Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, September 03, 2024

09/03 Links Pt2: Islamism's Assault on Israel Is a Crime Against All of Humanity; Time to nix 'Palestine': Terrorists aren't entitled to a state

From Ian:

Dr. Qanta A. Ahmed: Islamism's Assault on Israel Is a Crime Against All of Humanity

As a Muslim committed to Islam, and thus starkly opposed to the mendacious, totalitarian imposter of Islam that is Islamism, the underpinning of all Hamas's words, deeds, and diabolical aspirations, I and countless other Muslims around the world who saw a humble Muslim Israeli (Farhan al-Qadi) rescued by the IDF, only to witness the appalling execution of 6 Israeli hostages at the last moment of rescue, are reaffirmed in our mission to expose, disavow, reject and dismantle Islamism by all means possible.

Far from a moral stance, tolerating Hamas or even going so far as to celebrate it as in some way "defenders" of the Palestinians against Israel is, in fact, an immoral fallacy.

Hamas murders Jew after Jew while expending Palestinian lives to do so, its appetite for death boundless.

The vile murder of 6 Israeli hostages tells us who Hamas is; the heroic rescue of Bedouin captive Farhan al-Qadi tells us who Israel is.

JPost Editorial: UN, time to end your inaction and help bring home the remaining hostages

For a UN official to draw an equivalency between the hostages abducted by Hamas and Palestinian terrorists being held in Israeli jails is outrageous – and the secretary-general, António Guterres, should at the very least censure if not dismiss the Italian jurist, who should know better.

But Guterres himself has failed to condemn Hamas for murdering the six hostages. “I will never forget my meeting last October with the parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin and other hostage families,” he posted on X. “Today’s tragic news is a devastating reminder of the need for the unconditional release of all hostages and an end to the nightmare of war in Gaza.”

Anne Bayefsky, director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust and president of Human Rights Voices, noted that Guterres refused to name the perpetrators while equating their horrible deliberate execution with Israel’s effort to release them.

“The United Nations top apparatus – its Security Council, General Assembly, and Human Rights Council – has never specifically condemned Hamas,” she told Fox News Digital. “UN denial of the right of Israeli self-defense and its promotion of violence against the people of Israel has never been more clear. No amount of UN photo-ops with hostages or their families will erase the reality of the UN’s insidious role in the nightmare of war in Israel for seven decades.”

According to the Preamble of the UN Charter signed in 1945, the purpose of the United Nations is, inter alia, “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained.”

As we mourn for the six hostages, we urge the UN to change its course, condemn Hamas, and take action immediately on behalf of the 101 hostages it is still holding.

Why Anti-Zionism Is Antisemitic

Anti-Zionism undermines the millennia-old ties between Judaism and the Land of Israel.

While preparing to leave my position as a tenured full professor and academic administrator at Rutgers University in May, I was called out for contending that calls for Israel's destruction, including the view that Israel has no right to defend itself or its citizens, are antisemitic.

Anti-Zionism - opposition to the Jewish right of self-determination in the Jewish people's historic homeland - is antisemitic because it attacks a core belief of Judaism.

Three times a day, traditional Jews pray for the rebuilding of Jerusalem as part of the Jewish homeland. Academics would be outraged if anyone tried to dictate to any other religion what its beliefs should be.

09/03 Links Pt1: The deaths of these hostages shame the Western conscience; Hamas's Inhumanity Is Laid Bare Once Again; Hersh Goldberg-Polin and ‘The Hope’

From Ian:

Brendan O'Neill: The deaths of these hostages shame the Western conscience

Now this is resistance. Unprepared, unarmed, these six young people did what they could to resist the anti-Semitic savagery of the invading army from Gaza. They repelled its grenades, rescued some of its intended targets, tended to the victims of its racist sadism. They didn’t ask for war, they didn’t expect war, they didn’t deserve war. But when it came, brutishly intruding on their kibbutzim and parties, they took action that helped to minimise the Jewish people’s suffering. It is a testament to Western radicals’ swirling moral disarray and their detachment from civilisational values that they referred to the racist invaders of Israel as the ‘resistance’, and the Jewish heroes who fought back as ‘colonisers’.

But this goes beyond foolish ‘left’ apologism for Hamas. It goes beyond excuse-making for terror. There is a case to be made that the self-styled progressive conscience of the West has not been complacent in the face of Hamas’s barbarism, but complicit. Many in the West played an active role in justifying the kidnapping of people like Goldberg-Polin, Lobanov, Gat, Sarusi, Yerushalmi and Danino. They actively bolstered the kidnappers’ claims to be resistance fighters, and they actively prevented the raising of awareness of the kidnap victims, particularly through the destruction of posters featuring their faces. They were more than bystanders to a pogrom – they were unpaid PR men for the pogromists.

Consider the feral mobs of anti-Semites that clawed kidnap posters off public buildings and lampposts. The six dead of Rafah will have been on some of those posters. Indeed, in April, in Melbourne, Australia, a huge ‘Bring Them Home’ mural featuring the face of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, among others, was graffitied by anti-Israel agitators. They daubed ‘FREE PALESTINE’ in massive letters over his face and the faces of the other stolen Jews.

This rash, racist allergy to any awareness-raising of the Israeli hostages was pure spin for Hamas. In destroying the posters, or daubing them with shit, or scribbling ‘coloniser’ on them, Western Israelophobes were slavishly amplifying Hamas’s insistence that these people are not innocent. That they deserve persecution. That you absolutely should not sympathise with, and in fact you should hate, the likes of those six young men and women who were held and brutalised and murdered in Rafah. That people in the West, in virtually every major city, assisted in Hamas’s dehumanisation of the Jews in its captivity should chill us to the bone.

Or consider the frenzied ‘radical’ hostility to any effort by Israel to rescue its seized citizens. It is just three months since the social-media craze of ‘All Eyes on Rafah’. Nearly 50million people, including celebs, shared that slogan on Instagram, the aim being to condemn Israel for even thinking about sending troops into Rafah. We now know that that is where the six hostages, and others, were being held in rank, repulsive conditions. We now know Hamas was using Rafah as a base for attacking Israel. ‘All Eyes on Rafah’ was no progressive cry – it was an act of woke appeasement. ‘Leave Rafah to Hamas’, was the sick undertone of this reckless trend. Not content with defiling images of the six young Israelis interned in Rafah, the virtuous of the West then raged against military action that might have led to their rescue. They made themselves the defenders of Hamas’s wicked dominion over Rafah.

