Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, December 06, 2024

All you need to know about the flour crisis in Gaza (Guest post by Imshin)

The wonderful Jacqui Peleg, the person behind #TheGazaYouDontSee hashtag known as Imshin, created a video describing exactly how Hamas steals aid and resells it to desperate Gazans. I asked her for the transcript to make it into a guest post.

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In recent days, the media has been airing disturbing footage of massive queues outside bakeries in South Gaza, reporting terrible shortages of flour and bread.

At the same time, COGAT, the unit in the IDF responsible for coordinating and facilitating humanitarian aid for Gaza, says 18,000 tons of flour entered the Gaza Strip in November on 600 trucks.

So what’s going on? Where is all the flour?

One of the problems facing Hamas since the beginning of the war has been how to continue to pay salaries to their people, especially since the IDF has discovered and confiscated huge amounts of cash found in Hamas terror tunnels.

They’ve done all sorts of things, even resorting to robbing the banks!

But by and far the most lucrative money-making scheme has been turning a profit from the hundreds of humanitarian aid trucks that pour into the Gaza Strip weekly, and also dozens of private sector supply trucks.

Hamas regularly steals humanitarian aid trucks, taking what they need, and selling the surplus for exorbitant prices in the markets. They have even created a special unit of enforcers, the Saham Unit, ostensibly to prevent stealing of trucks, but in fact believed by many Gazans to be doing a lot of the stealing itself.

Hamas also “taxes” private sector food imports for half of their worth and more. By “taxes” I mean that armed Hamas forces stop the trucks at gunpoint and force the drivers to either pay or hand over the merchandise.

Between 16th– 17th November, 109 flour trucks were reportedly stolen after entering South Gaza via Kerem Shalom crossing. Hamas claimed the trucks were stolen by “criminal gangs”, but Gazans on social media said that the only criminal gang, capable of pulling off such a large-scale heist, was Hamas itself. This is because Hamas continues to control the population and resources in the Gaza Strip with an iron fist.

Gazan activist and journalist Hamza al-Masri commented a few days ago that one sack containing 25 kg of flour pays the salary of one Hamas Nukhba terrorist for a month.

Although food prices in general had been going up before the heist - and why this is happening is a subject for a separate article - this 109 flour truck heist was the trigger that started the so-called flour crisis.

With the heist, Hamas in effect created an artificial flour shortage, putting severe pressure on the population, and this lead to the creation - or perhaps continuation on a higher level - of yet another Hamas money-making scheme. This scheme involves running what Israeli commentator Abu Ali has called “a bread cartel” with the big bakeries.

According to COGAT, twelve big bakeries are operating in Gaza, four in North Gaza and eight in South and Central Gaza, producing close to three million pita breads a day.

The bakeries receive free flour and fuel and are supposed to sell each bag of ten pita breads for three shekels. That’s the equivalent of 83 US cents.

Descriptions I’ve seen of how the bread cartel works suggest two options:

The first option is that the queues outside the bakeries are policed by gunmen who make sure that those buying the three shekel bags are children and young girls belonging to certain families and crime gangs. The bags are then sold on for thirty to forty shekels each. That’s between eight to ten dollars.

The second option is to sell a small amount of the three shekels bags at the bakeries. Of course, everyone converges on the bakeries to try and get a bag of the subsidized bread, creating a massive crush that makes for great propaganda, for the “The Gazans are Starving” lie.

Now, I‘ve seen enough queues in Gaza to know that when they want to, the Gazans are quite capable of enforcing orderly queues, and standing patiently in line for hours on end. So, when I see one of these shocking massive crushes, I can usually tell by the source that it has been manufactured to shock and manipulate a Western audience. What’s more, it is more often than not filmed and photographed by Hamas mouthpieces, such as Hasan Eslaiah, who you may remember also participated in the October Seven Massacre.

To continue, in this second option, a large proportion of the bread is smuggled out of the back, and sold, again, for thirty to forty shekels for a bag containing ten pitas, ten times and more above the official price!

My guess is that both option one and option two are used by the bakeries in tandem.

Unsurprisingly, Gazans are tired of these games. After the heist they started to buy sacks of 25kg of flour to make their own bread, which many Gazans have been doing all along, using traditional clay ovens.

At first, the prices skyrocketed – you could pay anywhere between 600 to 1000 shekels for a sack of flour. That’s between $165 to $280. That’s if you could even find any. But relatively quickly, as additional flour trucks entered, prices started to come down again. The last I saw were around 280 to 300 shekels. That’s $78 to $83. But it’s probably come down more, and I just haven’t seen it.

Now the strange thing is that while all this fake crisis has been unfolding in South Gaza, in North Gaza there has been no flour shortage at all. On the contrary, there has been a surplus, and since prices remain low, some flour shipments to the North have even been thrown away, perhaps to keep the price up.

A few days ago, I even came across 25 kg flour sacks being sold in North Gaza for 5 shekels each! That’s $1.40 each for 25 kgs of flour! For the benefit of American readers, 25 kg are just over 55 lbs.

My message to people watching the heartbreaking footage of desperate Gazans being crushed in bread lines in Gaza, is that I’m afraid to say you are being conned. This is not to say that the Gazans in those crushes are not suffering, but that it is not the result of any real shortage, but of a manipulation to exploit both the ordinary Gazans, and you.

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Kan TV also had a story on how Hamas steals aid into Gaza.

The English translation is here.

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!

Amnesty didn't seek any input from its Israeli branch - because, again, Jews can't be trusted

Since October 7 last year, we've seen, again and again, a consistent theme from the media: Jews cannot be trusted.

Everything Israel says that makes it look less than monstrous is triple-checked and publicly doubted. Gaza "witnesses" and "humanitarian workers" - who are all either working with or are deathly afraid of Hamas - are trusted without any verification or skepticism.

The trope of the untrustworthy Jew is well over a century old.

The new Amnesty blood libel report accusing Israel off genocide continues that antisemitic tradition. But something that happened outside the report itself is, in many ways, more illuminating than he hundreds of examples of how Amnesty believes anything a Palestinian says and nothing a Jew says.

Amnesty Israel issued a statement that it disagrees with its parent organization Amnesty as to its conclusions. But more interesting still is that the Israeli branch says that they were not involved in the report at all. Their press release says Amnesty Israel "is not one of the initiators of the report; it is not one of its authors, and that the branch in Israel was not a partner in financing or approving the report,"

The question everyone should be asking is...why not?

Why didn't Amnesty ask their Israeli branch to contribute to a report about the country that they know better than any other Amnesty researcher?

Amnesty complains in the report that Israel didn't cooperate with them. But they themselves didn't cooperate with their own Israeli branch!

Certainly the Amnesty Israel people could have added context, color, and depth to the report, not to mention correct the many mistakes like taking Israeli officials' quotes out of context. Apparently the parent organization didn't even use Amnesty Israel to help translate Hebrew!

Amnesty interviewed scores of seemingly ordinary Gazans and aid workers. But they didn't interview any Israelis. or IDF soldiers who fought in Gaza. Amnesty Israel could have looked out their window and found a dozen IDF reservists willing to talk about what they did (and didn't do) in Gaza.

