Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, November 13, 2024

11/13 Links Pt2: A Worldwide ‘Jew Hunt’; Natan Sharansky: We Are Never Alone; Fear of the ‘Muscular Jew’

From Ian:

Bret Stephens: A Worldwide ‘Jew Hunt’

Notice what these attackers aren’t saying. They aren’t expressing themselves in the faddish language of anti-Zionism. They aren’t denouncing Israeli policy or speaking up for Palestinian rights. They aren’t trying to make careful distinctions between Jews and Israelis. They are, like generations of pogromists before them, simply out to get the Jews — a reminder, if one was needed, of the truth often attributed to Maya Angelou: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

Which makes it even more remarkable how strenuously some people initially tried to obscure the nature of the Amsterdam pogrom. The media are rarely shy about calling out certain kinds of hate crimes as racist. Yet for days the word “antisemitic” was either put inside quotation marks or attributed to Dutch officials when talking about the violence. The identity of the attackers has been treated as a mystery, or a secret, beyond delicate references to people with “a migration background,” in the words of Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof.

A great deal of attention has also been paid to some Israeli fans who pulled down a Palestinian flag, vandalized a taxi and, in Hebrew, chanted ugly anti-Arab phrases. There’s no excuse for any of that. But rowdy English soccer fans in Germany have been known to celebrate German war casualties. Somehow it doesn’t lead to a frenzy of organized violence.

Nor does it add any light to provide the “context” of the war in Gaza as a way of trying to understand what happened in Amsterdam. No decent person would explain anti-Asian attacks in the United States by observing that attackers might be angry about, say, China’s human-rights abuses or its biosafety standards.

Yet so many supposedly decent people are quick to try to account for the evil that is done to Jews through reference to the evil (as they see it) that Jews do to others. As Leon Wieseltier pointed out years ago, this type of reasoning is not an explanation for antisemitism. It’s the essence of antisemitism.

Antisemitism in Europe has now reached the point where the future of many of its Jewish communities is seriously in doubt. I’m not sure most Europeans understand what a civilizational catastrophe this represents — albeit less for Europe’s Jews, most of whom will find other places to go and thrive, than for Europe itself. The fate of societies that become “Judenfrei” — free of Jews — has not, historically, been a happy one.

The United States is still a long way from this point, thanks to a larger and more politically confident Jewish community, along with a national culture that traditionally has generally admired Jews. But that culture is also under growing threat today, whether from Hamas’s fellow travelers in the Ivy League and the publishing world; Louis Farrakhan’s admirers in the Black community; or the alt-right inveighing, with a sinister wink, against “globalists” and “neocons.”

Americans (and not just Jews) should beware: If we stay on this path, the Jew hunt of Amsterdam may be upon us, too, and sooner than we think.

Natan Sharansky: We Are Never Alone

During a swing through California with the organization Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM), Natan Sharansky addressed a private group of donors at a breakfast sponsored by the Jewish Community Foundation, the largest manager of charitable assets for Jewish philanthropists in Greater Los Angeles. Sharansky is chair of the CAM Advisory Board and held meetings in Southern California with Jewish communal leaders and grassroots activists ahead of CAM’s upcoming Mayors Summit Against Antisemitism in Beverly Hills on Dec. 11-13. More than 200 mayors are expected to attend the Mayors Summit to share best practices and discuss ways to counter antisemitism.

Sharansky is a modern-day hero, imprisoned for nine years in the Soviet Union for his activism on behalf of Soviet Jews trying to emigrate to Israel. He was finally freed in 1986 and reunited with his wife, Avital, in Israel, where he has lived ever since. Over the years he served in several capacities in the Israeli government, as well as the head of the Jewish Agency for Israel, promoting rights for new immigrants, religious minorities, and women. Sharansky’s most recent book is “Never Alone: Prison, Politics, and My People.” Natan Sharansky, Justin Jampol, founder and executive director of The Wende Museum of the Cold War.

At the breakfast on Nov. 7, Sharansky answered questions by moderator Justin Jampol, founder and executive director of The Wende Museum in Culver City, whose collections and programs focus on the Cold War, and then from the audience. The following are edited highlights from his answers.

Q: How can Israel continue to heal from the war?

Natan Sharansky: Oct. 7 has changed our self-image. We know we can no longer appease our enemies. Yes, mistakes were made by the government and by the military, but we are in a much better place strategically than before. We finally know the real enemy is Iran and we are much less afraid.

