07/10 Links Pt1: Melanie Phillips: Abandoning Israel and the Jews; DOJ interviews Oct. 7 victims for case against Hamas; US House leaders demand probe into Palestine Chronicle

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Abandoning Israel and the Jews

Five days after Britain’s Labour party won an overwhelming parliamentary majority in the general election, we can see the outline of what this is likely to mean for British Jews and their country’s relationship with Israel. That outline is not reassuring.

The new Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, is said to have purged his party of antisemitism and has persuaded many British Jews that he has made Labour safe again for Jewish voters. On Sunday morning, he told the Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas — antisemite, Holocaust denier and fan of Hitler’s wartime ally in the Middle East — that an independent state was the “undeniable right” of the Palestinian people and that “financial support for the Palestinian Authority” was one of his “immediate priorities”.

He did not tell Abbas that a condition of this financial support was that the PA must stop paying financial rewards to terrorists and their families for murdering Israelis. Nor did he say that a condition of receiving more British taxpayers’ money was that the PA must end its indoctrination of Palestinian Arab children in Nazi-themed demonisation of the Jews, teaching them that their greatest ambition should be to murder Jews and steal all their land.

Instead, Starmer proceeded to lecture Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, that there was a “clear and urgent” need for a ceasefire in Gaza as well as an immediate increase in the volume of humanitarian aid reaching civilians. As for the war being waged by Hezbollah in Lebanon against northern Israel, Starmer warned Netanyahu:
It was crucial all parties acted with caution.

What kind of “caution” does Starmer suggest is appropriate in the face of a threat of genocide by Hezbollah and its patron, Iran? Or to put it another way, with Hezbollah primed to unleash its armoury of 150,000 rockets and other missiles that can reach all of Israel, and with Iran itself along with Iraqi, Syrian and Houthi militias not to mention the terrorist armies of the “West Bank” all primed to attack Israel if it launches all-out war against Hezbollah, does Starmer really believe that Israel actually needs to be told to act “with caution”?

Can he really not grasp that, given the daily onslaught over the past nine months from dozens of rockets, drones and guided missiles that have destroyed Israeli border towns, left swathes of northern Israel burning, made more than 60,000 Israelis refugees in their own country and kept other residents in the north trapped in their safe rooms (two Israelis were killed today by a Hezbollah rocket strike that hit their car) that if the Israelis abandon that “caution” it’s because they have no other choice?

Starmer shows absolutely zero understanding that this crisis isn’t about Hamas, Hezbollah or the Palestinian Arabs. They are proxies and pawns in an Iranian war of extermination against Israel, the essential precursor to the destruction and conquest of America, Britain and the west.

So little does he understand this that the new Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, is now poring over the government’s legal advice on whether to stop UK arms sales to Israel.

Justice Department interviews Oct. 7 victims for case against Hamas

The U.S. Justice Department is interviewing Oct. 7 survivors and victims’ families to build a case against the terrorist organization and its financial supporters.

Former hostages and families of U.S. citizens who have been killed abroad have spoken with prosecutors and FBI agents in recent months, sources told Bloomberg News.

Beyond acts of terrorism, the broader focus of the U.S. investigation is targeting the financial networks that have funded Hamas, the report said.

That support includes backing from countries such as Iran and Qatar.

The U.S. has seized assets in cases where it’s hard to arrest the people facing criminal charges. “In terrorism cases, seized funds can be potentially redirected into a reserve for U.S. victims of state-sponsored terrorism,” Bloomberg reported.

On Feb. 2, the Justice Department announced that it had seized more than 500,000 barrels of Iranian fuel it said provided funding for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and its Quds Force. In addition, it seized $108 million destined for the Quds Force.

“Iran utilizes the proceeds of its black-market oil sales to fund its criminal activities, including its support of the IRGC, Hamas, Hezbollah and other Iranian-aligned terrorist groups,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland in a Justice Department statement.

Iran and Syria are facing a slew of recent lawsuits filed on behalf of hostage victims and their families for providing the financial backing that enabled the Oct. 7 attack.

Top House lawmakers demand federal probe into US nonprofit linked to Hamas operative

A pro-Palestinian news outlet linked to Hamas is facing scrutiny from three separate House committees in a joint memo urging the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate.

