Tuesday, November 12, 2024
Elder of Ziyon
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Tuesday, November 12, 2024
Tuesday, November 12, 2024
Elder of Ziyon
cartoon of the day, Comix, ElderToons, humor
- Tuesday, November 12, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
This joke went around newspapers in 1921.
The idea that Jews cannot be trusted is centuries old. And while it was the subject of jokes a century ago, it never really left.
We saw it a year ago, when Jews were not believed that they said they were slaughtered, raped and burned alive, even after the murderers filmed their own actions.
We saw it during the year, when Israeli statements about the war in Gaza are received skeptically and required verification while Hamas statements issued by anonymous spokesmen with no supporting evidence are repeated as truth.
We've seen only in the past week that a pogrom documented by the antisemites themselves is not believed to be true, or assumed to be justified.
It turns out that Kristallnacht was treated the same way.
Pat Harrison was a popular senator from Mississippi, holding that office from 1919 until his death in 1941. But he didn't quite believe the reports from Jews in Germany about Kristallnacht.
From United Press, November 16, 1938:
Harrison, like other southern Democrats, was racist as well. He filibustered against the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill as he and his cohorts argued that lynchings were a response to rapes.
It is amazing how easily violence can be justified by people claiming to be on the side of justice.
It is also noteworthy that when you look at the justifications of yesterday's bigots, they sound reasonable at the time but are obviously rubbish when looked at from today. In fifty years, today's justifications for antisemitism will look equally ridiculous. Their arguments have no merit, but too many people want to believe them so they aren't seriously contested.
The "genocide" charge is also based on an assumption of Jews not telling the truth.
As I tweeted this morning, everyone who tries to apply the definition of "genocide" to Israel is antisemitic. A large part of that is based on the assumption that Jews are liars.
Genocide requires intent. They rely on out-of-context quotes from Israelis that show that in the days after 10/7 they were very angry at Gazans.
The reason they believe that the out of context quotes indicate genocidal intent is because they ascribe the worst attributes to Jews.
The reason they don't accept the many, many, quotes from Israeli officials that they are only targeting Hamas and not Gaza civilians is because they don't believe anything that Jews say that make them look like less than horrible monsters.
The reason they don't accept the physical evidence (asking Gazans to get out of the way of attacks, coordinating humanitarian aid, using the smallest possible munitions, etc.) is because they claim Israel is only trying to cover up what are obviously its crimes, because deception is what Jews do.
All counter-evidence is looked upon as faked; all "evidence" is trumpeted no matter how tenuous or proven false it is.
Every piece of evidence and counter-evidence is viewed through the prism of Jew-hate.
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- Tuesday, November 12, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
When there was an organized, premeditated pogrom in Amsterdam against Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, UEFA did not condemn those attacks specifically. It put out a general statement that "both sides" the issue. (The announcer assumes it is supportive of the Israeli fans but the wording says nothing about them as victims.)
The UEFA strongly condemns the incidents and acts of violence that occurred in the city of Amsterdam before and after the UEFA Europa League match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. We trust that the relevant authorities will identify and charge as many as possible of those responsible for such actions. UEFA will review all official reports, gather available evidence, evaluate it and consider any other appropriate course of action in accordance with its relevant regulatory framework.
This statement is not on their website or social media.
The UEFA has rules against political messages at games, yet it didn't say anything negative about the huge "Free Palestine" banner shown at a game last week which included a map that erased Israel and a depiction of the Temple Mount topped with the Dome of the Rock on the site of the Jewish Temples.
And the UEFA is lying about its own policies. Its rules ban all political messaging, without caveats: "The promotion or announcement, by any means, of political messages or of any other political actions inside or in the immediate vicinity of the stadium is strictly prohibited before, during and after the match."
The UEFA also did not say a word about footballer Hakim Ziyech who mocked Israeli fans running for their lives in Amsterdam.
Again, this is a violation of UEFA rules, which say, "Any person under the scope of Article 3 [which includes players] who insults the human dignity of a person
or group of persons on whatever grounds, including skin colour, race, religion,
ethnic origin, gender or sexual orientation, incurs a suspension lasting at least ten
matches or a specified period of time, or any other appropriate sanction.
Normally, the UEFA zealously adheres to these rules. When Jews are the victims, not so much.
Because there are a lot of Muslim football fans in Europe and if the UEFA would apply its own rules to situations that would upset them, they would protest and threaten the UEFA itself.
In short, antisemitic threats force people to avoid any situation where they could become targets of the antisemites, and they justify their hypocrisy after the fact by claiming that there is a loophole in their own policies that allow discrimination against Jews.
The UEFA inactions are perfect examples of "proleptic dhimmitude" where Westerners take what they assume to be pro-Muslim positions in anticipation of supremacist Muslim threats and demands.
As bad as that is, there is a newer dimension of fear where ordinary people are not only afraid of extremist Muslim violence, but of "cancellation" from their "progressive" friends.
Canadian surrogate mothers, the most progressive people you can imagine, are refusing to carry Israeli babies.
They claim to have only the best and most moral of reasons, of course. According to The National Post, some say that they oppose any Israeli parents because they consider all Israelis guilty of "genocide." Others say they don't want their birth children to grow up in a conflict zone. Those are the reasons that are highlighted in the article and in various Facebook surrogacy groups.
But hidden among those is the real reason that most surrogates would prefer non-Israeli parents:
[A] few surrogates fear personal blowback if it became known they were gestating a baby for an Israeli....Jacki Lebert, CEO of Ontario’s Platinum Surrogacy, [said] “There are surrogates who feel that carrying for an Israeli would be supporting genocide … More frequently than that is the fear (of harm to the parents or baby or reprisals for them).”