Israel is such a small country, and we feel the tragedy of the hostages and the many, many losses of our soldiers. Every loss is deeply felt. But we also have a deeply idealistic young generation whose readiness to continue to fight despite their personal sacrifices is unbelievable. I believe the vast majority of soldiers agree that they must fight until Hamas is destroyed and oppose a ceasefire. I have encouraged soldiers sharing the same tanks to go into politics to expand and broaden our political coalitions. They become close, sharing a tank.

'History is back, and the old normal isn’t returning' Bari Weiss tells young Jewish leaders

“History is back, and the old normal isn’t returning,” Bari Weiss, a journalist and the founder of the Free Press, told an audience of young Jewish leaders at the Jewish Federations of North America’s General Assembly in Washington.

Addressing over 100 participants of the Change Makers Fellowship and thousands of participants from across North America on Tuesday, Weiss urged attendees to recognize the “new world” they faced, one she described as increasingly hostile to Jewish values and identity.

In her speech, Weiss highlighted a series of recent and historical events that she believed marked a turning point for the Jewish community, including the October 7 Hamas massacre and the public displays of anti-Jewish sentiment that followed.

“If it feels like the end. That’s because all beginnings do,” she said, cautioning her audience not to grow complacent. “We bend the arc of history; it doesn’t bend on its own.”

Throughout her address, Weiss underscored the importance of resilience and vigilance in the face of rising antisemitism.

“We must learn… the resilience, the vigilance, the courage, and the pride not just to survive, but to thrive in this new world,” she said, drawing inspiration from Jewish dissidents in the Soviet Union who resisted oppression despite immense pressure.

Anti-Zionism is antisemitism
Weiss added, “The task for us at this moment is to learn from those who never had the luxury of losing their instinct for danger.”

Reflecting on recent antisemitic incidents and societal shifts, Weiss challenged the young leaders to be unafraid to speak truthfully and to hold their own communities accountable.

“Anti-Zionism is antisemitism, full stop,” she said, denouncing what she called “the perverse need to indulge in panel discussions” on the matter within the Jewish community itself.

She added, “We need to take the phrase ‘globalize the intifada’ seriously. It is not a fun rally chant. It is a call for violence against our community.”

Weiss also took aim at what she described as “the quiet purging of proud Jews” from influential spaces in art, education, and human rights groups.

11/13 Links Pt1: CIA Officer Arrested for Classified Israel Attack Plans; PIJ releases video of Russian-Israeli hostage; UNRWA’s “Palestine Refugee” Hoax

From Ian:

CIA Officer Arrested in Cambodia for 'Deadly Serious' Leak of Classified US Docs on Israel

An overseas CIA officer was arrested Tuesday in Cambodia and charged with leaking highly classified U.S. intelligence on Israel’s military plans for a strike on Iran, according to the New York Times.

The Times identified the officer as Asif W. Rahman. He was indicted last week on two counts of "willful retention and transmission of national defense information" and transported to federal court in Guam to face the charges.

The leaked documents, which showed Israeli military movements in preparation for a retaliatory strike on Iran last month, sparked an international firestorm, with both American and Israeli officials accusing the Biden-Harris administration of working to hamstring Israel’s sensitive operations. One senior Biden-Harris official described the leak as "deadly serious" and part of "a concerted campaign to leak what at least seems to be classified information by anti-Israel elements."

The materials—compiled by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency—revealed Israeli Air Force movements and munitions ahead of the counterstrike, which was delayed as a result. Israel ultimately made good on its promise to strike Iran late last month, destroying large swaths of Tehran’s air defense systems and several military installations.

Rahman held a top-secret security clearance and could access the information as part of his CIA duties. The documents first emerged publicly on a Telegram channel tied to the Iranian regime.

While the leak served to further erode already tense diplomatic relations between the United States and Israel, the Jewish state made clear that it would not be deterred from a strike on Iran as payback for Tehran's two massive ballistic missile attacks this year.

"After we attack in Iran, they will understand in Israel and elsewhere what your preparations have included," former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant said shortly after the classified documents became public. "Everyone will understand your strength, the process of preparation and training—any enemy that tries to harm the State of Israel will pay a heavy price."

The leak also ignited congressional investigations, with Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) ordering the Biden-Harris administration to brief Congress every two weeks until the leaker was caught.