Ways & Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., and Education & Workforce Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland on Monday accusing The Palestine Chronicle and the U.S. nonprofit that runs it of running afoul of several laws.

"We write to urge you to investigate The Palestine Chronicle and People Media Project for violating the law, particularly for providing material support to a known terrorist organization in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2339B, for filing a false tax return in violation of 26 U.S.C. § 7206, and for failing to file a valid tax return and pay estimated taxes in violation of 26 U.S.C. § 7203," the letter said.

It comes after multiple Israeli hostages taken into Gaza by Hamas during their Oct. 7 terror attack were found in the home of Abdallah Aljamal, according to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Aljamal was a contributor to media outlets, including The Palestine Chronicle, as well as a spokesman for the Hamas-run Gaza Labor Ministry. He was killed by the IDF during an operation to rescue the hostages.

"During his time as a 'journalist,' Mr. Aljamal was listed as a ‘correspondent’ on The Palestine Chronicle’s website, but the publication later changed the description to 'contributor' after news of his holding innocent Israeli hostages was reported around the world," the lawmakers' letter said.

The Republicans also accused The Palestine Chronicle and People Media Project of having ties to Iran, writing that the outlet's founder and editor-in-chief, Ramzy Baroud, "has also written for Kayhan International, an outlet that reportedly is funded by Iran’s supreme leader. Notably, Kayhan International has had six of its published writers appear on state-controlled sites that were previously seized in 2020 by the U.S. government after finding that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps unlawfully used them to further a global covert influence campaign."

The lawmakers pointed to a federal statute that states anyone under U.S. jurisdiction providing "material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization, or attempts or conspires to do so, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both, and, if the death of any person results, shall be imprisoned for any term of years or for life."

"[B]ased on the facts available, The Palestine Chronicle and People Media Project appear to be at the very least complicit in supporting Hamas, and at worst full-fledged financiers of terrorism," the letter said.

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"No one is free until everyone is free" quote was originally a message to American Jews from Emma Lazarus. We should listen.

We see a lot of variations of the quote "No one is free until everyone is free" in protests and essays.

It is often attributed to Maya Angelou, who said it as "The truth is, no one of us can be free until everybody is free."

But Angelou got it from Emma Lazarus, the Jew who also wrote the "Give me your tired, your poor..." quote on the Statue of Liberty. 

It is not well known but towards the end of her short life, Lazarus became a Zionist - before Herzl -  and an ardent opponent of antisemitism. She founded a society to help oppressed Jews in Eastern Europe to go to the Land of Israel.

Here is what Lazarus wrote in The American Hebrew, in her column "An Epistle to the Hebrews," in 1883, from which the quote came:

In defiance of the hostile construction that may be put upon my words, I do not hesitate to say that our national defect is that we are not "tribal" enough; we have not sufficient solidarity to perceive that when the life and property of a Jew in the uttermost provinces of the Caucuses are attacked, the dignity of a Jew in free America is humiliated. We who are prosperous and independent have not sufficient homogeneity to champion on the ground of a common creed, common stock, a common history, a common heritage of misfortune, the rights of the lowest and poorest Jew-peddler who flees, for life and liberty of thought, from Slavonic mobs. Until we are all free, we are none of us free. But lest we should justify the taunts of our opponents, lest we should become "tribal" and narrow and Judaic rather than humane and cosmopolitan like the anti-Semites of Germany and Jew-baiters of Russia, we ignore and repudiate our unhappy brethren as having no part or share in their misfortunes- until the cup of anguish is held also to our own lips.

Lazarus used the phrase to refer to Jews in America who she felt were not adequately concerned about the oppression of their fellow Jews in Eastern Europe. She felt Jews should become more tribal, more concerned about each other, prioritizing the wellbeing of our fellow Jews anywhere in the world over universal principles that  antisemites and Jew call "humane and cosmopolitan." 

Lazarus warns that if we ignore the plight of our fellow Jews around the world, we will eventually drink from their same cup of anguish.

Her message is the opposite of how the phrase is understood now. It is not universal but narrow. She is saying to Jews what Benjamin Franklin probably didn't say, "We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately,"

Lazarus, if she was alive today, would be aghast at the American Jews who embrace Israel's enemies in the name of "human rights" - the same self-deception that the racial antisemites of the 19th century used in pretending to be upholding moral standards. Lazarus would use this phrase not to refer to Palestinians but to Jews being held hostage by Hamas and those kept homeless in the north under Hezbollah fire, today's equivalent of the "poorest Jew-peddler." 