Surrogates are uniformly progressive. A great number of the parents they help out are gay men who want a family. They know that in their social circles, they would be ostracized if their friends know that they are carrying Israeli babies.
Because no one wants to admit to knuckling under pressure and threats, most of them re-work their brains to say that this is their own courageous decision to show how moral they are rather than thinking of themselves as cowards and hypocrites. In the end, the only people they refuse to help out are Jews.
This is only one of many examples that show how insidious modern progressive antisemitism is. The BDSers promise they will incessantly hound anyone who shows even the slightest relationship with Israelis, and most people - understandably - don't want the hassle. Over time, they create their own justifications for their discrimination against Israeli Jews and Zionists, because they cannot live with the knowledge that they cannot stand up for their own principles of treating everyone equally.
The Canadian surrogacy story goes beyond proleptic dhimmitude - it is a fear not of Muslims directly, but of fellow progressives who have already gone beyond dhimmitude into full blown antisemitism themselves.
In both cases, and countless others like when artists refuse to perform in Israel or Kamala Harris buckles under to demands by Israel haters out of fear of their own supposed supporters, the BDS and Islamist method of threatening anyone and everyone who do not adhere to their maximalist demands is startlingly effective. It furthers their agenda and the people who fear being bullied end up becoming BDS' biggest backers in order to be able to live with themselves and their hypocrisy.
- Tuesday, November 12, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
The Intercept, which literally appeals to antisemites to raise money to write anti-Israel stories, describes a bill in Congress this way:
Let's read H.R. 9495:
Up for a potential fast-track vote next week in the House of Representatives, the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, also known as H.R. 9495, would grant the secretary of the Treasury Department unilateral authority to revoke the tax-exempt status of any nonprofit deemed to be a “terrorist supporting organization.”Under the bill, the Treasury secretary would issue notice to a group of intent to designate it as a “terrorist supporting organization.” Once notified, an organization would have the right to appeal within 90 days, after which it would be stripped of its 501(c)(3) status, named for the statute that confers tax exemptions on recognized nonprofit groups.The law would not require officials to explain the reason for designating a group, nor does it require the Treasury Department to provide evidence.
Let's read H.R. 9495:
(i) NOTICE REQUIREMENT.—Prior to designating any organization as a terrorist supporting organization under subparagraph (B), the Secretary shall mail to the most recent mailing address provided by such organization on the organization’s annual return or notice under section 6033 (or subsequent form indicating a change of address) a written notice which includes
(I) a statement that the Secretary will designate such organization as a terrorist supporting organization unless the organization satisfies the requirements of subclause (I) or (II) of clause (ii),
(II) the name of the organization or organizations with respect to which the Secretary has determined such organization provided material support or sources as described in subparagraph (B), and
(III) a description of such material support or resources to the extent consistent with national security and law enforcement interests.
The bill explicitly says that the IRS must provide evidence. In theory, an unscrupulous IRS could claim that every bit of evidence is classified, but if that would happen the news media would be all over it, and the IRS would not wantonly designate organizations it has political problems with unless they can back it up.
In short, The Intercept is lying. So is the Who's Who of Israel haters who signed a letter opposing this bill, pretending that an organization losing its tax exempt status is tantamount to silencing free speech.
The potential for abuse under H.R. 6408 is immense as the executive branch would be handed a tool it could use to curb free speech, censor nonprofit media outlets, target political opponents, and punish disfavored groups across the political spectrum.
Somehow, Al Jazeera is still available to read in America without getting a tax break. If the people who donate to Jewish Voice for Peace or Students for Justice for Palestine refuse to donate unless they get a tax deduction, then they aren't really such strong supporters of those groups' messages to begin with.
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Monday, November 11, 2024
From Ian:
David Collier: BBC News promote yet another Hamas ‘doctor’
David Collier: BBC News promote yet another Hamas ‘doctor’
Yesterday, the BBC ran another story about a ‘massacre’ in Gaza. We have now seen it countless times – Hamas propaganda make an empty claim – and the BBC rush to promote it.The modern intellectual diktat for Jewish authors
The latest headline covered both Gaza and Lebanon.
‘Israeli strikes on north Lebanon and Gaza kill dozens, officials and rescuers say’.
The only named Gazan based source for the claims in the BBC article was a Dr Fadel Naim, director of the Al-Ahly hopsital:
The report from the good doctor is grim. Of the 17 bodies his facility received ‘nine’ were women – thus strongly implying this was a random attack that killed women – not terrorists.
But is there any reason the BBC should not have reproduced the claim of Fadel Naim? Did the BBC do the slightest bit of due diligence on this witness, before sharing his lies to the world?
The answer is no. They could not have checked at all.
The timeline of the doctor
Unusually for Gazan based witnesses these days, Fadel Naim does not hide his social media behind confusing variations of his name. Search for a ‘Fadel Naim’ in Gaza on Facebook and you quickly find his account.
When you search his account to see what he was posting on October 7 2023 – it quickly becomes apparent this is not the type of person any of us would recognise as a doctor. His timeline is full of open support for the October 7 atrocities:
It is not just about October 7. On 27 January 2023, Hamas terrorists slaughtered seven Jews outside a synagogue in Jerusalem. Fadel Naim took the opportunity to celebrate the attack:
If the BBC journalists had even bothered to look – they would have seen that this man openly supports terrorism and should not be trusted. In the end, it is left to people like me to do their job for them.
The Hamas doctor
From scanning the photos on his own public timeline, it soon becomes apparent that this doctor is no idle supporter of terrorism. This is an image from his daughter’s wedding. The top table at the event included not just Fadel Naim, the BBC ‘witness’ – but also Ismail Haniyeh – the (then) leader of Hamas in Gaza:
We can conclude that this doctor is closely aligned to the top Hamas leadership – and no western media organisation should be relying on him as a witness. It is kind of obvious anyway. A basic truth completely ignored by western media is that Hamas control Gaza – so if a person has ‘made it in Gaza’ – (for example becoming a director at a hospital) – it is a near certainty that his family is aligned with Hamas.
