Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Saturday, December 07, 2024

12/07 Links: Why the media keep underestimating Israel; Syrian rebel commander urges Israel to support uprising; IDF assists UN forces in Syria repel attack

From Ian:

Why the media keep underestimating Israel

Most recently, Israel has confounded expectations in its war against Hamas. The IDF has ground Hamas into the rubble of Gaza, killing most of its leaders. It has wreaked sufficient devastation on Hezbollah to produce a ceasefire agreement, albeit a shaky one. Commentators warned solemnly of ‘escalation ladders’ and a ‘wider regional war’, predicting that Iran would not stand idly by as its proxies were degraded. Yet apart from a few token missile strikes, that is precisely what has happened.

Heeding caution in military matters is wise, as Iraq and other misadventures have shown. But an aversion to conflict at all costs grants bad actors free rein. As Israel’s enemies sue for peace – precisely because of Israel’s resolve in pursuing a war many deemed unwinnable – it’s clear that caution has its limits. While a decisive victory has yet to be achieved, Israel certainly appears to be winning. It has demonstrated that the murder of its citizens has dire consequences – a fact it must constantly prove to secure its survival. Israel has also shown that Iran, reportedly leaning on Hezbollah leaders to agree to a ceasefire, has little appetite to risk its neck for its proxies.

Yet many commentators continue to treat ‘de-escalation’ and an immediate ceasefire as the only viable routes to peace, scarcely hiding their disappointment when the realities on the ground suggest otherwise. After Hamas’s military leader, Yahya Sinwar, was killed by the IDF in October, Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor, snarked that ‘to get a ceasefire and a deal you need every side really in it’. He thought this would be harder after the assassination. Yet since Sinwar’s death, Hamas has actually shown more interest in negotiation. Similarly, when Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah was eliminated in September, journalists at Israel’s Channel 12, which has also taken a defeatist view of the war, reportedly greeted the news with ‘mournful faces and barely hidden disappointment’.

Contrast this with the elation of ordinary Israelis – and many others around the world – at these momentous victories. Such enthusiasm is well placed. Nasrallah’s policy of showering rockets on northern Israel until the IDF withdrew from Gaza has, for now, been discontinued. This is a tangible win for thousands of Israelis who can now return to their homes in the north.

The war itself enjoys widespread support within Israel. It is, among other things, democracy in action (just not the kind favoured by the media and commentary classes). Yet so many media outlets portray it as little more than a ruse by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to cling to power. This narrative conveniently diverts attention from Israel’s strategic gains.

Reflecting on the Second Intifada, which broke out in 2000 and led to over 1,000 Israeli deaths, writer Pascal Bruckner remarked that journalists sympathetic to the Palestinian uprising had taken a more sanguine view of it than the Palestinians themselves. In 2004, Fatah leaders conceded that the ‘militarisation of the Intifada had been a great failure and had left society exhausted and on the brink of civil war’. According to Bruckner, this failure was a ‘disappointment for the militants, but also for the press correspondents, who thus found themselves repudiated’. The journalists, he concluded, had ‘allowed themselves to be blinded by their convictions: these men in the field had seen in reality only the projection of their own fantasies’.

Twenty years later, fantasies and wishful thinking still cloud much of the media’s judgement.

Victoria Coates: Palestinians lost battle with Israel – 'someone has to tell them'

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict ended decades ago with the country's founding and its victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, according to former U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser Victoria Coates.

Speaking to ILTV on Monday at the Misgav Institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy, she said the Palestinians were never told they lost. Instead, "they were encouraged, particularly after the Iranian Revolution, to continue this self-defeating, suicidal, genocidal [behavior] we saw on October 7."

"Someone has to have the nerve to say to the Palestinians, we are not negotiating a ceasefire, we're negotiating terms" to end the conflict, she added.

Coates, an evangelical Christian and staunch supporter of the Jewish state has visited Israel many times. She has held several key political leadership roles, including serving in the Department of Energy, where she advised Secretary Dan Brouillette on national security issues and acted as his representative in the Middle East and North Africa.

