Saturday, December 28, 2024
Elder of ZiyonThis year the Yiddish speaking community has created a number of videos.
And for something completely different than that....
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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Saturday, December 28, 2024
Friday, December 27, 2024
From Ian:
Melanie Phillips: The real message of Chanukah
Melanie Phillips: The real message of Chanukah
Of course, divisions weaken a community and undermine its defences. But the real issue is the reason for such division. Under both Greek and Roman rule, it was that too many Jews had forgotten what they were.Aviva Klompas: Jew hatred is not just a Jewish problem. It's a Canadian problem
And just like today, under both the Greeks and the Romans it was universalism that weakened the Jews. Scorned and vilified for their particularism and drawn into the embrace of a less demanding culture, they became vulnerable as a result to threats of both assimilation and external attack.
Most of today’s diaspora Jews who live in western societies that disdain or even hate them choose not to fight back. Instead, they keep their heads below the parapet, pretend that the threats aren’t as bad as they actually are or choose to suck up to the governing classes who merely flick them aside. Far worse, some of these Jews actively support the ideologies that have the Jewish people in their sights.
This way lies assimilation and thus destruction. To avoid that fate, Jews have to fight for who they are and what they stand for.
Liberals will respond that, since the opposing side thinks precisely the same, who is to say who is correct? From that they conclude that fighting to defeat the other side is always wrong.
This is the trap of moral relativism, which is based on the belief that objective truth doesn’t exist and that everything is instead a matter of subjective opinion.
But that’s a lethal error. There is indeed such a thing as objective reality.
There really are abuses of power. There really is a difference between aggressors and victims. Iran really does pose a demonstrable threat to Jewish life and the survival of Israel. Assimilation really has caused huge swathes of Jews to disappear as Jews.
Not all division between Jews is “baseless hatred”. Sometimes, if one side wins over the other the Jewish people will be demonstrably harmed. Such situations require not consensus but victory for the side that would best prevent such harm.
Of course, agreement is desirable. But if Jews were to agree to a course of action that would result in their wipeout, maybe that kind of agreement wouldn’t be such a good idea.
Conflict is undesirable, division is dangerous, and war is hell. But the alternative may be far worse.
So far, it has been divine intervention — or perhaps the random mercy of circumstance — that has prevented these attacks from ending in the kind of horrific tragedy witnessed by Jewish communities elsewhere, such as the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 where eleven were killed and six were wounded, some of whom were Holocaust survivors. This fragile luck, however, is not a substitute for government policy or action. Each new act of hate brings us closer to an unthinkable outcome, one that words of outrage and condolence will never undo.Centenarian Jewish D-Day veteran ‘doubts’ sacrifice was worth it
Instead, antisemitism has been allowed to fester and grow. Canada is failing to learn from history. In 1930s Europe, antisemitism didn’t stop at destroying Jewish lives; it undermined the very fabric of society, paving the way for totalitarian regimes and eroding the democratic values we now hold dear until Canada and the other Allied powers went to war to destroy that threat.
Hate is a pollution that doesn’t remain confined to one group or one place. It spreads, infecting everything it touches.
That poison is already visible on Canada’s streets. Masked mobs draped in keffiyehs march through major cities, burning Canadian flags, vandalizing monuments, and intimidating anyone who dares to disagree with their ideology. What begins as targeted hatred against Jews inevitably grows into a broader assault on the freedoms and values that define our society.
These attacks do not occur in a vacuum. Each unpunished act of violence and each ignored plea for protection sends a dangerous message: that hatred and bigotry are permissible.
This global surge in Jew-hatred is inexcusable everywhere, but its prevalence in Canada is particularly shameful. Canada was the first nation to adopt multiculturalism as an official policy in 1971, later enshrining it in law through the Canadian Multiculturalism Act of 1988. Canadians pride themselves on being champions of diversity and tolerance, yet today, what they are tolerating is violence and bigotry.
For over two decades, Kehillat Shaarei Torah was a second home for me. To see it attacked again and again is heartbreaking and terrifying. Jewish Canadians are resilient, but resilience alone is not enough. We cannot fight this battle alone.
Canada’s leaders have failed Jewish Canadians. They have failed to protect synagogues and schools from attack. They have failed to hold perpetrators accountable. They have failed to take meaningful steps to deter further violence.