Clearly, Amnesty didn't want to pollute its blood libel report with facts and context.

The report is book-sized. It takes a lot of resources to put something like that together. Not using Israelis who have a more accurate perspective on how the IDF works - indeed, many of the Amnesty Israel employees probably served in the IDF - can only be because Amnesty doesn't trust Jews.

This is further proof that Amnesty wrote the report from the start to make the libelous "genocide" claim against Israel, and always intended it to be one-sided. Amnesty Israel - which is still far -Left and highly critical of Israel's conduct in Gaza - would have watered down what Amnesty wanted to say. It would have pointed out mistakes. Amnesty knows that its thesis is precarious to begin with (after all, they had to make up a new definition of genocide) , and if their Israeli branch would have been involved, the pre-determined conclusion would have been endangered.

This is echoed by some Amnesty Israel employees who can say with authority that the conclusions were written before the "investigation."

In a separate statement obtained by the Haaretz newspaper, several members of Amnesty Israel and Jewish members of Amnesty International went one step further and accused the report of producing an “artificial analysis” of the situation in the Gaza Strip.

“From the outset, the report was referred to in international correspondence as the ‘genocide report,’ even when the research was still in its initial stages,” Haaretz cited the Amnesty members as saying.

“This is a strong indication of bias and also a factor that can cause additional bias: Imagine how difficult it is for a researcher to work for months on a report titled ‘genocide report’ and then to have to conclude that it is ‘only’ about crimes against humanity,” they added. “Predetermined conclusions of this kind are not typical of other Amnesty International investigations.”

They accused the report of having been “motivated by a desire to support a popular narrative among Amnesty International’s target audience” that stemmed from “an atmosphere within Amnesty International of minimizing the seriousness of the October 7 massacre. It is a failure – and sometimes even a refusal – to address the Israeli victims in a personal and humane manner.”

At the very least, Amnesty's not using the Israelis shows a shocking level of disrespect that Amnesty has towards its Israeli branch. To Amnesty, their Israeli employees are untrustworthy and must be marginalized.

Which is yet more evidence that Amnesty is irredeemably biased. They are practicing BDS against even the most progressive Israelis who fully subscribe to Amnesty's ideals.

If Amnesty Israel had any self respect at all, it would quit the organization. Clearly they are treated as if they are worthless.

Right now their entire role is to be the token Jews that Amnesty can point to in order to pretend they aren't antisemitic.

Here's a Soviet-era cartoon from 1972 that sums up the entire Amnesty report. (Caption: "In his likeness and image.")

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!

12/05 Links Pt2: The infernal Qatari strategy; NYC Schools Are Scaring Jewish Students; Al Jazeera+ used bots to amplify anti-Israel discourse; Yoseph Haddad faces anti-Israel mobs on Concordia campus

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The infernal Qatari strategy

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has said that there will be “all hell to pay” if the Israeli hostages being held in the Gaza Strip aren’t released by his inauguration on Jan. 20. He added: “Those responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied history of the United States of America.”

While no one knows what Trump would actually do, can anyone doubt that a similar stance by the United States after the Oct. 7 pogrom would have produced results?

If, instead of appeasing Iran and bullying Israel, the Biden administration had told Qatar on Oct. 8 that unless the hostages were released within 24 hours, Washington would sever all economic, diplomatic and security relations with Doha—and meant that—it’s likely the hostages would have been freed and the horrors of the past year averted.

That’s because Qatar is Hamas. The Gulf state founded it, funded it and, until Trump won the November presidential election, sheltered the men who run it.

Qatar is a profound threat to the free world. As Yigal Carmon of MEMRI has written, it supports ISIS, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Hamas and Hezbollah. In 1996, it hid the future 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) in Doha. When the FBI came to arrest him, informing only the Qatari Emir, KSM disappeared within hours.

Arab states that support the Abraham Accords have repeatedly warned the West against Qatar. In 2017, Dr. Anwar Gargash, then the United Arab Emirates’ minister of state for foreign affairs, described Doha as the “main sponsor” of terrorism and a “safe haven” of extremism.

In 2017, Qatar’s behavior led Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt to cut their diplomatic ties with it and impose a blockade on all contact by land, sea and air—a blockade that lasted for three-and-a-half years.

Yet the West refuses to treat Qatar as a godfather of terrorism and an enemy of civilization. During the past year, the United States has used it instead as an interlocutor with Hamas, treating the emirate as an honest broker in the negotiations to release the hostages.

These negotiations were never going to succeed. They were used instead to cripple Israel’s ability to inflict a speedy military defeat of Hamas. The only way the hostages were ever going to be released was through pressure on Hamas.

Yet Qatar had no intention of exerting that pressure, and none was exerted on Qatar, in turn, to do so. So the emirate played America for suckers, while more Israeli soldiers were killed or injured, and the hostages were left to their appalling fate.

Refusing to cut off the head of the snake in Tehran, the Biden administration conducted a Potemkin negotiation with Qatar which, despite its Islamist extremism and terrorist ties, has insinuated itself into the West on an enormous scale.

Clifford D May: Israel’s gift

In 2006, Hezbollah precipitated a war with Israel. After 34 days, under the newly passed U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, the Israelis ceased firing and withdrew.

In exchange, Hezbollah was to pull out of southern Lebanon, from the Litani River to the northern Israeli frontier, under the supervision of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).

Instead, both the LAF and UNIFIL did nothing—or actively collaborated with Hezbollah, which has now spent almost two decades emplacing missiles in schools and mosques, building underground fortresses and storing chemical weapons.

All this was in preparation for a future invasion of Israel that was to be followed by massacres, hostage-taking and, if possible, the conquest of the Galilee and other northern Israeli territories.

Had this plan been carried out in coordination with Hamas’s invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, along with missile barrages from Iranian territory, and strikes by the Houthis in Yemen and Shia militias in Syria and Iraq, who knows how many Israelis might have been killed? Who knows whether Israel would have survived?

For reasons about which we can only speculate, that didn’t happen. But on Oct. 8, Hezbollah demonstrated solidarity with Hamas by firing missiles at northern Israeli communities. These strikes continued for more than a year. Tens of thousands of Israelis have had to abandon their homes.

Enormous numbers of Iranian missiles were launched against Israel from Iranian soil in April and October of this year, and sporadically by the Houthis.

Israel’s missile defense systems, augmented by American systems, minimized damage and, in response to Tehran’s attacks, Israel destroyed Iran’s air defense systems.

In September, the pagers carried by hundreds of Hezbollah operatives suddenly exploded. Days later, an Israeli airstrike killed longtime Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah deep in his bunker.

The Israelis then proceeded to destroy hundreds of Hezbollah missiles, launchers and weapons caches. Most of the group’s senior leadership has now been eliminated.

The ceasefire the Biden administration arranged last week has left Israelis arguing among themselves.

Critics contend that it will allow Hezbollah to get up off the mat, and that it doesn’t ensure that displaced Israelis can return to their homes.

My reading is that, on balance, the Israelis come out ahead. President Biden was adamant to achieve a “diplomatic solution,” and the Israelis need a prompt resupply of American munitions. That now appears to be in train.