Kamala Harris has questions to answer here. She’s issued a welcome, angry statement on the slaughter of the six hostages, describing it as ‘an outrage’. And yet for months she sternly instructed Israel not to launch a ‘major military operation’ in Rafah. There will be ‘consequences’, she warned. It is now known that in Rafah, an American citizen was being held captive. Now killed. Is this the first time in history an American leader warned of ‘consequences’ over the rescue of an American rather than over the kidnap of an American? As National Review summarises it, ‘Kamala Harris warned Israel of “consequences” if it invaded Rafah, where Hamas just murdered an American hostage’.

Here’s the only question that matters right now: are Jewish lives worth fighting for? Some of us think they are. Others, from the top of politics to the frenzied anti-Semites on the streets, seem to think otherwise. It is tempting to see the West’s moral disorder over Israel-Hamas as a consequence of that old problem, ‘the sleep of reason’, the sleep of our conscience. But in truth, the West’s conscience has been wide awake, and excitable, and noisy, and it has sided not with kidnapped Jews, but with their kidnappers. Let us hope the memory of the six slain will be a blessing – and let us hope their deaths will be a lesson for a West that seems utterly morally lost.

Hamas's Inhumanity Is Laid Bare Once Again

The international narrative continues to be overwhelmingly anti-Israel, even as IDF special forces extricate the bodies of innocent Israeli hostages dragged from their homes on Oct. 7.

They were kept in tunnels for months on end, tortured and starved, only to be killed as help arrived.

The sheer mercilessness of their captors does not appear to exercise the same people around the world so eager to join pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

Where are the mass protests against the inhumanity of Hamas?

Hamas is happy to sacrifice as many Palestinians as it can to turn international opinion.

That it has partly succeeded in doing so is a blot on the people unable to make a moral distinction between those who perpetrated this violence and those responding to it.

Bassam Tawil: Israel: Ceasefire Deal Will Prevent Hostages from Coming Home, Anti-Government Protests Only Embolden Hamas

Hamas leaders, who are closely observing the protests, are likely to harden their stance in the hope that the Israeli government will give in to the demonstrators' demands, including an immediate and unconditional ceasefire in the Gaza Strip. Hamas has the Israeli public pressuring their government to allow Hamas to "live to fight another day": to rearm, regroup and continue attacking Israelis – as Hamas official Ghazi Hamad vowed.

Hamas leaders are banking on the Biden administration to compel the Israeli government to give in to the terror group's demands.... It has long been the dream of Hamas and many Palestinians to see the US turn its back on Israel.

Hamas's primary goal is to remain in power and return to the pre-October 7 era, when it built a large terror infrastructure in the Gaza Strip. Hamas knows it will not be able to accomplish its aims without a full Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and an official end of the war.

That is why Hamas is insisting that Israel withdraw from the Philadelphi Corridor along the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. Israel's presence there obstructs Hamas's efforts to smuggle weapons into the Gaza Strip through cross-border tunnels, as it has been doing for the past two decades.

Hamas is reportedly demanding US and international guarantees that Israel will not target the terror group anytime in the future. Until then, Hamas will continue to hold on to many of the hostages as an "insurance policy."

Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the October 7 atrocities, will not release all the hostages at once. He will continue to physically surround himself with many of them to ensure that Israel does not kill him. Sinwar does not care how many Palestinians in the Gaza Strip perish, as long as he is permitted to stay alive.

Even if Hamas were to initially release 10 or 20 hostages as part of any agreement, who could ensure that the remaining captives would be released? Are we supposed to take Hamas's word for it? Are we supposed to believe that the Americans, Egyptians and Qataris would be able to force Hamas to comply with the terms of any agreement?

Palestinian media is reporting:

Social media activists circulated a shocking video clip, showing extremist Jewish settlers stealing the contents of the Ibrahimi Mosque in the West Bank, and turning it into a Jewish temple under the protection of the occupation police, to practice their Talmudic prayers in it.

The video shows extremist Jewish settlers seizing the contents of the Ibrahimi Mosque from the ground up, placing the Talmud inside it, in a clear provocation of the feelings of Muslims in the West Bank, and placing wooden barriers inside the mosque.

Here's the "shocking video:"

For most of the year, the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron is divided into Muslim and Jewish sections to allow everyone to pray. For ten days of the year, it is exclusively Jewish; and for ten days it is exclusively Muslim.

Every single time it becomes exclusively Jewish, Muslim media freaks out and publishes stories like this one pretending the Jews are taking it over.

In this case, the Jews are marking Rosh Chodesh Elul. They are wheeling in mechitzot to separate mean and women worshippers (not wooden barricades.) They are bringing in a Holy Ark, not stealing Islamic furniture.

Everyone in Hebron, Muslim and Jewish alike, know all of this. They choose to create these fake news reports anyway, to incite hate against Jews.

And so it goes.

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!

Stupid recent academic paper #2: "Bridging the Jesus Event and the Nakba"

This piece of drivel was published last month in Political Theology:

Reclaiming History and Memory: Bridging the Jesus Event and the Nakba
Abeer Khshiboon

This article examines the interconnected histories and memories of two Palestinian points in time: the historical Jesus event and the Nakba. It critiques colonial-imperial narratives that have historically disconnected the Jesus event from Palestine, often interpreting it as a divine sacrifice that signified Europe’s transition into a new era: Christianity. Inspired by Ahn Byung-Mu’s work on the minjung or ochlos (the sheep without a shepherd, the dehumanized and alienated crowd in the Gospel of Mark), this study draws on critical historical Jesus scholarship, seeking to reevaluate the journey of the ochlos between exile and redemption. It offers a postcolonial interpretation of the Jesus event through the concepts of collective memory and trauma, arguing for the importance of revisiting the past to address and reframe present injustices and disenfranchisements. The conclusion discusses the relationship between remembrance and belongingness, emphasizing its potential to challenge memory erasure and trauma denialism.

The author appears to be an Arab Israeli Christian who is now a doctoral student in Berlin. Her paper praises the antisemitic "liberation theology" of today's Palestinian Christians.

This goes beyond the Christmas memes of Palestinians as Jesus. The "scholar" not only compares today's Zionist Jews to all the bad guys in her view of history - she claims Palestinians are the real Jews.

To recapitulate, the Galileanness of Jesus, inspirational on many levels, helps us to reconstruct the notion of belonging in the context of Palestine today. Just as Galileans were rendered enemies under the temple-state of Jerusalem, so too are today’s Palestinians cast as such under Zionism, where they are denied the right to belong to their biblical memory, history, culture, and homeland and denied recognition as Ām HaĀretz. More liberatory and decolonial theologies enable us to better think through and thus to reclaim the oneness of history and memory, of the Jesus event and the Nakba. Whether it is in stories of Galilee’s struggle against Jerusalem, Jesus’s against David, Biblical Israel’s against Roman Palestina, the crowd of sinners’ against the laos, or Filastin’s against the Zionist regime, each time we find the ochlos anew, exiled from human rights, and persistently yearning for a single sense of home. ... Here and now, it is indispensable to reread Palestine’s disenfranchised stories from Solomon’s Temple to Khurbān HaBāyit all the way to the Nakba; they seem to carry exiles that are yet to be remembered as one.

