Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, October 13, 2024

How can you explain Palestinians supporting Hamas when Hamas hates Palestinian civilians?

Although we knew this, the New York Times reviewed some internal Hamas meeting minutes, and among the discoveries was that Hamas deceived Israel into thinking it wanted calm. It didn't get involved in the mini-war with Islamic Jihad in 2022, for example.

Interestingly, I don't think the NYT ever mentioned Hamas' deception plan before. In the article it says "While Hamas leaders have spoken vaguely in public about how they tried to deceive Israel in the years leading to the attack, the minutes reveal the extent of that deception." The hyperlink points to an Arabic-only interview with Hamas' Khaled Meshal, saying pretty explicitly that Hamas wanted to give Israel the impression that it wanted calm and to help the people of Gaza receive aid, fuel and electricity.

What the NYT and other media don't seem to recognize is that while Hamas was deceiving Israel, it was deceiving Gazans as well.

As of October 6, 2023:

* More truckloads of aid were entering Gaza than at any time since before Hamas took over Gaza. Gaza was also exporting near-record numbers of goods to Arab and European countries.

* The GDP per capita in Gaza had, for the first time in a decade, increased two years in a row before October 7 2023.

* The unemployment rate had gone down in 2022 and was probably down in 2023 before October as well.

* In 2023, Israel allowed some 18,000 Gazans to have jobs in Israel for the first time in many years.

We've all seen the videos of how Gaza had thriving fancy restaurants, malls, high end shopping and catering halls.

Things were getting better in Gaza because there was calm. The calm did foot the Israelis - into providing more services for Gaza. The situation on October 6 proves not only that Israel never had any "genocidal" plans for Gaza, but it wanted Gaza's economy to thrive and give Gazans a reason to want to continue the calm.

Hamas used the Gazans to fool Israel. They made a conscious decision to start a war that they knew would destroy Gaza's economy, kill thousands of Palestinians, and cause far more damage than the 2009 or 2014 wars did.

This is besides building a tunnel network directly underneath civilian apartments, schools and mosques.

If Hamas hates Palestinian civilians so much, then how come most Palestinians (outside Gaza) support Hamas so enthusiastically? And the same question goes for Western supporters of Hamas - if they were really pro-Palestinian, how could they support a group that has made it blindingly clear that they look at Palestinian civilians as only valuable when they are suffering, injured or dead?

The answer to this (and, indeed, most similar questions of seeming illogical decisions by Palestinians and their supporters) is antisemitism.

As the NYT article shows, Hamas originally wanted to do much worse. They hoped for simultaneous attacks by Iran and Hezbollah, they had considered a 9/11 style attack on the Azrieli Towers in Tel Aviv - in short, they wanted to murder tens of thousands of Jews, not just 1,200.

People who are pro-Hamas are not pro-Palestinian in the Western sense - they share Hamas' antisemitic desire to perform a genocide of all Jews in the region.

#ICYMI: Children at Brooklyn October 7 Anniversary March: F*** Israel!; Hamas Needs to Build More Tunnels, Go into Israel and Attack Them pic.twitter.com/gbKniMmNki
— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) October 12, 2024

To them, wanting to kill Jews is the definition of being "pro-Palestinian."

No matter the cost.

If the goal is to destroy the Jewish state and not to help Palestinians, then there is no daylight between the "pro-Palestinian" crowd and the neo-Nazis. They pretend to care about Palestinian civilians but their support for Hamas proves that they, like Hamas, only value Palestinians who can be used for propaganda purposes.

It is a cynical way to manipulate Western opinion by appealing to Western values, when in fact these people despise Western values. They only want to see dead 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!

10/12 Links: Hamas Tried to Persuade Iran to Join Its Oct. 7 Attack; Jimmy Carter, friend of dictators and champion of terrorists; Eli Lake: The Hundred Year Holy War

From Ian:

NYTs: Secret Documents Show Hamas Tried to Persuade Iran to Join Its Oct. 7 Attack

Minutes of Hamas’s secret meetings, seized by the Israeli military and obtained by The New York Times, provide a detailed record of the planning for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack, as well as Mr. Sinwar’s determination to persuade Hamas’s allies, Iran and Hezbollah, to join the assault or at least commit to a broader fight with Israel if Hamas staged a surprise cross-border raid. The documents, which represent a breakthrough in understanding Hamas, also show extensive efforts to deceive Israel about its intentions as the group laid the groundwork for a bold assault and a regional conflagration that Mr. Sinwar hoped would cause Israel to “collapse.”

The documents consist of minutes from 10 secret planning meetings of a small group of Hamas political and military leaders in the run-up to the attack, on Oct. 7, 2023. The minutes include 30 pages of previously undisclosed details about the way Hamas’s leadership works and the preparations that went into its attack.

The documents, which were verified by The Times, lay out the main strategies and assessments of the leadership group:
- Hamas initially planned to carry out the attack, which it code-named “the big project,” in the fall of 2022. But the group delayed executing the plan as it tried to persuade Iran and Hezbollah to participate.
- As they prepared arguments aimed at Hezbollah, the Hamas leaders said that Israel’s “internal situation” — an apparent reference to turmoil over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s contentious plans to overhaul the judiciary — was among the reasons they were “compelled to move toward a strategic battle.”
- In July 2023, Hamas dispatched a top official to Lebanon, where he met with a senior Iranian commander and requested help with striking sensitive sites at the start of the assault.
- The senior Iranian commander told Hamas that Iran and Hezbollah were supportive in principle, but needed more time to prepare; the minutes do not say how detailed a plan was presented by Hamas to its allies.
- The documents also say that Hamas planned to discuss the attack in more detail at a subsequent meeting with Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader at the time, but do not clarify whether the discussion happened.
- Hamas felt assured of its allies’ general support, but concluded it might need to go ahead without their full involvement — in part to stop Israel from deploying an advanced new air-defense system before the assault took place.
- The decision to attack was also influenced by Hamas’s desire to disrupt efforts to normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, the entrenchment of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Israeli efforts to exert greater control over the Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem, sacred in both Islam and Judaism and known to Jews as the Temple Mount.
- Hamas deliberately avoided major confrontations with Israel for two years from 2021, in order to maximize the surprise of the Oct. 7 attack. As the leaders saw it, they “must keep the enemy convinced that Hamas in Gaza wants calm.”
- Hamas leaders in Gaza said they briefed Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s Qatar-based political leader, on “the big project.” It was not previously known whether Mr. Haniyeh, who was assassinated by Israel in July, had been briefed on the attack before it happened.

Hamas delayed terror attack on Israel by a year in an effort to rope in Iran, Hezbollah into plot

The minutes detailing the planning before the attack were found on a computer in late January by Israel Defense Forces soldiers who were searching an underground Hamas command post in Khan Younis, the New York Times said.

The documents were verified by experts, including Salah al-Din al-Awawdeh, a Hamas member and a former fighter in its military wing who is now an analyst in Istanbul.

The discovery also set off a flurry of questions within Israel’s intelligence agencies, as an internal military review demanded to know how Israel’s spies failed to obtain the information before the Oct. 7 attack or to understand what they described, the Times noted.