Most damningly, they have failed to recognize that Jew-hatred is not just a Jewish problem — it is a Canadian problem.
If our leaders do not act — if they do not prioritize the safety and dignity of Jewish Canadians — it won’t just be the Jewish community that suffers. Canada, as a whole, will pay the price. Hate, when left unchecked, corrodes the foundation of any society.
History is watching. The Jewish community is waiting. The time for action is now.
Mervyn Kersh, a Jewish Londoner and D-Day veteran who turned 100 on Dec. 20, has lived through some of modern history’s most tumultuous chapters.
But the events of recent months have stirred fears in Kersh unlike anything that he has felt since he stormed the Normandy beaches 80 years ago, Kersh told JNS in several interviews in the last few months.
Fears for the destruction of Israel—a place this British patriot also calls home—and about antisemitism on display in his native England.
Kersh, who fought with the British Army during the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France, now fears both for the safety of the Jewish state and for that of Jews in the United Kingdom. (He celebrated his 100th birthday with family in London.)
Looking back on his role in helping liberate Western Europe, Kersh has mixed feelings, not about the bravery of his comrades or the necessity of the war but about whether the sacrifices he and others made still hold the value they intended.
“I thought what we did was worth it,” he told JNS. “I have my doubts now.”
The Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which Kersh calls his “first home” even though he has never lived there, and the resurgence of Jew-hatred in Europe and beyond have left him questioning whether his generation’s hard-fought victories have been eroded.
“Our politicians are repeating the same cowardly lack of military action as those politicians did in the mid-1930s,” Kersh said about the British position on Israel’s fight against its enemies. “All words but no action while the enemy was still relatively weak.”
From Ian:
How the international community funds the Hamas war machine
How the international community funds the Hamas war machine
Eyal Ofer has been following the funding methods of Hamas and other terrorist organizations for years, collecting data and writing about his findings. He told JNS that Hamas’s financial conduct has not changed in a significant way over the years. If before the war it extorted 25% from luxury car dealers, today in the midst of war it extorts money from wheat merchants.Seth Mandel: It’s Against the Rules to Win
“Hamas is present everywhere in the Gaza Strip: the police, humanitarian associations, actors in the private and public sectors, the contractors’ union—Hamas is networked within and across Gaza. You can’t just vacuum Hamas out, it is everywhere,” he said.
In a tweet that went viral on Sunday, he wrote that “Hamas operates like a mafia and a clan-based enterprise: one brother is in the military wing, another in the police force, they ensure the sister works for UNRWA, a noncombat-profile cousin becomes a driver for an aid organization, an uncle gets a government position, another cousin is a ‘journalist’ for Al Jazeera, and the grandmother is added to the list of welfare recipients.”
The claim that Iran provides 70% of Hamas’s funding is “nonsense,” he wrote. “In extreme cases, Iran provides 5-10% of Hamas’s funding. The vast majority of Hamas’s funding comes from its ability to funnel money that the world sends to the Palestinian Authority (and other Gaza charitable causes) and Gaza for its own purposes.”
As an example, he attached a document from the P.A.’s Municipal Development and Lending Fund (MDLF), a semi-governmental urban development fund, highlighting the receipt of some $3 million from the government of Belgium in 2023 for a project named, “Promotion of Green Services and Climate Action in Local Governance—Green Gaza.”
“What are the chances that Hamas’s regime in Gaza will manage to place its members or their relatives among the beneficiaries of this Belgian grant? In my opinion: 100%. … Multiply this story by 200, and you’ll see how Hamas is funded,” Ofer said.
The money-laundering scheme
Ofer further explained that Hamas’s chief financial problem is not raising money inside Gaza, but transferring its accumulated cash out of the region.
The primary currency in the Gaza Strip is the Israeli shekel. During the war, Hamas acquired a monopoly on cash in Gaza, with local banks largely unserviceable. Ofer told JNS that it is impossible to assess how much cash Hamas currently holds.
“Hundreds of millions, maybe even one to two billion shekels. It extracts money from the population by force, which is how it continues to pay salaries to its operatives [and recruit new fighters], but also how it established itself as the monopoly on the supply of money,” he said.