I see a lot of "scholarship" that pretends to find parallels between disparate situations and extracts meanings from them. In reality, you can throw two darts at any history timeline and find parallels between any two events as long as you ignore the differences.

It is not actual scholarship; it is reading tea leaves. And in this case, it is doing so in the service of promoting hate against 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!

"The Academic Question of Palestine", by Walaa Alqaisiya, was published as an introduction to a special edition of the Middle East Critique journal in August.

Here is its abstract:

Building on the work of Edward Said, we maintain that Palestine constitutes a unique question with special status in international academic spaces, particularly in the West, because of its entanglement with other imperial and settler colonial forms of dispossession. We argue that the special place that Zionism and its defence has occupied for decades in academia has rendered Palestine one of the thorniest and most divisive issues of our time. In the new millennium, the birth of the BDS movement; the emergence of new solidarities with global anti-racist movements; the scholarly and human rights consensus that Israel constitutes a regime settler colonial apartheid; the acceleration of Zionist violence, until the Gaza genocide, have generated new forms of repression and resistance in the academic space. This Special Issue offers the tools for understanding these recent transformations of the question of Palestine.

Notice how academia has created a completely fake version of Israel that is supported by its own false articles to create an edifice built out of playing cards.

The author writes, as fact, that Israel is guilty of settler colonialism, of apartheid, of genocide - all lies and all easily disproven, but the desire to pretend that these are true outweigh any counter-arguments to these pseudo-scholars.

The only thing unique about "Palestine" is Jews. If an identical "nation" had been created anywhere else in the world, it would not get one percent of the publicity or interest. If it wasn't for antisemitism, the word "Palestine" would mean today what it meant in 1948: the English translation of Eretz Yisrael, nothing more.

The actual paper starts off with a quote that is a lie:

“We call upon our colleagues in the homeland and internationally to support our steadfast attempts to defend and preserve our universities for the sake of the future of our people, and our ability to remain on our Palestinian land in Gaza. We built these universities from tents. And from tents, with the support of our friends, we will rebuild them once again.”

(Gaza Academics and Administrators)

Really? The universities in Gaza were built from tents?

Islamic University of Gaza (IUG) was founded in 1978.

Al-Azhar University-Gaza was esstablished in 1991.

Gaza University was founded in 2000.

Palestine Polytechnic University, which has a Gaza branch, was established in 1978 in Hebron, with the Gaza branch more recent.

Notice that every one of these major universities in Gaza were established under Israeli "occupation."

So when the paper says Israel is engaging in "scholasticide" against Gazans, it doesn't want you to know that Israel approved and allowed each Gaza university to be built to begin with. If Israel intended to destroy all academia in the territories, why did no university exist under Jordanian and Egyptian rule, and only under Israeli rule?

Every paragraph in the article includes lies and deceit. Nothing negative is said about Hamas, and every Israeli strike in Gaza is framed as a deliberate act of extermination of civilians instead of an attack on a terror group for whom civilians only exist to protect it. It even frames the Simchat Torah massacre of civilians in heroic military terms, as "the military operation launched by Hamas and Palestinian militant groups on October 7."

That is just one example of the sloppiness and falsehood that we see in academic papers about Israel, multiple times every month. And I hope to show other examples just from August 2024.

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!

Hamas has proven that they are Nazis. You don't negotiate with Nazis. You kill them.

Hamas has admitted that they murdered the six Israeli hostages. They made videos of each of them in the hours before they executed them by gunshot, and are starting to use those videos to further split Israeli society and put political pressure on the government to allow Hamas to survive.

Hamas said they will continue to murder the hostages as long as the IDF attempts to rescue them.

Here's a poster they made with that disgusting promise.

It says, in Hebrew and Arabic, "Military pressure equals death and failure... an exchange deal equals freedom and life." Yet even Hamas posters show that they are happy to execute hostages.

As the Nazis often did in death camps, Hamas is pretending that their choice to murder Jews is a natural outcome of the choices Jews make. If Jews in death camps tried to escape, or to attack guards, the Nazis would murder more Jews and pretend that the Jews who tried to save their lives or fight back were responsible for the innocents murdered afterwards.

It is a level of sadism that Hamas shares with Hitler's henchmen.

I don't want to minimize the impossible position that the government of Israel is in, simultaneously trying to save the hostages but trying not to allow Hamas to be in a position to do the exact same thing again.

But make no mistake: Hamas has admitted that do not care about morality, or international humanitarian law, or the laws of armed conflict. They are cold blooded executioners who blame their own murderous ways on innocents.

When Hamas and its Western defenders claim that the terror group has "no choice," they are claiming that Hamas has no free will. Only animals have no choice when they attack humans or others, and only animals cannot be blamed for those deaths. Hamas and its defenders are justifying murders by saying Hamas has no choice but to murder and rape Israelis. They are admitting that, at a minimum, Hamas are animals - by their own logic.

One cannot negotiate with animals.

But in reality, Hamas terrorists are biologically human. They do make the choice of whether to murder or not, whether to rape or not, whether to put the families of the hostages through hell or not.

Which means they aren't animals. They are Nazis.

Anyone who gives credence to Hamas' claims is helping Hamas. They are buying into the logic that Hamas has no choice but to murder. Doing so plays into Hamas' hands, and that is exactly the reason Hamas spends so much time torturing the families of the hostages with highly edited and coerced videos.

Blaming Bibi for trying to save hostages is doing exactly what Hamas wants the world to do.

This week's events prove (as if October 7 already didn't) that Hamas and its allies are today's Nazis. My heart goes out to the families of the remaining hostages but the world cannot treat Hamas as anything other than what they are. By giving them respect, by blaming Israel for failed negotiations, by protesting against Israel instead of Hamas, people are doing exactly what these modern day Nazis want them to do.

But if the world truly internalized how evil Hamas is and treated Hamas like the Nazis they are, Hamas would have no leverage.

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!

Sorry, no linkdumps today

Ian could not do the linkdumps today for technical reasons beyond his control. Apologies!

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!