While Israel did obtain Hamas’s battle plans before the attack, Israeli commanders repeatedly dismissed the idea that Hamas had the ability or intention to carry them out.

The Iranian Mission to the United Nations denied the allegations made in the minutes.

“All the planning, decision-making and directing were solely executed by Hamas’s military wing based in Gaza, any claim attempting to link it to Iran or Hezbollah — either partially or wholly — is devoid of credence and comes from fabricated documents,” the statement to the New York Times read.

Back in February, the Director of National Intelligence’s threat assessment said this:

“We assess that Iranian leaders did not orchestrate nor had foreknowledge of the HAMAS attack against Israel.”

When the Israelis had found evidence from Hamas to the contrary a MONTH prior. https://t.co/4O77bLP5Ni pic.twitter.com/uDzX4DvAFD
— Gabriel Noronha (@GLNoronha) October 12, 2024

10/11 Links Pt2: 365 Days of October 7; The creepy thought experiments of Ta-Nehisi Coates; BBC Iranian expert who ranted about ‘chosen people’ pictured in IRGC uniform

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The Jewish Moment

It’s the same environment in which the deranged hatred of Israel and the Jewish people in the general population has become mainstream and is overwhelming the culture.

This is obviously very frightening. However, it’s important for Jews to view these tumultuous events not through corrupted Western eyes, which peer through a prism of demoralization and despair, but through Jewish eyes, which gaze through a prism of clarity and hope.

We Jews are not alone. There are good people who support us. They are people who still understand the distinction between right and wrong, truth and lies, victim and victimizer.

Although there are millions of them, they don’t possess cultural and political power. They have been effectively disenfranchised by those who aim to destroy Western civilization, who despise Israel and the Jews, and who dominate the elite positions within Western society.

With the decent millions fighting back through the democratic avenues available to them, a titanic civilizational struggle is under way.

The Jews are the leaders of that resistance. Israel is leading it in geopolitical and military terms, fighting to defeat the forces of evil in Iran and the Islamic world.

More generally, the historic culture of the Jewish people reaffirms the core values of civilization against the forces upholding lies, hatred and the abuse of power.

Those forces are embedded within the left-wing establishment in every country. In the Diaspora, many Jews themselves are signed up to the ideologies that have unleashed them. Some of these Jews have been deeply dismayed since Oct. 7 to find their supposed fellow “progressives” have turned against them.

These Jews have a choice. They can recognize the unique value of the inherited, specific precepts of Judaism that have bound the Jewish people together over the centuries and enabled it to survive every culture that has tried to annihilate it. Or else they can stick with a Western culture which, unless it dramatically changes course, is going down.

This weekend is Yom Kippur. Rarely has its central theme of teshuvah—“return”—seemed more apposite.

In the Middle East, the enemies of the Jewish people are now on the back foot. In Israel, there’s a quiet certainty that we are winning.

More than that, it’s astounding that this tiny country is standing alone to defend civilization against barbarism—a service to humanity that it’s delivering on behalf of the entire world.

No one is under any illusion. Many perils and maybe even more suffering lie ahead. What’s certain, however, is that Israel and the Jewish people will survive and thrive.

As Poilievre so movingly declared: “One thing I know—even a thousand years from now, on Friday as the sun sets and Shabbat begins in Israel, the songs of Shabbat will continue to be heard, and the Jewish people will continue to exist.”

We are living through a seismic chapter in Jewish destiny. The world may rage and shout and scream—because they know it, too. This is the Jewish moment.

The New Zionist Renaissance

The Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023, and the subsequent “Iron Swords” war have thrust profound philosophical and political questions to the forefront that will in turn shape the future of Zionism and with it, the fate of the Jewish people. What role should the State of Israel play in the life of the Jewish people? What is the meaning of Jewish consciousness in the life of the individual? What historical lessons should be learned from the events of the past year that might help ensure the survival of the Jewish nation?

Grappling with these questions has yielded an unequivocal conclusion: a resurgence of the relevance of the “Zionist idea” in the 21st century, both in Israel and in the diaspora.

Since the dawn of the Jewish emancipation in the 18th century, the Jewish people have wrestled with the question of their collective fate. Some argued that Jews should strive for full cultural integration into non-Jewish society, while abandoning religious, social, and cultural traditions and instead adopting the customs of the host countries. Conversely, others contended that one should not trust foreign societies or rely on the aid of host nations during times of crisis. According to this view, the Jewish people should direct most of their resources and efforts toward building internal Jewish resilience—culturally and politically. After the Holocaust, this debate was largely settled by the comprehensive vision of Zionism.

In addressing the distress among the Jews of Eastern Europe, and assimilation in the West, the Zionist movement sought to revitalize the Jewish people economically, socially, and most of all, politically and culturally. It aimed to ensure the continuity of an autonomous Jewish life through the ingathering of Jews to their ancestral homeland and the establishment of an independent sociopolitical base that would secure their existence, security, and well-being. Otherwise, assimilation within host societies and persecution from without would lead to their physical and spiritual destruction.

The Holocaust proved the prescience of the Zionist prognosis, at least regarding physical existence in the diaspora, in such a definitive manner that even its most ardent proponents could not have dared to imagine. It became evident that the Jewish people could not count on help or shelter from other nations, but must rely solely on an independent army and state.

In the ensuing decades, as Jews integrated into Western society alongside the establishment of the State of Israel, these hard-learned truths began to fade. Many came to believe that this existential diagnosis was a relic of the past with no relevance to contemporary reality. Senior political and security figures, both from within the Israeli establishment and the international community, exerted significant influence on decision-makers in Jerusalem to rely on international guarantees for existential issues concerning security and well-being.

The attacks of Oct. 7 have once again thrown into stark relief the “normal” historical condition of the Jews throughout history, including now. The attacks did not uncover unknown facts. However, only after their occurrence did these facts transform from abstract concepts into a bitter reality that could no longer be ignored. For many Israelis, Oct. 7 catalyzed an experiential and ideological shift in their fundamental beliefs, leading back to the Zionist idea.

Andrew Fox: Reflections on a week of remembrance

Dear all,
The subtitle of this piece might be misleading, but I’m going with it. This letter isn’t just to the new friends I’ve made this past year, both Jews in the UK and people in Israel. It’s also to my non-Jewish readers who may wonder why I have been quite as vociferous as I have over the last year, on a topic where I don’t really have a dog in the fight.

It starts, as do all acts of remembrance this week, on 7th October last year. I’m a former Army officer; my academic areas of interest were (and are) strategy in the Middle East, and the psychology of disinformation. So when a war began in the Middle East that raised many strategic questions, whilst soaked in the patterns of disinformation I know intimately from my studies… well, I had something to say.

Of course I knew of the events of 7th October: I’m a Middle East researcher. On the day itself, the Telegram channels I follow were writhing like a bag of snakes with snuff movie after snuff movie. All so abhorrent; all so shocking; even for a reasonably experienced soldier.

My early strategic analysis was about right. I guessed Israel’s strategic goals and I looked at their tactics, and felt they all looked logical. They fought a contested urban battle against a dug-in defence in pretty much the same way British Army doctrine advises. Isolation; break-in; seize objectives; clearance.

