Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, July 15, 2024

07/15 Links Pt2: It's Time to End Hezbollah's Decades of Impunity; Marvel strips Sabra of Israeli identity; Paris memorial for 1972 Olympics massacre to be held in secret

From Ian:

Aviva Klompas: It's Time to End Hezbollah's Decades of Impunity

Since October 7, Hezbollah has used that arsenal to launch almost 5,000 rockets and explosive drones at Israel. The near-daily attacks have set swaths of northern Israel on fire and forced tens of thousands of families to evacuate their homes indefinitely. In recent weeks, the attacks have stretched deeper into Israel, making more and more of the small country uninhabitable.

At the same time, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah is ramping up the rhetoric. He recently vowed to fight Israel "without restraint, without rules, without limits and without restrictions," and even threatened to attack Cyprus, a member of the European Union.

While global leaders have spoken with dismay about the escalating tensions between Hezbollah and Israel, they have failed to stop the attacks from Lebanon or to enforce Resolution 1701. If no solution is found, Israel will have no choice but to take matters into its own hands.

It's not too late to stop an impending war — but that can only happen if the international community confronts Hezbollah and backs its resolutions with resolve.

That means designating both Hezbollah's political and military wings as terrorist organizations, which would leave no room for ambiguity to freeze assets, ramping up counter-terrorism efforts, and bringing terrorists to justice. It also means implementing a true monitoring system and guarantees that Hezbollah doesn't creep back toward Israeli territory and resume attacks on northern towns.

As world leaders and officials gather in Buenos Aires to mark the 30th anniversary of the AMIA tragedy, such accountability would be the most fitting way to honor the victims' memories.

Until that happens, Hezbollah and Iran will have license to spread terror and commit murder around the world, just as they did the morning of July 18, 1994.

Offensive anti-Israel protests at Holocaust memorials

The Holocaust is a reminder of the consequences of unchecked hatred and violence. Exploiting this sacred memory to push a political agenda disrespects the victims and diminishes and trivializes the gravity of their suffering. The actions of these groups feed into the narratives of antisemites who seek to delegitimize and demonize Israel, further endangering Jews worldwide. As a child of Holocaust survivors and proud Zionists, I find these actions despicable.

Accusations of genocide against Israel are a gross misrepresentation of reality. Israel’s military actions are defensive measures against terrorist organizations, including Hamas, which continuously threaten the safety and security of Israeli civilians. By equating these actions with genocide, protesters ignore the legitimate right of a nation to protect its people.

Protests at Michigan’s largest Holocaust museum justify violence against Israelis and Jews by falsely portraying them as perpetrators of heinous crimes. This dangerous rhetoric incites hatred and violence, contributing to rising antisemitic incidents globally. These libelous protests distort historical facts and promote a false narrative that fuels antisemitic sentiments, misuses the memory of the Holocaust to criticize Israel unjustly and feeds into dangerous and false allegations of genocide.

The Coalition Against Genocide, JVP and their supporters are morally corrupt. All community members and leaders need to denounce this protest and its sponsor groups. It is our collective responsibility to protect the memory of the victims of the Holocaust and to ensure that their suffering is not trivialized or misused. Let us stand together against antisemitism, for truth and for Israel’s right to protect itself.

Paris memorial for 1972 Olympics massacre to be held in secret over threats – report

The memorial ceremony at the upcoming Paris games for the victims of the 1972 Munich Olympics terror attack will reportedly be held outside of the Olympic Village in a secret location, due to concerns that it may be targeted by extremists, given heightened antisemitic and anti-Israel sentiment.

According to the Hebrew news outlet Israel Hayom, the ceremony was originally scheduled for July 24 at the Paris City Hall, but was canceled due to security concerns. Instead, an alternate smaller ceremony will be held with fewer attendees at a location that will not be disclosed to the public, the report stated.

The Israel Olympic Committee refuted the report that the ceremony was moved due to threats, saying it was nothing more than a logistical issue, as specific permits needed to hold the event at the City Hall could not be issued in the days before the Olympics opening ceremony.

“Due to the delegation’s tight schedule, it was decided to hold the ceremony, in coordination with International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach, in its full format on August 6 in another location,” the committee said. “Claims that the ceremony is underground or that it was moved due to any specific security alerts, or that canceling it was considered are fundamentally false claims.”

The memorial ceremony for the victims of the attack at the Munich Olympics, when eight members of the Palestinian militant organization Black September infiltrated the Olympic village and killed 11 Israelis, was held for the first time during the Tokyo 2020 games.

The decision to recognize the victims of the attack with an official commemoration was made by the IOC president after extensive campaigning by the families of the 11 victims.

The memorial was followed a year later by a ceremony in Germany marking 50 years since the attacks, in which Berlin acknowledged, for the first time, its “responsibility” for failings that led to the deaths of the athletes.

The ceremony in Paris next month will be attended by Bach, as well as Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, members of the Israeli delegation, and French Jewish communal leaders.

07/15 Links Pt1: Trump picks J.D. Vance as running mate; The Palestinian theater of terror; Natasha Hausdorff: "There is No Genocide, No Apartheid, No Occupation"

From Ian:

The Palestinian theater of terror

After the October 7 massacre, the international community was shocked by the harsh atrocities committed by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Palestinian civilians who participated in the attack.

Hamas has been compared to ISIS and the Nazis, which has given Israel broad international support and credit for acting in Gaza to topple Hamas and bring the hostages back home.

Hamas and the PA’s smear campaign against Israel
Both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority realized that in order to win this war they would have to use the card that the Palestinians have been using for years – to smear Israel’s legitimacy in the world.

Nabil Abu Radina, spokesman for the office of Mahmoud Abbas, chairman of the Palestinian Authority has said that the “series of daily killing crimes” of the IDF in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank is a comprehensive “war of extermination against the Palestinian people”.

This is how the murderous organization tries to obscure the symbolic date of the horrible massacre it carried out against Israel – and makes the date symbolic for the Palestinians – as “the day Israel attacked the Palestinians."

Palestinian officials from the PLO and Hamas also use the terms “extermination” and “Holocaust” to strengthen the influence on public opinion that Israel is committing a “Holocaust” to the Palestinian people.

Hamas spreads disinformation on Palestinian female prisoners
Hamas continues to present false information that Israel keeps women, elderly people and children in extremely difficult conditions to further characterize Israel as “the aggressor."