What makes this all worse – is that the Associated Press used him before – and was notified of the doctor’s terrorist associations.
Nearly a century ago, the Nazis burned the books of Jewish authors. Today, the publishing world is attempting to resurrect the exclusion of writers because of either their faith and nationality or their refusal to conform to a new intellectual diktat.Writers and Careless Use of Words
Books deemed “degenerate” by the Nazis for being “un-German” — especially those written by Jews — were purged from bookstores and libraries for reasons of racial as well as intellectual superiority. This self-righteous effort to purify German thinking targeted such Jewish luminaries as Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Lion Feuchtwanger and Vicky Baum, whose works were either banned outright or torched by Nazi Stormtroopers.
Nearly a century later, a new effort is afoot to compel Israeli authors into a contemporary variant of ideological submission. Last week, more than 1,000 writers, including acclaimed Irish author Sally Rooney and award-winning Indian author Arundhati Roy, signed a letter calling for a boycott of Israeli writers, publishers, book festival organizers and literary agents who have yet to publicly denounce the “genocide” in Gaza.
Boycotts like this are self-licking ice-cream cones, enabling the signatories to congratulate themselves for taking a stand on the “right side of history,” as Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei last spring fittingly described the protestors in Western countries championing groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. That such literary boycotts are as blatantly antisemitic as they are hypocritical is of course ignored by their exponents.
The statement these writers have endorsed proudly declares that it is the “biggest cultural boycott against Israeli cultural institutions in history,” and encourages Israeli writers and literary institutions to “Denounce and distance themselves from Israel’s genocidal apartheid regime” and “Affirm the full protected rights of the Palestinian people under international law, including the right of return.”
In essence, the statement’s signatories want Israelis to publicly acknowledge that their state has no right to exist, thereby disavowing their religion, whose aspiration has for centuries been the return to Zion.
In the 1930s, German Jewish writers were just banned. Today, their Israeli counterparts are being told to denounce their own religious and national identity and cruelly distance themselves from their homeland or else risk ostracism and opprobrium.
[T]he esteemed writers did at least four things that one does not expect from people of letters.
The first was casting anathema on publishers, book clubs, cultural associations, art festivals and, inevitably, hundreds or perhaps thousands of writers, poets, composers, cineastes, dramatists, painters and other artists associated with them, simply because they happen to be Israelis.
Annie Ernaux the French winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, also a signatory, explained her move as opposition to "institutions that have never recognized the undoubted rights of the Palestinian people" without saying what those rights were and why are they undoubted, or whether they include raids like the one on October 7, 2023.
The second move not expected from the literati... is to preach blanket censorship based on guilt by association.
This is all the more surprising because most signatories are from the "Western world," where refusing guilt by association is a fundamental principle of the law.
Thirdly, a writer always provides even the character he most dislikes the chance to make his case before he is stamped with a final judgment of banishment.
[W]all-building, now done by the United States, Turkey, Iran, Hungary, Poland and Estonia, doesn't amount to Apartheid. In any case, as Israelis built walls to keep Hamas away, Hamas built tunnels to go and pay them a visit.
The Palestinian cause may be a noble one. So, as a writer, show us what it is and why it is noble. A writer isn't a labelling machine or a virtue-signaling device.
However, neither Walker nor Corbyn wondered why so many Palestinians in Gaza were still in refugee camps, although Hamas had ruled Gaza for more than a decade after the Israeli withdrawal.
Virtue-signalers do no service to Palestinians by using and abusing their undoubted sufferings to vent historic, cultural and pseudo-religious hatred against Jews.
If they are sincere in supporting the Palestinians they should call for transforming a "cause", that in Hamas's version means the annihilation of Israel -- a cause that has produced nothing but grief for eight decades -- into a "project" to shape a better future for Palestinians beyond eternal refugee camps.
From Ian:
Seth Mandel: Justifying the ‘Jew Hunt’
Seth Mandel: Justifying the ‘Jew Hunt’
This is what the counternarrative surrounding Amsterdam is doing. And it’s edifying to see the counternarrative crafted and released into the air vents in real time.Brendan O'Neill: The moral ghettoisation of the Jews
There’s an easy test to see whether the “Jewish soccer hooligans” blather is yet another “109 soon 110,” only this time from the left: Even if you were to grant the worst possible interpretation of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans’ behavior, would it mitigate the evil of the pogrom? Did random Jews deserve to be stabbed and run over because other Israeli soccer fans were rowdy? To even write out that question is to see how much of a lunatic you’d have to be to entertain it.
And yet we also know that you cannot grant the worst possible interpretation of Maccabi fans’ actions. For example, we now know that the small number of Israelis who picked up sticks or other makeshift weapons had done so because they were set upon by organized attackers. We now know that taxi drivers were not victims of Israeli abuse but rather were the ringleaders of what the pogromists referred to as the planned “Jew hunt.” We now know the disingenuous nature of the accusation that random Jews deserved to be stabbed because some Maccabi fans interrupted a moment of silence for victims of a flood in Spain: The announcer was speaking in Dutch, which only one team’s fans in the stadium could understand. We now know that the rumor that Israelis were disruptive at a casino is false and that what actually happened is that an employee of the casino alerted the pogromist organizers to the Israelis’ location so they could be hunted. (Those last two details come to us from excellent reporting by the Wall Street Journal.)
So we’re left with a video of some Maccabi fans singing an anti-Arab chant as they’re being escorted by police away from crowds that taunt them and which the police assume will get into a violent confrontation with the Israelis. The people claiming that video is what led to a preplanned pogrom are telling on themselves, both because they don’t know what “preplanned” means and because there is a sociopathic element to their justifications.