Obviously, the isolation and break-in phases to Gaza City drew the world’s ire. The global public was unprepared for the live-streaming of the effects of modern weaponry in an urban setting. The closest most people have come to it is Call of Duty. They were primed on decades of Palestinian information operations about Israel, and swam in a rising sea of antisemitism. They didn’t understand what 7th October meant and why Israel had to respond the way it did. When Hamas’ ringmasters presented them with a narrative of genocide that fit their prejudices and biases, they clung to it with both hands.

Israel’s great mistake was in assuming that the horrors of 7th October would buy them some credit. They wildly overestimated their bank balances of sympathy, and as victims of disinformation fraud they rapidly became overdrawn.

So, there was I, in my Twitter/X stovepipe, merrily analysing away in broad support of Israel’s strategy. Until April 2024.

I was invited on a trip to Israel by the Military Expert Panel. We were granted decent access by the IDF and they briefed us their plans, which I noted smugly were just about what I’d predicted. Situation: no change.

What changed everything for me was visiting the massacre sites and seeing those hurt by it: victims and hostage family members. I wasn’t prepared for it conceptually or emotionally. It turned those snuff films of months earlier into 3-D.

Before, it was just another set of horrors in a world full of horrors, of which I had seen my fair share firsthand.

After, it was a lurid kaleidoscope of pain, misery, inhuman rape and torture; sadism, dehumanisation, and bloody, mutilating murder of the utmost savagery, carried out with Satanic glee. I walked in human ashes mixed with the remnants of the fires in kibbutzim where innocents were burned alive. I have seen the evidence of rape. I have seen the sites of these obscenities against humanity.

Before, I knew. After, I understood.

John Podhoretz: Antisemitism's Rise after Oct. 7 Should Scare Us All

A new study released on the anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in Israel finds that 3.5 million American Jews say they have experienced some form of antisemitism in the year since.

The study by the National Opinion Research Council at the University of Chicago found that a quarter of Jewish respondents avoid displaying their Jewish identity in the workplace, an increase of 33% over the past year.

A quarter of those affiliated with a synagogue or other Jewish institution "report that their institution has been targeted with graffiti, threats, or attacks since Oct. 7."

At universities, 39% of Jewish students report they have felt uncomfortable or unsafe at a campus event due to their identity, while 29% have felt or been excluded from a group or event because they are Jewish.

We Jews don't just feel like we're in danger. We are in danger.

10/11 Links Pt1: Winning This Regional War Is the First Step to Creating Regional Peace; The Nobel Peace Prize has become a sick joke

From Ian:

Winning This Regional War Is the First Step to Creating Regional Peace

Following the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7, 2023, the strategic goal of Israel's counteroffensive was to restore its shattered deterrence. Israelis across the political spectrum agreed that the first step was destroying Hamas's ability to govern, not allowing the regime responsible for Oct. 7 to remain on Israel's border.

Destroying the Hamas regime meant denying it immunity. Terrorists would not be allowed to massacre Israeli civilians, cross back into Gaza and hide behind Palestinian civilians. Destroying Hamas's capacity to govern required pursuing terrorists wherever they operated, including inside hospitals and mosques. It meant entering Hamas's vast network of tunnels.

But the war that began in Gaza was never about Gaza alone. Defeating Hamas was only the first stage of a regional conflict between Israel and the Iranian-led axis of radical Islamism. Israel's stunning success against Hizbullah has gone a long way to restoring our military credibility.

Today, Iran sits at the nuclear threshold. No country, including the U.S., is likely to use force to prevent the Iranian regime from developing a nuclear bomb - except Israel. The Jewish state, founded on the promise of providing a safe refuge for the Jewish people, cannot allow the ayatollahs to attain the means to fulfill Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei's prophesy of the destruction of Israel.

Israel's determination to prevent a nuclear Iran is precisely what has attracted Sunni Muslim states to seek normalization with the Jewish state. Arab leaders are terrified not of Israel but of an imperial Iran, which seeks hegemony over the region. The worst-kept secret in the Middle East is that Arab leaders are quietly hoping for an Israeli victory over Hamas and Hizbullah and, most of all, Iran. Winning this regional war is the first step to creating a regional peace.

What the West Could Learn from Israel

While the U.S. under Biden and the yesterday nations of Europe continue to view the Middle East through their twin doctrines of Iran appeasement and two-state solutionism, Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and the UAE understand - as Israel does - that Western good intentions are a dangerous indulgence in this region, and that responsible statecraft means dealing firmly with Tehran and its proxies.

As commentator Andrew Klavan notes: "I just hope Israel can save Western civilization before Western civilization can stop them."

Truth be told, Israel isn't in the business of saving Western civilization, it's in the business of saving itself.

It just so happens that doing so benefits a Western civilization that is busy dismantling itself.

IDF: We Are Dismantling Iran's Stranglehold, Piece by Piece

IDF Major Roy Ofir, commander of the 71st Armored Battalion Tactical Command Post, described the fighting in southern Lebanon.

"We just returned from one of the villages. We hit Hizbullah hard, destroyed their infrastructure, and neutralized several of their forces and enemy squads. We found a lot of weapons, some of which we've brought back for research in Israel. We crushed anyone who confronted us."

"We're coming in with significant force. Hizbullah can't even lift its head. They're taking hit after hit. The IDF has prepared for this... we've been preparing for Lebanon and Hizbullah."

Ofir, who began the war in the Gaza sector, continued: "In the end, we are dismantling the stranglehold Iran has built around us, piece by piece."

Iran Gives in to Spy Mania

This week, there have been numerous unconfirmed reports about the fate of Esmail Qaani, who is the head of the Quds Force, the expeditionary arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Benny Avni writes:

On Thursday, Sky News Arabic reported that Mr. Qaani was rushed to a hospital after suffering a heart attack. He became [the Quds Force] commander in 2020, after an American drone strike killed his predecessor, Qassem Suleimani. The unit oversees the Islamic Republic’s various Mideast proxies, as well as the exporting of the Iranian revolution to the region and beyond.

The Sky News report attempts to put to rest earlier claims that Mr. Qaani was killed at Beirut. It follows several reports asserting he has been arrested and interrogated at Tehran over suspicion that he, or a top lieutenant, leaked information to Israel. Five days ago, the Arabic-language al-Arabiya network reported that Mr. Qaani “is under surveillance and isolation, following the Israeli assassinations of prominent Iranian leaders.”

Iranians are desperately scrambling to plug possible leaks that gave Israel precise intelligence to conduct pinpoint strikes against Hizballah commanders. . . . “I find it hard to believe that Qaani was compromised,” an Iran watcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, Beni Sabti, tells the Sun. Perhaps one or more of [Qaani’s] top aides have been recruited by Israel, he says, adding that “psychological warfare” could well be stoking the rumor mill.

If so, prominent Iranians seem to be exacerbating the internal turmoil by alleging that the country’s security apparatus has been infiltrated.

Israel bombs smuggling route from Syria to Lebanon - but Iran claims it hit their field hospital. Which might be the same thing.