In January 2024, Hamas started a social media campaign using female terrorists imprisoned in Israeli prisons for its counterpropaganda. It published various posts in which the “Palestinian women prisoners” are described as experiencing abuse in the prisons and that they are “in danger”. Moreover, Hamas detailed the “abuses” that Palestinian women suffer in Israeli prisons: “Severe beatings and torture, a shameful (physical) examination” and more.

Hamas uses external agencies to incite against Israel
Al Jazeera to further incite against Israel:
Hamas employs not only its own disinformation tactics but also leverages affiliated media channels and a network of compliant journalists for information and propaganda purposes.

During IDF operations in late January 2024 at a Hamas base in the northern Gaza Strip, the laptop of Muhammad Samir Muhammad Wishah, a reporter for Al Jazeera Mubasher and the Al Jazeera network in Gaza, was seized.

This discovery underscores the presence of terrorist operatives posing as journalists within Al Jazeera’s ranks, raising questions about the network’s credibility. Based in Qatar, Al Jazeera often serves as a mouthpiece for Hamas, frequently inciting against Israel.

'Not the MSF I knew': Doctors Without Borders accused of picking side in Israel-Hamas war

Former leaders and a major Canadian donor of Doctors Without Borders are distancing themselves from the venerable aid organization after its employees celebrated the October 7 atrocities, gave aid to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health, ran a one-sided social media feed and internally circulated articles accusing Israel of creating Palestinian “death worlds.”

“To be frank, I was very, very, surprised because it’s not the MSF I knew,” Alain Destexhe, the secretary general of the organization, popularly known by its French acronym MSF, from 1991 to 1995, told National Post.

Destexhe said MSF’s messaging throughout the Israel-Hamas war is markedly different than past conflicts.

“We used to make statements, you know, in Bosnia and Rwanda, but not taking sides like this,” he said. “We always took into account the political context, but not to take sides from one group to another. In the Gaza War, I really got the feeling that MSF was totally biased.”

Despite MSF’s charter principles of “bearing witness” through neutrality and impartiality, the organization’s response following the Hamas invasion of Israel and the ensuing war is leading passionate supporters to question its role in the conflict.

The organization dismissed these criticisms.

“Our decision to speak out about these grave realities as an impartial and independent humanitarian organization has sometimes prompted questions from the public about our neutrality in the conflict itself,” Claudia Blume, a spokesperson for MSF Canada, told the Post by email. “We unequivocally disagree with the notion that MSF’s communications on Gaza have been ‘politicized’ or represent an ‘abandonment of our neutrality.’”

Destexhe wasn’t the only MSF loyalist to have an October 7 wake-up call. One major Canadian Jewish donor told the Post he urged his mother to support the group despite pushback from family members cautioning him against MSF’s reputation of being institutionally biased against Israel.

“I think most people know that they have a history of not being the friendliest towards Israel,” the philanthropist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told the Post.

He said he reassured his mother, following conversations with MSF Canada’s leadership, that the organization was duty-bound to be apolitical and strictly adhere to its mission of providing aid and observation. However, the inconsistencies between their initial promise and their treatment of Israel reached a boiling point in November 2023 when the patron confronted MSF Canada’s executives.

“I will be honest,” the donor told then-executive director Joe Belliveau in an email shared with the Post, “the more I review MSF public communications (Instagram, specifically), the evidence is overwhelming that the MSF stance has a pronounced bias. There is still not one single mention of the 200+ civilian hostages; not one mention of Hamas’ indiscriminate rocket fire into civilian centers, both of which are war crimes and violations of the Geneva conventions,” he wrote in late November.

Bassam Tawil: Hamas's 'Popularity': Attempt To Deceive The American Public?

"If you notice, there is a growing dissatisfaction in the West Bank, from the Palestinians, about Hamas," Biden said during a press conference. "Hamas is not popular now."

It seems that Biden does not want the American people to be aware that most Palestinians in the West Bank are enthusiastic supporters of Hamas, as that would discourage them from endorsing his idea of creating a Palestinian state there.

The broad support Hamas enjoys among the Palestinians, including those who live in the West Bank, means that a Palestinian state would be ruled by the same terrorists who masterminded and carried out the October 7 atrocities against Israelis.

Biden appears to be convinced that hiding the fact that most Palestinian people support Hamas from the American people will make it easier for him to promote the insane idea of pressuring Israel to accept a state that is controlled by Hamas and other Iran proxies, such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah.

Hamas is not only deeply committed to refusing Israel's right to exist, it has also openly announced that it will use a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Jerusalem as a springboard to eliminate Israel and murder as many Jews as possible.

Biden's claim that Hamas is "not popular" among the Palestinians in the West Bank actually contradicts analysis by US intelligence agencies showing that Hamas's popularity has significantly grown after the terrorist group's attack on Israel on October 7, 2023...

The latest poll, released on July 10, 2024, showed that since the October 7 attack, satisfaction among the Palestinians in the West Bank with the "performance" of Hamas murderers and rapists has risen to 82%.

When asked who the public would prefer to control the Gaza Strip after the current war, 71% of Palestinians in the West Bank chose Hamas, compared to 46% in the Gaza Strip.

The reason Hamas has such high popularity among Palestinians is because it seeks to destroy Israel though jihad (holy war).

With respect, President Biden, it was after its members murdered, sexually assaulted, tortured, and abducted hundreds of Israelis on October 7, that Hamas became even more popular among the Palestinians.

It is time for Biden and his administration to come clean with the American people about the Palestinians: the majority of them favor destroying Israel and murdering Jews.

Remember "settlers"? Now, the official Palestinian news agency calls them "colonists"

It used to be that the official Palestinian news agency Wafa railed against "illegal Israeli settlers storming" something or other. For example, this story from November in their English-language edition:

Sometime around January, WAFA changed its style guide. Because now, virtually every similar article describes them as "colonists," not "settlers." See this story from May:

Someone, probably from the PLO, decided that "settlers" just didn't have that visceral effect that they wanted. "Colonists" sounds even more illegal.

Similarly, "settlements" have morphed into "colonies."

While I haven't seen them use the term this way, it could be that they prefer "colonists" because they can use that word for Israelis on either side of the Green Line. Hamas calls all Israelis "settlers," perhaps the PLO wants to reserve the term "colonists" as a rhetorical tool against all Jews.

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!