And history is littered with them. In 1881, Jews in Alexandria were accused of kidnapping and killing a Greek child in a ritual murder—the classic blood libel. A newspaper reporter wrote that, in light of a similar accusation made against the Jews in Syria, “the position taken up by the Greeks is not on the face of it so absurd, untenable and prejudiced as the European colony would have us believe. If the voice of the vast majority be the voice of the people, and if it be true that vox populi vox Dei, then one should surely pause before exonerating the Jews of Alexandria of every suspicion of guilt.”
His point was: Could it be that the Jews keep getting accused of the same thing and yet all of these accusations are false? Could it be, today’s anti-Semites on both left and right will ask, that the Jews keep getting kicked out of their “host” countries and yet it is always the host countries’ fault? In the past year there have been Jew hunts not just in Amsterdam but across Europe and even an occasional version in the U.S.; could it be, we are asked, that none of those Jew hunts were the Jews’ fault? And don’t get so defensive, these pundits and activists insist; they’re just asking questions.
There seems to be a new rule on the woke left: if some members of an ethnic group behave badly, we should not be surprised if other members of that ethnic group get attacked. Will this rule be applied consistently? Will they say, next time a few fuming Islamists gather in a city centre in Britain to burn the UK flag or the Israeli flag and to chant about the return of Muhammad’s army to finish off the Jews, that we shouldn’t be surprised if EDL-style racists then go out and attack random Muslims? That these people ‘fucked around and found out’? Of course they won’t. I hope they won’t. So why are they ceaselessly mentioning that some Maccabi fans are idiots, as if this explains why some Jews got beaten to a pulp in a self-described jodenjacht?
Worse than the contextualisation is the moral inversion. In accusing all of the visiting Israelis of ‘rampaging’ through Amsterdam, of being ‘racist’, even of bringing ‘the spirit of Israeli fascism’ to Europe, the left turns truth and reason utterly on their heads. The Israelis are accused of doing what was in truth done to them. It was the self-confessed ‘Jew-hunting’ mob who rampaged. It was they who stamped racism on to the streets of Amsterdam. It was they who embodied the ‘spirit of fascism’ with their vile demands to know who’s an Israeli, who’s a Jew, so that they might know who to batter. To accuse the victims of something not unlike fascism of being the real fascists is almost unimaginably cruel, even by the standards of the post-truth woke left.
We cannot overlook the magnitude of what happened last week. A literal Jew hunt unfolded in one of the cities that trembled under Jews hunts in the last century, and some in our intellectual classes essentially said: ‘Well…’ People who write for newspapers, who are feted by the BBC, who move and shake in the middle-class universe of performed virtue scratched their chins, offered up explanations, saw a young Jew with the gash of an anti-Semite’s boot and wondered: ‘Is this a thug who deserved it?’ This was more than hypocrisy. It was more than the identitarian downplaying of anti-Jewish racism that has become tragically commonplace on the modern left. It was confirmation of a new moral ghettoisation of the Jews, of their unforgiving exclusion from the entire realm of progressive sympathy.
In essence, a new edict of expulsion has been issued against the Jews not from the physical kingdom of the nation state this time, but from the moral kingdom of elite empathy. They are to enjoy none of the rights or privileges of woke concern. No other social group can be victim-blamed, but they can be. No other ethnic group’s ‘truth’ about the hatred they experience may be discounted, but theirs can. No other group is forbidden from making sense of their current persecution through their past persecution, but they are. Witness the rage against those who have used the word ‘pogrom’ to describe the hunt in Amsterdam. The words ‘genocide’ and ‘Holocaust’ have already been stolen from the Jews, and are now used against them by a woke elite convinced Israel’s war on Hamas is a new species of Nazism. Now, ‘pogrom’ is taken from them, too. Not only is their persecution denied – the very linguistic tools through which they might describe their persecution are denied to them as well.
To my mind, the chattering classes’ ‘contextualisation’ of the violence in Amsterdam could prove more dangerous, in the long run, than the violence itself. The Jews’ black eyes and torn skin will heal. Their attackers – we hope – will be brought to justice. But the grim ‘intellectual’ singling out of the Jews as a lesser identity, to whom few of the new moral codes apply, will linger. The pogrom is over – the spirit of the pogrom lives.
- Monday, November 11, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
- book review
The main point of the book is that Brill, who was Jewish, was urged by his boss not to travel home for Yom Kippur in 1973 because he had absolutely positive information that a war was going to break out that day.
The rest of the book is mostly Brill's attempts to find out why NSA didn't tell the Israelis about this intelligence ahead of time. After he left the military and the NSA, Brill moved to Israel and over the decades interviewed many of the decision makers and wrote about his experience (once cleared to do so); he eventually realized that not only didn't the Americans warn the Israelis but they misled them, saying that Egypt was not going to attack that day. Newly release d archives support this contention. This is one reason the Israelis were caught flat-footed on that terrible Saturday morning.
However, Brill does not address the other evidence that the IDF ignored at the time. Assuming he is right, the American deceit was a factor, but not the only factor.
Brill fills out the book with some other anecdotes and unproven theories; after all he was a fairly junior member of the NSA and everyone there is only told what they have a need to know. He writes about the secret "Jew Room" at the NSA as reported in "The Secret War Against the Jews," by John Loftus and Mark Aarons, where they intercept and decode Israeli communications and don't allow Jews to enter. Brill believes he saw a glimpse of the "Jew Room" he was not allowed to enter without escort when he worked at the agency - the door was opened and he saw a map of Israel and settlements that wasn't behind its usual curtain. But he has no proof.