"This leak is an outrageous betrayal of an ally and a breach of trust that will undermine our relationship with partners for years to come," Cotton said last month in a letter to the White House. "I am deeply concerned as to whether your administration will adequately address this serious security breach."

British cop arrested for supporting Hamas online

Counter-terrorism officers in the United Kingdom arrested a policeman in southwestern England on Tuesday on suspicion of online activity linked to supporting Hamas.

Counter Terrorism Policing South West officers arrested the man in Gloucester, the BBC reported on Wednesday. The officer, who is in his 30s, was taken to a police facility outside Gloucestershire, the BBC reported on Wednesday. It did not say how he expressed or engaged in support for Hamas.

Authorities searched the policeman’s home and vehicle to locate and analyze digital devices, according to Gloucestershire Police Assistant Chief Constable Arman Mathieson.

“The arrest of a serving officer on suspicion of such a serious offense will no doubt cause our communities concern, as it does everyone who works for Gloucestershire Police,” Mathieson told the BBC. “The arrest has been made to allow for a prompt and effective investigation to take place and we must not draw any conclusions at this stage.”

In the U.K., providing support to a proscribed terrorist group, such as Hamas, violates section 12 of the Terrorism Act.

Following the Hamas-led invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, British officials have raised concerns about anti-Israel rallies that may have promoted terrorism, urging that support for Hamas be prosecuted under the full extent of the law.

Canadian teens planned to bomb pro-Israel rally at Parliament Hill

Two Canadian teens who were arrested in December and February planned to bomb a pro-Israel rally at Ottawa’s Parliament Hill, court documents obtained by Global News showed on Tuesday.

The suspects, whom Canadian police have identified only as “young persons,” are “alleged to have formed a plan last fall to violently attack Jewish persons in Ottawa, possibly through the detonation of an explosive device at a pro-Israel rally,” the Department of Justice said.

The assertion that a pro-Israel demonstration was the target of the thwarted terror attack appeared in an application by federal lawyers to withhold sensitive national security information from the criminal trials.

One accused is being charged with possessing acetone, oxidizer and metal ball bearings. All are possible components of homemade bombs.

According to the government’s Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre, the plot was allegedly linked to ISIS, also known by the Arabic acronym Daesh, and was “possibly accelerated” by Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attacks.

“At least one of the individuals was reportedly in contact with DAESH overseas and the arrests occurred during a period of DAESH calls to violence in response to the conflict,” the agency wrote.

The first suspect was arrested on Dec. 15 and charged with conspiracy to murder and “communicating instructional material related to an explosive substance.” Prosecutors also charged him with recruiting a second suspect to “carry out a terrorist activity against Jewish persons.”

Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.

Trump trounced Harris and the next morning, she conceded. Now, all that was left was for Dems to do grieve. Except for the small matter of sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner with their Trump-happy relatives in just a little over 3 weeks—less at the time of this writing. Should Harris voters be expected to sit across the table from their cretinous MAGA cousins?

Not at all, explained Yale-affiliated psychiatrist Dr. Amanda Calhoun to MSNBC’s Joy Reid. “If you are going to a situation where you have family members, where you have close friends who you know have voted in ways that are against you . . . against your livelihood . . . it's completely fine to not be around those people and to tell them why.”

Calhoun’s advice, I’d venture to say, runs contrary to what most of us were taught by our mothers; namely that is courteous to set aside political differences at the holiday table for the sake of preserving family harmony. We can agree to disagree, because presidents come and go but family is family until death do you part. We spend time with family at the holidays not because they are entitled to our presence, but because it’s a tradition we value and cherish as a society.

In Israel, of course, there is no such November 28th conundrum to worry about. For one thing, most of those celebrating Thanksgiving in Israel are expat Americans. They left their families behind to make Aliyah, so there’s no one to argue with at table.

Then again, Thanksgiving is something expat Americans mostly celebrate for the sake of the food: turkey, stuffing, yams, gravy, cranberry sauce, and pie. And guess what? Sitting down to eat that meal will be pure pleasure not only because of the food and the lack of argumentative relatives, but because Donald J. Trump won—which means that this year, the only arguing around Israeli Thanksgiving tables will be over who gets the wishbone.