Peace of Mind: Israel is in the forefront of psychological health for soldiers returning from battle

The academic journal Military Psychology published an article about Israel's Peace of Mind program in 2022:

Peace of mind: Promoting psychological growth and reducing the suffering of combat veterans

ABSTRACT: The Peace of Mind (POM) program was designed to enable combat veterans in Israel to process their combat experience, address difficulties in the transition to civilian life and facilitate psychological growth as a result of their military experience. During the course of the program, 1068 participants were studied at four time points. Post-traumatic symptoms were measured using the PTSD checklist for DSM-5 (PCL-5), and post-traumatic growth (PTG) was measured using the Post Traumatic Growth Inventory (PTGI). Multilevel Modeling (MLM) was used to assess symptom and psychological trajectories for all participants and for those who began with and without PTSD symptoms, respectively. The results demonstrated that those who began the program with elevated PTSD symptoms experienced a significant reduction in PTSD symptoms following the completion of the intensive element of the program. Additionally, all participants demonstrated an increase in PTG following the intensive section of the program and this was maintained throughout follow-up.

The Israel Psychotrauma Center, known as Metiv, has built this program.

A unique and key part of the program has entire groups of soldiers visit a US Jewish community:

The team and their facilitators travel to a Jewish community outside of Israel. This eight day workshop is the core of the program and includes intensive group sessions from 8 AM to 4 PM every day, followed by varied evening activities after an intensive day as well as quality time with each other and the host families. The distance from Israel during this phase of the therapeutic process plays a crucial role in creating a safe, quiet and supportive environment.

In a sense, the diaspora Jews help the Jewish soldiers get whole again.

Various Jewish communities in the US are now volunteering to host these groups in their communities.

This is just one small example of how Israel and the larger Jewish world, thrust into a position of constant battle readiness that they never sought, manage to come up with innovative and creative ways to help everyone, including soldiers, who are forced by circumstances to move between the military world and everyday life.

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!

Forensics experts have determined that Hamas executed six Israeli hostages late last week.

These six - Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Alex Lobanov, Carmel Gat, and Almog Sarusi - were alive a few days ago. Hamas murdered them.

All of them were shot multiple times from close range.

They weren't killed in battle. They weren't killed from airstrikes. They were deliberately executed by Hamas.

Their kidnappings were a war crime. Their being taken hostage with the intent to trade them for murderers was a war crime. Their ten months of imprisonment were a crime against humanity. Their executions were a heinous crime against humanity.

And as of this writing, not a word of condemnation has been tweeted by Amnesty or Human Rights Watch or Oxfam or the UN Human Rights Council.

These are groups who are keen to condemn Jews marching with flags in Jerusalem, or Jews praying in their holiest spot, or Jews renting out houses as Airbnbs on the "wrong" side of an arbitrary line. Yet when Jews are summarily executed by Palestinians, they are suddenly struck mute.

So you know how they claim to care about international law? How they say they care about morality? How they pretend to care about human rights?

They don't give s damn about any of them. They only condemn things that align with their politics, and Palestinians murdering Jews is not something they consider abhorrent or immoral. They sort of admire them.

Sometimes, in order to appear even handed, they will write a report about undeniable and egregious violations of international law by Palestinian terror groups. One in perhaps 30 reports will mention rocket attacks by Hamas or rapes of Israelis. But those are the exceptions that prove the rule: they support Palestinian "resistance" in all its forms, but are forced to sometimes pretend to be consistent and issue half hearted condemnations while invariably at the same time also condemning Israel.

But there is no immediate, reflexive horror at Hamas being proven to do the most heinous war crimes that exist. They remain silent in the fact of human rights and international law violations, when Israeli Jews are the victims.

They are the worst hypocrites on Earth. Their silence proves that their incessant condemnations of Israel are merely political and worthless. Because if they cannot immediately condemn Hamas executions of Jewish hostages, they are against human rights for people they also hate.

And those people are proud nationalistic 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!

EoZ is on vacation, so blogging will be lighter than usual for the next week

Mrs. Elder and I are taking a much needed break.

I'll try to post this week, but it won't be quite as much as usual.

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!

09/01 Links: The Hostage Murders and the New Threat; Sinwar’s Israeli accomplices; Three Israeli police officers killed in terror shooting near Hebron

From Ian:

John Podhoretz: The Hostage Murders and the New Threat

Hamas is the evil here. America is not responsible for the deaths of anyone in Gaza, and anyone who says otherwise is a moral idiot—just like those deranged people who seem determined to blame Bibi Netanyahu for not surrendering to Hamas, as though the hostage deals of the past, like the one that freed Hamas mastermind Yahya Sinwar in 2011, weren’t among the root causes of this horrible conflict.

But we American are morally liable for our role in our backseat-driving in this war, for screaming at the Israelis at the wheel, unnerving them as they were trying to keep their eye on the road ahead.

Hersh Goldberg-Polin was 23 years old. There are two babies there, somewhere, in those tunnels that Kamala Harris said Israel should not go into. At her convention, Rachel and Jon spoke. America wept. Then Kamala Harris gave her speech and said Israel had the right to defend herself BUT there was too much killing and we needed a ceasefire and a hostage deal and a two-state solution and for the oceans to turn to lemonade, which is about as likely in the foreseeable future as a two-state solution.

And Hamas saw her, and saw Biden, and was so terrified by what they saw, so fearful of America’s martial response to their evil, that they killed Hersh and the five others whose bodies were found—and who knows who else yet.

This is a dangerous moment. This monstrous act of villainy will not quiet the campuses as the anniversary of October 7 approaches. No, it will embolden the very monsters who have been psychologically torturing Jewish students—and assaulting them in some cases—over the past year. The stories we’ve read in the past two days about the report of Columbia University’s anti-Semitism task force chill the blood. “Hillel Go to Hell,” read a banner at a Baruch College demonstration this week, in case you were wondering if things were going to quiet down.

The threats were real then and they are going to be even more real now, as those who support the destruction of the Jewish state and the crushing of the spirit and the freedom of American Jews make their moves over the next month. Their intention is to take over the anniversary of the massacre and turn it into a tribute, as they plan to do at the University of Maryland.

We don’t need to read Joe Biden issuing statements of outrage about Hersh. We need to see that things are going to be done to protect America’s Jews from the evil that might be visited upon us as we tick down the days until it’s been a year since Jews were plunged into this existential battle designed to destabilize the Jewish state and drive American Jews underground.

Joe Biden was sitting on the beach this afternoon as the Israelis recovered the bodies. He is a spent force, a quartered roasted duck. So what are you going to do about it, Ms. Harris? What are you going to do?

Caroline Glick: Sinwar’s Israeli accomplices

The discourse in Israel isn’t simply removed from reality because it is based on a false presentation of the U.S. position by the security brass. The entire domestic debate is taking place while Hamas isn’t even participating in the negotiations. For the generals, for Gallant and their comrades in the Knesset, the media and on the streets, the only one responsible for anything is Netanyahu.