Al Jazeera Mubasher published two articles about a 2017 Turkish TV series that ran for five years, Payitaht: Abdülhamid, and another more recent one, Akif, both of which spin conspiracy theories about how Jews worked to destroy the Ottoman Empire.

According to the articles, Payitaht: Abdülhamid depicts a huge Jewish conspiracy against the Ottoman Empire spearheaded by Theodor Herzl.

An old weapons storehouse, more like a cave from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, on the outskirts of Istanbul, the capital of the Caliphate, is infiltrated by four figures, three of whom are Jewish: the most prominent Zionist thinker and the founder of the Zionist state in the Islamic lands (Palestine) and from there to the greater Jewish state from the Nile to the Euphrates, Theodor Herzl, along with his friend Emmanuel Carasso, and Marco, the mastermind behind the collapse of the Caliphate, Barros, one of the most important and greatest Zionist figures. The fourth figure was the Ottoman Mahmud Pasha, who allied with the Zionists to destroy the Caliphate of Abdul Hamid, his wife’s brother, and seize the Sultanate.

The four enter, each carrying a lighting torch. The four torches come together to draw the “Star of David,” the emblem of the Zionist state on its flag. On the floor of the old warehouse, a map is drawn showing the locations of oil in the regions of the Islamic nation. If the ground is lit, the map appears. From behind the caves and tunnels of the warehouse, comes the voice of Barros, who specifies for the three Zionists and the Ottoman traitor Mahmoud Pasha the four pillars of the Caliphate and how to destroy them.

The "Barros" character is the uber-Jew, a combination of every antisemitic trope:

The Jewish character whose voice was the driving force of the previous scene is Barros, the hidden master whom only a few people see, even Herzl and Carrasso do not know what he looks like. He is the owner of the deed granting Zionism to the Jews, the mastermind of the movement and its main financier, controlling the world’s banks and their money, and consequently its companies, factories and arms trade.

Barros can move armies and stop them, he arms countries and strips them of their power, all the banks in the world are under his command, he tried through his followers to get rid of Abdul Hamid by killing him but he could not, and he is the one who determines the role of each person in the world, (I do not know, perhaps he represents the world administration or the Jews who control the world’s money.)

In the Akif series, Jewish domination is achieved in a different way:

The Akif series revealed how Jews and Zionists infiltrated cultural and youth circles through the poet Tawfik Fikret and his son, who was recruited by the Zionist movement during his study trip, and Zionist characters appeared working to recruit young Turks through newspapers and schools.

The influence of the Jewish Zionist movement on the youth of the Caliphate appeared in the two works through the temptation of these youth with the manifestations of Western civilization and culture, and the freedoms enjoyed by the West. It reached the point of changing their beliefs, so these youth began to call Caliph Abdul Hamid the Red or Bloody Sultan, as he was called in the European newspapers.

This was evident in the figures within the palace represented by Prince Abdelkader, the eldest son of the Sultan, and Prince Sabah al-Din, his nephew and son-in-law, Mahmoud Pasha. This young man was initially influenced by the slogans of freedom and democracy until he reached the point of clearly conspiring against his father with Herzl in all his attempts to seize Palestine as the beginning of his dream.

But the infiltration mentioned in the earlier series was more nefarious:

The most dangerous thing that the series, Payitaht: Abdülhamid, indicated was the infiltration of Muslims by Jews living in the capital as Muslims, among them one of the imams of the largest mosques in Istanbul, gold and jewelry merchants, army officers, and maids in the palaces of the Caliphate.

These people lived as Muslims until they reached the foundations of the state. They were originally Jews working to overthrow the Caliphate, the only obstacle to the establishment of the State of Israel. You think they are Muslims, but they become imams, teachers, and journalists, teaching the youth in mosques and schools and on the pages of newspapers and magazines.

This is mainstream thinking in Erdogan's Turkey, which wants to re-establish a Turkish-based pan-Muslim caliphate.

Qatar's Al Jazeera now thinks it makes sense to spread the antisemitic conspiracy theories throughout the Arabic-speaking world.

You can see a portion of how the first series depicted the First Zionist Congress here.

Most Westerners don't realize how lucrative antisemitism is in marketing to the Muslim world.

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!

"May I buy Zionist Coke for a homeless man?" The responsa literature of BDS

Anti-Israelism has all the trappings of a cult.

It demands total loyalty, it restricts what activities are allowed for its members, it limits communications with outsiders, and those who dare leave the cult are subjected to vicious attacks on social media.

But the anti-Israel cults, specifically BDS, also has an intricate faux-legal framework where members who aspire to faithfully adhere to the rules are faced with problems that require higher guidance.

The BDS group on Reddit is filled with what can only be called an insane version of responsa (or, perhaps, fatwa) literature, where people who are caught up in the excitement of being members of the cult find themselves with real world questions on how to properly boycott products that are Israeli, Israel-adjacent, third- and fourth- degree related to Israel, rumored to support Israel or owned by Jews and assumed to be supporting Israel.

Here are some of the questions being asked:

BDS friendly face washes?

Do we need to boycott despicable me 4?

Have any popular YouTubers shown either support for Palestine or made a statement?
I ask because I think it’s just as bad to be silent on the genocide as it is to be complicit. Especially at this point, 9 months in when they’ve had nearly a year to educate themselves. I unfollowed some of my favorite YouTube creators like Fundie Fridays, and Plumbella because I couldn’t stand how chipper and ignorant of a genocide they were, pretending like nothing was happening and refusing to even acknowledge it

Target and Cvs
Can i still shop at Target and Cvs if their shareholders are blackrock and vanguard? Those stores are the ones i buy from when i need hygiene products, hair products, school supplies etc.

an Ai that doesn't support Israel
hey guys, since chatgpt and gemini are supporting Israel, I wonder what are eome alternatives that doesn't support Israel ??