Emma Lazarus is a hero today among progressives who have erased her Judaism to turn it into a universal, watered down message. Perhaps they should read what she really said. 

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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Fake Hamas website is really anti-Hamas propaganda

Someone bought the Hamas.com domain and turned it into a fake Hamas site that emphasizes how evil it is while pretending to be legitimate.

I personally don't like this sort of deception as a means of hasbara, but the site is worth looking at because it has a lot of documentation of atrocities and quotes from Hamas leaders.

Also, while its description of Hamas political aims  is not what Hamas would admit openly, it is pretty accurate.

I have no idea who set it up. It was created using the Israeli website builder Wix, but anyone could be behind it. 

As with any website, be careful and make sure that you browse it safely. 


(h/t Andrew)

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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University of Washington antisemitism and threats to Jews are swept under the rug

If you do a search on "University of Washington" and "hate crimes," all of the student protests have been against Islamophobia on campus.

The university itself says it is against all hate crime. It has a webpage for their "Hate Has No Home Here" initiative, which talk about anti-Black and anti-Asian hate crimes.

The president said in December that "Our University will not tolerate religious bigotry or harassment." He set up task forces to tackle antisemitism, and, of course, Islamophobia.

What is largely unreported, though, are hate crimes against Jews on campus. 

The state of Washington yesterday released its 2023 annual report on crimes, and it has a section on hate crimes. In Washington State, as with most of the country, the vast majority of the anti-religious hate crimes are against Jews. 

The report breaks down hate crimes by police departments across the state. It turns out that the University of Washington has its own dedicated police department. 

Here are the hate crimes reported by UW police in 2023:

At this liberal, progressive university where there are lots of resources against anti-Asian and anti-Black and anti Muslim hate, there were more antisemitic hate crimes than all the other types combined.

This university police department was only behind the cities of Seattle and Vancouver in the number of antisemitic hate crimes reported. 

The amount of antisemitic crimes per capita in UW far exceed every other area of Washington State. Even though there are only 46,000 students in UW there were more antisemitic hate crimes there than Spokane or Bellevue or any other medium size town in Washington with well over 100,000 people.

Where are the student protests against this?

And things have only gotten worse in 2024. One student with a Star of David necklace was spat upon, harassed, screamed at and followed as he passed by an anti-Israel encampment. And the president of the university condemned antisemitic graffiti seen at the encampments, without giving details. 

Here are some of the examples of threatening messages and incitement against Jews seen at the encampment at the University of Washington in May:

None of this made the newspapers. 

Antisemitism on the UW campus is provably worse than any other kind of hate, yet it gets less coverage and less concern from both students and faculty than every other kind. We don't even know what the specific five hate crimes against Jews at UW in 2023 were - they are simply not mentioned in the media. 

Clearly, nothing the university is doing or saying affects student behavior against Jews one bit. On the contrary, the university has tacitly encouraged this behavior, by supporting the encampments (bringing in porta-potties, for example). 

In October, the The Office of Student Diversity and Inclusion sent out a letter to all students supporting Hamas and Palestinian terrorism. It was unauthorized, but it still reflects on how the staff on campus thinks. 

The rot is embedded in university campuses, and it will not be impacted by occasional letters from their presidents pleading for more civility or handing out flyers saying that they are against all hate including antisemitism. 

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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Nearly 60% of all NYC hate crimes for 2024 have been against Jews

Here are the hate crime statistics from New York City for June.

Hate Crimes Statistics: June 2024

(Representing June 1 – June 30 for calendar years 2024 and 2023)

Motivation	2024	2023	Diff	% Change
Asian	3	2	-3	50%
Black	2	5	-3	-60%
Ethnic	4	1	3	300%
Gender	0	2	-2	-100%
Hispanic	3	2	1	50%
Jewish	45	19	26	137%
Muslim	3	0	3	***
Religion	2	1	1	100%
Sexual Orientation	17	15	2	13%
Grand Total	79	47	32	68%

Note: Statistics above are subject to change upon investigation, as active possible bias cases June be reclassified to non-bias cases and removed from counted data.