On Monday, I wrote in an article about how Iran's Red Crescent Society has been used over the years for smuggling militants and arms to Lebanon:

The Tehran Times reported Sunday that the Iranian Red Crescent Society set up a field hospital on the Lebanon-Syria border - a very convenient way to smuggle arms to Lebanon. Imagine the outcry if Israel would bomb that field hospital - yet it would be completely justified if it has intelligence that it is being used to smuggle weapons to Hezbollah.

My prediction may have come true.

Israel did bomb the road right at that location, but according to Syria reports, only the road:

An Israeli strike hit a road linking Syria and Lebanon Thursday as Israel tries to cut off supply routes of Hezbollah, a war monitor said.

"Israeli aircraft carried out a strike targeting the road linking Syria and Lebanon" in the Quseir region on the Syrian side of the border, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Rami Abdel Rahman, the head of the group with a wide network of sources in Syria, said the strike came as part of Israeli attempts "to cut the supply line to Hezbollah".

There were no casualties.

Now look how Iran reported the story:

The Iranian Red Crescent Society (IRCS) has strongly condemned the Zionist Israeli regime's attack on its makeshift hospital on the border between Lebanon and Syria on Thursday.
Pir Hossein Kolivand, the head of the IRCS said that no paramedics was killed in the Zionist regime's aggression.
He said that "Ambulances, field hospital and all the medical equipment and items of this center were destroyed in the attack."

One would think if Israel did burn down a hospital, Lebanese and Syrian media would be reporting it. So far I can only see it in Iranian media, although there is this photo in their stories that does look like a temporary structure burning.

I don't know the truth, but if Israel did hit the hospital, chances are it was far more than just a hospital.

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!

This is an update my Yom Kippur message of previous years.

I unconditionally forgive anyone who may have wronged me during this year, and I ask forgiveness for anyone I may have wronged as well.

Specifically:

-If you sent me email and I didn't reply, or didn't get back to you in a timely fashion -- I apologize.

-If you sent me a story and I decided not to publish it or worse, didn't give you a hat tip for the story -I'm sorry. I'm also sorry if I didn't acknowledge the tip. I cannot publish all the stories I am sent, although I try to place appropriate ones in the linkdumps, or tweet them.

-If you requested help from me and I wasn't able to provide it -- I'm sorry.

-I apologize if I posted without the proper attribution, with the wrong attribution, or without attribution at all, including graphics.

-I'm sorry that I usually don't give hat tips on things I tweet.

-If I didn't thank you for a donation, I'm very, very sorry.

-I'm sorry if I didn't give the proper respect to my co-bloggers Ian, PreOccupied Territory, Varda, Daled Amos and the guest posters. Also to people who send me tons of tips.

-I'm sorry if any of my posts offended you personally.

- Please forgive me if I wrote disparaging things about you.

- I'm sorry if things got published in the comments that violated my comments policy but that I missed. I don't have time to monitor most comments.

- I'm sorry that I didn't do some of the projects I planned to get done this year.

May this be a year of life, peace, prosperity, happiness, security, good health, Jewish unity, and complete victory over our enemies.

I wish all of my readers who observe Yom Kippur an easy and meaningful fast.

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!

There has been some publicity and consternation lately about UNRWA being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

As The Telegraph reports:

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which was implicated in the October 7 Hamas terror attacks on Israel, has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

UNRWA was shortlisted for the prestigious award in February despite Israeli claims that dozens of its workers took part in the attacks by distributing ammunition, abducting hostages, and co-ordinating transportation.

What really happened was two non-stories that were slapped together by a hungry media.

The first non-story was that UNRWA was indeed nominated for the prize. The reason that story is meaningless is because literally anyone (who is alive) can be nominated.

I know this from experience, because in 2018, when I read an equally stupid story about how the BDS movement was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, I looked into how the nomination process works and discovered that tens of thousands of people are eligible to nominate anyone. Valid nominators include any country's members of national assemblies and governments as well as any university professors of history, philosophy, religion, theology, social sciences or law.

Previous nominees include Adolf Hitler (as a joke) and Josef Stalin (seriously, in both 1945 and 1948.)

So I got myself officially nominated for the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize. In 2069, you can go to the future Nobel holographic website and see my name there (and who my nominator was.)

In other words, being nominated is pretty meaningless, and news stories about nominations are fluff.

In this case, though, the media made it sound like UNRWA was "shortlisted" and one of the top condensers for the prize. The reason for this is because they were listed, along with four other potential winners, by the director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), as the most likely winners .

But PRIO has nothing to do with the Nobel Committee. They issue their own list every year for self-promotion; their track record of predicting the actual winner is pretty bad. PRIO gets publicity with their annual list and that is the only time the institute makes world headlines, so this is their moment.

This caused pro-Israel groups to write letters to the Nobel Committee asking them to rescind the nomination. But the Nobel Committee has no mechanism to do that - if you are nominated, you cannot be un-nominated.

As usual, PRIO's list had no bearing on the actual winner, which was just announced to be the Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo where survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki campaign against nuclear weapons.

Just because something is in the news does not mean it is newsworthy.

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!

10/10 Links Pt2: What’s wrong with ‘demonising’ Hamas?; Does CBS News Know Where Jerusalem Is?; Mayim Bialik: Hillels Are Under Attack

From Ian:

What’s wrong with ‘demonising’ Hamas?

According to Guardian film critic Stuart Jeffries, ‘If you want to understand why Hamas murdered civilians… One Day in October won’t help’. Even worse, in his eyes, the documentary ‘does a good job of demonising Gazans, first as testosterone-crazed Hamas killers, later as shameless civilian looters’.

Of course, the documentary makes no such generalisations. It seems that daring to present the unvarnished truth of 7 October is the same as presenting all Palestinians as racists, murderers and looters, according to this midwit reviewer, at least.

To the normal viewer, however, this is a grotesque objection. The film does its job, which is to convey the unimaginable horror of 7 October, the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. It does not set out to ‘understand’ the motives of an anti-Semitic terror group.

One Day in October uses footage captured on the day, mostly recorded by the Hamas terrorists themselves. In one scene, GoPro footage shows a Hamas fighter panting with excitement, as he says: ‘I swear to God, we’ll slaughter them. I want to livestream this. We’ve got to show the folks back home.’ Other CCTV footage depicts armed Hamas terrorists swarming Kibbutz Be’eri.

We all know what happened next. But according to the Guardian, such footage – real footage of the atrocity, let’s not forget – makes the documentary little more than an ‘othering machine’. Heaven forbid that viewers might not see eye to eye with those who murdered, raped and kidnapped their way through southern Israel that day.

The review also complains that ‘all of our sympathies’ in the documentary are guided towards ‘relatable Israelis’, as if ‘sympathy’ were an unusual reaction to footage of a 15-year-old boy asking his father to bury him with his surfboard – or to an interview with Emily Hand, who was abducted by Hamas when she was just eight years old.

Time and again over the past year, we have seen supposedly progressive media struggling to grasp the horrors of 7 October and deflecting attention away from Hamas. But this review is something else. Apparently, even depicting Hamas’s barbaric crimes can be ‘othering’. The Western intelligentsia really has lost the moral plot.