My boss implemented Monday.com 🥲
I didn’t know they were headquartered in “Israel” until last month, when my boss was already finalizing details to go with Monday.com for work management. We were using Google Sheets before, and although Google is also bad, Monday.com is next level since it’s an Israeli company. For functionality it works better than Google Sheets for sure, so when my boss asked me if I liked it, I couldn’t say otherwise, other than that I haven’t really used it and will use it first before I say for sure. I’m planning to really focus on the cons of it and at the same time look for alternatives to recommend to my boss. I wonder if anyone here knows/ have used any good work management tools that would be a better alternative? Thank you!!

is boycotting a company that collabed with a company whose investors’ investors are problematic reasonable?
sorry for the convoluted title, but i was just wondering how far i should go? i recently purchased makeup from a company that as far as i know has no ties to israel (i can still cancel the order). i noticed that they did a collab with a character tomie from junji ito and some of their products have images of the character, thought i did not purchase any products from the collab. upon further notice i saw that they had the copyright of a publishing company, asahi shimbun, and i looked into the company’s investors. the investors themselves seemed to be fine, but i noticed that one of the investors, tv asahi, had vanguard listed as one of their shareholders on fintel, but not on the site or wikipedia as i believe the shares were acquired very recently, between may 19-june 27 2024. is this something to be concerned about, considering i doubt any of my money is going toward vanguard? i have quite a bit of time to cancel the order.

Where to buy kn95s/n95 masks aside from Amazon?
I have a chronic illness and am higher risk (asthma), and I need to be masking frequently. I just recently went to the ER because I got a viral infection that gave me a bad asthma flare up. However, as much I need to be masking for my health I so far have not found any reliable places to buy kn95/n95 masks except Amazon. Since I started boycotting against Israel, I haven't used Amazon at all. I live in the United States. Please suggest some ethical places to buys masks!

Is it okay to buy from brands that sell their products in Israel?
I want to buy shoes from Crocs, but I noticed they sell their products in Israel. Should I be boycotting brands that sell their products in Israel?

Old Eurovision Songs
I used to be a massive eurovision fan before I knew what was happening in the first place. When I say that, I mean I genuinely had no idea, mind I was in my early to mid teens at the time (18 now).
But, fastforward to today, a lot of my playlists consist of these old eurovision songs. I feel awful when I get a music craving for them, because the question that’s always on my mind is whether i’m supporting the EBU and people who choose to partake in it. I don’t listen to israeli entries, as far as I can remember I never really liked their entries as songs (barring Netta, but that swiftly exited my playlist once I found out what was happening).
My question is, is this true? Because if it is it’s a lot of my childhood music taste gone, but it may be necessary

Michael's craft store?
A few weeks ago I saw a tiktok about Michael's crafts is pro-israel but now I can't find anything about their involvement. Does anyone know what I'm talking about? I feel like I am going nuts but also worrying they may have scrubbed the Internet for PR. I don't want to be misguided in my BDS efforts so I appreciate any info available, thank you!

Is buying Coke once okay if it’s for a good reason?
So I’ve been hard boycotting for a while now to where it’s just a part of my life. When I get groceries, checking the No Thanks app is a ritual for every single item I buy. I know Coke is on the list and a brand that has connections to “Israel” but yesterday I bought one.
I was on my lunch from a new job and walked to the nearby dollar store. There was a houseless man sitting on the curb outside the shop and he looked really unwell. When I walked by he looked up and asked “Could you buy me a cold soda? Please?” And the thing is, we’re on the brink of a heat wave, the man had every reason to want a cold drink, so I said “If my card works, absolutely.” I’m not going to say no to someone asking for help when it comes to food to drink or anything like that.
So I went inside and grabbed a water for myself and looked in the refrigerated drinks area near the registers and it was only cola products in all of them. I felt bad and stood there for a second but there was no way I could go back out without a cold drink for him, he looked overheated, dehydrated, and exhausted. So I grabbed a cola and for the first time in however long I can’t remember, I bought it. Went out and gave it to him but I can’t stop thinking about it.
What’s done is done, but do you think that was okay? I really can’t stop thinking about it, I’m trying so hard to do everything I can to support the cause but that felt like a big slip up and I didn’t know what else to do. I feel like helping people in need is part of the actions we need to take to help bring in the new world we’re trying to create, but idk how much that means anything if I did it using a product that’s actively helping along a genocide. :/

Should I quit McDonald's?
I started working at McDonald's a couple weeks ago, but now I'm not sure if I should stay. Backstory is, I quit my last job in November and started to look for another one (which I was not very motivated to do). I applied to several places, but none of them would take me. My parents suggested McDonald's, but I kept putting it off because I knew something was going on with McDonald's and Israel (I didn't understand what at first, but I do now). I didn't want to say the real reason, though, because I wasn't sure what they would say (though looking back, maybe they would have understood). As for why I could stay, as I mentioned, I haven't had a lot of luck with applying for jobs, so I'm not sure how successful looking for another one would be. I can't be without a job either as I need to pay for at least part of this semester's tuition. I tried to justify it for myself as well by saying that maybe things would get better now that McDonald's had bought out the Israeli franchise, but I'm not sure if that cuts it. Above all else, if I quit after just a few weeks, that would bring about conversations with my parents I'd rather not have right now. I know I probably should've fixed this a long time ago, but what should I do now?

These are people who are looking for a meaning in life, and they are choosing hating "Zionists" as their religion.

Maybe someone should go on the forum and mention that 9% of Reddit is owned by Sam Altman (OpenAI founder) so their using Reddit helps support someone that BDS considers a Zionist. Therefore they should all leave Reddit.

When reading this idiocy, one just wants to slap some sense into these people.

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!

Anti-Jewish hate crime is also soaring in Chicago

Here is a chart from the Chicago Police Department showing hate crimes against Jews by year:

There were 6 hate crimes against Jews in 2020, 8 in 2021, 39 in 2022, 50 in 2023 and 55 in 2024.

But the year is only half over.

In 2023, there were a total of 81 hate crimes attacking religion, and 61% of them were anti-Jewish. This year, there have been 62 hate crimes against religions so far, and 89% of those have been anti-Jewish.

By contrast, there have been 4 anti-Muslim hate crimes so far this year in Chicago.

There are roughly the same number of Jews and Muslims in Chicago (between 300,000 and 400,000.)

How long will it take for local and national leaders to understand that anti-Jewish bigotry is fundamentally different from all other types, and requires different methods to fight them?

The assassination attempt on Trump on Saturday shows that some people take demonization rhetoric seriously enough to kill on behalf of their twisted idas of morality. . If Trump is evil personified, then killing him makes as much sense as assassinating Hitler in 1938. But the same deranged hate rhetoric is being hurled against Jews every day - after all, the majority of Jews are accused of supporting genocide, the worst possible crime. It is not out of the question that a similarly deranged person with a gun will believe that shooting up a synagogue or a random Jew in the street is a righteous, necessary act for the good of mankind.

This has already happened many times to Jews in the US. Usually the shooters are either Muslim or far Right, but the Right feeds on the anti-Israel propaganda of the Left - the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer has graphics from The Guardian and quotes Haaretz.