The Israelis are already responding forcefully to Hezbollah violations of the ceasefire.

And next month, President Trump will bring a new approach to the Tehran-fueled conflicts of the Middle East.

But back to the Lebanese. They now have a chance to remove the imperial yoke Iran’s rulers put around their neck and regain their freedom, sovereignty and independence. The LAF, long funded and trained by the United States, should at least attempt to disarm a crippled Hezbollah.

Lebanese patriots need to ask themselves two very Israeli questions: If not now, when? If not us, who?

What is happening in Syria is a microcosm of the dynamics of the Middle East

The area controlled by the thing that refers to itself as the Syrian government, which should more properly be termed the regime of Bashar Assad, remains the largest of the three zones of control in partitioned Syria. This structure controls around 60 per cent of the territory of the country.

The Assads run their fiefdom as a family dictatorship. One young Syrian evocatively described the country to me under the Assadsas a “family run farm, and we’re the animals.” This statement sums up the brutally repressive nature of the regime. But the Assads rule by more than terror. They are members of the Alawi sect, a split-off from Shia Islam. They have privileged their own community and implicated it in their excesses. The loyalty, partly coerced, of Syria’s Alawis is the foundation on which Assad’s continued rule of his area rests.

East of the Euphrates, in an area comprising roughly 30 per cent of Syria’s territory, a governing structure dominated by Syria’s Kurdish minority holds sway. The self-styled Autonomous Administration of North East Syria (AANES) is recognised by no state in the world. It has nevertheless created the most stable and functioning area of Syria. Its fighters formed the key ground ally of the US-led coalition in the war against the Islamic State, concluded victoriously in 2019. Once the toast of all those opposed to the murderous excesses of ISIS, the Syrian Kurds and their beleaguered enclave are now largely forgotten by the world. They are nevertheless determined to maintain and defend their zone of control against ongoing attempts by both Assad and the Sunni Islamists supported by Turkey to encroach upon it.

Lastly, and most relevantly to the events of recent days, in the north west of Syria there is an enclave maintained with the support of Turkey, comprising around 10 per cent of Syria’s territory (though now considerably more, as a result of recent events), and further subdivided between two Sunni Islamist governing entities, the so-called Syrian Interim Government to the north, and the Syrian Salvation Government in the southern part of this area.

It may well be that any reader who has lasted this far now feels they understand less about Syria than they did when they began the article. Syria can have that effect. Nevertheless, the background matters. What has happened in recent days is that the Syrian Salvation Government, an entity maintained by a Sunni jihadi group called Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), has launched an offensive against the Assad regime, and has achieved remarkable success. Its allies in the Syrian Interim Government, meanwhile, have embarked on their own offensive against the Syrian Kurds.

HTS have rapidly covered ground. In a remarkable achievement, they have taken Syria’s second city, Aleppo. They are now menacing the city of Hama, 100 km or so further south. As a result of the gains of recent days, the Sunni Islamist enclave in Syria now has a population of around 7 million people.

The Assad regime is not yet in serious danger. The Sunni jihadis’ lines of advance are still far north of Damascus, and east of the Assad’s heartland in Latakia Province on Syria’s Mediterranean coast. As of now, at least, HTS’s remarkable offensive has simply re-set the balance between the areas of control in Syria.

So why should no-one have been surprised by the offensive?

First, because frozen conflicts rarely stay frozen forever. The causes that originally animated them tend to make themselves manifest at a time when one or another of the sides finds it opportune.

Secondly, because all serious observers of Syria have known for a while that behind its rhetoric, the Assad regime is a depleted and rotting structure, dependent on its powerful Iranian and Russian allies for survival. These allies are currently distracted in wars with Israel and Ukraine respectively. HTS, whose leader Abu Mohammed al Jolani is as tactically flexible as he is strategically rigid, spotted the opening and chose to strike.

And lastly, no one should be surprised at rival ethno-sectarian forces, supported by powerful regional and global states clashing in the Middle East across the landscape of collapsed states, because that is the very essence of the way that power is wielded across the region at the present moment. From this point of view, current events in Syria offer a kind of microcosm of the dynamics of the region as a whole. Hopefully, both western governments and publics are watching carefully, and may even emerge better informed about the nature and dynamics of the Middle East.

12/05 Links Pt1: Amnesty International and Balaam’s Talking Ass; Cotton introduces bill to ban federal use of the term ‘West Bank’; ICC Reveals Its Moral Bankruptcy

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Amnesty International and Balaam’s Talking Ass

There’s a reason for that. The report is a joke. It didn’t take long for people to find the part where Amnesty explained that in order to find Israel guilty of genocide, the organization had to literally redefine genocide.

The crime of genocide requires intent, which is difficult to prove. Raphael Lemkin, the father of the term, had in mind “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves” (emphasis added).

The fact that Israel, for example, moved a million civilians out of Rafah before killing a bunch of Hamasniks with very few civilian casualties is representative of Israel’s approach to this war and cannot under any reasonable circumstances even be mentioned in the same breath as “genocide.” Moving civilians out of harm’s way and allowing in regular caravans of food and medicine and other humanitarian items are actions that are mutually exclusive to genocidal intent. Without proof of genocidal intent, such intent can be determined if the only plausible explanation of the state’s actions is genocide. Obviously Israel’s conduct comes nowhere close to meeting that standard.

So Amnesty just changed the definition, insisting that “Amnesty International considers this an overly cramped interpretation of international jurisprudence and one that would effectively preclude a finding of genocide in the context of an armed conflict.”

So Amnesty International dissents from international law. That’s fine. Just be up-front about it: Amnesty is not accusing Israel of “genocide,” it is accusing Israel of a different crime which Amnesty has named “genocide,” just so it could use that word.

Amnesty International accused Israel of genocide and in the process acquitted Israel of committing genocide. It’s an age-old story—just less fun without the talking donkeys.

Brendan O'Neill: The genocide lie

Here’s the thing: even that would be in keeping with the combatant-civilian death ratio for most modern conflicts. Some studies claim that, from the 1980s onwards, around 75 per cent of deaths in war have been among civilians. Whether the proportion of civilian deaths in Gaza is 60 per cent, as some in Israel claim, or 80 per cent, as Israel’s critics claim, it is normal. Awful, yes. Truly awful. But there is no proof that Israel is carrying out anything other than war. And, what’s more, a war it has every right to fight. It was Israel that was attacked, by an army of Jew-haters, and its decision to crush that army of Jew-haters is understandable and just.

Accusing Israel of genocide is factually wrong and morally repulsive. It is a gross moral inversion. It was Israel that was subjected to a genocidal attack when the death cult of Hamas indiscriminately slaughtered more than a thousand of its people, and yet it is Israel that is called ‘genocidal’. It was Israel that was targeted by the worst act of racist violence of the 21st century so far – and the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust – and yet it is Israel that is hysterically accused of pursuing the racial extermination of the Palestinians. The West’s activist class that seeks to prove its moral worth by noisily accusing Israel of ‘genocide’ ends up proving nothing more than its own unmooring from truth, reason and decency.