Today, she serves as Vice President of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation. She recently published a book, The Battle for the Jewish State: How Israel—and America—Can Win, which focuses on October 7 and why America must stand with Israel.

She said the possibilities for the Palestinians, if they were to disarm and accept defeat, are abundant.

"You could imagine what would flow into both the West Bank and Gaza, just the offers of assistance and the enthusiasm on the part of Israel," Coates said.

She added that some actions from the Trump administration, such as cutting funding, might help deliver this message.

However, while Coates is deeply passionate about Israel, she said her book aims to address issues in her own country. "Because this [Islamic extremism] isn't a Jewish or an Israel issue. This is a Western civilization issue," she explained.

"They might be coming for Israel right now, but the United States is next, make no mistake about it," Coates said.

Caroline Glick: A coup attempt in the shadow of Oct. 7

This week, Channel 11’s journalist Ayala Hasson broadcast a two-part exposé on the Israel Defense Forces’ self-investigation of the massacre at the Nova music festival on Oct. 7, which took place a kilometer from the Gaza Strip. Hasson’s reports reinforced the fact that the IDF and Shin Bet top brass are to blame for Hamas’s successful day of genocide.

A total of 364 people were brutally murdered at the Nova music festival and along avenues of escape. Thirty-nine were taken hostage. The rave opened on Oct. 5 with 3,800 revelers.

According to earlier investigative reports, the IDF intercepted Hamas’s invasion plans a year before Oct. 7. They received multiple, rapidly escalating warnings of the impending invasion from a variety of sources in the Southern Command in the months, weeks and days prior to that day. Intelligence head Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi and Shin Bet director Ronen Bar did not share the warnings or Hamas’s intercepted invasion plans with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Instead, they repeatedly briefed him that Hamas was deterred, and Israel simply needed to provide it with more cash from Qatar and more work permits for Gazans in Israel to keep the terrorist regime fat, happy and deterred.

On Oct. 10, we learned that on the night between Oct. 6 and Oct. 7, Halevi, Bar, Southern Command Chief Maj. General Yaron Finkleman, Operations Directorate Chief Maj. Gen. Oded Basiuk and Haliva’s assistant (Haliva was on vacation and not answering his phone), held two telephone consultations, at midnight and 4 a.m., when they discussed multiplying indications that Hamas was about to carry out its invasion, slaughter and kidnapping plan. They chose to do nothing, told no one and agreed to meet again at 8 a.m. Hamas invaded at 6:30.

Hasson’s reported excerpts from two-and-a-half hours of recordings of a conversation between Halevi’s representative Brig. Gen. Ido Mizrahi and police commanders in the Southern District. Halevi appointed Mizrahi to conduct the IDF’s inquiry into the slaughter at Nova.

The police were the heroes of the festival. By declaring that Israel was under invasion at 6:30, Southern District Commander Superintendent Amir Cohen precipitated the Ofakim police station commander’s order to disperse the concert-goers. That decision is credited with saving the lives of 90% of the party’s attendees. According to Mizrahi, about 200 people were at the party site when the Palestinian rape, murder and kidnapping gangs arrived a bit after 9 a.m.

Forty policemen and women died staving off the invading Palestinian terrorists from the Nova festival. IDF forces didn’t show up until after the massacre was over and the 39 hostages had been taken to Gaza. All the same, Mizrahi tried to shift the blame for the mass slaughter from the IDF onto the police, asking why there were still 200 people at the party site at 9.

Surprised, the police explained that they couldn’t enforce the order because they were busy fighting Hamas since the IDF didn’t arrive.

Mizrahi disclosed to Cohen and his officers for the first time that on nighttime telephone calls, Bar, Halevi and their associates discussed the Nova festival but opted to do nothing. The police officers noted that had they known this at 4 a.m., the slaughter would have been prevented.

12/06 Links Pt2: Winners and losers in the Middle East: The story so far; No more political games: Pass the Antisemitism Awareness Act — NOW!