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!

How Lavender Saved Israel (Forest Rain)

By Forest Rain

I don’t particularly like lavender, but a farm dedicated ONLY to lavender?! I thought that would be something worth seeing. I never imagined I’d hear about lavender saving Israel but then in Israel, you never know what you will discover.

Azizo Lavender Farm is located in the community of Kanaf in the Golan Heights.

The name "Azizo" is inspired by a Latin inscription discovered on a lintel of the ancient synagogue in Deir Aziz, where modern Kanaf now stands. Farmer Dan and his wife Lilach chose this name to honor the deep historical connection to the land and the water source by the same name that sustained the ancient community and continues to nourish their lavender fields today.

The place is beautiful and full of purple accents – and fresh lavender smells much better than the lavender scent used in perfumes and detergents.

Farmer Dan happily explained the history of the business, growing and harvesting lavender. His lavender brought a small but crucial revolution to Israeli households. Everyone used to use moth balls to protect clothes – an effective but terrible-smelling solution. The first Azizo product was small bags of lavender to use instead. They work so well and last so long that some Kanaf residents still use the ones they bought in 1987!!

The farm now sells a large variety of products made with their lavender – everything from chocolate, liqueur, honey, and lavender ice cream to lavender-based toiletries.

Nice, wholesome, and a little boring until suddenly farmer Dan told us about October 7^th.

We didn’t know to ask. Who would think that a flower farm in the north of Israel had anything to do with the horrors of the Hamas invasion in the south?

On October 7^th Dan got a phone call from a woman begging for help. Her husband was among those evacuating bodies of the massacred to the Shura Camp for identification. Within hours the rooms of the camp were piled to the ceiling with bodies and the smell was unbearable.

The soul could not deal with what they were seeing. The task needed to be done but the workers were becoming physically ill.

“You have to help me!” she pleaded.

The next day the Shura teams received Dan’s solution - small bags of lavender which they inserted inside their face masks and lavender oil they could drip on the masks themselves. Instead of breathing death, they could breathe in lavender.

The invaders massacred Jews to try to disconnect us from our land. Flowers born of the ancient love story between the Jewish People and our ancestral homeland, between this land and her People, saved the day.

Flowers protected those doing the unspeakably horrible and deeply sacred work of identifying the massacred. They enabled the families of Israel to get much-needed answers. We used sheer determination and technology too but we needed flowers, a blessing from the land herself to finish the job.

Think about that.

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!

07/14 Links: The free world needs a strong America and safe Israel; ‘God bless Trump’: Israeli politicos react to assassination attempt

From Ian:

Ruthie Blum: The free world needs a strong America and safe Israel

What happened a mere four hours after Netanyahu’s declaration that he wouldn’t budge on his red lines made everything else suddenly pale in comparison. While addressing supporters at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, Trump was nearly killed by a sniper.

Thankfully, the assassination attempt failed. Miraculously, Trump turned his head at the split second that the shot was fired, so the bullet grazed his ear, but missed his brain. One hopes that Deif wasn’t so lucky.

Which brings us to the problem of moral equivalence in general and that which the Biden administration has been applying to Israel and Gaza specifically. (The progressives in the Democratic Party don’t bother with false comparisons; they simply consider Israel to be culpable of all crimes.)

Killing individuals or groups who set out to annihilate you, especially if they manage to accomplish part of their mission, is a worthy aim. Understanding, empathizing with or appeasing them is exactly the opposite.

It is therefore good to wish Deif dead and be happy that Trump’s would-be assassin was taken out. It is honorable to battle forces of evil, and shameful to succumb to their blackmail. The concept isn’t all that complicated.

When he was president, Trump’s less-than-complex instincts led him to starve the regime in Tehran of the resources that his predecessor, Barack Obama, had heaped on it in order to cut America down to the size of its inferiors. To the amazement of his detractors, the same gut feelings—coupled with top-notch advisers—resulted in the Abraham Accords.

When Biden took the reins, he resuscitated Obama’s “leading from behind” doctrine. And here we are.

Everyone now knows that Biden’s faculties are impaired, but his politics have always been defective. Replacing him with Kamala won’t make the slightest bit of difference on that score.

Nor can eradicating Trump—through lawfare or bloodshed—obfuscate the need of the free world for a strong America and safe Israel.

Victor Davis Hanson: Assassination porn and the sickness on the left

If we were leftists and we were to use leftist tropes to editorialize the recent attempt on Trump’s life, then we would frame the assassination attempt in the following way:

We have witnessed for years blatant exceptions to the once-common custom that we don’t normalize the imagined killing of any president or presidential candidate and thus lower the bar of violence.

But the left constantly makes Trump an exception. Now, it is as if the imagined killing of Trump had been mainstreamed and become acceptable in a way inconceivable of other presidents.

(Do we remember the rodeo clown who merely wore an Obama mask during a bull riding contest and was punished by being permanently banned by the Missouri State Fair authorities?)

So, since at least 2016, there has been a parlor game among leftist celebrities and entertainers joking (one hopes), dreaming, imagining and just talking about the various and graphic ways they would like to assassinate or seriously injure Trump:

By slugging his face (Robert De Niro), by decapitation (Kathy Griffin, Marilyn Manson), by stabbing (Shakespeare in the Park), by clubbing (Mickey Rourke), by shooting ( Snoop Dogg), by poisoning (Anthony Bourdain), by bounty killing (George Lopez), by carrion-eating his corpse (Pearl Jam), by suffocating (Larry Whilmore), by blowing him up (Madonna, Moby), by throwing him over a cliff (Rosie O’Donnell), just by generic “killing” him (Johnny Depp, Big Sean) or by martyring him (Reid Hoffman: “Yeah, I wish I had made him an actual martyr.”).

Or should we deplore the use of telescopic scope imagery, given that the left blamed Sarah Palin for once using bullseye spots on an election map of opposition congressional districts, claiming that such usage had incited the mass shooting by Jared Lee Loughner?

Yet recently, POTUS Joe Biden was a little bit more graphic and a lot more literal.

In a widely reported call to hundreds of donors last week, Biden boasted: “I have one job, and that’s to beat Donald Trump. I’m absolutely certain I’m the best person to be able to do that. So, we’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.”

“In a bullseye”?