‘Genocide’ is a wildly overused term in the 21st century. Various wars are rebranded as genocides. We hear insane talk of a ‘trans genocide’, which is basically when you fail to use a person’s preferred pronouns. Horrendously, even the mistreatment of animals can be called genocidal these days – who can forget when the moral void that is PETA described your meat dinner as ‘the Holocaust on your plate’?

All this depthless relativism has the effect of minimising the importance of the crime of genocide. But the accusation of genocide against the Jewish nation is even worse. For here, the descendants of history’s worst genocide find themselves reimagined as genocidaires, as the very evil that once stalked them. This is a projection of the sins of Europe on to the victims of that sinning. It is a cynical effort by the European elite to morally absolve itself of the crimes of its ancestors by finding the Jews themselves guilty of the same crimes today. And so are they unburdened of historic guilt, even if the price of that unburdening is truth itself.

Howard Jacobson once asked why Israel, of all nations, is so often called genocidal. It’s because, he said, the aim of such hotheaded activism is not to oppose war but to ‘wound Jews’, to ‘punish them with their own grief’. That’s what I saw in that Led By Donkeys stunt: the further wounding of a historically wronged people by Western activists who value their own continued access to polite society more than they do the security of the Jewish State. The accusation against Israel of ‘genocide’ is not only wrong – it is reckless, cruel, self-serving and deserving of the firmest moral pushback we can muster.

Arsen Ostrovsky and John Spencer: How Amnesty International Became a Joke

That there have been civilian casualties in Gaza is tragic, but it is also the inevitable consequence of Hamas using its own people as human shields and embedding its military operations in schools, hospitals, kindergartens, and homes. Notwithstanding the complex challenge of operating in such difficult environment, the IDF has gone to extraordinary lengths, not seen in modern warfare, to abide by the principles of International humanitarian law and avoid harm to civilians in Gaza. This has included implementing historic measures to prevent civilian harm, such as advanced alerts to provide early warning and temporary evacuations, daily pauses of fighting, distributing maps to civilians, using precision weapons, as well are facilitating daily provision of aid.

In fact, to demonstrate just how utterly ludicrous Amnesty's accusation of genocide is, one only needs to see that, according to the CIA World Factbook, the population in Gaza has actually increased 2 percent in the last year. This is the very opposite of seeking to destroy, in whole or in part or in any way, a group of people.

Perhaps knowing it doesn't have a legal leg to stand on, Amnesty has resorted to manufacturing its own definition of genocide. Amnesty claims that the universally established and the sole accepted legal definition as outlined in the Genocide Convention of 1948 which requires the existence of intent is an "overly cramped interpretation of international jurisprudence and one that would effectively preclude a finding of genocide in the context of an armed conflict."

It's not just Israel that finds this redefinition ridiculous. In an absolutely scathing rebuke, even Amnesty's own Israel office has totally rejected Amnesty International's report, saying it was a "predetermined conclusion" based on "biased" and "artificial" analysis of the situation in Gaza and "motivated by a desire to support a popular narrative among Amnesty International's target audience."

If anyone is guilty of genocide here, it is Hamas. Not only does Hamas openly state that the destruction of Israel is its ultimate goal, as evidenced in their Charter, it acted out on those intentions on October 7, when Hamas massacred over 1,200 Israelis in a rampage that included raping, burning, mutilating, executing and abducting women and children. We've stood in the kibbutzim and communities in the south of Israel and saw first-hand the death and destruction. That is where the real attempted genocide occurred.

In an interview last year, shortly after the massacre, senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad admitted that the terror group would repeat the October 7 massacre "again and again" until Israel was "annihilated," openly admitting the group's genocidal intentions. But Amnesty has completely disregarded this, instead absolving and whitewashing the heinous actions of Hamas.

The incoming Trump Administration should declare Amnesty a hate-group and adopt blistering sanctions against them, including withdrawing financial support and any cooperation with government agencies.

Regrettably, Amnesty International, once a storied human rights organization, has lost all credibility, becoming nothing more than a propaganda mouthpiece for the murderers and rapists of Hamas.

Zionism's Not Jewish - Most Zionists Aren't Jewish! Which Is Why We Only Attack Jewish Zionists. (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Zionism's Not Jewish - Most Zionists Aren't Jewish! Which Is Why We Only Attack Jewish Zionists.

by Zachary Foster

New York, December 5 - We anti-Zionists long ago grew tired of facing the baseless accusation the anti-Jewish sentiment animates our movement. Nothing could be further from the truth! We have nothing against Jews - only against the notion that Jews may establish a nation-state where anyone else might once have lived. We also oppose non-Jews who support that notion, who actually constitute the vast majority of those with that view! It isn't about Jews - so of course when we take action against the proponents of that racist notion, we focus on the Jewish proponents.

Get it out of your head that our opposition to Zionism stems from animus toward Jews. Where would you get such a ridiculous idea? Everyone honest acknowledges that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, even if Zionists try to discredit anti-Zionists by pointing out how many anti-Zionists also happen to be antisemites. As if that matters. It matters about as much as our choosing to attack only Zionists who happen to be Jewish. Ridiculous, as I said.

A central pillar of the anti-Zionist approach that dismisses Jewish nationhood - it's just a religion - also involves pointing out that ninety-nine percent of the world's Zionists are not even Jewish. It's always been overwhelmingly supported by Christians. Almost by definition, that makes it not a Jewish movement. The number of Jews in favor of Zionism - I don't even need to mention all the Jews who oppose Zionism, but I love to mention it, and do so at every opportunity because it gives my position cover - is negligible in the sea of non-Jewish Zionists. It's effectively not about Jews at all! Obviously, to underline this point, our movement only confronts and attacks the vanishingly small minority of Zionists who are Jews.

This approach offers the added benefit if demonstrating to the world, and to Jews, that they do not need a state of their own at all to feel secure. I can think of no better way of showing Jews that they need not worry about placing their trust and well-being in the hands of their host cultures than by attacking them in those host cultures while other people mostly just look on or shrug.

Listen, we have no problem confronting non-Jewish Zionists. We might call them slurs normally reserved for Jews, but so what? If you can provide a list of non-Jewish synagogues we can picket or vandalize, we'll get right to it.

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!

Amnesty International decided on its own definition of "genocide" in its 296-page blood libel report released today.

I touched upon this, but the language is incredible:

The jurisprudence on genocidal intent on the part of a state is more limited. The ICJ has accepted that, in the absence of direct proof, specific intent may be established indirectly by inference for purposes of state responsibility, and has adopted much of the reasoning of the international tribunals. However, its rulings on inferring intent can be read extremely narrowly, in a manner that would potentially preclude a state from having genocidal intent alongside one or more additional motives or goals in relation to the conduct of its military operations. As outlined below, Amnesty International considers this an overly cramped interpretation of international jurisprudence and one that would effectively preclude a finding of genocide in the context of an armed conflict. The organization considers that the Genocide Convention must be interpreted in a manner that ensures that genocide remains prohibited in both peacetime and in war and that ICJ jurisprudence should not be read to effectively preclude a finding of genocide during war.

