may acknowledge Jesus Christ our Lord. Almighty and eternal God, who dost not exclude from Thy mercy even Jewish perfidy [Judaicam perfidiam]: hear our prayers, which we offer for the blindness of that people; that acknowledging the light of thy Truth, which is Christ, they may be delivered from their darkness. Through the same our Lord Jesus Christ, who liveth and reigneth with thee in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Modern defenders of the prayer, which was changed by the Catholic Church in 1955, say that "perfidis Judaeis" does not mean "perfidious Jews" but "faithless" or "incredulous Jews." But the English and French translations of the term I can find from before 1955 invariably use the word "perfidious." And some Catholics want to bring the phrase back in the prayers.

In fact, the phrase "perfidious Jew" was part of the lexicon. I see dozens of examples in my search through older books and newspapers. This antisemitic account from a French periodical described Jews in Romania at the turn of the 20th century:

The Jews in the villages are the prime cause of the poverty, drunkenness, debauchery and demoralization of the Roumanian peasants. The Jew, who is always sober, thrifty, alert and shrewd, makes the peasant drink liquor, teaches him how to spend money, and when in a state of mirth and intoxication, the perfidious Jew induces the peasant to sell him the products of a whole year for a merc pittance. While the Jew is continually growing rich in the rural communes the peasants are being reduced to extreme dearth and penury. In order to save our country and for the sake of common decency the Jew must leave the peasant alone.

An 1881 California newspaper thought it witty to use this headline:

Far right antisemite Nick Fuentes has directly called for the genocide of "perfidious Jews" in America.

I don't think that the accusations of IDF perfidy today are necessarily directly related to the previous use of that specific term. But the term "perfidious Jew" has been one of the tropes of Jews throughout the history of Christianity. Jews are regarded ab initio as being treacherous and untrustworthy, and this myth has permeated the Western world for centuries.

It is hard to ignore how the news media continues to emphasize how IDF claims are inherently unreliable even when they can point to practically no examples where the Israeli authorities tried to mislead them.

This CNN storyCNN story is a perfect example:

Did CNN ever write a headline or even article copy saying "Hamas authorities claim 274 civilians died during the raid without providing evidence"? Why would the IDF climb a ladder to enter a room in the middle of a camp if they didn't already know the hostages were there and the names of the people imprisoning them? And why does CNN ignore Arab NGO reports that appear to confirm appear to confirm the "allegation"?

The "perfidious Jew" trope is part and parcel of Western culture, and consciously or not, the media today still embrace it.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

The Washington Post has a detailed description of the hostage rescue, and it includes some details that refute the anti-Israel narratives that Hamas and its supporters has managed to spread instantly in the moments after the event.

The rescue of Noa Argamani apparently went very cleanly, with no shots fired:

Israeli troops succeeded in reaching Argamani’s apartment without tipping off her guards, according to Hagari, who was watching video feeds from drones circling above and soldiers’ helmet cameras. Almost simultaneously, other units entered the building holding the three male hostages, about 220 yards away.

“In Noa Argamani’s building, we surprised them completely,” Hagari said.

The stunned young woman was bustled down the stairs into a vehicle and driven to a helicopter waiting nearby.

Soldiers relayed the good news with a coded phrase: “We have the diamond in our hand.”

The chopper lifted off, heading for a hospital near Tel Aviv. At 12:20 p.m., Argamani’s family was told she was free.

This is the ideal that everyone hopes for.

The apparently high death toll came from the other rescue, where Hamas terrorists used heavy weapons to fight back

The guards with the three male hostages had not been taken by surprise. A Yamam commander was shot as they entered the building. A firefight erupted, exposing the covert mission.

“Immediately, it became a war zone,” said Amir Avivi, a reservist brigadier general and former deputy commander of the IDF’s Gaza division who was briefed on the operation.

The soldiers were able to get the three hostages and the injured man into a vehicle, but it broke down under Hamas fire from rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, officials said. At one point, Avivi said, they were forced to abandon the vehicle and seek refuge in a building nearby.

The commanders called for air support.

Hamas used RPGs in a crowded refugee camp and marketplace. It is highly likely that Hamas, whose leaders gain politically from every dead civilian, did not distinguish between the soldiers and anyone else in the area. Yet not one news story even floats the idea that some civilians were killed in a firefight by Hamas weapons and not by the IDF. Yet Hamas members have routinely used weapons dressed as civilians - they film themselves doing it every day - and the soldiers have no way of distinguishing them.