‘God bless Trump’: Israeli politicos react to assassination attempt

Israelis from across the political spectrum on Sunday conveyed overwhelming support for Donald Trump following the attempt on his life at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the assassination attempt on the former president and presumptive Republican nominee for the White House “is not only a heinous crime, it is also an attempt to assassinate American democracy.”

At the start of the weekly Cabinet meeting in Jerusalem on Sunday morning, Netanyahu said that he “would like to send him in my name, in the name of my wife, Sara, in the name of the ministers of the Israeli government and in the name of the entire people of Israel our best wishes for a speedy recovery and a return to full strength.”

Netanyahu earlier wrote that he and Sara were “shocked by the apparent attack on President Trump” and praying “for his safety and speedy recovery.”

Foreign Minister Israel Katz tweeted, “I am shocked by the shooting at the 45th President of the U.S. Donald Trump. I pray for his speedy recovery. Violence can never ever be part of politics.”

Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid described the shooting as “greatly troubling and dangerous,” tweeting, “Political violence is an existential threat to democratic systems. I extend my wishes for a speedy recovery to the former president.”

Anti-Jewish hate crimes hits a new record in California

There were 289 reported hate crimes against Jews in California in 2023, a 52% increase from 2022, according to the hate crimes statistics released by the State of California earlier this month.

Anti-Jewish hate crimes accounted for over 73% of all anti-religious hate crime.

Since 2014, the numbers of hate crimes against Jews has increased dramatically and consistently. While anti-Muslim hate crimes increased in 2023, they have remained fairly steady over the years.

Anti-Jewish hate crimes account for nearly the entire increase in all anti-religious hate crimes between 2022 and 2023. In fact, the total number of all hate crimes in California decreased slightly in 2023, with the most drastic increases against Jews (+100) and LGBTQ+ (+70)

The dramatic increase in antisemitic hate crimes in 2023, which were already high out of proportion to the number of Jews in those areas beforehand, has been seen in most places that have released hate crime statistics so far.

And 2024 looks like it will be not just worse, but far worse.

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!

Antisemitism in Turkey has skyrocketed since October 7

A new book has been published about the history of antisemitism in Turkey, which is manifest on both the political Right and Left.

The German language book "Antisemitism in and from Turkey" is edited by Corry Guttstadt, whom you can see in this 2015 lecture about Turkish antisemitism and how Turkey created the fictional story of rescuing tens of thousands of Jews in the Holocaust. In reality, Turkey knowingly allowed Jews to die.

Since October 7, things have gotten exponentially worse for Jews in Turkey.

One need only look at the Twitter/X account of the Jewish community in Turkey. Their weekly "Shabbat Shalom" messages, often with a prayer for peace, have antisemitic responses. Even their commemoration of the anniversary of the deadly February 2023 earthquake received antisemitic responses.

Synagogues, and churches that Muslim Turks could not distinguish from synagogues, have been attacked.

Nazi symbols have been found in Turkish schools in reported antisemitic incidents.

A man proudly posted a video of himself teaching his young son to murder Jews.

A Turkish bookseller posted a notice that no Jews were allowed in his shop.

When Turkish president Erdogan's AKP party lost in some local elections, people blamed Jewish vote manipulation.

I had reported about the hysteria in Turkey where the media falsely claimed that 4,000 Turkish Jews are fighting in Gaza. A new bill was introduced that would revoke the citizenship of Turkish nationals who served in the IDF in Gaza and allow for the confiscation of their assets.

Perhaps the epicenter of Turkish antisemitism is the newspaper Yeni Şafak, which has close ties to Turkish president Erdogan. In response to the "secret Chabad tunnels" story in January it published lurid accounts of the classic blood libel, saying that Jews were murdering gentile children in those tunnels in Brooklyn to use their blood in Jewish rituals.

This post is still on Instagram today and received over 58,000 "likes."

This isn't "anti-Zionism." This is state-approved Jew-hatred.

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!

At the beginning of the Gaza war, I posted a list of things the media gets wrong every single time there is a war there. And for the most part, that post remains correct even today.

However, nine months into the war, the New York Times published a lengthy article about Hamas war tactics in Gaza that begins to describe only some of my points.

Very little of what they report is a surprise for anyone following the war, and it is mysterious why they took over nine months to mention all of these things, most of which they admit could be seen in Hamas' own videos taken months ago.

Virtually all of those tactics violate international law. And that point is almost completely ignored.

An analysis of battlefield videos released by Hamas and interviews with three Hamas members and scores of Israeli soldiers, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, suggests that Hamas’s strategy relies on:

Using hundreds of miles of tunnels, the scale of which surprised Israeli commanders, to move around Gaza without being seen by Israeli soldiers;

Using civilian homes and infrastructure — including medical facilities, U.N. offices and mosques — to conceal fighters, tunnel entrances, booby-traps and ammunition stores;

Ambushing Israeli soldiers with small groups of fighters dressed as civilians, as well as using civilians, including children, to act as lookouts;

Leaving secret signs outside homes, like a red sheet hanging from a window or graffiti, to signal to fellow fighters the nearby presence of mines, tunnel entrances or weapons caches inside;

Dragging out the war for as long as possible, even at the expense of more civilian death and destruction, in order to bog Israel down in an attritional battle that has amplified international criticism of Israel.

Dressing as civilians while fighting is a war crime.
Using civilian homes for military purposes is a war crime.
Purposefully hiding among civilians and firing rockets from civilian neighborhoods is a war crime.
Recruiting children to do military activities is a war crime.
Hiding soldiers in hospitals is a war crime.

Astoundingly, the article gives one paragraph to Israel pointing out that this intentional use of civilian clothing and buildings is the reason why there is so much destruction in Gaza, and five paragraphs to Hamas officials defending their war crimes.

And not a single international law expert is consulted to see which side is correct.

One soldier said Hamas used chained dogs to entice soldiers toward a booby-trapped building, hoping that the soldiers would try to free the dogs.

Another soldier recalled spotting a dead Hamas fighter inside an apartment block and making his way toward the body. As he drew closer, he realized the corpse had been rigged with an explosive, he said. When his squad fired at the body, it blew up and set the building ablaze, he said.

There is, surprisingly, no international law that specifically protects animals from being abused in war, but there is such a law against mutilating the dead.

While the NYT describes all of these violations of the laws of war, the only time it mentions that fact is saying more than 50 paragraphs into the report that "International law requires combatants to avoid using 'civilian objects,' which include homes, schools, hospitals and mosques, for military objectives."