With our stateside cousins of course, it is a different story. We spend time with them only virtually in fits and starts. That makes it a little easier to avoid tense subjects. And if ever there was a tense subject it was this election, with most American Jews wildly at odds with their Israeli counterparts.

Our cousins care about the hostages, but not as much as they care about domestic issues, for example reproductive rights. They care about Iran, but they care about abortion more; they have been told that Donald J. Trump will take away their rights to their own bodies. Kamala Harris told them so.

Joy Reid told them so.

In Israel, we understand our Jewish cousins in America have domestic priorities. But we have trouble understanding how they feel about geopolitics. We don’t like to think that they are ignorant, but do they know they voted for a woman who helped fund October 7 and all that has happened in its wake?

Israelis are hyper-aware of these geopolitics. So much so that in the run up to the election, all of us were tense. I was tense. My neighbors were tense. We all knew that Israel’s enemies were watching and waiting to see who would win the election. My personal fear was that if Harris won, Hamas would take it as a green light to shoot all the remaining living hostages dead.

I did not dare tempt evil by voicing my fears, but now, in retrospect, I can talk about it because it didn’t happen—Harris lost. But it was rough. In the run-up to the election I could literally see those executions playing out in my mind’s eye. Over and over again. It was hard to hold down food. Hard to breathe.

I don’t know if I was alone in experiencing these visions—but I know my feelings of dread and terror were not exclusive to me. Everyone around me felt the same way and we were all quietly speaking about it to each other. The election was the Sword of Damocles hanging over not just the hostages’ heads, but all our heads. This was something more than politics.

And it is that “something more” that makes it so difficult to be polite as we were taught, and set aside differences for the sake of family.

I know what you’re thinking. What’s the difference, Harris lost. But you see, it’s the vote that counts. It’s the vote that hurt and cut so deeply.

It’s hard to square it in our heads, how “family” could vote for Harris, someone who sends money to Iran and ties Israel’s hands. Someone who bears responsibility for the fact that the Jewish people are no longer safe anywhere in the world.

Many of us have a very hard time with this. We think of what happened on October 7, of the hostages and of the hundreds of soldiers who have been killed since, beautiful young people, older reservists with wives and children, and we can’t bring ourselves to agree to disagree and move on. It’s just too hard. We can’t look the other way and call it “only politics.”

I myself think back to certain lovely childhood memories from back when I was a toddler, and I don’t know what to do. We are family and yet this "family" prioritizes something other than me, my family here, and our people. They prioritized something other than the hundreds of Israeli soldiers who died defending our people—something other than the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who can’t go home to their homes in the north.

How can I look the other way?

They put us all at risk.

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!

Two recent incidents shows that Hezbollah regards UNIFIL as being an annex to their own forces, and is upset when they don't serve their Hezbollah masters.

On November 1, Israeli naval commandos captured Hezbollah Captain Imad Amhaz in northern Lebanon.

Hezbollah is complaining that Germany, which leads the UNIFIL Maritime Task Force, didn't inform them of the raid ahead of time.

Hezbollah's new leader, Naim Qassem, said in a speech last week, "For the Israelis to enter in this manner is a grave insult to Lebanon and a violation of its sovereignty. Ask UNIFIL, especially the Germans, what they saw that night and what actions they took," Qassem said.

The UNIFIL Naval Force's entire job is to stop Hezbollah weapons coming from the sea. However, Hezbollah expects UNIFIL to be their ally - to provide intelligence, and to avoid performing its mandate.

There was another UNIFIL incident where Hezbollah is upset at UNIFIL and expected UNIFIL to be on their team.

Hezbollah has accused German forces within UNIFIL of shooting down a drone off the Lebanese coast on Oct. 17. The downing of the drone occurred following a series of attacks targeting UNIFIL forces in southern Lebanon.

While they officially declared the drone's origin as "unknown," sources close to Hezbollah have suggested that the downed aircraft belonged to the party. An article published in the pro-Hezbollah newspaper Al-Akhbar directly accused German forces of intentionally targeting a "resistance drone," further fueling tensions.

Since 2020, Germany considers all of Hezbollah to be a terrorist organization. Hezbollah's goal in targeting Germany for insults, rather than UNIFIL as a whole, seems to be to get Germany kicked out of UNIFIL as a biased member, since it sells arms to Israel.

Which means, again, that Hezbollah considers UNIFIL to be an ally and it is upset when it does what it is supposed to do: stop proliferation of Hezbollah weapons in southern Lebanon.