In other words, Gallant, the generals, the left’s political leaders and the rioters in the streets are all playing the roles Sinwar assigned them.

This reality played out starkly during Thursday night’s Security Cabinet meeting.

From leaks of the supposedly secret deliberations that can be traced directly to Gallant, we learned that Gallant presented his fellow ministers with an ultimatum that might as well have been written by Sinwar. Gallant said that if they don’t agree to withdraw from the Gaza-Egypt border (temporarily), the hostages will be killed.

Netanyahu reportedly exploded at Gallant and explained that there is no such thing as a temporary withdrawal from the border zone, because of the actual U.S. position opposing a reinstatement of hostilities. Gallant responded to this dose of reality with a total meltdown. He said that Netanyahu was effectively calling for the hostages to be murdered.

Netanyahu responded by presenting a draft Security Cabinet decision to reject any concessions on Israel’s control over the Gaza-Egypt border in any hostage talks. It passed with one nay vote—Gallant’s.

Then on Saturday night, the news began percolating that the hostages were executed and the IDF retrieved the bodies.

As Tal Gilboa, whose nephew Guy Gilboa-Dalal remains hostage in Gaza, wrote on her X account on Sunday morning, “If the formula is ‘dead hostages = shutting down the country,’ … what would you do if you were Sinwar?”

Gallant responded to the news of their executions by publishing a statement on X demanding that the Security Cabinet reconvene and cancel its decision on the Gaza-Egypt border from Thursday night.

Towards noon on Sunday, Netanyahu issued his first response to the news that that the hostages had been executed. He explained that Hamas stopped carrying out serious negotiations with Israel last December. Sinwar rejected the U.S. ceasefire for hostages deals in May and August—both of which Israel accepted. Netanyahu concluded by noting that the execution of the six hostages makes clear, yet again, that Hamas doesn’t want a deal.

Given past experience, in all likelihood the left’s current calls for mass riots will indeed lead to unrest. But they won’t bring down the government. All the same, as Gilboa inferred, they will place the rest of the hostages in even greater peril.

Israel needs to win this terrible war. It has no choice. Just as the Jibril deal paved the way for 20 years of escalating terror warfare against Israel, and just as Oct. 7 was born with the Shalit deal, so events far more terrible than that one-day holocaust will happen if we dare to play by Sinwar’s rules. It is shocking, and frankly unforgiveable, that Israel’s left, led to his disgrace by Gallant, insists on doing so.

Ruthie Blum: Kamala’s push for Palestinian statehood

The news of the six bodies of murdered hostages found by Israeli troops on Saturday night in the tunnels of Rafah makes such remarks especially repugnant. In the first place, one of the captives held by Hamas terrorists with the help of “innocent” Gazan collaborators—and killed in cold blood in recent days—was American citizen Hersh Golberg-Polin.

The only appropriate response on the part of the Biden-Harris crew to this travesty would be to hang their heads in shame for enabling Iranian proxies, in this case a group of rapist thugs with machetes and mortars, to dance rings around what is supposed to be the world’s greatest super-power. Instead, Secretary of State Antony Blinken eulogized Goldberg-Polin on X by calling him a “hero” and resuming his efforts to secure a “ceasefire”—a euphemism for a Hamas victory over Israel.

Secondly, if the incompetents in D.C. hadn’t been trying to court Hamas-supporting constituents—on the grounds, as Biden said at the Democratic National Convention, that “they have a point”—they might have behaved like the allies of Israel that they’ve been professing to be since Oct. 7. Yes, had they not kept trying to block it from entering Rafah, or withholding weapons shipments as leverage, Goldberg-Polin and many others might well have been rescued by now.

This brings us back to Harris, who made sure, in her inarticulate fashion, to stress that she’ll toe the party line on Gaza: nodding slightly to the Jewish community by purporting to back Israel’s right to be upset about the atrocities of Oct. 7, while attempting to appeal to progressive antisemites.

“We have got to get a deal done,” she told Bash. “We were in Doha [the capital of Qatar, where some of the ceasefire negotiations were held]. We have to get a deal done. This war must end. And we must get a deal that is about getting the hostages out. I’ve met with the families of the American hostages. Let’s get the hostages out. Let’s get the ceasefire done.”

Bash interjected, “But no change in policy in terms of arms so forth?”

Harris said a perfunctory “no,” repeating, “I—we—have to get a deal done. Dana, we have to get a deal done. When you look at the significance of this to the families, to the people who are living in that region, a deal is not only the right thing to do to end this war, but will unlock so much of what must happen next.”

Not a mention of Hamas’s refusal to accept any deal that doesn’t guarantee its continued reign, nor of the inconvenient fact that it never agreed to release all the hostages.

“I remain committed, since I’ve been on Oct. 8, to what we must do to work toward a two-state solution,” Harris declared. “Where Israel is secure and in equal measure the Palestinians have security and self-determination and dignity.”

There you have it.

Harris was admitting that, from the day after Palestinian terrorists committed the worst atrocities against Jews since the Holocaust—before Israeli boots even touched the ground in Gaza, but while rockets continued to be launched from the Strip into the south, and Hezbollah in Lebanon fired missile barrages on the north—Team Biden was promoting a narrative of moral equivalence between perpetrator and victim.

We all must keep this in mind as Israel lays more hostages to rest and buries additional brave soldiers who fell in the battle to bring them home and beat their monstrous captors.

Not one person found under the rubble in Gaza for four months - there are still exactly 10,000 missing (if you believe Hamas, which the UN does)

One of the many bogus statistics we've been following from Gaza is the number of missing people buried under rubble.

As we've noted, between November and May, Hamas regularly reported - and the UN regularly repeated - 7,000 missing people under the rubble in Gaza. Then, sddenly, on May 3, that number jumped to 10,000 people missing.

Does anyone have the names of these missing people? Do we know what methodology was used to estimate their numbers?

Of course not. Because Hamas made them all up. And that's good enough for the UN.

Right now, the number of supposedly missing people has remained steady at exactly 10,000 for four months. The UN keeps publishing that number, crediting the Gaza Government Media Office, which is Hamas.

So not one person has been discovered under the rubble since May? Or maybe some have been discovered, but are equaled out with the number newly buried?

The number is fiction, like all of Hamas numbers. But NGOs and the UN need to publish the highest, most absurd numbers because that gives the sense of urgency that they demand for their anti-Israel political purposes.

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!

In Taba, Egypt, three Arab Israelis vacationing there got into an altercation with two hotel employees. But before the news was reported, there were rumors that six Jews were stabbed in Taba.

Turkish magazine Baran Dergisi was very happy upon hearing that rumor:

There is no longer any place for Jews in the world!
Six Jews were attacked in a hotel in Taba, Egypt. The occupying Jews, who gained the hatred of the world with the massacre they carried out in Gaza, are being destroyed on sight....