Later on, it admits that it is not following the ICJ's own standards on determining genocidal intent:

The ICJ has held that “in order to infer the existence of dolus specialis from a pattern of conduct, it is necessary and sufficient that this is the only inference that could reasonably be drawn from the acts in question”, meaning that “intent to destroy the group, in whole or in part, must be the only reasonable inference which can be drawn from the pattern of conduct.”

CAUTIONARY COMMENTS ON ICJ’S STANDARD ON INTENT In his dissenting opinion in Croatia v. Serbia, Judge Cançado Trindade argued that the ICJ “seems to have imposed too high a threshold for the determination of mens rea of genocide” and that the standard of proof adopted by the majority is “entirely inadequate for the determination of State responsibility”.

So the ICJ is not international law - but the dissenting opinion is.

The way Amnesty tries to fudge this is the constant use of the word "jurisprudence" instead of "international law." Jurisprudence is anything legal scholars say, and they can and do often contradict each other. Amnesty is pretending that there is a baseline of accepted jurisprudence that supports its unique interpretation of international law, but there isn't. They are deciding what the jurisprudence is and presenting it as accepted legal fact.

According to Amnesty, the determination of genocide must be done "holistically." Which means that every other case where Amnesty twists international law specifically against Israel must be considered as part of the whole:

[T]he jurisprudence and commentary above suggest that the evidence for a state’s intent must be approached and considered holistically; it must be assessed based on direct, contextual and circumstantial evidence, alongside the existence of a pattern of conduct. Second, the context in which Israel’s military campaign took place must be part of this holistic examination. This includes its unlawful military occupation of the OPT, including Gaza, and the system of apartheid it imposes on Palestinians

Except that Amnesty made up a new definition of "apartheid" to apply only to Israel.

It also made up its own definition of occupation that contradicts its own previous definition to apply only to Israel.

This is damning. It is a clear pattern of literally making up legal definitions that apply to Israel and Israel only.

The "holistic" view that Amnesty pretends proves "genocide" is a house of cards built on Amnesty's own earlier lies.

(h/t Mark Goldfeder)

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Hezbollah MP says it will cooperate with the Lebanese Army - to attack Israeli forces

L'Orient Today is monitoring statements from Hezbollah officials, noting that they are often contradictory. This indicates that Israel completely disrupted the organization's ability to know what it is doing.

“The decision to go to war is in the hands of the Israeli enemy. If it attacks us, we will resist,” said [Hezbollah MP Hassan] Fadlallah. He added that this “we” refers to a coordinated action between the Lebanese Army and the “resistance.”

However, this position is not in line with the terms of the cease-fire agreement, which stipulates that only the Lebanese Army can retaliate in the event of violation by the adversary.

In response to a journalist’s question, Fadlallah said the “resistance fighters will not abandon their villages in the south where they come from.” However, this answer would not constitute a breach of the agreement, provided that the fighters returning home are unarmed.

However, Hezbollah is adamant: “The shura council decided on a cease-fire and respect for 1701. All party members respect this decision. It is also the wish of the party’s popular base,” a Hezbollah official told L’Orient-Le Jour on condition of anonymity.

They add an intriguing thought, that Iran does not want the ceasefire to unravel - because of Syria:

Iran would have every interest in pushing Hezbollah to respect the agreement, since it does not want a resumption of the escalation, especially at a time when its position in Syria is threatened by the rebels’ surprise offensive.

The newspaper also has a photo essay of Beirut, showing both bombed out Hezbollah areas and fully functioning shops and restaurants.

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UNRWA's latest press release shows that it simply cannot defined itself based on facts, so it is claiming that Israel is engaged in "hate speech."

Using commercial advertisement including billboards in several cities around the world and paid Google ads on multiple websites, the Government of Israel has stepped up its disinformation campaign against UNRWA.

These ads are the latest in a series of a wider campaign against UNRWA by the Government of Israel, which continues to publicly call for dismantling the Agency.

This latest global effort by a UN member state to label a UN agency as a terror organisation may amount to hate speech using corporations that are supposed to promote commercial products.

This campaign is creating immense reputational damage to UNRWA...

Those responsible for the spread of disinformation, including advertisement companies must stop and be held accountable. Regulations must be put in place to control the spread of such damaging and possibly dangerous messages.

So UNRWA is trying to pressure advertising companies to censor ads because they are "disinformation" and "hate speech."

What, exactly, is the disinformation, and how, exactly, is this "hate speech"?

The Israeli government site that details its charges against UNRWA says this:

New intelligence collected by Israel since October 7th shows that over 10% of the 510 employees in UNRWA's education system in the Gaza Strip who hold senior positions (school principals and their deputies, directors and deputy directors of training centers) are members of Hamas or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, both of which are designated terror organizations.

It shows details about 10 of the over 50 school principals and directors, showing which schools they headed and their terrorist affiliations.

I can find nothing from UNRWA that disputes these facts.

Moreover, some of these schools that they headed had Hamas tunnels underneath, and many of them employed supplemental materials - under UNRWA's name -that glorifies terror and "martyrdom." (See the IMPACT-SE report.)

Can UNRWA point to a single example of "disinformation" here? Of course not.

A careful look at UNRWA's page disputing the charges against it indicate that it is spinning furiously. For example, it appears that the media misrepresented the Israeli claim above that over 10% of UNRWA senior school officials were associated with terrorism as saying that 10% of all UNRWA staff in Gaza were members of Hamas. UNRWA says that it had not received confirmation of the media claim, but ignores Israel's actual claim. Moreover, UNRWA says that as of January, Israel hadn't shared details of terror linked individuals, while Israel says that they did - in March.

There is not a single thing on the government website pointed to by these ads that UNRWA has shown to be false.

Other evidence of UNRWA ties to Hamas, such as this sporting event sponsored by Hamas and promoted by UNRWA's school principal/Hamas operative as having "our boys" participating, are not mentioned or countered. (There were Hamas tunnels underneath that school, Al-Maghazi Boys Preparatory School B.)

So much for "disinformation." But what about "hate speech"?

Hate speech, by definition, is abusive or threatening speech or writing that expresses prejudice on the basis of ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or similar grounds. Criticizing an organization in no way can be considered hate speech. On the contrary, it is free speech in its most classic sense - and UNRWA is evidently against free speech.

If UNRWA is claiming that ads that expose their ties to terror are Islamophobic, that indicates that they believe that Hamas represents Islam.

The good news is that UNRWA is admitting that the campaign is damaging UNRWA's reputation. This is seventy years too late.

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Amnesty's "genocide" report: a blood libel against Israel

Amnesty International has issued a 296 page report that attempts to prove that Israel is engaging in genocide in Gaza.

Throughout the report, the assumption of guilt is a given. Every piece of "evidence" that supports the lie is highlighted as true, and every piece of counter-evidence is dismissed as unimportant.

The report tries to prove that Israel has the intent of destroying the Gaza population. It bases much of this on comments made by officials in the immediate aftermath of October 7, and it pooh-pooh's any counterevidence - even when said at the same time.