The article should have been written many months ago, and it should have emphasized that Hamas' actions are not only illegal but also the cause of so much suffering of the innocent in Gaza.

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!

07/13 Links: Muhammed Deif dead?; Trump shot at during rally; The Lancet libel: Lies masquerading as medical research; Dr. Ruth passes away at 96

From Ian:

Palestinian destruction of Jewish archaeological sites must be halted

A large group of the most prominent Israeli archaeologists (including Zartal critics and anti-Biblical-narrative archaeologists at Tel Aviv University including many Israel Prize laureates in archaeology) twice signed a public petition to then-Defense Minister Benny Gantz and Prime Minister Netanyahu demanding protection for the “altar” site on Mount Ebal; to no avail.

In January 2023, a Palestinian building contractor started again to plow-up the area. An Israeli officer even found the PA plans to destroy the entire site inside one of the tractors in operation.

An Archaeology Staff Officer then acted to demarcate the site as a protected site, but the Civil Administration insisted that the line be drawn narrowly around only the “altar” without the surrounding plain where the biblical “swearing-in ceremony” may have been held and which could be an archaeologically rich zone. The excuse: insufficient legal authority.The battle continues.

Another infuriating story relates to the incredible aqueduct identified as King Solomon’s magnificent water system in Judea that runs from Hebron through Bethlehem to Jerusalem, including what is today termed “Solomon’s Pools,” southwest of Bethlehem.

This marvel of ancient engineering, 40 km. long, is described in detail in the Bible, and the description matches the archaeological findings precisely. The pools and aqueducts survived 2,000 years of summer and winter and many invaders and predators – until the arrival of the Palestinian Authority.

In 2022, the PA dug an enormous 1,500-dunam quarry pit at Beit Fajar right through a section of the aqueduct. The quarrying caused irreversible damage to the aqueducts, with some 100 m. of tunnel and approximately 2,000 m. The Government of Israel did nothing to stop this.

This is the place to point out that PA-directed destruction of Jewish heritage sites in Judea and Samaria is a gross and explicit violation of the Oslo Accords and all relevant international legal frameworks, including heritage preservation obligations under UNESCO (which the PA joined in 2011), and the World Heritage Convention (known as ICOMOS, the International Council on Monuments and Sites).

The flip side of this is that the government of Israel has been derelict in its international heritage preservation legal obligations too (in addition to its responsibility for Jewish memory and historical truth), under provisions of The Hague Convention and Jordanian law which still partially apply in the West Bank.

The Israeli Supreme Court in particular has been a comatose, regressive actor in this ongoing saga – foregoing opportunity and after opportunity to force the hand of the Israeli government into action against Palestinian destruction-ism.

The sad result to-date is truly annihilationist: Three thousand years of heritage on its way to near-complete wipe-out within a mere 30 years. This is a tragedy that must be stopped.

I salute the activist archaeologists and Ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Amichai Eliyahu, MK Amit Halevi, and others who have driven this matter to the government table. Clear policy directives must be issued to the IAA, IDF, Israel Police, and Israel Security Agency to prioritize the preservation of heritage sites in Judea and Samaria and to punish the PA for its belligerence.

Preservation and protection is a necessity so that something of biblical heritage remains for future generations. So that the land of the Bible is not erased by Palestinian aggression and denialism.

The Lancet libel: Lies masquerading as medical research

THERE ARE multiple issues to call out regarding this “gold-standard” publication. The entire premise of the article (aka “letter”) argues that conflicts lead to non-combatant deaths, meaning that the fatalities can be as high as 186,000 due to “indirect deaths.” Yet the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health casualty numbers already included indirect deaths, which the authors did not adjust for. The 186,000 figure also includes “post-conflict deaths.” However, according to international law, any deaths that occur after the war’s conclusion are not counted as part of the official death toll.

Early in the article, they write that the Hamas casualty figures were “accepted as accurate by Israeli intelligence services” – but this claim is false. The authors cite one Vice article that references a Mekomit article claiming that unnamed Israeli “intelligence sources” found Hamas numbers reliable. There is also no evidence that some Gazan “first responders” are counting bodies in addition to “Gaza Health Ministry.” They are relying on a fringe news item based on unidentified sources to legitimize Hamas’s numbers.

The authors also claim the UN estimates that 35% of Gaza has been destroyed, but the UN study referenced cites only 12%. They also present all the deaths as civilians and ignore that 17,000 terrorists have been killed, ignore the thousands of natural deaths, and ignore any deaths that were caused by Hamas or Islamic Jihad terrorists themselves from misfiring rockets.

I have not been able to scratch the surface of the amount of false information in this piece. It is disinformation masquerading as “reliable research,” which cites unreliable sources, presents gross misrepresentations, and suffers from omissions. Even one of the writers, Prof. Martin McKee, retracted from the numbers he presented and co-signed on, claiming that “our piece has been greatly misquoted and misinterpreted.”

The Lancet once again allowed disinformation to spread on what is considered a “well-respected magazine” with a readership of 36 million people. When healthcare and medical professionals and policymakers read such reports, it has a direct impact on the Jewish state that is fighting an unprecedented urban war where the terrorists are hiding under the civilian population.

These three authors completely misconstrued the reality and repeated falsehoods based on fringe sources. We live in a world where the facts matter and should matter, especially when the lives of Israelis and Palestinians are at stake.

07/12 Links Pt2: UN says it paid for Albanese’s anti-Israel lobbying trip; 2,500 Rabbis Call for Columbia Uni Pres. Resignation; Rashid Khalidi’s distortion of history

From Ian:

UN finally says it paid for Albanese’s anti-Israel lobbying trip

After months of refusing to state publicly who paid for an anti-Israel United Nations official’s politically-centered visit to Australia and New Zealand, the U.N. Human Rights Office told JNS on Friday that the global body paid for the trip in November.

Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for Palestinian rights, has become the focus of an internal U.N. investigation into allegations launched by U.N. Watch, a watchdog that alleges that pro-Hamas lobbying groups funded the trip.

The Australian Friends of Palestine Association claimed publicly that it had “sponsored” Albanese’s visit, and Free Palestine Melbourne, the Australian Palestinian Advocacy Network and Palestinian Christians in Australia stated that they “supported” the trip. All four are lobbying groups.

During the visit to Australia, Albanese participated in media and fundraising events, as well as meetings with pro-Palestinian politicians and civil society members.