To be sure, many civilians were killed by the air support bombings needed to extract the soldiers and hostages. Soldiers are not obligated under international law to allow themselves and the people they have rescued to be sitting ducks and let themselves die - they can use whatever means is necessary to get out alive, within the boundaries of proportionality. The proportionality calculation takes into account both the value of the soldiers lives and the military importance of rescuing the hostages successfully.

No nation would be considered guilty of violating the wars of law for doing the exact same thing. Yet only Israel is held to this standard.

The Post also links to a six second video taken by a nearby resident as the muffled gunfire began, showing the ladders used by the IDF to get to the third floor apartment owned by a "journalist" and his family who were holding the three hostages.

The person taking the video says, "Here they have arrived," almost as if she was expecting this.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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In 2008, a fake international humanitarian organization force tricked FARC terrorists into releasing hostages. No one complained of "perfidy."

Ken Roth claims claims that the Israelis who entered the Nuseirat camp dressed in civilian clothing were guilty of the crime of perfidy:

"Disguising combatants in civilian clothing in order to commit hostilities constitutes perfidy," a war crime. .Israel's rescue team reportedly entered Nuseirat in a furniture truck "driven by a female soldier in civilian clothes."

An Israeli military spokesman "declined to say whether" the soldiers who conducted the rescue operation "were disguised as Palestinian civilians, a tactic that Israeli special forces have previously used." That's because it is the war crime of perfidy.

Roth's source, strangely, is an article in a US Navy law journal and not a link to actual international law. The article makes clear that it is only the opinion of the author. Why does Roth not link to actual international law?

Because it is not at all clear cut that pretending to be a civilian during a hostage rescue mission is perfidious.

A 2014 monograph from the Israel Democracy Institute from 2014 looks at exactly this issue in great detail. Roth's blanket statement that this was perfidy is not accurate at all, but it is a complex question, depending on the exact nature of the incident and who does what.

But it is clear that Roth doesn't really care about perfidy, and just wants to insult Israel, And we have proof from an incident in Colombia in 2008. That incident was far closer to classic perfidy than anything Israel did on Saturday.

On 2 July 2008, the Colombian government directed a daring operation took place at Apaporis River in the department of Guaviare to free several hostages including Íngrid Betancourt. The aim was to motivate the leader of Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) known as Cesar that the hostages he held were to be moved to another hostage camp by helicopter, with the help of an international humanitarian NGO, so that negotiations could begin for their release. The Colombians decided to pose as an NGO ..

On Tuesday two helicopters painted white and orange and with a stylized red bird made up of wavy red lines above two curved branches of blue leaves on the sides of the helicopter which disguised it as a fictitious NGO left a military base in an Andean mountain valley and settled in a jungle clearing. Another helicopter was carrying Colombian agents wearing Che Guevara T-shirts which landed to pick up the hostages. On board were Colombian military intelligence agents plus a doctor and two nurses. The rescuers included an agent, pretending to be Italian, another supposedly from the Middle East and an Australian with English ‘identical to Crocodile Dundee’. Two others wore Che Guevara T-shirts. The NGO group was accompanied by a TV crew of two who were Colombian commandos.

15 hostages were rescued from the FARC and two guerrillas including the commander who was liable for the hostages were captured.

So we have Colombian armed forces posing as FARC rebels, as humanitarian aid NGO employees, and as journalists, all as part of a successful ruse to fool Cesar into handing over the hostages.

By any measure this is far more perfidious than what Israel did.

Did Human Rights Watch, headed by Ken Roth at the time, call out Colombia for its perfidy? Not at all. It said, "Human Rights Watch today welcomed reports that 15 hostages that had been held for several years by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) have been rescued. Human Rights Watch called on the FARC to immediately and unconditionally release hundreds of others still being held...In light of reports that there were no civilian casualties, the Colombian security forces should be commended for carrying out an effective mission that respected international humanitarian law. "

HRW declared the rescue operation that relied on feigning protected status of journalists, NGO workers and also the perfidy of pretending to be fellow rebels in their dress and actions followed international law.

So why was that legal, according to Roth, but not the IDF action to rescue hostages?

In fact, there are a number of legal analyses trying to figure out why world governments and NGOs all seemed to give Colombia a pass. The best explanation given is that everyone hated FARC so the ends justified the means.

As always, the rules for Israel are different than for everyone else.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Ten (count'em, TEN!) EoZ cartoons!

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!