“Many Gazans today receive direct donations from abroad, transferred via Western Union, the banks, cryptocurrencies like USD Coin, Vodafone Cash Wallet [a mobile app], GoFundMe, monthly stipends from the P.A., U.N. humanitarian agencies such as UNICEF. All these transfers are deposited in bank accounts, and their holders need to convert them into cash—whether the deposit is in dollars or shekels. Who do they go to for cash? Hamas.”
The Islamist organization developed an entire industry of non-banking ATMs, Ofer explained. The Gazans transfer to Hamas their dollars or shekels and Hamas provides them with cash, though with “unbelievably” high fees, he said. “The fees started at 15% and have reached more than 30% in areas with greater scarcity,” he added. “This is how Hamas manages to launder money to unknown accounts.”
Ofer could not say with certainty that all money changers in Gaza are Hamas operatives, but noted that it is hard to imagine a regular person moving about in the Gaza Strip with hundreds of thousands of shekels in cash without fear.
The broken Gaza fallacy
In 1850, French economist Frédéric Bastiat published an essay titled “That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen.”
In it, he described what became known in the field of economics as the “broken window fallacy.” The conceptual framework notes that while it is seen that a child breaking a shopkeeper’s window, for example, will provide the glazier with work to repair the window, what is not seen is the aggregate growth of the economy through alternative work had the window not been broken (such as the shopkeeper purchasing a new pair of shoes).
The Palestinian case may demonstrate a similar fallacy. That which is seen is the reconstruction of Gaza after every war, believing that this helps the Palestinians. That which is unseen is letting the Palestinians deal with the consequences of war alone, having to choose whether to abandon their ideological battle against Israel or continue on their path to destruction.
“The Palestinians know that after every round of fighting, the round of reconstruction begins,” Ofer said, adding that this causes perverse economic incentives.
“If the Qataris come in and propose rebuilding a city that was destroyed in the previous war and was now destroyed again, a private contractor has two jobs, not one. The Hamas government cuts its share from the contractor, the residents who received contributions and everyone else in the chain of rehabilitation,” he noted.
According to Ofer, many of the regular economic metrics that economists use, such as GDP, are irrelevant in the case of Gaza, because a huge section of its economy is nonproductive.
“There is no question that Gaza, in great percentages, is a charity-based economy. A private sector emerges out of these donations, but the nucleus of the economy, maybe 40% to 50%, is based on external donations that fund Gaza’s welfare [programs] and the public sector,” he told JNS.
Ofer added that Israel lacks “political wisdom. Instead of disengaging from Gaza, we keep opening more and more crossings into the Strip in the hope that the world will see us as enlightened rulers. At the start of the war, all aid came through the Rafah Crossing border with Egypt. Israel should have stated: That’s it Gaza, from now on, you work with Egypt. You are not our problem anymore.”
This is an important window into how much the foreign-policy debate in America has deteriorated. Ukraine and Israel were the invaded parties. There is no argument over this—it’s not unclear who started either war, even if we debate about the chosen casus belli in each case. Even those who offer insipid justifications for Putin’s and Hamas’s actions implicitly accept that those actions marked the beginning of the current wars.Brendan O'Neill: This year, Israel showed us what anti-fascism really means
It is, then, genuinely insane to compare Ukraine and Gaza this way. What Ukraine and Gaza actually have in common at the moment is solely that they are, to different degrees, “losing” these wars. A “win” for Ukraine is generally defined by Kyiv as retaining all its territory. That was possible at one time, had the Biden administration and Western Europe provided the support Ukraine needed and deserved at the outset of the war, though now it appears unlikely.
Gaza, meanwhile, was doomed from the start because even a Hamas victory—which would mean its outlasting of Israel’s determination and its accumulation of enough international support to hold its legitimacy as rulers of Gaza—would be a disaster for Gazan civilians. Hamas essentially rigged the Gaza Strip to blow up, then lit the fuse, because it had already built a second Gaza for itself underground. But Hamas is on the ropes as well, bringing some measure of justice for what the terror group has done to Gaza and to Israel.
And that is Israel’s crime: winning a war it didn’t start.
The Times does its best to play along. “The Israeli military, supplied with American weapons, has killed more than 45,000 Palestinians and destroyed most of Gaza, according to officials in the strip and satellite images,” reads the report.