There is a lot of paranoia in this book. Brill talks about his fears that he will be assassinated for his work to expose this conspiracy. For example, he thinks a character named "Brill" in the Gene Hackman movie "Enemy of the State" was named after himself.
When he writes letters to everyone he can think of asking what they know about the US misleading the Israelis and the "Jew Room," most of them ignore him. He thinks that is evidence of a coverup, but it is more likely they think he is a flake.
In the end, the only thing he proves is the NSA knew about the Yom Kippur War ahead of time. He corroborated that with other translators who worked at the NSA at the time. Brill fills up the book with copies of original letters and documents; he submitted the book to the NSA to be vetted and he left the blacked-out parts as part of the book.
One of his paranoid-sounding theories does make one wonder, though.
When Brill's miliary time was up, he had an option to "convert" to become a civilian employee at the NSA. He decided to apply - not because he really wanted to stay there but because the process happened during working hours and he was bored. One of the steps was a polygraph test, and when they asked if he would ever pass information to a foreign country he said no - but the polygraph said he was lying. That uis usually enough to disqualify anyone from working there, but not only did they then invite him to negotiate a salary, they offered him a much higher pay grade than his job would normally receive. Since he wasn't interested, he declined anyway.
The NSA, of course, knew Brill was Jewish and was studying Hebrew. Why did they want him so badly? Brill wonders if they were trying to set him up - this is before Jonathan Pollard - as someone to whom they would leak critical secret information about Israel's enemies and then try to entrap him when they assumed Brill would tell it to Israeli agents.
Could it be that this was a plan, and this was done to Pollard? It seems far-fetched, but antisemitism at the NSA in those days seems certain, and Brill describes some that he had to endure.
Some parts of the book - like details about working at the Agency - are fun to read. I was surprised to find out that satellite imagery in the 1970s was already good enough that Brill could read the Hebrew on the knit kippah of an Israeli soldier embroidered with his name from space. If that was true in the 70s, it is mind boggling to think how today's intelligence agencies could do orders of magnitude more.
But it is not a very well written or edited book.
It is nearly impossible to read Deceit of an Ally and not think of analogies between Israel's intelligence failure in 1973 -whatever the true reasons were - and its equally devastating failure on October 7. In both cases, the data was there; the people whose job is to interpret the firehose of data and make correct decisions, or at the very least hedge their bets and make contingency plans in case their assumptions were wrong, were the ones who failed.
Bruce Brill sounds like a fun person to talk to, but once you know the gist of his book, there isn't much more to learn.
- Monday, November 11, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
There is no international incident. No one is saying that this will harm potential relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel.
The reason is because he was a Shiite terrorist, described as a fighter in Hezbollah, where he was known as Imran Karim. Hezbollah has extensively mourned his "martyrdom."
The US is still seeking Ahmed for trial.
- Monday, November 11, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
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| Yemenite Jew in the early 20th century wearing the sudra |
One Israeli, Rudy Rochman, is marketing his own sudra with a Star of David pattern, and he made this video describing it and its Jewish roots.
The only reason I found this video is because rabid anti-Zionist Rafael Shimunov stumbled upon it and labeled it "genocidal."
Yes, Jews wearing a scarf like their own Middle Eastern ancestors did is "genocide." Just like Israeli versions and adaptations of Middle Eastern foods are "genocide." Just like Israeli versions of Middle Eastern dance are "genocide."
Perhaps the ubiquitous olive wood camels that Arabs eagerly sold to Jewish tourists in the 1950s and 60s are also "genocide."
The constant associating Jews with genocide is, of course, deliberately meant to invert the Holocaust, the event that the term to be coined for. It is ironic that the people who pretend to care about genocide by using it for everything Israelis do are redefining and trivializing the term so that it becomes meaningless - and therefore all but ignored in cases that it really happens.
To the modern antisemites, applying the term to Jews is far more important than genocide itself.
- Monday, November 11, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
Hezbollah has been recruiting child soldiers from their Imam al-Mahdi Scouts who are as young as 15, according to reports.
From what I can tell, they were killed in the vicinity of adult Hezbollah fighters, and were not targeted themselves.
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| Nazi salute at the Mahdi Scouts |
According to experts interviewed in Lebanese media, Hezbollah is suffering a manpower shortage. They have been recruiting from their scouts to backfill various functions.
It does not look like these are fighters, but they are being used as messengers, lookouts and couriers. Under international law, they are still combatants.
Since Hezbollah's communications system has been thoroughly compromised, messengers are necessary to communicate between different cells.
Hezbollah attracts the youth to the Scouts with promises of an (Iranian) salary as well as the promise of martyrdom that they children are brainwashed with in the scouts. Al Jazeera quoted one 14 year old in 2021 as saying, “Al-Mahdi Scouts told us to be martyrs defending our land from all the countries that attack us.
Training kids to want to die is, of course, child abuse. And Western media simply doesn't talk about it.
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Sunday, November 10, 2024
From Ian:
Melanie Phillips: A new Israeli nation is arising from the smoke of battle
Melanie Phillips: A new Israeli nation is arising from the smoke of battle
The shiva was an unbearably tragic, moving and yet inspirational experience.10 Lies about Israel (pdf)
Inspirational because here in microcosm was something of unexpected and priceless value that has emerged in Israel during this terrible year. It is no reflection on the grit and valour of those who fought in Israel’s previous wars to say that what’s now taking place is seen by many as a spiritual rebirth of the Jewish nation.
At the funeral and shiva, Avi’s widow Rachel showed the inner strength of this couple when she spoke up for three principles dear to her husband and demanded by his ultimate sacrifice.
The first was the need for unity, demonstrated by the family’s request that any politician who paid a shiva visit should be accompanied by someone with a different perspective.
The second was that Charedim should enlist in the IDF, a demand she made in public to a prominent rabbinic opponent of the Charedi draft when he visited the mourners.