06/09 Links: Daring Israeli Rescue of 4 Hostages Discredits Appeasement; ‘At the level of Entebbe’; Journalist, doctor held Israelis hostage in Gaza

From Ian:

Daniel Greenfield: Daring Israeli Rescue of 4 Hostages Discredits Appeasement

After months in which it was falsely claimed that the only way to rescue hostages was to cut a deal with Islamic terrorists, Israel launched a daring daylight rescue operation, simultaneously hitting two houses where four hostages were being held.

The operation brought together the Israeli Army, the Shin Bet, its version of the FBI, Yamam, and the border police, which penetrated deep into enemy territory in a risky rescue mission that required precise timing and holding off hordes of terrorists who swarmed to attack the rescuers.

Despite the odds, Israel pulled it off. And the media and the political establishment doubled down on the narrative.

The White House and international leaders repeated their demands for a “ceasefire” that would leave Hamas in power and ready to launch another Oct 7.

The media eagerly passed on the Hamas claims of “mass civilian casualties”.

Both were responding to the fact that the operation had once again shown that the only right and moral thing to do was to defeat the terrorists.

There is only way to stop the cycle of Islamic terrorism and that is to stop cutting deals with the terrorists.

‘At the level of Entebbe’

The operation’s sole Israeli casualty was Chief Inspector Arnon Zamora, 36, a Yamam squad commander. He is survived by his wife and two children.

Noa Argamani (26) was held in one apartment, locked in a room, while Almog Meir Jan (21), Andrey Kozlov (27) and Shlomi Ziv (40) were held in second apartment, in a building 200 meters away, according to Hagari. All four had been kidnapped from the Nova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im on Oct. 7, and were constantly watched by armed Hamas guards.

“Families with guards who had weapons inside the buildings, inside the flats, together, holding the hostages,” said Hagari.

Hamas periodically moved the hostages from one location to another, some of which were above ground and some of which were below. The fact that four hostages were being held above ground relatively close together created a unique opportunity.

At 11:00 a.m., the special forces assault teams got the “go” from Halevi and set out, approaching the two buildings in Nuseirat—a heavily populated civilian area.

At 11:25 a.m., the forces entered both buildings at the same time, engaged the terrorists, and extracted the hostages, with air support.

Had the operation targeted only one of the buildings, the IDF assessed that the Hamas guards in the second building would have killed their hostages, believing a raid was imminent, Hagari explained. “That is the reason why we made this decision,” he said.

The operation had been canceled three times before finally being given the green light, said Hagari.

“We gather the intelligence in multiple ways in order to make sure that we are ready for [an] operation,” he added. As information comes in, commanders need to decide whether or not to wait for more, he explained.

“There are a lot of details, like in a puzzle,” he said. “We may never have all of the links, but we have to make sure that we have enough links to ensure there is leverage.”

The IDF built models of the apartments for special forces to rehearse the rescue, according to Hagari. “The scale of the rehearsals was as large as the [1976] Entebbe operation—[in terms of] the models we used, as well as the way in which we trained, and we had to make sure that everything was done simultaneously,” he said.

Extensive preparations notwithstanding, tensions in the ISA command room were extremely high as the operation got underway, Hagari recalled.

“In Noa Argamani’s building our forces surprised them completely; it was still hard. In the other building, we had crossfires with the guards during which the commander of the squad from the [Yamam] Unit was injured,” he said.

Zamora was evacuated to hospital in critical condition, where he later died of his wounds.

“A very brave warrior,” said Hagari.

At this point in the operation, the word was out and terrorists armed with RPGs were “running in the streets” of the heavily populated residential neighborhood, converging on the rescue force, he continued.

“The cynical way in which Hamas is using [the] civilian population [of Gaza] in order to fire at our forces, embedding themselves within civilians, is tragic,” he stated.

“There was so much fire drawn to our forces, which meant we needed to fire from the air as well as the streets,” he said. “It was done very very professionally and precisely,” he emphasized, adding that the IDF had a pre-planned target bank of terrorist forces in the area.

The successful rescue highlights the high-level integration of Israel’s various security and military organizations, with the IDF, ISA, Yamam and IAF demonstrating their combined capabilities in intelligence gathering, operational planning and execution.

Hagari noted that 120 hostages are still held by Hamas in Gaza, and reaffirmed Israel’s commitment to securing their release.

“We will do everything possible to return all the hostages home. This morning’s operation was not only a success but also an opportunity to fulfill the goals of this war,” he said.