From Ian:

Winners and losers in the Middle East: The story so far

Dealing with the Iranian regime, whose machinations lie at the core of this conflict, will be a major focus of the next Trump administration’s foreign policy. Yet even before Donald Trump enters the Oval Office (again), Iran is already looking damaged and weaker now when compared with Oct. 7. While its missile attacks on Israel failed to dent either the IDF or the Israeli population’s resolve, Jerusalem’s responses have badly frayed Iran’s air defenses and highlighted the vulnerability of its nuclear program. As well as seeing its Hamas and Hezbollah proxies degraded, Iran is now watching as the Assad regime in Syria clings to survival. Iran still retains its proxies in Iraq and Yemen, but these, too, may also find themselves in the firing line with a new administration in Washington. “Although today’s Iran is confident that it can fight to defend itself, it wants peace,” wrote its former foreign minister in a frankly ludicrous article for Foreign Affairs. That sounds suspiciously like a plea to the regime’s adversaries to hold off because the reality is that the regime cannot defend itself from Israel—not to mention the Iranian people, growing swaths of whom truly loathe the Islamic Republic and are determined to get rid of it.

For two states in the region, the outlook is unfortunately rosier. One is Turkey, whose membership of the NATO Alliance remains undisturbed despite the increasingly unhinged attacks on Israel leveled by its autocratic president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and its open support of Hamas. Ironically, Israel’s punishing of Hezbollah has helped Erdoğan in Syria, where Turkey is backing anti-Assad forces in the north of the country, though don’t expect him to acknowledge that.

Secondly, there is Qatar, an emirate grounded in Sharia law, where a little more than 10% of the population enjoy full citizenship while the vast majority—mainly migrant workers toiling in slave-like conditions—live under a form of real apartheid. The Biden administration’s faith that Qatar—a financial and diplomatic backer of Hamas whose capital hosted the terror organization’s leaders—could act as an honest broker in negotiations to release the hostages was spectacularly misplaced, with more than a year dragging by since the one-and-only prisoner exchange that compelled Israel to release Palestinians convicted of terrorism and violence. Despite this dismal failure and its two-faced stance on terrorism, Qatar’s ruling family continues to be feted by international leaders, most recently in London, where the British Royal Family dutifully trooped to The Mall for a parade welcoming the visiting emir. For the foreseeable future, Qatar’s astonishing wealth, coupled with its financial hold over many of the world’s capitals, is a guarantee of immunity from criticism, let alone actual sanctions.

For Turkey and Qatar, then, net gains. For Iran and its Palestinian and Lebanese proxies, net losses. For Israel, the jury is out. The first year of Trump’s term in office will doubtless tell us more.

Reports: As Syrian rebels take Hama, Israel preparing for possible collapse of regime

Israel is said to be preparing for the possibility that the Syrian army may collapse in the face of rapidly advancing rebel forces, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu holding security deliberations on the matter on Thursday night.

Channel 13 reported that the IDF now assesses the rebels may pose a real threat to the continuation of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s rule. According to a report on Channel 12, Israel has been surprised by the weakness of the Syrian army, as it continues to swiftly lose ground to the jihadist-led fighters.

The report added that Israel has sent a strong warning to Iran not to send weaponry to Syria that could reach the hands of the Hezbollah terror group in Lebanon.

Kan news reported, citing two unnamed sources, that Israel and the United States are “detecting signs of certain collapse” in the Syrian army, and that one of Israel’s main concerns is that the rebels will advance as far south as the Israeli border with Syria in the Golan Heights.

Channel 13 said Israel has conveyed messages to rebel leaders to stay away from the border.

Earlier on Thursday, Defense Minister Israel Katz and IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi held an assessment on the developments in Syria, as the rebels led by Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) captured the key central city of Hama, a little more than a week after they launched their offensive, just as a ceasefire took hold between Israel and Assad’s ally in Lebanon, Hezbollah. Residents take to the streets of Hama, to welcome anti-government fighters after they took control of Syria’s west-central city on December 5, 2024. (Photo by Bakr Alkasem / AFP)

Last week the rebels took control of Aleppo, Syria’s second largest city, and have since pushed south, capturing Hama on Thursday and advancing further south to Homs, a key central city that functions as a crossroads connecting Syria’s most populous regions.