Jews must learn that from October 7th onwards the Jewish world will be narrow and they will not be able to find comfort anywhere. They will be destroyed wherever they are seen.

As we've been seeing lately, Turkish media is much less reluctant to spread pure Jew hatred than even most Arab media.

The same magazine had a recent article interviewing author Peren Birsaygılı Mut who said that "after October 7, Jews lost more blood than ever before, and in order for them to weaken them even more, we need to know our enemy and their propaganda methods well and fight. For example, it is essential that studies are conducted in academia on the invalidity of the concept of anti-Semitism."

Another article about a secular Turk who is critical of Islamism and supports Israel gives him the ultimate insult: it calls him a "crypto-Jew." himself. It ends off by asking "How long will Turkey shelter Jewish dogs?"

Similarly, it attacks the secular CHP party of Turkey as "Jewish-friendly."

There are about 14,500 Jews living in Turkey. I hope they wake up soon.

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!

08/31 Links: Kemp: The US should sanction the ICC; America 2024: Is antisemitism “the point?”; IDF working to identify bodies found in Gaza, possibly of hostages

From Ian:

Martin Sherman: America 2024: Is antisemitism “the point?”

Antisemitism as “a point”
Thus, while it is true that the Convention did not permit a Palestinian Arab speaker to address the Convention, this was overshadowed entirely by the fact that the Jewish members were compelled to assemble in hiding to conduct Jewish-related affairs for fear of disruption by anti-Jewish mobs.

One can only wonder in troubled bewilderment what departing president, Joe Biden, had in mind when he conceded that the pro-Hamas hooligans, demonstrating outside the Convention hall, “had a point”—as they raucously expressed their “outrage” at the IDF response to the murder and mutilation, the ravages and rapes of seniors and of infants, of men and of women that comprised the peaceful population of the towns, villages and agricultural communities in the Gaza Envelope.

Indeed, two aspects underscore the gravity of the unfolding metamorphosis: The one is the timing; the other is the substance.

With regard to the timing, this shift in sentiment seems particularly incongruous, coming as it does when the Palestinian Arabs seem more worthy than ever of censure and sanction, rather than support and sympathy. Indeed, this is all the more astounding since this emerging hostility comes hard on the heels, not only of the unspeakable barbarity and brutality on the part of the Gazan Arabs, but also the joyous embrace with which the appalling atrocities were celebrated by the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs, in general.

Crucible, not victim
Moreover, it is difficult to separate out between the moral culpability of the general populace in Gaza and their elected leadership. Indeed, contrary to popular belief, the overall population in Gaza is not the hapless victim of its radical Hamas leaders. Rather, it is the crucible in which Hamas was forged and the incubator from which it emerged.

Thus, Hamas is not an unwelcome imposition on an otherwise placid population, but an authentic reflection of the innermost desires of an inherently savage horde.

But rather than side unreservedly with Israel, the Democratic party and the Biden administration have chosen to take unprecedented measures against the elected government of a friendly nation.

Thus, with unspeakable impudence, and cynical exploitation of his Jewish origins, Democratic Senate leader, Chuck Schumer, purported to know better than the Israeli electorate itself what is good for it. In a desperate attempt to kowtow to his party’s increasingly assertive radical wing, he accused the elected Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, of being an “obstacle to peace”, calling for new elections to replace him—despite the fact that, even today, he is the most popular politician in the country. This, of course, is something Schumer would never have presumed to do with any other democratic ally of the US - or even any non-democratic adversary. Thus, somehow, Schumer found no reason to urge the removal of any member of the brutal Iranian regime in Tehran. Go figure.

Pompous pretentiousness
Arguably even more perturbing is the initiative by the Biden State Department to impose punitive sanctions on rightwing Israeli citizens—and to threaten sanctions on duly-elected senior ministers(Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir). Stunningly, none of the sanctioned individuals or organizations have been accused—never mind, convicted--of any current transgressions by Israeli law-enforcement agencies. With unmatched audacity, the Administration pompously proclaimed: "The United States remains deeply concerned about [Jewish] extremist violence and instability in the 'West Bank', which undermines Israel’s own security” neglecting of course any mention of how Arab extremism might impact Israel’s security.

Then, with breathtaking arrogance, it announced that if Israel does not act in accordance with its wishes, the US will take it upon itself to deal with “recalcitrant” Israeli citizens—with no commensurate intentions regarding lawless Arabs, who regularly stone, firebomb, and shoot at Israeli citizens: "We strongly encourage the government of Israel to take immediate steps to hold these individuals and entities accountable. In the absence of such steps, we will continue to impose our own accountability measures."

One can only imagine the outcry that would ensue should Washington threaten to intervene and supersede the functioning of the national law enforcement authority in any other country—especially if US citizens were not directly impacted by the action or inaction of that authority within the area of its jurisdiction.

Perverse and paradoxical
Furthermore, in terms of substance, Democratic support for the Palestinian Arab cause seems highly incongruous. After all, for anyone who ostensibly embraces progressive liberal values, there should be little attraction in the establishment of any Palestinian entity, especially a theocratic tyranny, such as a Hamas-ruled enclave in Gaza. Indeed, why would the party endorse establishing (yet another) homophobic, misogynistic Muslim-majority tyranny, whose hallmarks would be the suppression of women, the oppression of homosexuals, and the repression of non-Muslims and political opponents?

Clearly then, there is nothing that corresponds with the values to which the Democratic party professes to subscribe and the support for gender discrimination, gay persecution, religious intolerance, and political oppression that would characterize any self-governing Palestinian political entity.

So, if the new surge of support for Hamas and Gaza is antithetical to values allegedly dear to the Democratic party, but is manifestly detrimental to the Jewish state and by association, Jews who identify with it, what could be the motivation behind this malign shift?

Antisemitism certainly seems a highly plausible answer.

Richard Kemp: The US should sanction the ICC

We know of no other country that has been treated anything like this. For example Australia and the UK conducted war crimes investigations that took many years and were not plagued with intervention by the ICC. Israel, though, must apparently be subjected to special treatment. Arrest warrants were demanded by Khan seven months after the start of the conflict which triggered his intervention.

An ICC inquiry is one thing. Issuing arrest warrants against national leaders is something entirely different. In his latest submission to the ICC, Khan justifies his request solely on the basis that arresting Netanyahu and Gallant ‘could avert further harm to the victims who remain in Gaza and to those who were forced to leave but continue to suffer physical and mental harm’. That is manifestly absurd and Khan’s application should be immediately dismissed on that ground alone.