Col. Richard Kemp: 'Incredibly impressive, difficult to rescue hostages from 2 places'

Colonel Richard Kemp, the former commander of the British military forces in Afghanistan, spoke to Israel National News - Arutz Sheva about the daring rescue operation in Nuseirat yesterday (Saturday) in which four hostages were rescued alive, eight months after they were kidnapped from the Nova music festival on October 7.

"This was an extremely significant event in this war," Col. Kemp told us. "The IDF has been fighting very hard, very effectively, and with immense success in Gaza. They have destroyed most of the Hamas terror army and are on the path of its final destruction as a fighting force that can threaten Israel. But all Israelis’ hearts are firmly with the hostages and this dramatic rescue operation of four of them is a much-needed shot in the arm for people who have endured so much for so long in what is becoming Israel’s longest-ever war."

He noted that such successful hostage rescues are rare during warfare. "Successful hostage rescue in a hostile environment is probably the most difficult of military operations. I have been involved in the rescue of British hostages in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is rare for them to succeed. There are two prerequisites that are both extremely hard to achieve. First, you must have pinpoint intelligence to tell you exactly where the hostages are being held and in what conditions, including who and how many are guarding them. Second, you must be able to achieve surprise, in other words, to launch the operation without prior detection. Bearing in mind it is likely that hostages will have a gun to their heads and any warning that a rescue is coming will likely see them killed immediately. Terrorists will also often be expecting a rescue and will prepare to kill the rescuers eg by booby traps, snipers, etc."

"In this case, hostages were rescued from two separate locations which is incredibly impressive given the necessity to coordinate them so precisely to avoid terrorists in one location being so that one assault does not trigger reaction from terrorists in the other," he said.

"I have the utmost admiration for those soldiers, police, and intelligence officers who carried out this operation. Each one of them knew well the lethal dangers they faced, which has been tragically shown by the death of Yamam Chief Inspector Arnon Zemorah.

When asked about the question a BBC presenter asked about the possibility of the IDF issuing a warning prior to launching the rescue operation in order to reduce Gazan casualties, Col. Kemp responded that "that sort of question can be dismissed as a sign of complete ignorance of the reality of war. To give a warning that you are about to launch a hostage rescue operation would be a guarantee of that operation’s failure."

Official Palestinian Authority news doesn't mention the rescue once but claims there was a "massacre"

The official Palestinian Authority news agency Wafa had many stories about the events in the Nuseirat camp yesterday = but readers would have no idea that four Israeli hostages were rescued. To the Palestinian media, it was merely a senseless "massacre.'

The initial news story said,

80 citizens were martyred, the majority of them children and women, and others were injured, today, Saturday, as a result of the intense occupation bombardment, by land, sea and air, on the Central Governorate in the central Gaza Strip, specifically the Nuseirat camp, which witnessed unprecedented aggression, for more than two hours.

The followup:

The death toll of the massacre, carried out by the Israeli occupation forces as a result of targeting the central governorate in the central Gaza Strip, especially the Nuseirat camp, rose today, Saturday, to 210 martyrs and more than 400 injured.

Our correspondent said that military vehicles suddenly entered the areas east and northwest of the Nuseirat camp, coinciding with violent artillery shelling that targeted large areas of the camp.

The occupation vehicles also penetrated near the Wadi Gaza Bridge on the Salah al-Din Road in the center of the Gaza Strip, and expanded their incursion east of Deir al-Balah and into the Bureij and al-Maghazi camps.

Then a whole series of reactions from the Arab world that similarly ignored the point of the rsid:

The Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement issued on Saturday evening, “The Arab Republic of Egypt condemns in the strongest terms the Israeli attacks on the Nuseirat camp in the central Gaza Strip, which resulted in the martyrdom of more than 150 Palestinians and the injury of hundreds, in blatant violation of all provisions of the law, international law, international humanitarian law, and all the values of humanity and human rights.”

The Jordanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriate Affairs condemned the brutal Israeli attack that targeted the Nuseirat camp today, Saturday, and resulted in the death and injury of hundreds, which reflects the systematic targeting of Palestinian civilians, and the Israeli persistence in violating international law and international humanitarian law, and continuing to commit war crimes.

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation condemned the horrific bloody massacre committed by the Israeli occupation army in the Nuseirat camp in the Gaza Strip, which led to the martyrdom and wounding of hundreds of Palestinian citizens, the majority of whom were women and children. The organization considered, in a statement issued by it, that "what is happening is a continuation of organized state terrorism and the crime of genocide, in flagrant violation of international humanitarian law and relevant United Nations resolutions."