Of course, even if you accept Hamas’s overall numbers, it is still untrue that the IDF has killed 45,000 Palestinians. The Times is taking a Hamas lie and pushing it to its absolute limits, but there is no method of counting that gets you to this number unless you blame Israel for every single natural death in Gaza and for those killed by Hamas and other terror groups.
Nor is there any context to those long-debunked “stats.” Hamas has not surrendered, so the war goes on. Israel is continuing to win the war that Hamas started and is perpetuating. Should Israel simply stop fighting a war that the enemy carries on?
Never mind, we know the answer.
In the future, when humanity comes to its senses, 2024 will be seen as a watershed year in the battle against fascism. More fascist-adjacent killers and loons were bumped off over the past 12 months than in any other year in my lifetime. From the leader of an army of anti-Semites that tells its followers to buy cheap knives and ‘cut off the heads of Jews’ (Yahya Sinwar) to the spiritual head of a self-styled ‘Party of God’ that longs to excise those ‘cancerous’ Jews from the Middle East (Hassan Nasrallah), it’s been a rough year for neo-fascist nuts. And about time, too.
2024 is the year anti-fascism grew up. For years, ‘anti-fascism’ was the weekend hobby of bored rich kids. To say the masked wimps of ‘antifa’ gave anti-fascism a bad name is an understatement. They dragged its name into the gutter. Under their black-clad purview, anti-fascism entailed little more than shouting ‘BITCH’ at women who don’t want to see dicks in their changing rooms, weeping on the campus lawn whenever Ben Shapiro showed up, and having fisticuffs with working-class people who voted for Trump. The men of the Normandy landings and the International Brigades will have turned in their graves at the sight of these toytown radicals throwing milkshakes at ‘rednecks’ and calling it anti-fascism.
Now, thankfully, anti-fascism means something again. Largely courtesy of Israel’s war on the Jew-hating belligerents at its borders, a real fight with fascism has replaced the neurotic street theatrics of the affluent activist class that falsely called itself anti-fascism. Sure, these people might have slapped Richard Spencer once, but the IDF has throttled entire movements that were founded with the expressly fascistic intention to kill Jews and erase their homeland.
This year we bid adieu to Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas in Gaza; the man widely suspected of being the architect of 7 October, the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. It seems likely that Mohammed Deif was also hurried off this mortal coil by the IDF. He was the leader of the al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, which did so much of the raping and butchering on 7 October.
Many other Hamas gunmen were despatched – up to 17,000. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this gutting of an army whose founding covenant committed it to a ‘very great and very serious… struggle against the Jews’ is better anti-fascism than emptying a can of soup on gender-critical activist Posie Parker. Hamas has made good on its genocidal loathing countless times in recent years, murdering hundreds and hundreds of Jews on buses, in nightclubs, at music festivals, in their own homes. Israel’s war on Hamas, in defiance of the faint-hearted bourgeoisie of the Western world who’ve spent the past year cravenly calling on the Jewish State to cease fire, is a blow to modern fascism and a boon for humanity.
Friday, December 27, 2024
Elder of Ziyon
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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- Friday, December 27, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
From NBC News:
This story of the IDF burning the hospital is all over the news, usually with the proviso "according to Gaza's health ministry." Countries are condemning Israel for burning the hospital. Officials and doctors are saying they saw it.
And yet in all the coverage, I cannot find a single photo or video of this burning!
It becomes clearer when you realize that the director of Kamal Adwan is a colonel in Hamas. It was built as a military hospital.
Yes, Israel raided the hospital looking for terrorists. Yes, they also had some activity outside the hospital. But there is zero evidence - zero - of any burning of the wards as described by the "witnesses." Everyone has a cell phone with a camera, yet no one managed to capture the fires or the burned out rooms.
The same media needs verification of everything the IDF says, but none from Hamas. Which means that, objectively speaking, they trust terrorists more than Jews.
How is that not antisemitic?