The Israeli military assessment was held with the IDF General Staff Forum, the military’s top brass.

“The IDF is following events and is preparing for any scenario in attack and defense,” the military said in a statement. “The IDF will not allow a threat near the Syrian-Israeli border and will act to thwart any threat to the citizens of the State of Israel.”

Amid the growing concern, two senior Israeli officials told the Axios news site that the collapse of regime defense lines in the past 24 hours had happened faster than expected.

A US official who also spoke to the site said that Israel has expressed concern to Washington over both a potential radical Islamist takeover of Syria and an increased presence of Iranian forces in the country to back Assad.

At the same time, an official told The Times of Israel anonymously that Israel’s interest in the renewed fighting in Syria is “that they continue fighting one another.”

They added: “It’s entirely clear to us that one side is Salafi jihadists and the other side is Iran and Hezbollah. We want them to weaken one another.”

The official stressed that Israel is not getting involved on either side. “We are prepared for any scenario and we will act accordingly.”

12/06 Links Pt1: Amnesty International’s antisemitic agenda; Latest attack on Melbourne synagogue 'not surprising'; Bill Clinton: Arafat turned down a Palestinian state

From Ian:

WSJ Editorial: The Propaganda War on Israel Never Stops

From the people who brought you “Israeli apartheid” comes another trendy smear: “Israeli genocide.” With a new report Wednesday night, Amnesty International assures its good standing in the anti-Israel herd. The price is to swallow an inversion of reality.

Amnesty poses as a fair-minded critic of Israeli policies, but it tipped its hand in its 2022 report that tried to claim “this system of apartheid originated with the creation of Israel in May 1948.” That’s well before any “occupation,” but it reflects the ideological obsession that treats the Jewish state’s existence, in any borders, as a crime.

Amnesty’s headline-grabbing apartheid report quietly conceded it wasn’t arguing Israel’s laws are analogous to South Africa’s. This new report uses a similar sleight of hand by redefining genocide. The case law at the International Court of Justice requires a finding 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.” Amnesty says that’s too high a bar and looks at the “broader picture” and “context.”

By context it means apartheid and all its previous slanders of Israel. What about Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, which was genocidal in character? Here’s the report’s opening line: “On 7 October 2023, Israel embarked on a military offensive on the occupied Gaza Strip (Gaza) of unprecedented magnitude, scale and duration.”

Gaza wasn’t occupied, and Hamas, not Israel, embarked on a military offensive. But Amnesty says it will get to the Hamas mass murder later. Here it uses the Oct. 7 massacre to pathologize the Israeli “state of mind resulting from the attacks.”

While Amnesty uses the casualty figures of the “Gaza-based Ministry of Health,” aka Hamas, it never mentions that Israel says 17,000 dead Hamas fighters are among them. It omits the crucial civilian-to-combatant ratio, which would suggest Israel has done better than most in urban warfare.

The report essentially blesses Hamas’s strategy of using human shields. It suggests Israel has no right to attack in civilian areas even if Hamas is using them, just as it wouldn’t if some enemy soldiers had gone home on leave. As if that’s equivalent to terrorist headquarters in hospitals and a 400-mile, terrorist-only tunnel system beneath cities.

Ruthie Blum: Amnesty International’s antisemitic agenda

None of this is surprising. For the better part of two decades, Amnesty has been fixated on singling out Israel for condemnation.

In February 2022, Amnesty labeled Israel an apartheid state. This term, originally associated with South African segregation, has been misappropriated by anti-Israel activists to paint the Jewish state as inherently racist.

Amnesty ignored the active participation of Arab citizens in Israeli society, from serving in the Knesset to holding prominent roles in medicine, academia and law. It omitted the historical context behind Israel’s security measures, designed to thwart relentless waves of Palestinian terrorism, and distorted the legal and political realities on the ground.