Here's a photo that you will never see in Palestinian media.*

* I spoke too soon. Roya News used a similar photo to claim that Hamas treats the hostages better than Israelis treat prisoners.

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The infographic above shows some of the drivers for people believing misinformation. we see a lot of that in the sheer amount of anti-Israel propaganda and bias in the news media, especially since October 7.

One topic not often focused on, however, is the tendency of normal people to fill in information gaps with internally developed narratives that fit their biases.

During wartime especially, we only hear maybe 10% of what's really going on. We are all ignorant. As the dramatic rescue operation on Saturday showed again, there is a lot happening behind the scenes that we are not aware of.

When we are given incomplete information, it is natural as humans to fill in the blanks with whatever stories seem to make the most sense to us. We have a hard time accepting that we don't understand something; we look for familiar patterns and attempt to fit the little we do know into a framework where we feel that we are on more solid ground.

And that's where people reveal their biases, specifically, cognitive biases.

Imagine a video of a heated confrontation between a white person and a person of color in a mostly white neighborhood. Without audio or any other context, some people will assume the person of color was doing something that justifiably upset the white person, others would assume the white person is a racist who is attacking the person of color for no reason and would not act the same way if the other person was white. Bias will determine which of those scenarios people favor, and most people will subconsciously fill in the gaps to fit their biases as they watch the video, and cement those beliefs when watching it repeatedly, looking for hints like facial expressions and posture to justify their initial judgements.

During this war, we are seeing this play out every hour of every day. Modern antisemites invariably fill in the knowledge gaps with lurid narratives of Israeli evil. They project their bias that Jews are bloodthirsty, malicious, liars, and uncaring about anyone but other Jews. Subconsciously or consciously they take fragmentary narratives and turn them into anti-Israel screeds.

A great example is UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese's tweet yesterday soon after news of the hostage rescue raid in Gaza.

She doesn't know how many civilians were killed, and how many militants were killed, but she believes the only source available at the time - the Hamas propaganda outlet the Gaza Media Office.

She believes the lie that the IDF soldiers were hiding in an "aid truck" when even the truck identified by Al Jazeera as an "aid trucK' had a logo for a dishwashing soap (and even 24 hours later it is not at all clear that this was the truck that was used, some Gazans claim it was a furniture truck.)

She believes that Israel had a choice of only two positions: give up all terrorists, thus legitimizing Hamas' kidnappings, or use the hostages as an excuse to wantonly attack Gaza civilians in a planned genocide. There is no other option. It is an oversimplification of reality that fits her biases perfectly.

And she then concludes, based on her obvious ignorance, that the rescue is a "genocidal action" and not really meant to rescue hostages. Not only that, but her antisemitic interpretation of incorrect, biased and fragmentary data is is "crystal clear."

Albanese is not stupid. But her bias against Jews prompts her to take a very incomplete view of a situation and fill in the gaps to fit her anti-Israel and antisemitic bias, of Jews who suffered genocide now maliciously engaging in genocide themselves.

This is the pattern that nearly everyone uses: they look for evidence to back up their stories, and ignore anything that contradicts them. But the important fact is that the stories precede the evidence, and the evidence is cherry-picked to support the story, not the other way around.

Israelis who have been in the IDF know how important it is as a basic underlying principle to adhere to international law, to avoid harming civilians as much as possible. They are trained in the Laws of Armed Conflict more than 95% of journalists or human rights workers. They also know that LOAC doesn't mean sacrificing yourself or your fellow soldiers or your own civilians to save enemy civilians, that the lives of your own side take precedence when they are in danger. (Don't trust me, read the Geneva Conventions yourself. )

But too many in the media and NGOs and even other governments, who should definitely know better, make assumptions of Israeli malice that have no basis in reality. Whether the gaps in knowledge are a result the IDF not wanting to reveal its intel, or in their believing Hamas lies, or an unwillingness to look at how the IDF actually works (which is documented or those who care to know,) is not a as important as the fact that they choose to fill in the gaps with the worst possible interpretation and stories about Jews.

Israel is objectively doing more to protect enemy civilians than any army in history ever has. (Feel free to find counterexamples. The US has gotten close in some limited operations.) Hamas has engineered the war to maximize its own side's civilian casualties because its main weapon is world pressure on Israel; dead civilians are the best way to achieve that. Hamas lies from the Al Ahli hospital to today are obvious and proven.