The third, which encompassed the first two, was that the cause for which her husband had given his life was a war of good against evil.
This understanding lies at the core of the astounding spirit shown by countless IDF soldiers, secular as well as believers, over the past year.
These soldiers — many of them achingly young — have shown they aren’t fighting merely to defeat an enemy bent on their nation’s destruction and to recover the remaining Israeli hostages.
They understand they are up against an existential evil, the same barbaric depravity that has claimed millions of Jewish lives over the centuries.
This conscript army accordingly feels accompanied on the battlefield by the ghosts of those who were slaughtered in previous generations. These soldiers know they’re fighting for the moral and spiritual principles that have kept the Jewish people alive throughout unparalleled persecution.
It’s why they believe they will win this war, whatever the cost.
It’s why so many of them, secular as well as religious, have gone to war wearing tzitzit, the fringed garment intended to remind them of the Jews’ religious calling. They wear this Jewish identity like armour next to their hearts.
Avi Goldberg was a warrior rabbi fighting for the nation, the first for centuries to have taken this dual role so familiar to us from the Hebrew bible. He had the aura of a biblical figure fighting in what many have come to view as a biblical war. For it feels like a momentous new chapter is being written in Jewish history.
No-one is under any illusion that, after the war ends, Israel’s profound political dysfunctionality and social divisions will magically melt away. But a great new generation is arising from the smoke of the battlefield who will never again put up with the doublethink and confusion of a society that lost its ancient clarity of vision and paid a terrible price.
A spark has been rekindled by this war to forge the nation anew. The people of Israel are being bound together in fire, a nation fighting for civilisation against barbarism, for light against darkness, for life against death.
May the memory of all who have fallen in this seismic war be a blessing.
Telling the truth about Israel is an urgent necessity after the October 7th massacre and the unexpected wave of antisemitism that we witnessed afterward. For many years Israel’s image has been polluted to the point of asphyxiation by a well-prepared set of lies that, over the decades, have become widespread – mindsets that fuel not only incitement to terrorism in the Arab world but also antisemitic hatred in the Western world.
The resulting ignorance is an abyss of shame. The young people who take to the streets against Israel know nothing but myths and lies, while ignoring even the most basic facts of Israel’s history and current events. In this little book, we offer our contribution to the truth facing the ten basic lies about Israel.
- Sunday, November 10, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
(This is off-topic for me, but I got a little obsessed with the topic. See UPDATE at the end.)
At first glance, it appears that the number of votes for the Democratic presidential candidate were very anomalous compared to the previous and succeeding elections.
I know that people have analyzed the 2020 results to death, but this interested me enough to look at it on my own.
First of all, the scale of the chart - while acceptable practice - is deceptive, since the Y axis starts at 50 million votes, exaggerating the effect. Here is the correct chart for the past five elections in proper perspective.
Obviously far more ballots were counted in 2020 than for any US election in history. The reasons given, according to ChatGPT:
Heightened Political Engagement: The political climate in the years leading up to the 2020 election was particularly charged, motivating more people to vote.Expanded Mail-In and Early Voting: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many states expanded access to mail-in and early voting to make it safer and more convenient for people to cast their ballots.Increased Voter Registration Efforts: There were significant efforts by various organizations to register new voters, particularly among younger demographics and minority groups.High Stakes: Many voters on both sides viewed the 2020 election as particularly crucial, leading to higher turnout.Intensive Get-Out-The-Vote Campaigns: Both major political parties and numerous advocacy groups invested heavily in efforts to mobilize voters.
Four of the five apply to 2024 as well, yet the number of votes cast went up by over 21 million in 2020 and went down by about 18 million this year. The main difference as far as I can see is that there was a huge increase in mail-in voting in 2020 due to COVID concerns - 65 million compared to 25 million in 2016.
This year there were more than 80 million early voters, but I cannot find a breakdown yet of mail in vs. early voting at official locations.
Looking further into the 2020 numbers, I looked at the differential of votes compared to 2016 by party. My theory is that in general, 2016 Trump voters remained Trump voters (49%) and 2016 Clinton voters remained Clinton voters (51%), within a couple of percentage points.
If we subtract the 2016 results from the 2020 results, the excess number of votes come out to 58% Democrat vs. 42% Republican (I'm not counting third parties).
That number is, to me, statistically suspicious. The additional votes should be roughly in line with the more general results (which totaled 52% Democrat to 48% Republican, including the excess votes.) Clearly the excess votes are way out if whack and not close to a representative sample compared to the rest of the voters in America.
Even more crazily, if you subtract the number of Democratic and Republican votes of 2024 from the historical highs of 2020, you see that the "missing" votes that weren't cast were 83% Democratic and 17% Republican. (In this case, however, there are stong indications that there was a lot of voters who "flipped" from D to R this year so this number is not as meaningful.)
Now, it is possible that there are non-suspicious reasons for the 2020 anomalies. Trump disparaged mail-in voting throughout his campaign so in general Republicans went to the polls while a far higher percentage of Democrats voted by mail.
Surveys afterwards showed that people were happy with the ease of mail-in voting. However, if it is so easy and convenient, why did we see the number of votes cast go down so dramatically this year?
Nevertheless, the claim that somehow the 2020 voting - specifically the excess voting - was manipulated would require extraordinary proof to me. My hypothesis to test that idea is to look at each individual state's excess voting. If the Democrats were concentrating on manipulating the votes somehow, it would be logical to expect that they would put far more effort into the battleground states and not bother much with states that were not up for grabs.
The eight states considered battleground states in 2020 were Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. When I look at the percentage difference between those eight states and the 2016 results, I do not see them as being towards the top in a list of anomalies. The top four gains for Democrats percentagewise compared to 2016 were in already blue states (New Hampshire, Maine, Maryland, Connecticut, all with above 24% difference in Democrat excess vote in 2020 compared to total in 2016.) The swing states are generally in the bottom half of that list.