During “Operation Protective Edge” against Hamas in 2014, Amnesty accused Israel of grave violations of international law. Overlooking substantial evidence of Hamas’s use of schools, hospitals and mosques as weapons depots and command centers, Amnesty decried Israel’s defensive measures. It issued reports lamenting civilian casualties and damaged buildings while downplaying Hamas’s use of densely populated areas to provoke such tragedies.

Meanwhile, Amnesty remained silent on Hamas’s brutal treatment of its own people, including executions of alleged “collaborators” and the forced recruitment of child soldiers. Nor did it acknowledge Israel’s unprecedented measures to warn civilians—via phone calls, leaflets, and “roof-knocking”—before conducting strikes.

The aftermath of “Operation Cast Lead” in 2008-09 prompted a similarly warped narrative. Amnesty’s report “22 Days of Death and Destruction” portrayed Hamas as a minor player, rather than a bloodthirsty terrorist group that had fired thousands of unprovoked projectiles into Israel.

During the Second Intifada (2000-2005), when Palestinian suicide bombers attacked buses, cafés and nightclubs, Amnesty directed its ire at Israel’s counter-terrorism measures, such as the construction of a security barrier to reduce attacks on innocent Israelis.

Despite Israel’s complete withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, forcibly removing every last Jew from the Strip, Amnesty continues to describe the enclave as “occupied.” The pattern is undeniable: Amnesty seizes every opportunity to vilify Israel.

Founded in 1961 by British lawyer Peter Benenson to advocate for prisoners of conscience, Amnesty won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1977 for its defense of human dignity and a United Nations human-rights prize the following year. Once lauded for impartiality, it has devolved into a slanted advocacy group with a pernicious agenda.

Amnesty’s animus toward Israel transcends politics. Naturally. Considering the existence of the Jewish state to be illegitimate means never having to care about the ideological makeup of the ruling coalition in Jerusalem.

Lawmakers say Amnesty’s genocide report amplifies Hamas propaganda

House lawmakers are circulating a joint statement condemning Amnesty International for its report accusing Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinian people.

The statement, which is still open for additional signatories, according to a source familiar with the effort, accuses Amnesty of echoing “misinformation that has been spewed by Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran — the U.S’ shared enemies with Israel” and of “mislead[ing] the public by standing with the narratives produced and promoted by Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.”

The statement is being organized by Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ). Reps. Dan Goldman (D-NY), Greg Landsman (D-OH), Jake Auchincloss (D-MA), Max Miller (R-OH), Brad Sherman (D-CA), Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), Haley Stevens (D-MI), Tom Suozzi (D-NY), Shri Thanedar (D-MI), Tom Kean (R-NJ), Don Bacon (R-NE), Kathy Manning (D-NC), Jimmy Panetta (D-CA) and Ritchie Torres (D-NY) had signed on as of Thursday night.

The lawmakers accuse Amnesty of making “slanderous” claims, in line with a “long-standing, historically biased position against Israel and the Jewish people.” They said the NGO had “admittedly and nefariously created its own definition of the legal term ‘genocide’ in their report simply to fit their defamatory narrative.”

The lawmakers said that Amnesty’s “[f]alse statements about Israel’s conduct in its war of self-defense rewards self-proclaimed genocidal terrorist organizations intent on destroying the Jewish state and murdering Jews everywhere” and would “embolden Israel’s enemies” in their fight against both the U.S. and Israel.

“The promotion of this misleading report will further threaten the safety of the only Jewish nation in the world and undermine those working to achieve the safe return of all hostages,” they continued.

On December 1, Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA's Commissioner-General issued a press release:

We are pausing the delivery of aid through Kerem Shalom, the main crossing point for humanitarian aid into Gaza.
....

In Gaza, the humanitarian operation has become unnecessarily impossible due to:

- The ongoing siege,
- Hurdles from Israeli authorities,
- ⁠Political decisions to restrict the amounts of aid,
- ⁠Lack of safety on aid routes and
- ⁠Targeting of local police.