Does CBS News Know Where Jerusalem Is?

In late August, Mark Memmott, the senior director of standards and practices at CBS News, sent an email to all CBS News employees reminding them to “be careful with some terms when we talk or write about the news” from Israel and Gaza. One of the words on Memmott’s list of terms was Jerusalem.

Of Jerusalem, Memmott wrote: “Do not refer to it as being in Israel.”

He continued, in a note sent to thousands of journalists at the network: “Yes, the U.S. embassy is there and the Trump administration recognized it as being Israel’s capital. But its status is disputed. The status of Jerusalem goes to the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel regards Jerusalem as its ‘eternal and undivided’ capital, while the Palestinians claim East Jerusalem—occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war—as the capital of a future state.”

Jerusalem’s status is indeed contested. For instance, the United States’ embassy in Israel is in Jerusalem, and the Jordanian Islamic Waqf has custody of its holy sites. But acknowledging the competing claims on different parts of the city, or declining to refer to Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, are one thing. Denying that it is in Israel at all is quite another.

In which country is the Israeli Knesset, the home of the Israeli prime minister and the home of the Israeli president, located? The answer to that question is self-evident. Except, it seems, at CBS. In the rest of the United States, the answer is clear: Since 1995, when Congress passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act, the government has recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

This latest revelation comes after CBS Mornings host Tony Dokoupil was admonished by executives at the network for his interview of best-selling author Ta-Nahesi Coates about his new anti-Israel book, The Message.

Memmott’s Jerusalem guidance is in keeping with our previous reporting on the turmoil at CBS—and what The Free Press has heard from multiple people inside CBS today: that a double standard exists for journalism at CBS when it relates to Israel and Jews.

As we reported earlier today, a fractious meeting of CBS Mornings’ editorial team Tuesday included a debate about whether it is “fair to talk about whether Israel should exist at all.” We also noted that while Dokoupil was admonished for his tough questioning of Coates, CBS executives appear intensely relaxed about the possibility that his co-host Gayle King told Coates what questions she planned on asking him before the interview.

But the contrasts between the treatment of King and Dokoupil don’t end there.

In Israel, Every Day is October 7. In the U.S., Every Day is October 8.

Ever since witnessing an ecstatic pro-Hamas celebration in Times Square just 24 hours after the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, I thought nothing could surprise me. Then to commemorate the one-year anniversary of those atrocities, the Guardian published an essay by Naomi Klein titled, “How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war.”

“What is the line between commemorating trauma and cynically exploiting it?” Klein asks. “Between memorialization and weaponization? What does it mean to perform collective grief when the collective is not universal, but rather tightly bound by ethnicity?”

As someone who encountered gruesome videos of Hamas’s “cynical exploitation” and “weaponization” of Israelis’ trauma exactly a year ago, watched as terrorists referred to terrified Israelis in the South — those who just happened to be most likely to oppose “settlements” — as settlers and dogs, and heard firsthand from people who witnessed livestreams of family and friends held at gunpoint, most of them murdered or taken hostage, I found the premise grotesque.

It was particularly appalling because beyond the therapeutic effect of creating artwork, the cri de cœur that motivated the art installations from Tel Aviv to American college campuses, “kidnapped” posters across the globe, the Nova Exhibition, online maps of the massacres, and documentaries about October 7, is the denials of the trauma itself. And the feeling that since that horrific day, we have been abandoned. That we are profoundly alone. That every day in Israel is October 7th.

Given the depth of depravity of what happened that day, some Jews initially believed the world would finally stand with Israel. I didn’t. But I did think that everyone would at least condemn the atrocities. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Israel has faced obscene denialism and false accusations while young people across the globe celebrate monstrous barbarism and valorize those who perpetrated it. Jews across the world have the sense that the “universal collective” to which we thought we finally belonged has thrown us out and turned its back.

Where is the world’s outrage? Where is the world’s empathy? Where are the calls for Hamas to return our stolen souls? Where is the Red Cross? Where are the organizations and so-called allies with whom we stood, we marched, we campaigned? It’s #MeToo unless you’re a Jew.

10/10 Links Pt1: Biden-Harris should help Israel take out Iran's nuclear program; What’s With Biden’s Schizophrenia on Lebanon?; Police foil plot to topple Tel Aviv towers

From Ian:

Benny Morris: Iranian Escalation May Work to Israel’s Benefit, but Its Strategic Dilemma Remains

Examining the effects of Iran’s decision to launch nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel on October 1, Benny Morris takes stock of the Jewish state’s strategic situation:
The massive Iranian attack has turned what began as a local war in and around the Gaza Strip and then expanded into a Hamas–Hizballah–Houthi–Israeli war [into] a regional war with wide and possibly calamitous international repercussions.

Before the Iranians launched their attack, Washington warned Tehran to desist (“don’t,” in President Biden’s phrase), and Israel itself had reportedly cautioned the Iranians secretly that such an attack would trigger a devastating Israeli counterstrike. But a much-humiliated Iran went ahead, nonetheless.

For Israel, the way forward seems to lie in an expansion of the war—in the north or south or both—until the country attains some sort of victory, or a diplomatic settlement is reached. A “victory” would mean forcing Hizballah to cease fire in exchange, say, for a cessation of the IDF bombing campaign and withdrawal to the international border, or forcing Iran, after suffering real pain from IDF attacks, to cease its attacks and rein in its proxies: Hizballah, Hamas, and the Houthis.

At the same time, writes Morris, a victory along such lines would still have its limits:
An IDF withdrawal from southern Lebanon and a cessation of Israeli air-force bombing would result in Hizballah’s resurgence and its re-investment of southern Lebanon down to the border. Neither the Americans nor the French nor the UN nor the Lebanese army—many of whose troops are Shiites who support Hizballah—would fight them.

Seth Mandel: What’s With Biden’s Schizophrenia on Lebanon?

President Biden was committed to Hamas’s defeat at the beginning of the war a year ago. Halfway through, his efforts became singularly focused on ending the hostilities in any way possible, leaving Yahya Sinwar untouched and consigning at least some of the hostages to permanent captivity.

The original plan was to rebuild Gaza after removing Hamas from the strip. That required putting together a regional coalition willing to stick its neck out and plunk down ungodly amounts of money while taking at least some responsibility for management of Gaza during a dangerous and chaotic transition period. The flaking-out of the Biden administration didn’t just give Sinwar a new lease on life; it put our Sunni allies out on a limb and then cut that limb down.

The amount of commitment it would take to “fix” Lebanon would dwarf Gaza reconstruction. This is the second problem with the administration’s new grand idea. In four weeks, America will elect Biden’s successor. That person, whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, will replace the Cabinet with their own. Harris’s national-security team is dominated by those who want the U.S. less, not more, entangled in the politics of the Middle East. Which is to say, Joe Biden’s chosen successor would shred Biden’s plan on her first day in office.

Without a commitment from the U.S., there won’t be a commitment from anyone else. Our allies have already been burned by Biden’s about-face on Gaza.