Yet, when you compare some of the swing states percentage point difference between the excess 2020 votes and how they vote in 2016, some of them come out above the national average of 6.91 percentage points. They include Georgia (14), Michigan (9), North Carolina (7.4), Arizona (7.4) and Pennsylvania (7.) All of those besides North Carolina flipped from R to D.
Ohio, Arkansas, Nevada and New York's excess votes were fairly close to their 2016 votes.
Florida's excess votes were more Republican than in 2016 by 6.4 percentage points.
My analysis does not indicate that there was a concerted effort to manipulate the votes in the battleground states, at least no more than other states. Maybe many of the new 2020 Democrats, who were less motivated in previous years to vote, were unenthusiastic about Kamala Harris and went back to not voting.
But there are still many unanswered questions about the 2020 election and why it had so many more Democratic votes than the previous and successive election years, compared to Republicans.
UPDATE: Yair Rosenberg points out that the 2024 numbers (which I had verified at the time I first looked at this) have been significantly updated as new votes are counted. The number of votes in 2024 is not nearly as significantly lower as I thought - at the moment, less than a million fewer than 2020. So my comparison between 2020 and 2024 goes out the window, although why the excess votes in 2020 were so skewed towards Biden is still strange, to me at least.
Updated chart, including the section outlined in red shown in the original graphic for comparison:
- Sunday, November 10, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
The news out of Amsterdam gets more and more horrifying. And it appears that the police are part of the problem.
Another sickening video was released showing a gang of Islamic thugs chasing down and repeatedly kicking a presumed Jew in the head.
On Saturday night, police said, gangs were still roaming the streets threatening anyone who "looked Jewish" and demanded they show their IDs,
On Saturday, a number of "free Palestine" stickers were found in the city - including near the Holocaust Museum - backed by razor blades to injure anyone who tries to remove them.
It turns out that the Holocaust Museum is a "safe space" - for antisemites.
Because last month, the Dutch police admitted that some of their officers refuse to be deployed at places like the Holocaust Museum or at Koran-burning demonstrations because of "moral objections." Police spokesperson Mireille Beentjes said in response, "We take moral objections into account when drawing up schedules." But, she insisted, for "urgent" matters the police department expects all officers to show up.
Which means that there are fewer officers available to protect the Holocaust Museum compared to other sections of Amsterdam.
There is a clear trajectory we have seen over the years: the sort of attacks we see against Jews in the Palestinian territories spread to highly Muslim sections of Europe a few years later, then to England, then to Canada and the US. These attacks get normalized over time. That's what "globalize the intifada" means.
And no matter how depraved, how disgusting, how utterly inhumane the attacks are, they are always justified as a natural reaction to things Jews are doing.
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Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. Read all about it here! |
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- Sunday, November 10, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
While the usual Israel haters are justifying the pogrom against Israeli Jews in Amsterdam, Palestinians are celebrating them.
The Gaza Now Telegram channel is filled with videos of rabid Muslims beating Jews in Amsterdam. But they pretend that the attackers were regular freedom-loving Dutch citizens who had no choice.
Here are some of the caption of the most violent videos, where they freely admit and brag about terrorizing Israelis on the streets. The only justification they give is that Israelis tore a Palestinian flag.
After they tore up the Palestinian flag⚠️run over, stabbed and beaten🔻They told them this is for the children of Gaza, you scoundrels.🇵🇸🇳🇱Thousands of Dutch and Arab supporters of the Palestinians beat up the Israeli terrorist pigs in the Dutch capital Amsterdam after the match between "Maccabi Tel Aviv" and the Ajax Amsterdam team.100 injuries🔻Among the Israeli terrorist pigs in the center of the Dutch capital Amsterdam after they were beaten, stabbed and trampled in response to tearing up the Palestinian flag during the match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Ajax Amsterdam, and the response came from Dutch youth, Arabs, Turks, Russians and Chechens.🇳🇱🇵🇸The moment the Israeli terrorist pigs tore up the Palestinian flag in the Dutch capital Amsterdam, which led to an angry reaction from Dutch, Arab, Russian, Chechen and Turkish youth.🇵🇸🇳🇱
This is how the free people of the world in the Dutch capital, Amsterdam, dealt with the Israeli terrorist pigs who returned to normal life after killing defenseless Palestinian civilians and committing genocide in Gaza. All of these are Zionist soldiers who participated in killing the children of Gaza.🇳🇱🇵🇸🔻
Crying Israeli terrorist pigs in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and a Zionist soldier who participated in killing Gaza children gets punched in the face and falls to the ground.🇳🇱🇵🇸🔻
In response to the tearing down of the Palestinian flag and its removal from homes in Amsterdam... the free people of the world tear up and burn the flag of the terrorist Zionist occupation pigs in front of the hotel where the terrorist Israeli pigs are hiding in the Netherlands.🇳🇱🇵🇸🔻The Israeli terrorist pigs are trying to cover up their terrorism in Gaza by using video clips showing the free people of the world raising and disciplining the soldiers of the terrorist Zionist occupation in the streets of Amsterdam while they cry like mice.🇳🇱🇵🇸🔻
They aren't denying the crimes - they are proud of them.
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Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. Read all about it here! |
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Saturday, November 09, 2024
From Ian:
‘Why is they still in Gaza?’: Protesters in Tel Aviv mark 400 days since October 7
‘Why is they still in Gaza?’: Protesters in Tel Aviv mark 400 days since October 7
Hundreds gathered outside the IDF’s Tel Aviv headquarters on Saturday evening for the weekly protest demanding a hostage deal, as many of the captives’ families leading the demonstration marked 400 days since their loved ones were abducted.Families of four pairs of sibling hostages held in Gaza mark 400 days of captivity
The crowd appeared slightly larger than in recent weeks. This weekend’s rally on Begin Road was the first since the major one that spontaneously unfolded on Tuesday after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who was considered a proponent for a hostage deal.