A connected trip to New Zealand included what U.N. Watch calls a meeting “to lobby a major New Zealand sovereign wealth fund to divest from Israel-related companies.”

JNS sought a copy from the United Nations of its payment for Albanese’s travel and correspondence between her office and the global body that would confirm the timeline of when the United Nations agreed to pay for the travel.

Albanese’s special rapporteur position is a volunteer role that is technically independent of the United Nations. The global body pays her expenses out of a designated budget.

Her trips to Australia and New Zealand did not appear in the mandated U.N. special procedures annual report. The U.N. Human Rights Office told JNS that the trip was not included, because “it was not a designated ‘country visit’ per se.”

“Only official country visits aimed at assessing the human-rights situation in that country itself, and that are followed by a country visit report to the Human Rights Council, are included in this list,” it added.

JNS asked how the U.N. Human Rights Office, which has said it is in a dire financial state, justified spending an estimated $22,000 for Albanese’s politically-motivated trip.

Jonathan Tobin: Candace Owens is a cautionary tale about platforming ignorance

The manner by which she slipped effortlessly from normal political discourse to defending rabid antisemites like Kanye West to attacks on Israel and mimicking Hamas propaganda to her current bout of Holocaust denial also illustrates the way hucksters like her can exploit partisan divisions to gain clicks and then a foothold for hate. Having first established herself as a supporter of former President Donald Trump, and with the imprimatur of PragerU and Daily Wire behind her, it was all too easy for decent people to give her a pass when she first started demonstrating signs of extremism. In a media culture where “owning” one’s foes has become a paramount objective, anyone who can infuriate the other side is always initially assumed to be either trolling them for effect when they say outrageous things or are victims of groupthink and censorship when they get negative blowback. With Owens, there was also a tendency to see any criticism of her as evidence of the unfair way in which liberals always seek to smear blacks who choose to dissent from the leftist orthodoxy.

That’s how she got away with her defense of West, though her poor excuses for arguments demonstrated that she was woefully ignorant about the subject.

More to the point, having gifted her with a large audience, those who ran the Daily Wire seemed to be stuck with her, even as her opinions diverged more and more from the conservative beliefs they espoused and her weakness for Jew-hatred became more noticeable. They should have booted her off their platform nearly two years ago, as some of us said at the time. Whether it was because they feared losing her followers or because it had already become a complicated business transaction, there she stayed until her post-Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and Jews forced their hand.

It’s hardly surprising that Owens has now gone completely off the deep end now that she’s no longer held accountable, even in theory, to other more responsible people. The same was true for Tucker Carlson, who kept his animus for Israel mostly under wraps while he was hosting the most popular show on cable news but unleashed it once he was fired by Fox News Channel last year and was relegated to a smaller but still significant viewership via his X account.

We needn’t waste time refuting the lies Owens tells about the past or her falsehoods about being a victim of a corrupt establishment. Her decision to become a Holocaust denier puts her beyond the pale and should render her too toxic for anyone with a shred of credibility to bother defending. Much like crackpots like Nick Fuentes, who are called “groypers,” and Michelle Malkin, another former mainstream conservative pundit turned antisemitic fever swamp dweller, Owens is now likely to fade from view. We can only hope that from now on, only fellow extremists and antisemites like Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, will have anything to do with her.

Yet before she is rightly relegated to the dustbin of history where such hatemongers usually wind up, we do well to ponder just how easy it was for her to gain access to so many readers, listeners and viewers. Owens’s journey towards Jew-hatred isn’t unique to the right or to African-Americans. In the future, we should be wary of people with no track record of fully thought-out beliefs and whose only qualifications are their ability to talk fast, along with a particular ethnic or racial identity that makes them stand out. Those who initially applauded her stands should establish a policy of zero tolerance for hate that we would expect to be observed by those on the other end of the political spectrum. Failing to do that is a formula for disaster that will only produce more Holocaust deniers with a mass audience.

Ben Cohen: ‘The Neck and the Sword’ is Rashid Khalidi’s distortion of history

“The Neck and the Sword” is the title of an extensive interview with the prominent Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi in the latest issue of New Left Review, a London-based Marxist journal that, despite its name, is deep in the throes of middle age.

The interview’s title stems from one of the points made by Khalidi’s interlocutor, Tariq Ali, an aging New Leftist who used their discussion as an excuse to revisit his late 1960s heyday as a political activist.

Ali recalled that on a trip to the Middle East following the 1967 Six-Day War, he asked the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani whether a negotiated settlement was possible with these “bastards”—his term for the Israeli people. “Tariq, explain to me how the neck negotiates with the sword,” Kanafani apparently replied.

Ali was, of course, thrilled with this answer, because it articulated through a poetic metaphor one of the key elements of the Palestinian self-image: We are powerless; we are always and everywhere the victims of others, especially the Zionists; and we resist whenever we can garner the strength.

As romantic as that notion seems to the Western leftists who have adopted Palestine as the core element of their political identity, it is more properly understood as a license for Palestinian terrorist groups to carry out the sorts of monstrosities we witnessed on Oct. 7—reinforced by the adulation of their outside admirers—instead of admitting and accepting moral culpability.

Aided by Ali’s fawning line of questioning, Khalidi uncomplicatedly pushes this notion of perpetual victimhood throughout the interview. In my view, it is the clearest expression of an essentially secular Palestinian nationalist standpoint to have appeared in the last nine months, which is why it’s worth reading.

A Columbia University professor who is arguably the most erudite exponent of the Palestinian cause today, Khalidi certainly sounds more nuanced and historically literate when compared to the imbecilic, expletive-laden sloganeering disseminated by violently antisemitic groups like Within Our Lifetime and Students for Justice in Palestine.

For example, rather than denying the rapes, decapitations, hostage-taking and mass murder on Oct. 7—as these vile organizations do whenever they are not celebrating them—Khalidi acknowledges that these took place. Rather than denying or denigrating the Holocaust, he concedes that the Nazi genocide “produced a kind of understandable uniformity in support of Zionism” among the Jews who survived.

But does this cursory nod to the humanity and historical experience of the Jews meaningfully alter Khalidi’s perspective? The answer to that is negative. Khalidi’s softer touch on these questions actually makes the rest of his interview all the more disturbing. He has a historian’s knack for remembering dates, names, locations and quotes, and he marshals this information into a narrative that, for those who don’t know any better, is highly compelling. But for those who do know better, what stands out are the multitude of omissions and distortions in his account.