Does he expect Israel will arrest and hand over its Prime Minister and Defence Minister because he says so? Or perhaps he thinks the ministers will travel to the territory of a member state that will incarcerate them and send them into his clutches. Obviously neither would happen, but if it did, does Khan actually believe their replacements would end the war (read: surrender to Hamas)?

Khan must know none of this is realistic, and therefore his so-called justification is entirely without merit. The truth is that his arrest warrants are nothing other than a performative charade, intended to insult Israel and undermine its sovereignty and legitimacy.

We said earlier that this whole episode is not just a danger to Israel but to the world. Of course the inclusion of Hamas terrorists in Khan’s warrant application is yet more theatre, intended to pretend to the world that the ICC is ‘even-handed’. No extremist group or despotic regime has ever been or is ever going to be in any way deterred by the grandly-gowned justices at The Hague. Quite the reverse. Hamas and its kind will be emboldened by the knowledge that their enemies are vulnerable to legal action by the ICC while by definition they themselves remain inviolate. Khan pretty much confirmed this by not even bothering to adduce any justification for the Hamas arrest warrants, such as preventing further atrocities against Israel.

Like it or not, the only way to deal with such bloodthirsty terrorist gangs is by military force, not by lawsuits handed down with fanfare by the ICC. Paradoxically, Khan’s ill-judged machinations serve to deny effective military action by intimidating democratic national leaders who need to use force for the legitimate defence of their countries.

If the ICC’s ironically unaccountable judges succumb to Khan’s demand, we will have further confirmation that they are driven by a political agenda lacking legal logic or reason. Only the US can do anything about that. President Biden and Secretary Blinken both condemned Khan’s arrest bid in May but seem unwilling to go beyond words. Previously, the US sanctioned ICC officials for attempting to bring their countrymen before the court. In June, the US House of Representatives voted to pass legislation sanctioning the ICC for its action against Israel. Negotiations with the Senate to get that bill passed should be renewed with urgency. As with so much else in this anti-western political warfare campaign, Israel is the canary in the coal mine. If this precedent is allowed to stand, US political and military leaders will be back on the ICC’s menu and the world will be a more dangerous place.

Debunking the myth: Inside the IDF's efforts to minimize civilian casualties

The Israeli Air Force was a pioneer in integrating computers into bombers, drastically improving the precision of airstrikes. By the 1990s, these computers became small enough to be installed directly into bombs, leading to the development of precision-guided munitions (PGMs). The IDF has increasingly adopted this technology, particularly since the mid-1990s, to minimize collateral damage. For instance, during the First Gulf War in 1991, the U.S. used smart weapons in just 8% of strikes, but by later conflicts like 2008's Operation Cast Lead, nearly 100% of the munitions used were smart bombs. In the current war, Israel has not only employed smart bombs to target terrorists embedded within civilian populations—a Hamas war crime in itself—but has also integrated new technologies to enhance the accuracy of ground troops and artillery.

One such innovation is the Dagger sight by Smart Shooter, which uses computer vision and artificial intelligence to ensure that every shot is precise, effectively turning each soldier into a sniper and significantly reducing the risk of hitting unintended targets.

Another game-changing technology is the Iron Sting mortar, developed by Elbit. Unlike conventional mortars, which are generally imprecise, the Iron Sting is accurate to within meters. It relies on inputted coordinates rather than electro-optical imaging, significantly reducing collateral damage and the likelihood of civilian casualties.

Throughout the war, there were several well-known instances where Israel targeted terrorists in schools, with international media echoing Hamas propaganda by claiming that Israel killed many civilians during these strikes.

For example, on August 10, Israel targeted terrorists at Tabeen School. The Guardian reported: “At least 80 people have been killed in Israeli missile strikes on a school compound in Gaza City, according to the territory’s civil defense service.” In reality, the IDF targeted 20 terrorists, causing minimal damage to the school, and provided evidence demonstrating that the inflated number of casualties was highly unlikely. The IDF even posted the names and photos of those killed in the attack.

The Tabeen School strike is just one example of numerous propaganda attempts by Hamas and their allies to tarnish Israel’s image and further their strategy of maximizing civilian casualties to pressure Israel on the world stage.

A comparative perspective
These practices have enabled the IDF to achieve remarkable success on the battlefield while minimizing civilian casualties. The IDF reports that it has eliminated over 14,300 terrorists. Even if we accept the inflated figures from the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which are based on numbers provided by Hamas, the civilian death toll would be around 24,000. This results in a ratio of approximately 1.5 civilians killed for every one combatant. In comparison, the Soviet-Afghan War had a ratio of 10 to 1, and the Biafran War had a ratio of 15 to 1.

When we consider the total civilian death toll, which stands at around 26,000 (including Israeli civilians), this conflict is far less deadly for civilians than other recent wars. For example, the war in Yemen has resulted in over 367,000 civilian deaths, the Syrian Civil War has claimed over 617,000 lives and the Liberian Civil War left more than 200,000 civilians dead.

The IDF's efforts to avoid civilian casualties stand in stark contrast to these conflicts, demonstrating a commitment to minimizing harm even in the midst of intense warfare.

08/30 Links Pt2: The Nazification of anti-Zionism; As a lifelong Jewish Democrat, it pains me to say this; Israeli swimmer wins third Paralympic medal

From Ian:

The Nazification of anti-Zionism

Of course, there are significant differences between then and now, the most obvious being that during the Nazi era, antisemitism was a state-driven policy, whereas today it’s a civil society phenomenon in Western countries. Still, there are two overlaps that are worth pointing out.

Firstly, while Western governments aren’t actively discriminating against their Jewish populations, many of them are feeding antisemitic sentiments. This is certainly true of those countries in the European Union, such as Spain and the Republic of Ireland, which have pushed for unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state and advocated for sanctions against members of the current Israeli government. These politicians have essentially blessed the notion that Israel is a rogue state committing war crimes and therefore deserving of anger—anger that all too often gets directed at Jewish communities. As Arfi pointed out, “We all live with the idea that some people consider Jews to be legitimate targets for a battle happening 4,000 kilometers away.”

Secondly, many of the tactics and methods supported by the Hamas acolytes mirror the anti-Jewish measures introduced by the Nazi regime. A particularly shocking example emerged last week when the ultra-left New Communist Party in Italy published a blacklist of institutions and individuals who “support or promote the Zionist state in Italy.” In essence, this was an electronic version of the Nazi boycott campaign of Jewish-owned stores and businesses in Germany during the 1930s that helped give rise to the Holocaust a few years later.