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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- Friday, December 27, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
On January 10, 2021, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement:
Almost exactly three years after Pompeo made his announcement, Blinken said this:
The Department of State will notify Congress of my intent to designate Ansarallah – sometimes referred to as the Houthis – as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), under section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, and as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) entity, pursuant to Executive Order 13224. I also intend to designate three of Ansarallah’s leaders, Abdul Malik al-Houthi, Abd al-Khaliq Badr al-Din al-Houthi, and Abdullah Yahya al Hakim, as SDGTs.These designations will provide additional tools to confront terrorist activity and terrorism by Ansarallah, a deadly Iran-backed militia group in the Gulf region. The designations are intended to hold Ansarallah accountable for its terrorist acts, including cross-border attacks threatening civilian populations, infrastructure, and commercial shipping.The designations are also intended to advance efforts to achieve a peaceful, sovereign, and united Yemen that is both free from Iranian interference and at peace with its neighbors. Progress in addressing Yemen’s instability can only be made when those responsible for obstructing peace are held accountable for their actions.
The "experts" at Brookings said this would be a major mistake. "Designating the Houthis would be bad for Yemeni civilians, bad for peace talks, and, ultimately, bad for U.S. national security."
One of the first things the Biden administration did was to reverse this decision. The brilliant analysts won! As Antony Blinken wrote that February:
Effective February 16, I am revoking the designations of Ansarallah, sometimes referred to as the Houthis, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) under the Immigration and Nationality Act and as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) pursuant to Executive Order (E.O.) 13224, as amended.This decision is a recognition of the dire humanitarian situation in Yemen. We have listened to warnings from the United Nations, humanitarian groups, and bipartisan members of Congress, among others, that the designations could have a devastating impact on Yemenis’ access to basic commodities like food and fuel. The revocations are intended to ensure that relevant U.S. policies do not impede assistance to those already suffering what has been called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. By focusing on alleviating the humanitarian situation in Yemen, we hope the Yemeni parties can also focus on engaging in dialogue.
And then the Houthis attacked the world's shipping.
Oops!
Almost exactly three years after Pompeo made his announcement, Blinken said this:
The Department of State today is announcing the designation of Ansarallah, commonly referred to as the Houthis, as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist group, effective 30 days from today.The Houthis must be held accountable for their actions, but it should not be at the expense of Yemeni civilians. As the Department of State moves forward with this designation, we are taking significant steps to mitigate any adverse impacts this designation may have on the people of Yemen. During the 30-day implementation delay, the U.S. government will conduct robust outreach to stakeholders, aid providers, and partners who are crucial to facilitating humanitarian assistance and the commercial import of critical commodities in Yemen. The Department of the Treasury is also publishing licenses authorizing certain transactions related to the provision of food, medicine, and fuel, as well as personal remittances, telecommunications and mail, and port and airport operations on which the Yemeni people rely.
The main reason given in 2021 was to ensure Yemeni civilians get aid. The re-designation (even tough not as extensive as Pompeo's FTO desgination) ensured that aid would still get through. And no one is worried that aid sent to UNRWA or WFP is not going to make it into Gaza because Hamas is a FTO.
Which means that Biden's taking away the terror designation from the Houthis did nothing to dissuade their terrorism, as Blinken hoped, and very possibly helped them strengthen themselves.
It is important to aid civilians. But it is more important to get rid of the terrorists who are not only threatening the world but are also terrorizing those same civilians!
The "experts" and State Department Arabists "won" in 2021, and so did the Houthis. The very idea of removing the terrorist designation of a group whose very motto includes "Down with the USA! Curse the Jews!" is enough proof that the "experts" are often idiots.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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- Friday, December 27, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
Palestinian media typically celebrates terror attacks, claiming that the victims are all soldiers. That is a little more difficult when the victim is an elderly lady stabbed multiple times.
So they do everything they can to hide that fact.
Palestine Information Center mentions it was a woman, calling her a "settler."
Safa just says "Israeli woman," basing it on Israeli reports and avoiding saying her age.
The official Wafa news agency simply avoids mentioning the story altogether.
Arabi21 links to the Hebrew Maariv article whose headline emphasizes that she was an 83 year old woman, but in Arabic refers to her merely as a "settler" - and then offers a "quote" from "occupation forces" that say "What we can confirm is that a Palestinian suspect stabbed a settler, and Israeli forces are searching the area to rule out the presence of other perpetrators."
Apparently, the Palestinian algorithm automatically changes any mention of an Israeli "citizen" to "settler."