You can see at glance that  anti-Jewish hate crimes far exceed all other kinds - combined. 

This is happening while other types of crime in NYC are decreasing. As the report says:

The NYPD accomplished the repeated monthly crime reductions across the five boroughs while attending to and safeguarding a record number of demonstrations this year, many of them related to Israel’s ongoing battle against the terrorist organization Hamas. A hefty increase in the number of potential anti-Jewish bias incidents being investigated by the NYPD’s Hate Crime Task Force were a result of the fiery rhetoric and sometimes violent actions that accompanied the protests in New York City. Twenty-six of the 32 additional incidents taken on by Hate Crime investigators in June 2024 were anti-Jewish in motivation, reflecting a 137 percent increase in that category compared to the same month in 2023.

This has been the pattern since October 7. Here are the statistics for May:

Motivation	2024	2023	Diff	% Change
Asian	2	12	-10	-83%
Black	1	0	1	***.*
Ethnic	3	8	-5	-63%
Gender	6	5	1	20%
Hispanic	0	2	-2	-100%
Jewish	55	22	33	150%
Muslim	4	1	3	300%
Religion	4	1	3	300%
Sexual Orientation	9	4	5	125%
White	2	1	1	100%
Grand Total	86	56	30	54%

For the first six months of the year,  based on these monthly reports, over 59% of the hate crimes in New York City have been anti-Jewish hate crimes - 223 out of 377. 

For comparison, there have been 19 anti-Muslim hate crimes so far this year. 

In that same time period there was an increase of 120 hate crimes in New York compared to 2023, and nearly all of that increase (107) came from the increase of anti-Jewish hate crimes. 

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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Major Hamas leader in Jenin dies from injuries from Friday drone strike

On Friday, an IDF drone struck a car of terrorists in Jenin,

killing four of them.

One who was injured succumbed to his wounds on Sunday - and it looks like he was a major Hamas member in the West Bank.

IMEMC described Ahmed Abu Al-Haija as a "young man."  But the Hamas Qassam Brigades Jenin Telegraph channel say he was a leader of the Qassam Brigades in that city with a nom de guerre of "Abu Dujana."

Video they published show him as a clear leader, an alpha male in various venues.

It looks like the death toll from the clashes in Jenin on Friday is eight - and every single one of the dead were terrorists, mostly Islamic Jihad but Haija was from Hamas. 

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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07/09 Links Pt2: Blood Libels, Then and Now; Iran's Government Is Paying Anti-Israel Protesters; BHL: The French Left’s Fascist Creep

From Ian:

Blood Libels, Then and Now

E.M. Rose wrote an exceptional book on this topic, The Murder of William of Norwich: The Origins of the Blood Libel in Medieval Europe. She explained that the blood libel was unique in several ways.

First, it was a theory that originated and was embraced among the educated elite, not just the unwashed masses. She wrote: “This supposed ‘irrational,’ ‘bizarre,’ ‘literary trope’ was the product of lucid, cogent arguments, thoughtfully and carefully debated in executive councils, judged in detail by sober men who were not reacting under pressure to thoughtless mob violence.”

The original blood libel started with the intelligentsia and became well-accepted.

A second element she points out is that the blood libel put every Jew on trial: “Jewish identity was on trial, rather than any single individual perpetrator.”

Every Jew was guilty until proven innocent.

The 20th of Sivan is sadly once again an important date in 2024. Once again, Israel is guilty until proven innocent. Even a hostage rescue is immediately treated as a wanton massacre of innocent civilians until Israel provides video evidence to the contrary.

Once again, leading the charge against Israel are some well-educated people—professors and students at elite universities who, in their hatred of Israel, are eager to support a group of fanatical, depraved murderers. And like Thomas of Monmouth, the testimony of individual Jews, no matter how tainted, is taken to support horrific falsehoods.

The libel of Jewish ritual murder was accepted by some of the most educated people. And that opened the door to widespread violence.

Medieval antisemites believed awful things about Jews, and that gave them license to do awful things to Jews.

But one more point: The 20th of Sivan also marks exceptional heroism. The 32 Jews who were murdered in Blois died with their heads held high.