While weekly protests earlier on in the war attracted thousands, Home Front Command restrictions put in place in September cap such gatherings at 2,000 people.
A massive sign reading “Why are they still in Gaza? 400 days” hung from the pedestrian overpass down to street level, while big white cardboard letters on the street spelled out: “400 days — the shame of Netanyahu.”
Though overtly partisan politics are usually absent from the Begin Street protest, the youth wing of the opposition Yesh Atid party set up an informational stand by the demonstration.
A block away, some 500 people assembled at Hostages Square for the main weekly rally organized by the Hostages and Missing Families Forum.
With a band of mothers clad in white, Niva Wenkert, the mother of hostage Omer Wenkert, kicked off the rally with a call to join “Shift 101,” a silent protest group. Demonstrators calling for the release of Israeli hostages held in the Gaza Strip outside protest in Tel Aviv, November 9, 2024. (Itai Ron/Flash90)
After Wenkert, actor Lior Ashkenazi, the regular MC at the forum’s rallies, spoke against the government’s politicking at home while the captives have languished in Gaza. He noted that Saturday’s rally fell on the 86th anniversary of Kristallnacht, drawing a direct line between the Nazi pogrom and Hamas’s actions on October 7, 2023.
Steffen Seibert, Germany’s ambassador to Israel, also spoke at the rally, saying in Hebrew that for some Israeli politicians, “the fate of the hostages is just one of the [war’s] aims, and certainly not the primary one” — a not so subtle shot at members of Netanyahu’s hardline government.
Seibert added that he was speaking “as the representative of Germany and out of responsibility” to hostages with German citizenship. “I must admit that until now, we have failed to bring everyone home. All the talks with those who have influence on Hamas” have failed to materialize.
Naming hostages who have German citizenship or are related to German citizens, Seibert said: “These are Germans, or family members of Germans, and we want them back.”
Sylvia Cunio doesn’t live in Kibbutz Nir Oz right now, but when she visits, she has only one wish: To go to Gaza and find her two sons who were taken hostage last October 7.Noa Argamani on Instagram: 'The abandonment continues'
“I was in Nir Oz the other week and I said to my friends, to my family, ‘Let’s go to Gaza, let’s go, let’s go get them,'” she said. “I just want to go to Gaza and bring them out myself.”
The Cunios are part of a distinct circle within the broader group of hostage families — those awaiting the return of two siblings held by Hamas in Gaza.
Many sets of siblings were taken hostage on October 7, but only four pairs are left in the enclave, with their families bereft and anxious about the future of their loved ones: David and Ariel Cunio, Eli and Yossi Sharabi, Iair and Eitan Horn and twins Gali and Ziv Berman.
Sylvia’s sons David Cunio, 34, and Ariel Cunio, 27, were each taken from Kibbutz Nir Oz. David was taken with his wife, Sharon and their three-year-old twins, along with Sharon’s sister Danielle and niece Emilia who were visiting Nir Oz that weekend. Ariel was taken hostage with his girlfriend, Arbel Yehud.
On November 27, sisters Sharon and Danielle and their three young children were all released home to Israel under the week-long truce. David was left behind, injured, rail thin and terrified, as described by his wife, Sharon, who was aghast at the idea of leaving him behind in Gaza.
Ariel and Arbel are also still held in Gaza. Sylvia Cunio, far left, with her husband, Louis, and three of her four sons, Ariel, (third from left), David and Eitan; Ariel and David were taken hostage to Gaza on October 7, 2023 (Courtesy)
“I have hope and that’s the last thing I’ll lose,” Sylvia said. “But I won’t believe they’re coming back until I see them with my own eyes, next to me, and hug them, smell them and cook for them.”
Noa Argamani, who was rescued from Hamas captivity in Operation Arnon, posted an Instagram story marking 400 days since October 7, 2023.
''I don't even know how to describe to you the frustration I experienced while still in Hamas captivity. Another day passes and another day passes amid complete uncertainty wrapped in despair,'' she wrote.
Speaking about of her captivity drawings, she added: "'When will it be my turn to go home?' 'Have they forgotten me? Left me behind?' These are sentences that I would raise on a daily basis. But the most frustrating moment is when another hundred days join the previous hundred; it's the time when I started counting from the beginning again. Although the counting was restarted, the conditions only worsen, and the despair only increases. It is impossible to put aside the fact that for already 400 days there are 101 hostages who are just waiting for someone to come and save them. 400 days and the abandonment continues, 400 days too many.''
Meanwhile, the families of the hostages held a statement this evening at the Begin Gate in Tel Aviv. Einav Tsangauker, the mother of the hostage Matan, said: ''After 400 days, it's time to say clearly, everywhere, and on every channel: We must end the war in Gaza and bring everyone back. Yoav Gallant said this week that conditions are ripe, achievements have been secured, and there is nothing left to do in Gaza. The entire security system says this. Everyone understands that the only way to bring back the hostages is to end the war in Gaza. There is no other way.''
She claimed, ''But Netanyahu refuses to end the war for criminal political considerations. Because of Netanyahu, the hostages are dying in captivity. Because of Netanyahu, soldiers are being killed in a war that has achieved its goals. Instead of ending the war in Gaza, the government promotes Israeli towns in Gaza. Instead of acting according to the national interest, Netanyahu acts according to the interests of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. The people understand this, the people support the deal and ending the war. Every Israeli patriot should demand from Netanyahu: End the war in Gaza and bring back all the hostages. What else is there to do in Gaza besides a hostage deal?''
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