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!

COGAT writes today:

New humanitarian aid crossing:
-A new humanitarian aid crossing Into Gaza - the Kissufim crossing - started operating yesterday. This is part of our effort and commitment to increase the volume and routes of aid to Gaza. The aid enters Gaza after security checks at the Kerem Shalom Crossing.

Aid trucks entry:
-115 humanitarian aid trucks entered Gaza yesterday, 68 through Kerem Shalom, 32 via Erez, and 15 via the newly opened Kissufim crossing.
-The trucks carried food, shelter equipment and medical supplies, including dialysis machines and water sanitation equipment.

Aid Collection:
Yesterday, only 41 trucks were collected from the Gazan side of Kerem Shalom by international organizations. Approx. 870 trucks worth of aid are waiting for collection.

Why are so many trucks not being picked up?

A COGAT newsletter from last week describes efforts that IDF is making to help the NGOs, information that goes virtually unreported:

Alternative and Dedicated Humanitarian Routes: Israel is constantly working to allow and facilitate aid organizations to transfer humanitarian aid within the Gaza Strip. For example, COGAT worked together with international organizations to facilitate the creation of humanitarian routes and alternative pathways within Gaza that would allow the continued coordination and flow of aid trucks within Gaza. A major route has been expanded to secure transport from northern to central Gaza, even during active, targeted operations. Additionally, subject to operational considerations, attempts are made to implement, on an almost daily basis, tactical pauses along certain routes, allowing for safer movement and facilitating that aid convoys reach their destinations without interference, as well as daily humanitarian pauses in various areas.

Bottlenecks in Aid Collection: At the Kerem Shalom crossing, logistical constraints by the UN agencies have created bottlenecks of aid waiting to be collected and distributed within Gaza. In response, Israel facilitated the entry of additional empty trucks to assist with faster loading and facilitated the entry of forklifts to expedite aid handling.

Assisting aid organizations with overcoming criminality: Israel has taken measures to allow and facilitate the collection of aid by the UN despite criminal elements attempting to loot aid trucks. Measures include coordinating collection from the crossing during various hours, including at night, paving alternative routes, increasing the fence road option to deliver aid directly into central Gaza, and other measures taken by the IDF against the looters.

This is only part of what the IDF is doing to help bring in aid to the people who need it - and not to Hamas. Who reports that they are paving roads to help with aid transportation?

Israel opened up the Kissufim crossing which is closer to central Gaza. But it appears to be window dressing to make the Americans happy, because the aid that was already entering Gaza was not getting distributed. Adding more crossings only marginally helps get the aid to the people who need it.

Israel cannot go the last mile to directly bring the aid to the people who need it - that's the job of the UN and other organizations. They are dropping the ball.

The IDF is doing far more than any news media is reporting. The newsletter describes many more activities that no one else mentions.

Worse, while there are daily meetings between Israel and the UN organizations to coordinate humanitarian pauses, routes, aid transfer, planning for winter needs, expanding humanitarian zones and much more, the NGOs sit back and blame Israel for things that they are responsible for.

As always, the NGOs and reporters write all their stories from the perspective that Jews are intending to murder and hurt as many Gaza civilians as possible. None of that is true, and every issue of the COGAT newsletter proves it. It is a fundamentally antisemitic assumption, and it is what drives more Jew-hatred worldwide.

Is it too much to ask the media to report fairly? Is it too much to ask humanitarian organizations to treat Israel as a partner and not a bloodthirsty genocidal wa rmachine?

Apparently, for today's blood libelers, it is.

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!

Hassan Asfour is the editor of the Palestinian Amad newspaper, which leans towards socialism and is highly critical of the Palestinian Authority. He was one of the PLO negotiators in Oslo and was the PA minister of negotiation affairs in 1999. He himself appears to be communist.

He just wrote in his newspaper how happy he is that Muslims are attacking Jews all over Europe.

The headline: "After the 'Amsterdam Punch', fear haunts them...and it must continue"

Asfour praises the Muslim attackers in Amsterdam as "those who chose Europe as a second country to their original homeland, and whose immigration did not strip them of their stored Arab affiliation."

At the same time he dismisses any accusations of antisemitism on behalf of the attackers, he says,

Yes... persecuting the inhabitants of the Jewish state wherever possible, considering them "wanted by human justice" should be the standard from the act of "human resistance" and a popular implementation of Article Seven of the United Nations Charter.