Ephraim of Bonn, the great medieval chronicler of antisemitic persecution, wrote, “It was also reported in that letter that as the flames mounted high, the martyrs began to sing in unison a melody that began softly but ended with a full voice. The Christian people came and asked us ‘What kind of a song is this for we have never heard such a sweet melody?’ We knew it well, for it was the song: ‘It is incumbent upon us to praise the Lord of all.’” (“Aleinu” on the High Holidays is sung with a special melody.)

These martyrs died singing “Aleinu.”

This is what defiance looks like.

We are the descendants of those Jews. And we too will hold our heads high and defy Hamas and its slandering sycophants.

MEMRI: The Formation Of The Anti-Liberal Alliance – But Liberal Is Not A Synonym Of Woke

We are witnessing the formation of an anti-liberal alliance against the West. For years, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea have been trying to shape a multipolar world order, which would put an end to the Western-led unipolar one.

As explained by the anti-liberal philosopher Alexander Dugin, the 20th century was characterized by three political theories: liberalism (the first theory), communism (the second theory), and fascism (the third theory). Fascism emerged later than the other major political theories, and disappeared before them. The alliance between the first political theory (liberalism) and the second political theory (communism) and Adolf Hitler's geopolitical miscalculations were responsible for the demise of the third political theory. Fascism's disappearance cleared the battlefield for the first and the second political theories (liberalism and communism), which during the Cold War created a bipolar world that lasted nearly half a century. The 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union signaled the victory of the first political theory (liberalism) over the second (communism). Thus, by the end of the 20th century, the only theory left standing was liberalism.

However, the defeated forces did not accept liberal democracy's victory. Furthermore, new poles rejecting the "Western hegemony" emerged, among them Islamism, an anti-liberal force headed by Iran and Qatar; it has been strengthening itself since the 9/11 terror attacks.

The Islamist Pole
As mentioned, the unipolar order began to erode with the 9/11 attacks by Islamic terrorists on the U.S. The need for shaping an Islamist pole is better understood by Iran and Qatar, as both sponsor Islamist groups in the Middle East that aspire to Islamic hegemony. Hamas, sponsored by Qatar and Iran, is now on forefront of the battle for the establishment of an Islamist caliphate. Hamas official Fathi Hammad said: "We shall liberate our Al-Aqsa Mosque, and our cities and villages, as a prelude to the establishment of the future Islamic Caliphate. Therefore, brothers and sisters, we are at the threshold of a global Islamic civilization era."[9]

It should be noted that the Hamas covenant strongly opposes the "Crusader West." Since it was written in 1988, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the charter also counters the "Communist East." However, in recent decades, since liberal democracy became the main enemy of all the anti-liberal forces, Hamas and its patrons have joined not only modern Russia but also the communist PRC and DPKR, in order to shape a multipolar world order in which the collective West, which includes Israel, will be defeated.

South Korea's National Intelligence Service (NIS) has reportedly confirmed that Hamas is also using North Korean-made weapons to fight Israel in the war in Gaza. Earlier, in November 2023, media reported that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un had ordered officials to come up with ways to "comprehensively support Palestine."[10]

Newsweek, quoting Guermantes Lailari, a scholar at National Chengchi University in Taiwan and a retired U.S. Air Force officer, also noted that the IDF had found massive amounts of advanced Chinese military equipment and weapons technology in Gaza. Newsweek further wrote: "Chinese tunnel warfare specialists helped design and build the Hamas tunnels... [T]wo tunnel engineers from China's People's Liberation Army were discovered by the IDF, meaning that China helped Hamas significantly in its construction of the massive tunnel networks under the Gaza Strip."[11]

Conclusion
As Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea forge closer ties (Putin recently visited China and North Korea), the alliance of the anti-liberal forces is also trying to gain momentum with the help of progressive liberals, or, more accurately, woke supporters, who are being used as a fifth column to defeat the West from within. As mentioned in a previous MEMRI analysis, "liberal democracy" was the concept that was understood by Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan, while "progressive liberalism" has nothing to do with classical liberalism and more to do with a new totalitarian Marxist-inspired ideology.[12] It is therefore no coincidence that TikTok, owned by the Chinese internet company ByteDance, is spreading woke ideology in the West.

Hence, anti-liberal forces are preparing militarily and ideologically for the final battle against liberal democracy.[13] However, one question strongly resonates: Is the collective West ready for this fight?