All of this reveals the wasted potential of U.S. policy in the Mideast. The Obama-Biden administration’s coddling of Iran enabled the Gaza and Lebanon crises to reach this point. Four years later, Donald Trump handed Biden and Harris the Abraham Accords and an ongoing set of negotiations with Saudi Arabia, which they promptly shoved in a drawer so they could try to revive a policy that privileged Iran. When that went nowhere, the fickle crew went back to Saudi Arabia, too late to secure an agreement.

Now they want an Iranian proxy to remain in Gaza but an international coalition to push out an Iranian proxy in Lebanon?

Their hearts are in the right place—for now. But they have mortgaged the American credibility that would be needed to follow this path. Such are the wages of indecision and strategic caprice. The legacy of this administration will be chaos and missed opportunities.

Ruthie Blum: 50 shades of ‘Don’t’

This was evident from Biden’s urging in April, after Iran launched hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel, that Netanyahu “take the win” and move on. The “win” to which he was referring was the successful interception of the projectiles. In other words, dodging a bullet is preferable to targeting and taking out a shooter.

Following Iran’s ballistic barrage last week, Biden’s main concern focused on Israeli retaliation. He went as far as to say that he opposes an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities and oil fields. He then added the usual mantra about Israel’s right to respond, as long as civilians aren’t killed.

Which brings us back to the 50-minute phone call that was the first communication between Biden and Bibi in some 50 days. Apparently, the White House defines “having Israel’s back” as turning its back on the Jewish state—when not stabbing it in the back by withholding crucial weaponry and constantly calling for ceasefires, that is. You know, the kind of “peace deals” that benefit the very mass murderers engaged in the ongoing seven-front assault against America’s key ally in the Middle East.

Given the length of the chat, it’s obvious that much was omitted from the White House summation of it. But reading between the already despicable lines is sufficient to glean what must have been a far worse exchange.

The following excerpt is illustrative: “On Lebanon, the president emphasized the need for a diplomatic arrangement to safely return both Lebanese and Israeli civilians to their homes on both sides of the Blue Line. The president affirmed Israel’s right to protect its citizens from Hezbollah, which has fired thousands of missiles and rockets into Israel over the past year alone, while emphasizing the need to minimize harm to civilians, in particular in the densely populated areas of Beirut. On Gaza, the leaders discussed the urgent need to renew diplomacy to release the hostages held by Hamas. The president also discussed the humanitarian situation in Gaza and the imperative to restore access to the north, including by reinvigorating the corridor from Jordan immediately.”

The sole mention of Iran preceded the above passage; it was a short condemnation of the Oct. 1 ballistic-missile attack on Israel. No acknowledgement of Tehran’s being the head of the terrorist octopus. Not a word about nukes or Israeli plans for some major “October surprise.”

It’s not clear whether Netanyahu informed Biden of what Israel has in store for the ayatollahs. He probably didn’t reveal his whole hand, so as to avoid receiving a raspy presidential “Don’t.” But he certainly was right to save Gallant a flight.

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

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This is a message to the people of Lebanon: pic.twitter.com/btMQR0Xwtn
— Benjamin Netanyahu - בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) October 8, 2024

On Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent a message directly to the people of Lebanon. Part of it said:

Now you, the Lebanese people, you stand at a significant crossroads. It is your choice.

You can now take back your country. You can return it to a path of peace and prosperity.

If you don’t, Hezbollah will continue to try to fight Israel from densely populated areas at your expense.

It doesn't care if Lebanon is dragged into a wider war. Christians, Druze, Muslims—Sunnis and Shiites—all of you are suffering because of Hezbollah's futile war against Israel.

Today I ask every mother and every father in Lebanon a simple question: Is it worth it? Because, it doesn't have to be that way. I know you want a better future for your children.

So I am speaking to all of you today.

There is a better way. A better way for your children, for your cities, for your villages, for your country.

You deserve to restore Lebanon to its days of tranquility; you deserve a Lebanon that is different. One Country – One Flag – One People.

Don't let these terrorists destroy your future any more than they've already done. Stand up and take your country back. You have an opportunity that hasn't existed in decades. An opportunity to take care of the future of your children and grandchildren.

You have an opportunity to save Lebanon before it falls into the abyss of a long war that will lead to destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza. It doesn't have to be that way.

Each of you can take a step for your future.

Even a small step.

You can make a difference.

I say to you, the people of Lebanon:

Free your country from Hezbollah so that this war can end.
Free your country from Hezbollah so that your country can prosper again, so that future generations of Lebanese and Israeli children will know neither war nor bloodshed, but will finally live together in peace.

Many Lebanese interpreted this as a call for a civil war in Lebanon!

“Netanyahu is calling on the Lebanese to kill each other, in a message clearly addressed to Hezbollah’s opponents,” said Ziad Majed, a political specialist at the American University of Paris. Indeed, he seems intent on inciting the anti-Hezbollah camp to take advantage of the latter’s degraded capabilities, following the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah and the destruction of a large part of its military infrastructure, to finish it off domestically. Otherwise, Israel will do it, even if at the cost of destroying the whole country and killing many civilians.

I'm seeing the same interpretation all over social media.

It is absurd.

Netanyahu is saying what I have been saying for months: it is time for the Lebanese people to take a public stand against Hezbollah, in the form of protests, demanding that Lebanon not be ruled by an Iranian proxy.

Hezbollah claims to be defending Lebanon. As long as the Lebanese people remain silent, they can continue to use that lie for their own anti-Israel purposes. But if the Lebanese people tell the world that they would be better off without Hezbollah's pretense of defense, then Hezbollah has no leg to stand on.

The Egyptian anti-Muslim Brotherhood government protests of 2013 were largely peaceful. Why can't similar mass protests be mounted in Lebanon? Why can't there be protests insisting that Hezbollah and Lebanon adhere to UN Security Council resolution 1701?

If some Lebanese think that protests would lead to a civil war, that means they think that Hezbollah would counter peaceful protests with violence from their illegal militia. If they think that would happen, isn't that even more reason to try to get rid of Hezbollah's separate army, separate health system, and separate areas of control where the Lebanese army are not allowed to enter?

No one wants a civil war. The Lebanese people have the power to marginalize Hezbollah and eliminate Iran's control over them without anyone being hurt.

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!

Is Iran Zionist? By the definition of BDSers, apparently it is!

Yesterday, Brown University announced that its governing board had voted to reject a student proposal to divest from 10 companies that also sell to Israel.

The ten companies are Airbus, Boeing, General Dynamics, General Electric, Motorola Solutions, Northrop Grumman, RTX Corporation (formerly Raytheon and United Technologies), Textron, Safariland, and Volvo Group (AB Volvo).

The recommendation by Brown’s Advisory Committee on University Resource Management (ACURM) that was accepted by the board states that there are no direct investments by Brown in those companies, and its indirect investments are not only minuscule but virtually impossible to avoid, since Brown has practically no influence over how their investment managers choose to invest on behalf of thousands of other corporations. (Their previous divestment from tobacco companies likewise did not block indirect investments.)

Yet Iran does not have any problem trying to make direct deals with at least some of these awful Zionism complicit companies.