So for example, President Herzog said, "We have to understand there’s a state, there’s a state, in a way, that has built a machine of evil right at our doorstep. It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’état murdering their family members who were in Fatah." Amnesty interprets that, falsely, as Herzog calling to punish all Gaza civilians, rather than his simply pointing out that Gazans share responsibility for Hamas and are not victims of Hamas. Nothing that he said challenges their civilian status. Later in that same press conference, when a reporter asked Herzog to clarify, Herzog said explicitly that he was not saying that civilians are legitimate targets, and he later said there are many innocent civilians in Gaza.

Amnesty then says that since the first part of Herzog's statement was widely disseminated and the clarification was not, then he is responsible for how the world misinterpreted his initial, ambiguous statement and not his clear clarification.

That is only one example of Amnesty's blood libels. And it is throughout this report.

The many, many statements by Israeli leaders that they were targeting Hamas only similarly gets downplayed by Amnesty as window dressing and lies.

This paragraph is emblematic of Amnesty's antisemitism in assuming that any statement that agrees with their thesis is the truth and any that contradicts it is a lie:

Amnesty International recognizes that, at the start of the military offensive, Israeli officials defined its objectives as dismantling the military and governing capabilities of Hamas, subsequently adding to them the release of hostages and captives. Following that, Prime Minister Netanyahu, then Minister of Defense Gallant and Israeli army spokespeople publicly clarified on numerous occasions that the offensive was directed at Hamas rather than the Palestinian people. However, they appear to have intensified such clarifications only following mounting pressure from Israel’s Western allies over the scale of deaths and destruction resulting from weeks of relentless bombardment.

Amnesty is lying and it knows it. It says that the Israeli officials called for indiscriminate attacks against civilians, in this footnote:

For example, on 10 October 2023, in a meeting with Israeli soldiers deployed near Gaza, then Minister of Defense Gallant appeared to incite soldiers to indiscriminate attacks: “I released all restraints. Attack everything, take off the gloves, kill everyone who fights us, whether it is one terrorist or a hundred. From the air, from the land, with tanks, with bulldozers... all means. No compromises! Gaza will not return to what it was, and Hamas will not exist. Eliminate everything. It will take time, it won’t take a day, it won’t take a week, it will take weeks and maybe months. We will reach all places.”

Clearly Gallant is referring to Hamas. he says so. But Amnesty wants to interpret this as calling for indiscriminate attacks, because they can read his mind and understand his intent, his actual words being irrelevant.

This is the pattern throughout the document for pretending to prove intent. COGAT, which spends thousands of man hours coordinating aid delivery, but Amnesty frames them as deliberately withholding aid and frustrating NGOs for arbitrary reasons. When COGAT's statistics contradict those of the UN, the UN is assumed to be correct and COGAT is lying, and therefore everything COGAT does to bring in aid is again just a giant misdirection to cover up its genocidal intent.

This is the "pinkwashing" antisemitic mindset: when Israel seems to do something it shouldn't, that is the truth. When Israel does things that it should, that is simply a coverup to its true intent of doing evil. When Israel says that it has killed over 17,000 militants, Amnesty casts doubt on anything the IDF says, while accepting the Gaza Health Ministry numbers without question.

This constant assumption that Jews intend evil is Amnesty's antisemitism in a nutshell. When they drop bombs, it is not because they want to destroy Hamas or that they have intelligence information that they have a legitimate target. It is because they want to kill Gaza civilians.

That's the theme of the report: Jews lie.

Amnesty also plays fast and loose with the level of evidence necessary to prove genocidal intent. it quotes the ICJ:

The ICJ has held that “in order to infer the existence of dolus specialis from a pattern of conduct, it is necessary and sufficient that this is the only inference that could reasonably be drawn from the acts in question”,385 meaning that “intent to destroy the group, in whole or in part, must be the only reasonable inference which can be drawn from the pattern of conduct.”

Obviously, there are plenty of other inferences that would explain Israel's conduct in the war that are not genocidal. But since this undercuts Amnesty's entire legal argument, they highlight a dissenting opinion on the case quoted:

In his dissenting opinion in Croatia v. Serbia, Judge Cançado Trindade argued that the ICJ “seems to have imposed too high a threshold for the determination of mens rea of genocide” and that the standard of proof adopted by the majority is “entirely inadequate for the determination of State responsibility”.

Suddenly, the ICJ is not enough for Amnesty to prove its case. Suddenly a dissenting opinion becomes the basis for Amnesty's determination of international law!

One other critical point must be made: In building its case that Israel is guilty of genocide, Amnesty has to prove not only an intent to wipe out Gaza but also that the IDF is following through on that intent. Of course, it thinks it has plenty of proof, but most of it is examining social media videos of 18 year old soldiers who are saying stupid things about Gazans.

Amnesty has no idea how an army is run.

Soldiers do not have carte blanche on choosing targets or on anything strategic. The IDF took a full month to build its Gaza strategy, and it has been refining it almost weekly as it learns more about how Hamas operates and receives intelligence from captured fighters and computers. The IDF strategy does not come from statements by Ben Gvir, as Amnesty wants its readers to believe. Netanyahu and the war cabinet helps decide the general outlines of the war goals and the IDF puts those into practice.

Claiming that an IDF war goal is to commit genocide is simply insane. The army does not have an unlimited number of bullets or bombs, and what it has is often very expensive. The IDF has policies, manuals, ethics publications, lectures, all on how to follow international law and how to deal with new situations like an enemy that deliberately hides among civilians as strategy. The idea that Israel diverts some of its military budget to murder civilians - which is fundamentally Amnesty's thesis - is pure, unadulterated antisemitism.

IDF soldiers are taught more about actual laws of armed conflict than anyone who wrote this report.

Absence of evidence is evidence of absence:

Amnesty International found a pattern of direct attacks on civilians with no apparent military objective present, indiscriminate attacks and intentional destruction of cultural and religious sites with no apparent imperative military necessity.

If there is no evidence that Hamas was hiding in an area - something that by definition would not be admitted by the people - Amnesty assumes that the IDF is wasting expensive smart bombs to hit mosques or other cultural sites in the middle of a war. Again, this is an assumption of Zionist evil that pervades the entire report.

Every page shows Amnesty's clear bias. Israel is faulted for not opening up more passages into Gaza for aid, but also for not protecting the aid convoys adequately - even though safety is the main reason for not providing unfettered access. Damned if it does, damned if it doesn't. Either way, it is evidence of Israel's mendacity, and when even contradictory evidence is used to prove the same thesis, the problem is with the underlying theory, not the evidence.

Humanitarian workers are quoted extensively and anonymously about their difficulty in receiving medical supplies. They claim that Israeli restrictions are arbitrary and capricious. Yet hundreds of trucks of medical supplies, and tens of thousands of pallets, were imported into Gaza during the time period they cover. Amnesty eagerly quotes these workers - who all live in Gaza and most of whom support Hamas - without verification or checks.

Amnesty quotes a Gazan saying “To get a tent, you have to pay NIS 3,000 [approximately USD 827]" for his family. But it doesn't ask why exactly, tents thar are donated to Gaza are being charged for. Hamas is using aid to enrich itself and Amnesty doesn't say a word about it except to cast doubt on Israel's claims that Hamas steals aid.