Palestinian news site Raya also calls the woman a "settler," and adds details:
A member of the medical team who arrived at the scene of the operation said, “We received a report of a woman being stabbed. We quickly arrived at the scene and saw the woman lying on the ground, unconscious, suffering from a stab wound to her body. We provided her with initial medical treatment, which included stopping the bleeding, while transferring her to the hospital, where she is in critical condition.”This was a combination of two quotes, specifically edited to remove any hint of the victim as an elderly lady. Here was how the MDA reported it. Note what Raya specifically excluded.
MDA Emergency Medical Technician Elon Boaron, who was the first to arrive on the scene, stated:"I was near the incident location when the call came in. I arrived quickly and saw an elderly woman lying unconscious on the sidewalk with stab wounds. Together with additional forces that arrived, we performed resuscitation efforts and evacuated her to the hospital while continuing life-saving treatment. During the treatment, security personnel neutralized the assailant near the scene. It is a shocking event."MDA Paramedic Idan Shina added:"We received a report about a woman injured in a stabbing. When we arrived at the scene, we saw the woman lying near a retirement home, unconscious and suffering from stab wounds. We provided initial life-saving treatment, but her condition was critical."
Palestinian media are doing everything they can to avoid any Arab sympathizing with a Jewish victim of terror or getting angry at a "heroic" terrorist.
Notice also that Palestinian media, across the board, call every Israeli a "settler" no matter where they live.
If they go to such lengths to avoid reporting facts, why should anyone believe anything they ever say?
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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- Friday, December 27, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
They, and she, run the gamut of all of the skin colors humans have. This isn't a "European white colonialist" classroom, but a true rainbow representing all Jews in Israel in just one classroom.
Not only that, but how many schools in America or Europe would show children of different colors hugging each other? I'm sure there are some, but the current "woke" diversity emphasis is more on creating a separation between people of different backgrounds, not bringing them together. Here we see what is apparently a religious school where the Jewish children of Ethiopian parents, Mizrahi children and Ashkenazic children all love not only their teacher but each other.
To the world, religious Israelis are never framed as tolerant people. But how many secular schools in the world would see a scene like this one?
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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Thursday, December 26, 2024
From Ian:
Melanie Phillips: The Onslaught against the Jews Is an Onslaught against the West
Melanie Phillips: The Onslaught against the Jews Is an Onslaught against the West
You might have thought that after the Oct. 7 onslaught, the world would have shown sympathy to Israel. Instead, much of the so-called civilized world has turned against Israel and the Jewish people. Attacks on Jews worldwide are at record levels. We can only understand what's happening if we realize that we're looking at a worldwide war on both the Jews and the Free World.Rabbi Leo Dee shares his late wife’s lessons for life
The first demonstrations in the West, mainly by Muslims, took place on Oct. 7 itself while the attack in Israel was still going on. They were an ecstatic celebration of the slaughter of Jews. The Islamists believed that their moment had come. They understood Oct. 7 to be the final and victorious onslaught. Having broken through Israel's defenses, they thought that they were now on the way to destroying Israel altogether. Then the path would be open for the defeat of the West.
There's been nothing spontaneous about these demonstrations. They've been organized from the start by an alliance composed of Hamas and other Muslim Brotherhood groups, the hard left, and Western Palestinian activists. Anti-Israel indoctrination has gone on for decades and long colonized the universities. Billions of dollars have been devoted to frying the minds of the Western intelligentsia.
For several decades, Western elites have held that the West was born in the sins of racism and colonialism and that therefore national identity in the West is itself intrinsically evil. The Western nation-state, they said, had created hatred, prejudice, and war. The culture and laws of Western nations therefore had to be trumped by universalist institutions and laws such as the UN, international law, and "human rights" legislated by international courts.
As John Lennon sang, there's nothing to fight or die for. But Israel - the paradigmatic nation-state - certainly believes there's something to fight and die for. That something is its continued existence. It refuses to negotiate its own demise.
Israel will survive because it has no alternative. Israel will prosper and grow because there the Jewish people know what they are, they love what they are, and as a result they want their nation to survive. The West will only survive if it decides to love us instead of disdaining us and trying to erase what makes the Jewish people special - which is what has made the West special too.
Rabbi Leo Dee has shared his late wife Lucy’s life lessons and how they have helped him in the aftermath of her murder and the murder of two of their daughters.Andrew Pessin: "Anti-Zionism is Antisemitism," On Campus, Second Installment
Lucy Dee, 48, Maia, 20, and Rina,15, were shot by terrorists as they were driving in the West Bank in April 2023.