During the time period after the JCPOA was signed in 2015 and before the Trump administration revoked the agreement in 2018, Iran signed contracts with Boeing, Airbus and Volvo Group to buy products and parts. In 2016, Boeing signed a deal to sell 80 aircraft to Iran Air; Airbus signed deals to sell 100 planes to Iran. Even companies like GE pursued deals with Iran in that time period.

Volvo had factories to assemble trucks in Iran. Volvo maintains some sales ties to Iran today and Volvo trucks are used to transport Iranian missiles.

At no point did Iran say we will not deal with these companies that supposedly, somehow, violate Palestinian rights.

Which means that, according to the tortured logic of Israel haters, Iran violates their sacred BDS Call of 2005 and is therefore complicit in Zionist crimes.

The student protesters are more antisemitic and hate Israel more than Iran does.

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

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Read all about it here!

According to L'Orient Today,

Between Sept. 23 and 30, with the sudden and dramatic intensification of Israeli bombardments, General Security recorded the passage of 234,023 Syrians and 76,269 Lebanese into Syrian territory. By Oct. 5, more than 400,000 people had fled to Syria, according to Lebanese authorities — around 300,000 Syrians and 100,000 Lebanese, but also some Palestinians, Sudanese and other nationalities as well.

That means about 20,000 have been fleeing every day to Syria, meaning the number is apprpaching 500,000 this week.

And that is just the overland route.

Middle East Airways, the only airline to still service Beirut, has sold out all its flights . They fly between 5-10 planes a day in peacetime with each one having a capacity of between 150-400 depending on whether they are using Airbus A320 or A330. So we can conservatively estimate that 2000 are leaving every day by air, or about 50,000 since the fighting intensified.

Not only that, but private yacht owners and ferry boat charters are bringing hundreds of Lebanese to Cyprus and Turkey daily at what they consider exorbitant prices of between $1,400 and $2,300 per passenger. Those prices have gone up about 50% from before the war, and the Lebanese ministry of transportation is taking advantage as well, taxing the boats far more than they did before and driving prices even higher.

Now, compare this with how much Gazans were charged to become "VIPs" and leave to Egypt before Egypt closed Rafah.

Instead of a yacht, they had to take several buses for hours - and pay between $5,000 to $10,000 per person for the privilege.

Arab and Muslim countries are welcoming Lebanese - but none of them wanted Palestinians unless they paid a huge amount for the privilege.

While Palestinian leaders were against Gaza receiving aid from Cyprus, fearful that some Gazans would hitch a ride on the return trips with the boats, no one has a problem with Lebanese leaving for Cyprus.

As I noted previously, the difference of how the world didn't want Gazans to flee to safety and how the world welcomes Lebanese under the exact same circumstances trying to save their lives could not be starker. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians could have fled to Egypt and Syria and many lives could have been saved; those people would not be forced to keep moving away from where Hamas keeps following them and using their humanitarian camps as terror hubs.

The hypocrisy is stunning. It is even worse when you listen to the official reasons given by Egypt and Jordan and Palestinian leaders to oppose the resettlement of Gazans: it is for their own good.

No one even gave Gazans a choice in the matter. And none of the "human rights organizations" had a problem with that.

Even today, if, say, Qatar said that they would accept 30,000 Palestinians for a few months, the quota would be filled within minutes and Israel would cooperate to help the transfer, the same way it helps sever medical cases leave Gaza. But no Arab nation is saying that.

If they simply didn't want Palestinians, that would be bigoted enough. But the Arab and Muslim world is saying, quite clearly, that they would rather Palestinians die than be safe in their countries. Their deaths serve Hamas' purposes and are propaganda wins against Israel.

That is how little the Muslim world really cares about Palestinians.

And, incidentally, it is how Hamas and Islamic Jihad and the Palestinian Authority think about their fellow Palestinians as well.

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!

10/09 Links Pt2: Oct. 7 Forever Altered Jewish Life Worldwide; The woke dehumanisation of Jews; The strange story of the Palestinian flag

From Ian:

Oct. 7 Forever Altered Jewish Life Worldwide

Oct. 7 and its aftermath forever altered the daily lives of every Jewish person around the world. For nearly a century, Jews in places like America, Canada, Great Britain and Australia took for granted their connection to and comfort within their homes and nations. Even if antisemitism still dwelt at the fringes of society, Jews in these places felt as though they had finally been woven into the very fabric of society and shared history. We found homes and places where we could let our collective guard down.

It took a single day last year for that comfort and confidence to shatter. Our homes, businesses and places of worship suddenly became targets of hateful acts, slurs, screams of "go home," graffiti, assaults, gunshots and murder. At no point since World War II have so many Jews in so many places felt so insecure and untethered from the Western democracies in which they live. We have lost our basic sense of normalcy.

Oct. 7 and its aftermath demonstrated to Jews around the world that the lessons of the Holocaust have not been learned effectively enough to prevent the replay of those very horrors. We learned that "Never Again" is not real.

We learned that blacklists of Jewish authors, musicians and artists can sprout up again; that Jewish businesses can again be targeted, vandalized and destroyed; that Jewish schools and institutions must yet again rely on their own security to keep their children and community safe, while Jewish university students fear walking across campus alone.

What 4,000 years of Jewish history have taught us is that if it starts with the Jews, it never ends with the Jews. It is an American, Canadian, French, British, Australian, Argentinian and South African problem.

The writer is a former senior vice president for international affairs at the Anti-Defamation League.

Brendan O'Neill: Now they won’t even let Jews grieve in peace

Remember the Westboro Baptist Church? They were the fundamentalist fruitcakes who would picket vigils for slain American soldiers with technicolour placards declaring ‘God Hates Fags’ and ‘Thank God for Dead Soldiers’. Well, there’s a new mob of grief-intruders in town. There’s a new gang of hateful trespassers on other people’s sorrow. They’re not quite as God-bothering, not so homophobic, but they’re every bit as ghoulish. It’s the ‘pro-Palestine’ set on university campuses.

This week, something truly appalling took place at Columbia University in New York City. A vigil for the 1,200 people butchered by the fascists of Hamas in southern Israel on 7 October was noisily interrupted by the Hamas fanboys of the cranky Columbia left. ‘Fanboys’ is not hyperbole. Some were chanting ‘Resistance is glorious!’. This was on Monday, on 7 October, the anniversary of Hamas’s pogrom. If you are singing the praises of a ‘resistance’ one year after that ‘resistance’ slaughtered more Jews in one day than anyone else has since the Nazis, then you are a Hamas fanboy, you are a fellow traveller of fascism.

Jewish students and their allies had gathered to pay tribute to the dead and stolen of 7 October. They prayed for the Jews murdered by Hamas and demanded the release of the Jews Hamas still holds captive. They assembled on Columbia’s South Lawn. They displayed giant milk cartons featuring images of the Israeli hostages and a collection of teddy bears covered in red paint symbolising those who were murdered. Their lamentations were soon interrupted, though. Their murmured grief was punctuated by the shrill cries of Columbia’s legion Israelophobes. ‘Israel go to hell!’, these radical Westboro Baptists screamed.