In tandem with that is the rewriting of Jewish history and the caricaturing of Jewish theology. Social-media platforms like X (Twitter) and Instagram have been flooded with content that mocks the link between the land of Israel and the Jewish people, casting Israelis as Ashkenazi colonists who have willfully stolen Arab territories. The feed of Richard Medhurst—an Anglo-Syrian propagandist whose unhinged ravings are published by Iran’s Press TV and Russia’s RT—is replete with disparaging references to Ashkenazi Jews, to give one example. Medhurst’s co-thinkers, like Scott Ritter, an American former U.N. weapons inspector and convicted pedophile, and Mary Kostakidis, an Australian reporter who has enthusiastically embraced Medhurst’s own hatred of Zionism, form a reliable echo chamber for this theme and others, such as the slander that Jewish “chosenness”—a purely religious notion about the Jewish relationship with God—is actually an ideology of racial and national superiority. All these outpourings are designed to make their audiences despise all Jews, everywhere; in Israel, where they occupy and persecute the “indigenous” Palestinian Arabs, and outside, where the vast majority of Jews who support Israel, and have family and friends there, are framed as inherently suspect.

As I’ve argued before—and here is the link between the antisemitism of the last century and that in this one—anti-Zionism has morphed into “antizionism.” Freed from its hyphen, what remains is an ornate, multi-layered conspiracy theory with pretensions to be a revelatory, liberating and compelling explanation for why the world is in a rotten state.

For that reason, I think we can now reasonably speak of the “Nazification” of anti-Zionism. As the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer, citing the German historian Heinrich von Treitschke, declared from its masthead: “The Jews are our misfortune.” For their inheritors, it’s the “Zionists” who play the same nefarious role, but for all intents and purposes, there is no practical distinction between these two categories. If we are to educate non-Jews about the evils of antisemitism, we are obliged to demonstrate its consistencies across different historical periods. The core message is, after all, evolving in the same way as the trajectory of antisemitism through the ages: You have no right to live among us as Zionists; you have no right to live among us; you have no right to live.

Ruthie Blum: The high cost to the hostages of ‘enlightened’ hypocrisy

The argument over whether there’s such a thing as too high a price to pay for the release of the remaining hostages in Gaza continues to rage in Israel unabated. And “rage” is the right word to describe what is rarely a serious discussion on the part of the “Bring Them All Home Now” advocates.

Those whose family members are still languishing in the Strip can be forgiven for seeing the issue from a prism of personal pain. Still, not all the captives’ loved ones agree with their more vociferous counterparts that the government should cave in to Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s demands in order to seal a deal that would put an end to the 11-month nightmare.

The latter group grasps that it’s not so simple. In the first place, Sinwar hasn’t consented to free all the hostages, including if Israel withdraws all troops from Gaza and leaves him in power to repeat the atrocities of Oct. 7 “again and again and again,” as his henchmen have vowed to do.

Second, the hundreds of bereaved families of soldiers who fell in this war to defeat Hamas and rescue the hostages are desperate not to have all that loss be in vain. Ditto for the men and women in uniform risking their lives every day in the same pursuit.

The people who deserve no sympathy are the ones who’ve been exploiting everyone’s devastation to fan the flames of the pre-Oct. 7 protests aimed at ousting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition. Indeed, their cynical abuse of the hostage crisis to further a political agenda that got upstaged by the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust is nothing short of despicable.

Since the bulk of the Hebrew media has been complicit in this effort, it’s often difficult for members of the public to make a distinction between rational debate and “anybody but Bibi” hysteria. Occasionally, though, the disingenuousness gets exposed—and it’s a doozy.

As a lifelong Jewish Democrat, it pains me to say this

I have requested anonymity for this essay because there is intense social pressure on American Jews to be anti-Israel, especially on campuses. I am a professor at a liberal arts college where there is intense hostility toward Israel; my Zionism has already caused me to become a pariah on my campus.

If I was to publicly take the next logical step — conclude that drastic political changes are required to stem the public tide of Jew-hatred, even as drastic as supporting the presidential candidate “they” all uniformly despise — I sincerely believe my personal safety would be in question. That is why this essay both needs to be published and to be anonymous. The situation is that dire.

That somber moment when the flight attendant says, “Though we do not anticipate a change in cabin pressure,” so heavy with portent (at least for those of us with darker dispositions), and then the sage advice: “If you’re traveling with someone who may need assistance, put your own oxygen mask on first.”

Sage, if perhaps unnecessary, given the normal human instinct for self-preservation. I am reminded of the “Seinfeld” episode in which a fire breaks out at a children’s birthday party and George knocks children and elderly out of the way in order to escape. A moment of levity back then, the final calm, perhaps, before the storm, back when being Jewish was still somewhat cool.

This may just be my darker disposition speaking, but I believe the cabin pressure has changed.

If you do not already know this, or perhaps have been out of the United States — or off the planet — for the past year, a brief survey should catch you up. Franklin Foer summed it up back in March with his article in The Atlantic titled, “The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending.” That title, though perhaps optimistic in using the present continuous rather than past perfect, nails it.

Combine it with Jacob Savage’s 2023 article, “The Vanishing: The Erasure of Jews From American Life,” documenting the disappearance — a euphemism for “exclusion” — of Jews from academia, from all sorts of leadership positions, cultural institutions, activist organizations, legal positions such as judgeships, prestigious fellowships like Guggenheims and MacArthurs, and so on.

An article from just last week by Joshua Hoffman is entitled, “American Jews are increasingly excluded from leadership positions — because they are Jewish.” Being Jewish is also increasingly uncomfortable (another euphemism) in medical schools, law schools, and (anecdotally, though not yet well-documented) business schools.

The vanishing is complete in the public university system of New York City, once extraordinarily friendly to Jews in the American city with the largest Jewish population, now the largest urban university system in the country with some 25 campuses and approximately 230,000 people — where “of the top 80 senior leadership positions including campus presidents, as of April 2023, there were zero Jews remaining.”1

Five years ago the ever-prescient Liel Leibovitz urged Jews to “get out” of the elite American university system, where they were so clearly unwelcome; well that call has been heeded, if not by the Jews themselves then by the administrators and admissions officers who have kept them out, as the percentages of Jews in the Ivy League has plummeted over the last decade or two.

As Armin Rosen’s article last year put it, we have witnessed an “Ivy League exodus.” Professor of politics Eric Kaufmann found that just four percent of elite American academics under 30 are Jewish (compared to 21 percent of boomers).2 The steep decline of Jewish editors at the “Harvard Law Review” (down roughly 50 percent in less than 10 years) could be the subject of its own law review article.

Put it all together and we have seen what can only be called a purge: a purge of Jews from public life, from leadership, from elite institutions, and, most forebodingly of all, from the pipeline itself. If Jews are being hounded out of medical, law, and business schools, the next generation of physicians, lawyers, and businesspeople will be sparse with Jews.