Given all that, any assumption of Israeli malice or indifference towards Gaza civilians - and any assumption that Hamas cares one whit about Gaza lives or tells the truth in its accusations against Israel - is not a reflection of reality but a projection of antisemitic attitudes onto the IDF and Israel as a whole.

Of course, I have biases too. I tend to give the benefit of the doubt to Israel, with my own research into how the IDF works, my own knowledge of how Israelis really think from actually speaking to them and interviewing them, my knowledge about how large organizations like the IDF work and how difficult it is for emotions like "revenge" to be part of multi-layer decision-making with layers of legal oversight, and a history of hindsight that almost always shows that the Israelis did everything that could be expected of any moral army - and when they fell short, they worked hard to fix the mistakes.

Sometimes I am wrong in my assumptions of giving the IDF the benefit of the doubt, but not very often.

Anyone who looks at the Gaza rescue operation and sees only an anti-Israel narrative is not objective. But beyond that, none of us outside a few decision-makers know the extent of Israeli preparation, the amount of intelligence it had, the alternatives considered and debated, the amount of time available and other limitations, the chances that the hostages would be moved elsewhere during the preparations, the controls put into place to minimize civilian casualties, how many were actually killed and how many of them were legal combatants. These are all pieces of information that are necessary to evaluate the morality of the operation, and almost no one knows it all. Creating an anti-Israel story based on a tiny percentage of facts available is not analysis - it is propaganda.

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AP's Josef Federman and Larry Fenn wrote an important article, the first one by mainstream media that reported on the glaring inconsistencies between different Hamas accounts of the number of Gazans killed in the war and pointing to evidence that these were done knowingly. But while it questions the number of women and children killed and shows how the Gza authorities are contradicting themselves, it still accepts their total casualty counts as accurate - and that is absurd.

The proportion of Palestinian women and children being killed in the Israel-Hamas war appears to have declined sharply, an Associated Press analysis of Gaza Health Ministry data has found, a trend that both coincides with Israel’s changing battlefield tactics and contradicts the ministry’s own public statements.

The trend is significant because the death rate for women and children is the best available proxy for civilian casualties in one of the 21st century’s most destructive conflicts. In October, when the war began, it was above 60%. For the month of April, it was below 40%. Yet the shift went unnoticed for months by the U.N. and much of the media, and the Hamas-linked Health Ministry has made no effort to set the record straight.

AP even implies that the total number of reported deaths may be understated:

Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine director for Human Rights Watch, said his group has always found the Health Ministry’s numbers to be “generally reliable” because it has direct access to hospitals and morgues.

Whatever the reason for fewer women and child being killed, Shakir said, in the grand scheme, the trend pales when compared with the war’s overall devastation. “The death toll may be an undercount,” he added, because many bodies are still under rubble and the war has made it difficult for the Health Ministry to comprehensively gather data.

AP then claims that the differences between the detailed health ministry numbers and the total amount is from bodies that have not been identified:

The ministry said publicly on April 30 that 34,622 had died in the war. The AP analysis was based on the 22,961 individuals fully identified at the time by the Health Ministry with names, genders, ages, and Israeli-issued identification numbers.

The ministry says 9,940 of the dead – 29% of its April 30 total – were not listed in the data because they remain “unidentified.” These include bodies not claimed by families, decomposed beyond recognition or whose records were lost in Israeli raids on hospitals.

Perhaps there are a couple of hundred such bodies, but the vast majority of the difference in the two counts is that most of the 10,000 without complete data are made up.

We saw the Hamas "Gaza Media Office" make up statistics on Saturday. Its Telegram channel claimed 210 dead in the Israeli rescue operation in Nusseirat, but the health ministry did not as of this writing make that claim, only saying 55 at a press conference on Saturday afternoon. The 210 figure was made up by the Hamas media office, and wasn't based on anything the health ministry had released.

Just as the media office had been making up fake "women and children" casualties, it has also been making up fake total numbers of casualties. AP recognizes the inconsistencies in one - knowing that Hamas is lying - but still believes the other claims even with tons of evidence that these claims are wholly fictional.

Anyone who covered the Al Ahli hospital incident, where Hamas immediately claimed 471 victims while no Western source believed it, knows that Hamas has been lying since the beginning of the war. It is unconscionable and immoral for the media to keep reporting the Hamas lies when they know they are lies themselves.

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!