The daughters died at the scene and Lucy died three days later in hospital.
The London-born rabbi revealed "Lucy Dee’s 7 Fs” – otherwise known as “How to deal with anything in life” – during a moving presentation to a packed audience at Limmud Festival in Birmingham.
The “7 Fs”, he said, were the topics the couple had talked about when they went on date nights. They stood for family, friends, fitness, frumkeit, function, finances and fun.
Giving his talk in memory of his wife and two daughters, who were also born in the UK, Rabbi Dee said that when it came to his family, he and his surviving three children had been unable to sit down for Friday night dinner in their own home for the first three months following the funerals.
“We had been a family of two parents and five kids, and now we were one parent and three kids. We have one of those table where you can take out the middle part to make it shorter, and when I did that for the first time, it made me so depressed. We couldn’t sit down just the four of us.”
It was a conversation with Yair Lapid, leader of the opposition, which had shifted his mindset, he said. “His father had been a Holocaust survivor and then his sister was killed when she was eight. He said to me that when his father came back from the funeral, he had said: ‘This is a house to live in.’
“Three months after the funerals, the four of us sat down for Friday night dinner together. It was lovely, and I realised that we could do this.”
[This is the next installment of the longer piece examining the expression “anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” The first installment may be found here. That first installment offered some preliminary considerations then presented a ten-part case that anti-Zionism is prima facie a species of antisemitism. Further analysis begins with this installment.]
3. “Epistemic Antisemitism”
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Antisemitism in fact is at the very foundation of anti-Zionism.
We start by recalling the first two points above:
(1) For most Jews, Zionism is deeply entwined with or based on their Judaism and Jewish identity.
(2) Although not all Israelis are Jews etc., Israel is a, or the, Jewish project.
These two points made “hating Israel” while not “hating Jews” very challenging. As Salaita put it, Zionists make “antisemitism” honorable, recognizing that hostility toward Israel is ultimately hostility toward the Jews.
But that recognition now helps us locate the “antisemitism” in the right place. Once we realize that hostility toward Israel is hostility toward Jews and that the allegations against Israel are allegations against the Jews, the conversation shifts. It’s no longer about the anti-Zionist’s (failed) attempt to distinguish between opposing Zionism-Israel and opposing the Jews but about the deeper epistemic question of whether those allegations against the Jews are justified or not, true or not, or fair, or reasonable. It wouldn’t be bigotry, after all, to be against people who perpetrate dastardly deeds; no one said or says it was “anti-German” bigotry to condemn the Nazis and dismantle their evil empire. So if Israel—i.e. the Jews—really do all the terrible things anti-Zionists say they do, if the Jews really were guilty of genocide, apartheid, settler colonialism, etc., then hostility etc. toward them would be justified, and not a form of bigotry.[1]
Once we recognize that speaking of Israel amounts to speaking of the Jews, this moves into the open: it’s easier to hide behind abstract allegations that a “country” is doing dastardly things than to assert quite concretely that the particular people are doing them. But once it is the people you are accusing, then the epistemic question becomes central to determining if the views are antisemitic or not.
This point is precisely why anti-Zionists believe that calling anti-Zionism “antisemitic” amounts to “weaponing antisemitism” to protect Israel, and thus object to IHRA. They truly believe that Jews are guilty of dastardly things, so it’s not bigotry to oppose them. From that perspective, calling anti-Zionists “bigots” could only be a bad faith move to silence them.[2] That’s also why Salaita put “antisemitism” in scare quotes above, because he believes that activism against the Jews and their state is not bigoted antisemitism but justified opposition to dastardly Jewish deeds.
This point is also why the antisemitism question is not directly located in whether (for example) the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel is “inherently” or “per se” antisemitic, or even whether “calls to dismantle Israel” are “inherently” or “per se” antisemitic; the Nexus and Jerusalem proponents have a technical but (temporarily) legitimate point when they say that BDS and even Israel-elimination are not antisemitic “on their face” or “per se.” If the Jews were truly guilty of dastardly deeds, it would not be bigotry to take even extreme measures such as those against them.[3]
The antisemitism here, then, is deeper: not necessarily in the measures “per se” one takes against the Jews, given one’s belief in their dastardly deeds, but in that which motivates those measures, i.e. in the (falsely) believing that Jews are guilty of those dastardly deeds in the first place,[4] in being all too prone to falsely believing this. I have elsewhere called this kind of antisemitism “epistemic antisemitism,” analyzing it as a kind of malicious cognitive bias of which the agent is often unaware, to which we’ll return in section (5) below.[5]
And this is also precisely why Zionists do sincerely see those anti-Zionist measures as antisemitic.