"The Amsterdam Leash"... Let it be a model for pursuing Jewish fascism in the journey of comprehensive confrontation... and a new symbol of human resistance that does not know defeat.

The utter depravity and profound Jew-hatred of mainstream, respected and prominent Palestinians remains one of the least reported stories in the world.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

11/12 Links Pt2: 2024 has been a year of a ‘tsunami’ of antisemitism; The echo of broken glass from Amsterdam; Afghanistan’s last Jew arrives in Israel

From Ian:

Michal Cotler-Wunsh: What the results of the US election mean for the fight against antisemitism worldwide

In the midst of a raging war of authoritarian regimes and their proxies on civilization, at an existential moment in an algorithmic world rife with conflict, fear, despair and distrust, the results of the U.S. elections offer a glimpse of hope — first and foremost, that common sense will not give up to radical extremes without a fight.

It should be a moment of soul-searching, particularly for those who detest President-elect Trump, including legacy media in an age of digital platforms. It should be a wake-up call to all those who are committed to liberal values, which have been taken captive by a so-called “progressive” left that pulls back and not forward, is rejected by a huge public, and was exposed in the inability or lack of willingness to condemn the horrors of the Oct. 7 massacre.

Instead, many took to the streets in sympathy with its murderous perpetrators, sounding alarms that warn of an international and national security threat — including to the USA. The tsunami of antisemitism that was exposed, unleashed and mainstreamed provided a litmus test on the reality that threatens the foundations of democracies.

It was antisemitism to which the October 7 perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity were indoctrinated, and it is antisemitism, led by a murderous Islamist regime in Iran, that continues to fuel a multi-front war with the intent to destroy Israel, the proverbial Jew among the nations, and all those who support her right to exist.

The previous Trump administration advocated a historic pivot, represented in the Abraham Accords, from the “three no’s” of Khartoum to the three yes’s: to recognition, negotiation and peace. A return to this potential paradigm shift is significant not only for the State of Israel; it constitutes a critical change of perception toward a growing radical evil axis.

Antisemitism, a lethal shape-shifting hate, is a predictor for the collapse of all the spaces and places where it spreads. Its modern and mainstream strain manifests in tearing down posters of baby Kfir Bibas, stolen from his home into the terror tunnels of Hamas; in attacks on Jews/Zionists on campuses, on the streets and online worldwide; and in demonstrations in support of Gaza, including in the streets of New York City, days after six hostages including one American-Israeli were executed after surviving more than 11 months of hell.

Recognizing Israel as what it is — the nation state of a prototypical indigenous people, who returned to their ancestral homeland after thousands of years of exile and persecution — is a necessary first step, which enables negotiations and paves the path to peace.

Antisemitism envoy: 2024 has been a year of a ‘tsunami’ of antisemitism

The violent attack against Jews in Amsterdam over the weekend was not unique to Europe but just another incident in what Israel’s antisemitism envoy Michal Cotler-Wunsh described as a “tsunami of antisemitism” this year.

She said October 7 was the “worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust” and led to the “mainstreaming of antisemitism” around the world, including anti-Zionism, which denies Israel’s right to exist.

Is It Safe For Israelis In Eruope?
Israeli fans were assaulted after a soccer game in Amsterdam by groups of young people. Five people were treated at hospitals, and dozens were arrested after the attacks, which were condemned as antisemitic. According to Cotler-Wunsh, “what is happening in the streets in Europe is happening on university campuses, at sports and cultural events.”

She added that, in the same week, the only kosher restaurant in Washington, D.C. had its windows shattered, and in New York, a father walking with his six-year-old was attacked, with the child nearly pulled from his grasp.

“It’s not just about traveling or not going to sports events,” the envoy said. “It is much larger. It is much bigger. The genie has been let out of the bottle.”

Now is the time to push the Heritage Foundation’s “Project Esther” forward

The Heritage Foundation rightly called the global Hamas support network an existential threat to Israel and all Jews in the Diaspora. In response, they recently conceived of “Project Esther” to serve as an antidote to the Jew-hatred sown in the meadows of higher learning and readily spread in the corridors of democratic policymaking and the mass media. This project is now needed more than ever because the damage caused by the pro-Palestinian interest groups has infected the minds of impressionable youth in the United States, clearly evidenced by the flaming diatribes launched at Jewish students on campuses throughout the country since Oct. 7, 2023.