Previous lies (like saying Gaza is "occupied" or that Israel is guilty of "apartheid") are building blocks for proving Israel is guilty of genocide. It is all a house of cards that Israel haters have built to come to this point.

Anything said against Israel is assumed to be correct, anything said in defense of Israel is assumed to be false unless verified by people who hate Israel.

I could spend days tearing this report apart, page by page. But this is enough to prove Amnesty is knowingly lying and twisting facts, that it started its "research" not to examine the evidence but to find Israel guilty at the outset and that it only accepts evidence that supports that conclusion.

This report isn't an "investigation." It is a blood libel.

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12/04 Links Pt2: The Closing of the British Mind; Melanie Phillips: The hug of hypocrisy; Oxford Union ‘apartheid Israel’ debate accused of breaking the law by glorifying violence

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The Closing of the British Mind

We’ve had Writers Against Books so it’s not unexpected to see the arrival of Artists Against Art.

Jewish sponsorship of the arts in the UK has been deemed vulgar, as the British appear to have swapped culture for kultur. The message, even from artists, is that it would be better to have no art at all than to have a Jewish-sounding name attached to the room that houses it, for example Gertler. Candida and Zak Gertler are generous art patrons in the UK but after pro-Hamas activists occupied a campus exhibition space adorned with the Gertlers’ good name, that name was removed from the space and from the gallery’s board. The Gertlers’ crime? Donating to the Jewish National Fund.

Last year in London, Anita and Chaim Zabludowicz announced they would, over similar complaints, close the Zabludowicz Collection, an institution they founded in 2007 to increase the visibility of avant-garde work by young artists. The “pro-Palestine” left has volunteered for the young artists who depend on such patronage to learn to code, or something. You know, for The Cause.

Let them eat watermelon emojis. After all, Chaim Zabludowicz simply had to be punished for, as Art Forum notes, having cofounded a company that “aims to reject all characterizations of Israel as an apartheid state, as Amnesty International cast it in a 2022 report”—although Zabludowicz “relinquished his role as chairman of the organization in 2013 and departed as director in 2019.”

All of this was back in the news again this week at the presentation of the British art award the Turner Prize. The coveted award went to Jasleen Kaur, a Scottish artist who wowed audiences by draping a car in a large doily. But the art project itself is beside the point; the true art is protesting people with names like Chaim Zabludowicz and Zak Gertler. From the New York Times:

“As the award dinner began, about 100 activists gathered at Tate Britain’s steps and listened to speeches demanding that the Tate group of museums end any association with Israel, including the high-profile donors Anita and Poju Zabludowicz. In a protest letter published online, the activists said the Zabludowiczes have ‘well-documented economic and ideological links’ to Israel’s government through the Tamares Group, the family’s real estate investment business.

“The letter’s signatories included Kaur and two of the other artists nominated for this year’s Turner Prize, Claudette Johnson and Pio Abad.”

The Glasgow-born Sikh accepted the award wearing a Palestinian-themed scarf because, let’s be honest, we’re all Palestinian during award season.

Meanwhile headlining performances by Coldplay and Katy Perry at London’s upcoming major Christmas event have come under fire, as anti-Israel activists have set their pitchforks on the Jingle Bell Ball. (Is nothing sacred?)

The rise of antisemitism in the arts

On December 5 th Rob Rinder will be chairing a discussion about whether Jews are still welcome in the arts in Britain today. There are two striking things about this event. First, that it is taking place at all. As we shall see, it is happening because it is unfortunately very timely and relevant. Second, that the advertisement doesn’t give a location. It just says, “North West London venue.” Presumably, if you sign up you will be e-mailed a location. This may sound a little paranoid but it is unfortunately very realistic.

Recently, there was a very unpleasant anti-Israel demonstration outside JW3, Britain’s largest Jewish cultural centre. Police officers were there to prevent violence, but unfortunately — as so often in London — the police did nothing to stop the aggressive chanting and waving of Palestinian flags to intimidate local Jewish residents. The Jewish Literary Foundation, which hosts Jewish Book Week every Spring, has just been presented with a substantial security bill, which it will struggle to pay. And, finally, the Barnet Literary Festival, which takes place in Barnet Library every year, has had to take place online this year because of the Council’s security concerns.

The larger issue, why Jews are increasingly excluded and discriminated against in British culture, is unfortunately even more pressing. Last year when I went to see Tracy-Ann Oberman starring in The Merchant of Venice 1936 my wife took a plastic bottle of water. The security people at the door asked her to drink from it to prove that it didn’t contain acid, in case she was planning to throw it at the actors.

Last week, the Royal Court Theatre was reported to the Charity Commission for allowing its staff to campaign for the Palestinian cause by wearing “Free Palestine” badges. This was not entirely surprising, since the Royal Court has a history of producing plays by playwrights who are known for being passionate critics of Israel: for example, Perdition by Jim Allen, which was intended to be directed by Ken Loach, and Seven Jewish Children – a Play for Gaza by Caryl Churchill.

Also last week, Nicole Lampert wrote online about the story of Candida Gertler OBE, an Anglo-German art philanthropist and writer, who has donated millions to help struggling young artists. Lampert wrote, “She’s also a Jew and, like most Jews, a Zionist. Of course that meant she was ripe for cancellation. Her name was taken off a donor board at Goldsmiths College and there was an attempt to also have her cancelled from the Tate. Well, they’ve got their way. Another major donor to the arts has decided to walk away rather than be hounded by the bullies who want to see Jews hounded by the bullies who want to see Jews hounded out of public life. Describing why she was quitting all her voluntary positions in the UK arts world, she asked why people were refusing to stand up to these bullies. She has left as a protest, writing: ‘As someone who has dedicated much of my life to supporting contemporary art, championing dialogue, and creating platforms for diverse voices, I can no longer stand silent when institutions, intimidated by violent and aggressive activism that dismisses dialogue or any kind of communication fail to uphold the foundational values f equality and respect. Recent revelations of vile antisemitic sentiments in these spaces have shocked and appalled me. These are not isolated incidents but part of a broader culture that seeks to marginalise and dehumanise Jews.’”

Seth Mandel: Those To Whom Jewish Survival ‘Smells of the Devil’

It’s not about how many Palestinians died but how many Jews lived.

And look at them all there, by the millions. That’s the atrocity. That’s the war crime.

And so in some respects, it’s actually true that the Nakba continues to this day. The attempt to destroy Israel hasn’t stopped and hasn’t succeeded. The Gaza war is indeed a continuation of this phenomenon, of the original intent and meaning of the Nakba.

In 1921, one of the era’s prominent as-a-Jews, Ralph Philip Boas, wrote an article in the Atlantic called “Jew-Baiting in America.” The conceit was one of Boas’s obsessions—that social discrimination is all that’s left of anti-Jewish bigotry in America and therefore not worth complaining about. (Carey McWilliams dismantled this idea in a 1947 essay for COMMENTARY, found here.)

Boas’s essay makes for some amusing reading a century later; he is wrong about everything.