Until Palestinians Exorcise the Ghost of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, It Will Continue to Haunt Them

Besides being the anniversary of America’s Declaration of Independence, July 4 this year marked the 50th anniversary of the death of Amin al-Husseini, who was appointed grand mufti of Jerusalem by the British in 1921 and remained the de-facto leader of the Palestinian national movement through 1948. Thereafter, Martin Kramer writes, he faded into obscurity. He explains why:
Many mistakenly believe his collaboration with Hitler and the Nazis discredited him. It didn’t. Not only did the Arabs not care, but Western governments eyed the mufti with self-interest. The general view in foreign ministries held that he had picked the wrong side in the war, but not more than that.

What finally discredited the mufti in Arab opinion, where it mattered most, was his role in the 1948 war. It was a war he wanted and believed his side would win. In late 1947, the British sent someone to see if there might be some behind-the-scenes flexibility in his stance on partition, which he had completely rejected. There wasn’t.

[The mufti’s] underestimation of the Zionists proved disastrous, even more so than his overestimation of the Axis. He later wrote his memoirs, blaming “imperialist” intervention, Arab internal divisions, and world Zionist mind-control for the 1948 defeat. To no avail: his name became inseparable from the Nakba, the loss of Arab Palestine to the Jews. His reputation hit rock bottom, along with that of the other failed Arab rulers of 1948.

Kramer laments “Palestinian reluctance to wrestle candidly with the mufti’s legacy,” concluding:
He personified the refusal to see Israel as it is and an unwillingness to imagine a compromise. Until Palestinians exorcise his ghost, it will continue to haunt them.

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07/09 Links Pt1: Let Hamas Lose Already; Rescued Israeli hostage suing US employer of Hamas operative that held him; UN refers Albanese probe to colleagues who defended her

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Let Hamas Lose Already

“The enemy gets a vote” is a common expression that is invoked when your plans go awry. But what happens when events go according to plan?

There have been plenty of rocky roads during Israel’s nine-month military campaign in Gaza, but one of the underlying concepts guiding the IDF brass and the country’s political leadership hasn’t changed: keeping total victory as the goal puts pressure on Hamas.

This principle has been so maligned lately—even President Biden dismissed it as “an unidentified notion of total victory” that “will only bog down Israel in Gaza”—that it’s easy to forget it was the consensus among Western allies after October 7. Yet it’s not Israel that has just received a rude reminder of the limits of long-term planning—it’s Hamas.

“Several officials in the Middle East and the U.S. believe the level of devastation in the Gaza Strip caused by a nine-month Israeli offensive likely has helped push Hamas to soften its demands for a cease-fire agreement,” reports the Associated Press. To which the response might be: Well… yeah. Losing a war can do wonders in adjusting your refusal to compromise.

The AP isn’t just going on intuition. It has seen internal messages from senior Hamas officials describing “the heavy losses Hamas has suffered on the battlefield and the dire conditions in the war-ravaged territory.” According to the AP, “a person familiar with Western intelligence…said the group’s leadership understands its forces have suffered heavy losses and that has helped Hamas move closer to a cease-fire deal.”

This story coincides with Hamas leaders deciding to drop their demand that any ceasefire-for-hostages deal with Israel contain an up-front IDF concession it will not restart hostilities—thus meaning the war would be, for all intents and purposes, over. That would have effectively guaranteed Hamas’s survival. Instead, reports the Times of Israel, Hamas has expressed its “desire for ‘written guarantees’ from mediators that Israel will continue to negotiate a permanent ceasefire deal once the first phase of a ceasefire goes into effect.”

As I wrote in November, relentless Israeli pressure was key to the first ceasefire-for-hostages agreement. Hamas’s first true openness came when it wanted to forestall an Israeli ground invasion. Then it became pliable once again when the IDF was on the verge of taking Shifa hospital, forcing Hamas fighters to flee and leaving Israel in position to reveal the military use of the hospital by Hamas. That pattern continued until a deal was in place.

In contrast, the times any deal looked least likely were during moments of paralysis—US threats to withhold weapons from the IDF, Israeli domestic political instability, perceived Israeli diplomatic isolation. Pressure works. Unfortunately the Biden administration went from pressuring Hamas to pressuring Israel, and the hostages languished in Gaza dungeons or camps—except for the few rescued by the IDF.