Hundreds of ‘pro-Palestine’ activists ‘took over the campus’, reports the Daily Mail. The ‘raging students’ hollered their hackneyed Israel-loathing slogans over the ‘vigil to mark the one-year anniversary of the 7 October Hamas-led attacks’, the Mail says. Some were masked, many were adorned in the keffiyeh, the uniform of the self-righteous, the must-have fashion item of every turbo-smug radical who wants the world to know how good and edgy he is. They played ‘loud Arabic music’ and it ‘drowned out the sound of Israeli music that was playing for the vigil’. Shorter version: pipe down, Jews.

In one especially disturbing scene, two young, mournful women, the Israel flag draped over their shoulders, were surrounded by the barking mob. They stood stone-faced as the keffiyeh set swarmed, their placards crying ‘Resist by any means necessary!’. Think about this: Jewish students marking the one-year anniversary of the worst act of anti-Semitic violence since the Holocaust were mobbed by students celebrating that violence, bigging it up as ‘resistance’. This was Jew-taunting dolled up as radical activism, the salt of Israel-hate rubbed into the wound of Jews’ grief.

‘Two brave Jewish girls stand proudly while a crowd of terror supporters surrounds them’, tweeted Eyal Yakoby, a student and campaigner against anti-Semitism. ‘Terror supporter’ is accurate. When the TikTok revolutionaries of the painfully privileged Columbia classes cosplay as Middle East militants, complete with masks and keffiyehs, and loudly swoon over the gloriousness of ‘resistance’, by which they mean 7 October, they are indeed indicating their support for terror. One side at Columbia was mourning a pogrom, the other was celebrating it. It was the West’s crisis distilled: a small group of students quietly standing with civilisation while a larger, louder, brutish group of students essentially swore their fealty to civilisation’s opposite – Israel’s barbarous foes.

Batya Ungar-Sargon: 7 October was a mask-off moment for the left

I first noticed it about three weeks after the massacre, though at first, I was so shocked by the feeling that it took me a while to admit it was real. Yet there it was, in between fits of grief and rage – something else making itself known: a creeping sense of euphoria.

Crazy, right? After the greatest Jewish bloodletting since the Holocaust in acts of depraved barbarism we had thought this Earth rid of, I was feeling a sense of elation.

It wasn’t, God forbid, about Hamas’s massacre or Israel’s response. No, I was feeling the euphoria of being in a fight of good versus evil after a life wrestling with moral ambiguity. It was the high of seeing the truth so clearly bellowed from the rooftops by one’s enemies – rather than masked with dissembling language about ‘justice’ and ‘equality’. It was the joy of being released from the gaslighting, the pretence that the left is more moral, more compassionate, more good – on the ‘right side of history’.

In ripping off the mask and going all in on their support of ‘resistance by any means necessary’, the left made itself morally irrelevant. In condoning calls for the genocide of the Jews, elite universities in the US made themselves objects of mockery for generations to come. In becoming Hamas’s cheering section, the left has made its claim to be the side of morality patently and obviously false. It was the largest act of moral self-marginalisation that I can ever recall witnessing.

After all, who cares what someone’s take on transgender medical treatments is when they cheer for Hamas? Who cares what someone’s take on women’s rights is when they deny the mass rape of Israeli women? Who cares what someone thinks about abortion when they don’t condemn the murder of Israeli babies? Who cares what someone thinks about the war in Ukraine when they can’t tell who is an ally and who an enemy? Who cares who someone is voting for when they can’t condemn the genocide of the Jews?

Indeed, anti-Semitism is not an accidental wrong turn for today’s left. The woke worldview replaces the foundation of Western civilisation – a worldview based on the distinction of right vs wrong, virtue vs evil – with the binary of powerful vs powerless, and then superimposes race on to that binary. Identitarians ascribe inherent virtue to those they see as powerless and evil to those they see as powerful. This is the source of 21st-century leftist anti-Semitism: every Jew is coded as white and is thus a powerful oppressor, and every Palestinian is coded as a ‘person of colour’ and thus is oppressed and inherently virtuous. Crucially, to the woke, the powerless have no moral agency and thus no moral responsibilities, and this includes Hamas. Abjection is the only virtue the left recognises, and this even applies for terrorists. Hence, by any means necessary.

If you’re an American, you have to have a college degree to believe this crap, although TikTok has been instrumental in popularising this ideology. In using the highfalutin justifications of the woke ideology to cheerlead Hamas, the global left has managed to reveal its thought process to be inherently, irredeemably flawed. And in so doing, it has released the rest of us from having to pretend the left matters.

This is the euphoria of the post-7 October world: it is a world in which the left’s moral badgering isn’t just irrelevant – it’s a joke.

No longer must we pretend this nonsense about the real threat coming from the right. No longer must we pretend that weakness is virtue and strength is vice. No longer must we absolve people of moral responsibility based on their skin colour. These views cannot be untangled from the hatred of Jews that permeates the left so deeply.

The good news is, we now know who our enemies are, which makes them much easier to fight.

The woke dehumanisation of Jews

That Jewish people are regarded as a hyper-white community was clear in March 2021, when the BBC’s flagship politics programme, Politics Live, featured a bizarre debate on whether or not Jews are an ethnic-minority group. Apparently, this was open to question because some Jews have reached positions of power and influence. Thus, in the eyes of some, Jewish people have joined the ranks of the oppressors. The message communicated by Politics Live was that Jewish identity and the way that Jews perceive themselves should not be taken too seriously because they have little claim to the status of victimhood. The historical experience of the oppression of Jews is viewed as trivial compared with other groups’ experiences of victimisation.

The spoiling of Jewish identity goes a long way to explaining the identitarian left’s response to the 7 October massacre. Numerous celebrities and cultural influencers appeared indifferent to the horrific acts of rape, hostage-taking and murder committed against Israeli civilians, including children. The American actress Susan Sarandon personified this callous sensibility. At a pro-Palestine rally in November 2023, she told the crowd that those people who were feeling afraid of being Jewish right now are ‘getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country, so often subjected to violence’. Sarandon clearly had no idea that Jews had not only faced more than their share of violence in the past – they also make up a disproportionate share of hate-crime victims in the present.

The #MeToo movement, usually quick to ‘believe all women’ when they make allegations of rape, appeared to switch into silent mode in response to the scenes of barbaric sexual violence meted out by Hamas. For many feminist activists, the idea of sisterhood seemingly did not apply to Jewish or Israeli women. Some went as far as to outright deny what had happened, despite there being abundant evidence of these crimes. The director of the University of Alberta’s Sexual Assault Centre signed an open letter asserting that calling Hamas terrorists is ‘Islamophobic’ and denying that Israeli women were raped by Hamas fighters on 7 October. Such indifference to the plight of violated Jewish women shows how thoroughly dehumanised Jewish people have become in identitarian circles.

From the standpoint of identity politics, there is little room for empathy towards the predicament of the supposedly hyper-white Jew. As alleged possessors of so much power and privilege, Jewish people have no claim to the status of victimhood, even when they are brutalised in full view of the world. The sins committed by Hamas on 7 October are all too easy to wash away when its victims are no longer considered fully human.