The responsibility of protection of aid workers + supplies is with the State of Israel as the occupying power.

They must ensure aid flows into Gaza safely & must refrain from attacks on humanitarian workers.

Notice that all five reasons given blame Israel. Hamas and the armed gangs who steal food are nott mentioned as the problem - they are an inevitable consequence of Israeli actions. (This of course is bigotry - Lazzarini is saying that Gazans naturally steal.)

An UNRWA Director of Logistics for Gaza, Miranda Barakat, just toured an empty UNRWA warehouse in southern Gaza and she gave her own impressions of the problems for Arabic-speaking audiences.

She didn't mention Israel once.

Instead, she said that the reason the warehouse is empty is due to the danger felt by workers in transporting goods from the Kerem Shalom crossing to the warehouses as a result of the current security situation. She admitted that UNRWA has 700 lorries inside the crossing waiting to be picked up.

She said the thieves don't only take the goods but also steal the batteries and tires of the trucks.

Barakat properly blamed the thieves, not Israel. She said that those who deliberately steal aid trucks do not only aim to steal, but also to sabotage, disable and take them out of service, at a time when it is impossible to find replacement spare parts due to the war.

While she doesn't directly blame Hamas, it seems apparent that only Hamas would be interested in the batteries and tires to keep their own logistics running. The armed gangs would want to ensure that the aid keeps coming; disabling trucks hurts their entire business model.

It is still striking that the constant blaming of Israel alone is rhetoric meant for the West. Gazans know that Israel is bringing the goods to Gaza and the problems start there.

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!

Boulder CO city council is sick of anti-Israel lunatics. Is there a pattern emerging?

Boulder, CO is a heavily Democratic city - some 77% of its citizens consistently vote Democrat.

But their city council got sick and tired of lunatic wing of the party.

After nearly a year of contentious public comment periods at Boulder City Council meetings — dominated by protesters demanding the council endorse a Gaza ceasefire resolution and increasingly marred by personal attacks, including antisemitic remarks directed at City Councilmember Tara Winer, who is Jewish — the mayor and several councilmembers took a stand during their Dec. 5 meeting. Earlier this year, the council voted 7 to 2 to abstain from initiating a process to create a Gaza ceasefire resolution.

“This city council body has no role in international affairs,” Mayor Aaron Brockett said. “A ceasefire resolution has nothing to do with the business of the city. … This is not something that I’m changing my mind on,” he added, noting that he is “disturbed by some of the personal attacks that we’ve seen against other community members and individual city councilmembers.”

Brockett specifically referenced a comment from a previous meeting where someone compared the city council to Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief engineers of the Holocaust. The mayor said he had previously stayed silent during public comment periods, hoping the issue would fade.

Winer has been targeted by anti-Semitic remarks, including being called a “Jewish supremacist” during one meeting and receiving emails containing antisemitic slurs. People attending the Dec. 5 council meeting accused councilmembers of being “baby killers” and said they were “complicit in genocide.”

Last month, the Boulder campus of Colorado University was graffitied with "FUCK ISRAEL," "HAMAS IS RESSITANCE" and other slogans that the university termed antisemitic.

On the one hand, the haters have been successful in normalizing the worst antisemitic slurs like the "genocide" libel. On the other hand, they are really alienating normal people even on the Left.

But perhaps this is part of the strategy.

When they do extreme stunts like these or blocking traffic or stopping a Thanksgiving Day parade, it may be that this gives them more room for the accusations of "genocide" and calling Hamas "resistance." People only have the ability to be outraged at a limited number of things; responding to every "river to the sea" chant has diminishing returns and that ends up making the lies and calls to ethnically cleanse Israel in the name of democracy sound more reasonable in contrast.

I don't think the haters are quite that organized, but the effect is the same. Normal people might get upset at their blatant antisemitism but there has still been very little headway into pointing out that it is all antisemitism.

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!

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.

______________________

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.

__________________

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)

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!

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.

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!

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.

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!