Well, except one thing. He’s at least partially correct when he writes: “At the root of European anti-Semitism undoubtedly lies the shuddering hatred that men always feel for that which they cannot kill. The amazing vitality of the Jew is sufficient reason for believing any tale that is whispered of him; his survival smells of the devil.”

Those who claim a “genocide of the Palestinians” began on October 7, 2023, show that this mindset is found outside of Europe as well. This includes not just the poets who use their award speeches to reveal something foul about their own character, or the protest groups on campus who seek to appropriate October 7 as a day for them to wail publicly and don sackcloth and ashes.

The expounders of the genocide libel are all over the place, everywhere. Do they actually believe it? In many cases, no. What they believe is that the Jew’s survival smells of the devil. And we should freely remind the public that that is what’s actually bothering them.

12/04 Links Pt1: The Mideast Diplomats Trapped in the ’90s; Our friends, the French; Itay Svirsky’s body retrieved from Gaza for burial

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The Mideast Diplomats Trapped in the ’90s

In his first term as president, Donald Trump’s successful Mideast diplomacy required him to break through the wall of stale conventional wisdom that had been constructed by a tunnel-visioned DC establishment. He may have to do so again.

Watching experienced Mideast diplomats process reality is a great way to see a person unlearning every relevant lesson in real time. The New York Times interviewed outgoing UN Mideast envoy Tor Wennesland, and the article makes for frustrating reading. Here’s how it opens:

“In September last year, the top United Nations envoy for the Middle East peace process left a meeting with Hamas leaders in Gaza thinking that he had helped avert a major escalation.

“The veteran Norwegian diplomat, Tor Wennesland, said he believed that Hamas had agreed to reduce recent tensions along the Israel-Gaza border in exchange for more work permits for Gazan workers.

“But Hamas had bluffed Mr. Wennesland, along with the Israeli leadership and much of the international community. Days later, the group’s fighters attacked Israel, setting off the deadliest year in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

It’s a familiar story. Hamas fooled everybody and plunged the region into bloody chaos. So what’s the lesson that Wennesland learned from this? That focusing on steadily improving the quality of life in Gaza and making peace between Arab states and Israel were big mistakes. “Both approaches, Mr. Wennesland said, ultimately failed to solve the main issue driving the conflict in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank: the lack of a permanent settlement between Israelis and Palestinians.”

Let’s just spell it out. The current conflict is the result, according to Wennesland himself, of negotiators and politicians in Israel and abroad falsely believing that Hamas was interested in political stability, not war. So the decade spent helping Palestinians on the ground and spreading peace and reconciliation throughout the Middle East should have, instead, been spent trying to get Hamas to agree on a political settlement?

This aversion to reality is almost comical. Wennesland thinks the mistake was trusting Hamas and so the fix would be to treat Hamas as an honest broker.

As the interview develops, it just goes further off the rails. The failure to achieve a two-state solution “was also linked to how Western leaders — distracted by the migration crisis in Europe, the coronavirus pandemic and, finally, the war in Ukraine — had stopped convincing Israelis of the need for a two-state solution and Palestinians of the need for a united front, Mr. Wennesland said.”

Jonathan Tobin: Trump voices the moral clarity on hostages the world needed

We don’t know yet what impact President-elect Donald Trump’s bombshell statement about the fate of the Israeli hostages still held by Hamas will be. But in one post on his Truth Social site, he neatly summarized what has been lacking in terms of American leadership when it comes to the fight against Iranian-funded Islamist terrorism for the past four years.

Trump’s post—with its characteristic bombastic tone and use of capital letters for emphasis—was very different from the public statements of the Biden administration foreign-policy team in recent months on the same topic or that of any other world leader. The United States has condemned Hamas, but in the last year has been primarily focused on pressuring Israel to give up its campaign to eliminate the terrorists and agree to a ceasefire with only a partial release of the hostages. That would effectively hand the perpetrators an undeserved victory for the massacre of 1,200 men, women and children in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Instead, Trump put the onus for achieving the release of the hostages—something all decent people should support—on the Palestinians. They were responsible for that rampage of mass murder, torture, rape and kidnapping. But by specifying that the “All HELL TO PAY” would be felt throughout the Middle East, he was also sending a powerful message to Hamas’s foreign backers. Iran, as well as nominal U.S. allies like Qatar and Turkey, who have provided the terrorists with aid and diplomatic cover are also now on notice to secure the hostages’ freedom lest they, too, face Trump’s wrath once he returns to the White House on Jan. 20.

It’s true that the Biden administration has been working on trying to broker a deal that would lead to the release of at least some of the 101 hostages (approximately 60 are believed to be alive) that are still unaccounted for. But there has been no such unambiguous message from Washington about what it expects from the Hamas terrorist organization or its allies in the Muslim and Arab worlds. Instead, and in keeping with its consistent efforts to undermine and topple the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since Israelis elected it in November 2022, Biden has wanted Netanyahu to make concessions that wouldn’t return all the hostages at once and that would hand over Gaza to the weak and corrupt Palestinian Authority, which has, despite its rivalry with Hamas, never condemned the atrocities that took place on Oct. 7. That is a formula to ensure that Hamas would soon return to power there, leaving Israel in as much danger as it was when the Palestinians started this war.

Wanting Israel to ‘finish’ and win
Trump has made no secret of his desire for a clean slate in the Middle East when he takes office, with Israel having completed its wars against both Hamas in the south and Hezbollah to the north. While that puts Netanyahu on notice that the next administration is hoping not to be distracted from its domestic priorities by conflict in the Middle East, Trump was equally clear that he had no compunctions about the severity of Israeli military actions in Gaza or Lebanon. He just wants the Israelis to “finish” and achieve “victory” over Hamas—an idea that the Biden team has consistently opposed. Once that victory is achieved, Trump is obviously hoping to pick up where he left off when he left office four years ago by building on the 2020 Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and four Arab and Muslim-majority nations.

Many of Trump’s critics were predictably appalled by his hostage post because of its tone and what they consider to be his bias in favor of Israel and against the Palestinians. Despite starting the war with barbaric atrocities and sticking to their goal of wiping Israel off the map and committing genocide against the Jews, Hamas and its supporters—a category that includes what may well be a majority of Palestinians as well as their cheerleaders in the international media and on American college campuses—expect themselves to be depicted as the sole victims in the conflict.

Biden’s willingness to kowtow to that mindset has undermined his administration’s efforts to end the war.

Bassam Tawil: Arabs No Longer Buying the Lies of Hamas, Hezbollah

"Where is the victory? How much did it cost? What defeat is more terrible than such losses? How can one claim victory in the face of a massacre that has destroyed all the logic of resistance? It's not too late to ask Hezbollah to explain its unilateral and deadly decision to open the confrontation [with Israel] under Iran's cover." — Nabil Bou Monsef, prominent Lebanese journalist, kataeb.org, November 27, 2024.

Over the past 14 months, Hamas and Hezbollah have dragged the Palestinians and Lebanese into wars that have claimed the lives of thousands of people -- all to serve their patrons in Iran. Instead of admitting their defeat, both in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, the terrorists, at the behest of Iran's mullahs, are continuing to sell imaginary victories to the Arabs to encourage them to join the Jihad (holy war) against Israel.