Unfortunately, the perils of Jew-hatred have not been confined to the hallways of academia. These dangers are now palpable in industry, corporate life and, similarly, in the medical profession. According to the American Jewish Medical Association, founded in the wake of Oct. 7 by New York plastic surgeon Yael Haas, Jewish doctors are increasingly subject to scorn, harassment and deprecation at the merciless hands of colleagues who boldly express enmity toward them.

Tuesday’s election victory declaring former President Donald Trump as the winner of the highest office in the land has lifted the democratic decree that has threatened Israel’s right to defend itself—holding back 2,000-pound bombs and importuning the Jewish state to cease its efforts to eradicate the terror networks abutting their borders. The democratic decree is likewise lifted by the Republican sweep of the Senate. As the majority party controlling the Senate, any of Trump’s future foreign-aid packages to Israel will be less likely to face opposition from the legislative branch.

Just as Queen Esther took a proactive role in removing the decree against the Jews in Persia in the mid-fourth century BCE, we must embrace a proactive role in lifting the decree of destruction placed upon Israel. This decree caused the attrition of support for the Jewish state by a Democrat-led presidential administration and a Democrat-controlled Senate that has been influenced by the Hamas support network.

To combat the effects of the pro-Palestinian groups, we must push forward an agenda to denude college campuses, industries and media of their virulent Jew-hatred, which pose an existential threat to Israel and Diaspora Jewry.

Project Esther, defined by the Heritage Foundation as “a national strategy to combat antisemitism,” has gathered religious groups across the theological spectrum. Forming the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, Project Esther has chosen the Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV)—the largest rabbinic public-policy organization in America dedicated to restoring America’s moral foundation—to represent the interests of the Jewish community. Representing 2,500 traditional rabbinic leaders in public policy, CJV has garnered the respect of lawmakers on Capitol Hill. This provides an excellent starting point for reversing the damage of the democratic decree.

Trump’s victory and the simultaneous retaking of the Senate by the Republican Party provide a welcomed opportunity to undo the harm caused by the pro-Palestinian policymakers to Israel’s viability. To that end, it is imperative that we advance a comprehensive plan that assures the Jewish state receives the fiscal, military and practical support it sorely needs.

11/12 Links Pt1: Enthusiasm in Jerusalem as Trump national security team takes shape; Gaza's Forgotten Palestinian Victims: Dissidents Tortured by Hamas

From Ian:

Enthusiasm in Jerusalem as Trump national security team takes shape

Israeli officials were enthusiastic about President-elect Donald Trump’s expected incoming national security team, including Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) as secretary of state and Reps. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) and Mike Waltz (R-FL) for ambassador to the U.N. and national security advisor, respectively.

A source close to Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar said he is “expected to warmly welcome” his likely counterpart Rubio.

“We’re talking about someone who is not only a firm friend of Israel, but has a consistent track record on the major issues of the day,” such as Iran, the source said.

Officials in other Israeli government offices related to national security had positive things to say about the likely nominees, but did not want to be quoted until they are official. Trump has only announced he is tapping Stefanik for U.N. ambassador.

Israeli Environmental Protection Minister Idit Silman was the one cabinet minister to comment publicly on Tuesday morning, posting on X that she is “happy and congratulates President Trump for his appointments. Marco Rubio and Michael Waltz are people with their heads on straight and moral clarity. This is good news for the free world and the State of Israel.”

Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Danny Danon posted his congratulations to Rubio and Stefanik, and said that he “look[s] forward to strengthening the enduring bond between Israel and the United States, working together for a safer, more prosperous future for all.”

Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana praised the “brilliant pick” of Stefanik, posting photos from her visit to the Knesset last year and calling her “a strong voice of moral clarity and a fierce fighter for what is right,” as well as “a steadfast friend” of Israel and the Jewish people.

Former Israeli National Security Advisor and head of the Misgav Institute for National Security Meir Ben-Shabbat, who served under Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during Trump’s first term, said that while he does not know the nominees personally, he is familiar with their stances on matters important to Israel.

“There is potential for a dramatic change, to expand the Abraham Accords and continue the vision of the previous term, to bring stability, peace and prosperity, but it must be done through strength,” he said.