Rescued Israeli hostage suing US nonprofit linked to Hamas operative who held him

A rescued Israeli hostage is filing a lawsuit Tuesday against a U.S. nonprofit with financial ties to the Hamas operative who reportedly kept him prisoner.

Twenty-two-year-old Almog Meir Jan was held captive by Hamas for nearly 250 days following the Oct. 7 terrorist attack and was found in the home of Abdallah Aljamal, a contributor to the website The Palestine Chronicle who also worked as a spokesman for the Hamas-run labor ministry in Gaza. Aljamal was killed during the IDF's rescue mission.

The Palestine Chronicle is run by the tax-exempt group, the People Media Project.

Andrey Kozlov, 27, and Shlomi Ziv, 41, were also held captive at his family’s home in Nuseirat, Gaza, according to the Israeli Defense Forces.

"Under the leadership of Defendants [editor-in-chief] Ramzy Baroud and [People Media Project governor] John Harvey, Defendant Palestine Chronicle employed Hamas Operative Aljamal and offered him its U.S. platform to write and disseminate Hamas propaganda, ultimately subsidized, through its status as a tax-exempt charitable organization, by U.S. taxpayers," the court filing reads. "Following the Hamas terror attacks of October 7, while Hamas Operative Aljamal imprisoned Plaintiff, Defendants permitted Hamas Operative Aljamal to use their platform to whitewash Hamas’s crimes and attract international support for its terrorist cause."

"By providing this platform to Hamas Operative Aljamal and compensating Hamas Operative Aljamal for his propaganda, Defendants aided, abetted, and materially supported both Hamas Operative Aljamal and Hamas itself in their acts of terrorism, including kidnapping and holding Plaintiff hostage for 246 days, in violation of international law," the suit continued.

The lawsuit, which will be filed Tuesday in Washington state's western district court, goes on to claim that the defendants "knowingly and willfully procured and disseminated Hamas propaganda to the Palestine Chronicle’s readers in the United States," citing reports alleging "at least six Palestine Chronicle writers and contributors have been affiliated with Iranian propaganda outlets."

It also links Baroud with Aljamal by citing an opinion piece they co-authored in 2019 for Al Jazeera.

Eli Lake: Iran’s New ‘Reformist’ President Is Anything But

If you saw the headlines in the Western press about Iran’s election over the weekend, you might have thought it had yielded a miracle: the country’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, is a “reformer.”

Spoiler alert. He is not. But it’s worth examining why so many media outlets, including The New York Times and NPR, have leapt at the chance to declare Pezeshkian a liberal.

On the campaign trail, Pezeshkian was critical of the morality police who enforce the regime’s policy requiring all women to cover their hair. The 69-year-old heart surgeon, who has served as health minister in Iran’s parliament, also expressed a desire to revive the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran, America, China, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany.

But these campaign promises mean nothing when you consider Iran’s president has little if any power inside the Islamic Republic. That belongs to the country’s ailing Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and his Revolutionary Guard Corps, which directs proxy wars in the Middle East and has acquired banks, real estate, and businesses inside its own nation.

“He is a garden-variety regime guy,” Mariam Memarsadeghi, the founder and director of the Cyrus Forum for Iran’s Future and a longtime Iranian democratic activist, told The Free Press. “There is nothing about his past to suggest that he is interested in anything other than complete subservience to the Supreme Leader.”

Pezeshkian has spent most of his life in politics as a back bencher inside Iran’s parliament. In 1994, he lost his wife and son in a deadly car crash. He did not remarry and raised his daughters as a single dad, a rarity inside Iran.

One sign of Pezeshkian’s subservience is how he describes his own political ideology. He says he is a “reformist principlist,” which refers to the principles of the 1979 Islamic revolution that give the Supreme Leader and a guardian council power to overturn initiatives from the legislature if they do not cohere with Islamic law.

In short, Pezeshkian has pledged loyalty to a Supreme Leader who has cracked down against demonstrators and consolidated power among Iran’s unelected Revolutionary Guard Corps.

“Pezeshkian is a safe bet for Khamenei,” Alireza Nader, a former Iran analyst with the RAND Corporation, a private think tank that works closely with the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, told The Free Press. “He’s totally loyal to him and the Revolutionary Guards. He’s stated that he has no separate agenda from Khamenei and will pursue the regime’s policies, for example, fully supporting Hezbollah.”

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