Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, September 04, 2024

This week's insane antisemitism in Turkish media

As I've been documenting over the past couple of months, Turkish media is virulently antisemitic. It doesn't even pretend to be merely "anti-Zionist;" there is no distinction between Jews and Zionists.

Here are some examples from the past few days.

In Milat Gazeti, Muhammad Oskilinc - an Islamic cleric with a regular column inciting hate for Jews - writes:

As the saying goes, Jews are “both guilty and powerful”, they have always committed crimes against humanity and human values throughout history. But on the other hand, with the enormous media power in their hands, they have managed to present themselves as an oppressed, innocently pushed and pushed poor people. Since they have executed this plan very well, they still continue to receive large amounts of compensation from many European countries. The grandfathers of Europeans witnessed dozens of crimes of Jews and exiled them from their countries. But over time, many insidious plans have presented to their grandchildren that Jews are as clean as a spoonful of milk and innocent. Then, step by step, the lie that they were exiled by their grandfathers without guilt was pumped in, and then the Europeans were brought to the position of standing behind the Jews no matter what, with both compensation and a guilty mindset.

This cursed nation, cursed by Allah (swt) dozens of times, has managed to present itself as a victim and a wretched to the entire humanity. For this; the cinema, theater sector and the entire art world have been taken under control. The educational curriculums of the countries and then the entire internet world have been mobilized. The history of the nations has been forgotten and a new and false history has been invented that suits the interests and benefits of the Jews. In other words, the memories of the nations have been erased and a new memory has been loaded. Pressure has been put on the parliaments of almost all countries and bringing up the crimes of the Jews has been made a crime by law under the name of “ANTI-SEMITISM”.

Yes, people can be misled, deceived, and even their history and archives can be designed in reverse. But nothing can be erased from the divine archive. When you look at the Holy Quran, it is immediately understood how dark and hostile to humanity this cursed people are. ...

In fact, it is not possible for this cursed people to escape the humiliation collar that has been put around their necks because of their corrupt character and their hostility towards humanity and human values.

Yeni Akit quotes Akşam newspaper writer Hüseyin Besli's insane railing against Jews and the West:

Like all false structures, the divinity of the West and the existence of the State of Israel will soon come to an end, and the Jews will be condemned to live in disarray and misery on earth, as they deserve.

Because Jews are the perpetrators of unforgivable sins and crimes...

That is why today's Israel is a country inspired by George Orwell, where animals live and are ruled by wild animals.

Just as Abraham put Nimrod, the symbol of human deification, in his place, today's false god puts humanity in its place in the person of the people of Gaza. I hope and pray that; just like Nimrod was defeated and killed by a fly, the people of Gaza will enter through the West's nose and spill their brains on the ground, God willing..."

Popular Turkish news site Haber7 calls closing of the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron from Muslim worship ten days a year "systematic genocide."

Ali Barskanmay writes in Karar about the antisemitism in Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" and concludes that it was prompted by how evil Jews are to begin with.

At least in Egypt and Morocco, there are also articles about the history of Jews in those countries that are not overtly hostile. I have yet to see any such articles in Turkish media since I started looking a couple of months ago.

Arabic media used to be this bad, and they were shamed by Western media reporting on the most hateful articles translated by MEMRI. At this time, Turkish media is the most antisemitic in the world, with Yemen in a distant second place (since Yemen doesn't try to dress up its hate in intellectual arguments as Turkey does.)

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!

I received this press release:

Governor Henry McMaster, in partnership with the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM), invites you to attend a significant, one-day forum on addressing and combating antisemitism in higher education.

The event will take place at the University of South Carolina Pastides Alumni Center from 9:00am to 7:00pm on September 9, 2024.

The event will provide a platform for many individuals to share experiences, concerns, and insights, as well as discuss actionable strategies to prevent and respond to incidents of hate, discrimination, and intolerance on college and university campuses.

This is most welcome.

There was a similar two day summit in Virginia in June, about the larger problem of antisemitism but also with significant discussion of antisemitism on campus:

Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin addressed the summit and received the CAM Civic Leadership Award for his dedication to fighting antisemitism and religious bigotry of all forms.

“The work in front of us is to undo so much of the hate that has become embedded in our culture and our society today,” said Governor Glenn Youngkin. “We owe it to our future to stand strong in this moment, to stand together in this moment.”

...Attendees also heard directly from a Virginia Tech student leader about the state of antisemitism at universities, as part of a panel entitled “Free Speech or Hate Speech? Addressing the Crisis on Campus.”

“One of the biggest challenges for Jewish students this year is feeling and being isolated,” Virginia Tech student leader Vivian Cohen said. “But even though Jewish students right now are tired, we are not defeated. We will continue to proudly express our identities on campus.”

It is refreshing to see some governors willing to tackle antisemitism, without watering down the topic by adding in "Islamophobia" as the modern antisemites insist.

(h/t MtTB)

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!

09/03 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!

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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.

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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.

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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!