With majority, Senate Republicans pledge aggressive action against antisemitism

A spokesperson for Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID), who will chair the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that he “will continue to do all he can to support Israel in its war against Hamas and Hezbollah, to include the reversal of Biden’s policies of Iranian accommodation and doubling down on efforts to isolate Iran and deny the regime resources to threaten Israel.”

Risch, the spokesperson said, “will continue to counter antisemitism that exists across the world and in places like the [International Criminal Court] and the U.N. If the current Congress continues to stop short of taking action to sanction ICC officials and permanently cease funding to UNRWA, those will be early priorities next year.”

The committee has been at a standstill since April, the result of Risch and Foreign Relations Committee Republicans refusing to move forward on any of President Joe Biden’s nominations or other votes until the panel takes up a House-passed ICC sanctions bill. It is not clear if a bipartisan agreement will be reached before the new Congress begins in January.

Republicans have consistently argued since the spring that their conference would take a more hands-on approach to both Israel and antisemitism. Members have criticized Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) for refusing to allow for a vote on the Antisemitism Awareness Act despite facing calls from Jewish leaders and a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers to do so; Schumer said in late October that a vote on the AAA would take place after the election.

A spokesperson for Schumer pointed to Republican holds on the legislation, saying that “because of that fact pattern, the goal of passing antisemitism legislation has long been to use a viable, must-pass vehicle to accomplish passage.”

“We fully intend to get it done before the end of the year,” Schumer spokesman Angelo Roefaro said of passing AAA in the lame duck session.

GOP senators have also pointed to the lack of any productive hearings on domestic antisemitism as evidence of Democratic inaction, with several incoming committee chairs saying they’d like to convene hearings on the issue.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), the top Republican on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, has been pushing Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the committee’s outgoing chairman, to hold a hearing on the matter since last November. Sanders has refused the requests, despite pressure from HELP Committee Democrats and members of the Senate Bipartisan Task Force for Combating Antisemitism.

Sen. Marco Rubio: Israel's Enemies Are Also Our Enemies

Israel has been a steadfast U.S. ally, a wellspring of technological innovation, and a force for good in the world. Israel's enemies are also our enemies. The Iranian regime and its proxies - Hamas in Gaza, Hizbullah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and a multitude of groups in Syria and Iraq - seek Israel's destruction as part of a multi-stage plan to dominate the Middle East and destabilize the West. The Jewish state is on the front lines of this conflict, fighting with many shared American-Israeli lives.

This makes it outrageous that international institutions are targeting Israel. The International Criminal Court is currently mulling arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and senior Israeli officials over supposed "war crimes." The court isn't going after Assad in Syria, who gassed his own people. It isn't going after Xi Jinping in China, who is conducting real-time genocide against the Uyghurs. Instead, it's attacking a country whose military has gone to great lengths to protect civilian lives. The hypocrisy is astounding.

In the end, no matter what the international community says, Israel has a right to defend itself, and the United States must support its effort to destroy Hamas as a terrorist threat. We also must support Israel against Iran-backed Hizbullah to Israel's north. (National Review-May 6, 2024)

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

"Never trust a Jew" - an old trope we still see every day

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:

Just like today, when Jews claim something, "fair minded' people require an independent investigation. Victims are believed unless they are Jewish.

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.

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!

From soccer federations to surrogate mothers, antisemitic bullying works

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.

The UEFA spokesperson said the team would not face sanctions as it only bans political messages "deemed insulting or provocative." Showing a map erasing Israel, and a mosque deliberately built on the holiest spot, is not deemed provocative enough.

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.

How can the UEFA justify violating its own policies so egregiously?

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.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Hamas-supporting NGOs are upset at a House bill to strip them of tax exempt status

The Intercept, which literally appeals to antisemites to raise money to write anti-Israel stories, describes a bill in Congress this way:

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.

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!

11/11 Links Pt2: BBC News promote yet another Hamas ‘doctor’; The modern intellectual diktat for Jewish authors; JNF Canada loses appeal to retain charitable status

From Ian:

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 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.

The modern intellectual diktat for Jewish authors

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.

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.

Writers and Careless Use of Words

[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.

11/11 Links Pt1: Justifying the ‘Jew Hunt’; Dear Jared Kushner, the Jewish people need you; IDF seizes ammunition hidden Gaza aid convoy

From Ian:

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.

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.

Brendan O'Neill: The moral ghettoisation of the Jews

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.