From Ian:
The terrorist who shattered the Oslo myth
The terrorist who shattered the Oslo myth
If there was one terrorist whose life epitomized the Arab war against Israel and shattered the illusions fostered by the Oslo Accords, it was Fuad Shubaki, who died this week at the age of 83.Caroline Glick: The battle for Jerusalem
Shubaki was born in Gaza in 1940. Note that the Jews didn’t rule Gaza in those days (the British did), so Gazans didn’t demand a Palestinian state and didn’t organize any movement for independence. The next occupier was Egypt. The Egyptians illegally occupied Gaza in 1948 and ruled it for the next 19 years—yet still, there was no uprising against an occupation.
According to the Palestinian Authority’s Wafa news agency, Shubaki “was one of the first to join the Palestinian fedayeen movement in the mid-1960s.” Remember, there were no settlements or Israeli-occupied territories in those days. The territory that Shubaki and his fellow terrorists were trying to “liberate” was pre-1967 Israel.
The exact extent of Shubaki’s personal involvement in terrorism may never be known, but it is clear from his Wafa obituary that he was involved in many attacks. The news outlet put it this way: “He underwent training in the camps of the Palestinian revolution and participated in its battles.”
Shubaki gradually rose through the terrorist ranks. He was invited to serve on both the Palestinian National Council and Fatah’s Revolutionary Council. He became a senior aide to PLO chief Yasser Arafat, and Arafat appointed him to manage Fatah’s “military financial administration,” Wafa’s euphemism for arranging the financing to murder Israeli Jews.
When Arafat tried to take over Jordan, Shubaki was by his side. When Arafat and his guerrillas were expelled by Jordan and tried to take over Lebanon, Shubaki was there, too. When Israel succumbed to U.S. pressure to let Arafat and his senior terrorists escape Beirut in 1982 and set up bases in Tunis, Shubaki was among them.
From Gaza to Jordan to Lebanon to Tunisia, Shubaki devoted his life to financing the bombers, snipers, grenade-hurlers, stabbers and rock-throwers waging nonstop jihad against Israel.
Then came Oslo. Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, Shubaki and their colleagues announced they would live in peace with Israel. They signed the first Oslo agreement in 1993. They signed Oslo II in 1995. They promised to give up terrorism, to arrest and extradite terrorists, and to stop teaching anti-Jewish hatred in their schools.
The Jewish world was deeply divided. Optimists insisted that Arafat could be trusted; he was laying down his arms. Others said he couldn’t be trusted; he would use front groups to continue terrorism and would never keep his Oslo obligations.
As the months passed, the pessimists’ worst fears began coming true. Terrorism resumed. Arafat refused to use his new Palestinian Authority security forces to take action against Hamas. Arafat’s Fatah set up thinly disguised front groups, such as the “Fatah Hawks” and the “Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade” to carry out attacks. Israel’s requests to extradite terrorists were ignored. A revolving-door “prison” was used by the P.A. when it wanted to pretend it was “detaining suspects” but really setting them free.
Arafat’s incitement also continued unabated. There was the infamous “jihad speech” (there were actually many). There was the “Abir and Dalal speech” (there were many of those, too), in which he presented Arab women terrorists as role models for Palestinian Arab girls to emulate. Another generation of young Arabs was being raised to hate and kill Jews, Oslo or no Oslo.
At the center of it all was Fuad Shubaki, the master financier who made sure that funds were always available to keep terrorizing Israel.
Israel’s ruling elites—from the IDF General Staff to Shin Bet leadership, from the media to the legal system to academia—have refused to admit this state of affairs. Instead, they have insisted on an artificial distinction between the “moderate” P.A. and the “radical” Hamas and Islamic Jihad forces. In their efforts, they have been supported by successive U.S. administrations. The unbridled hostility of the European Union, the United Nations and other international actors towards Israel as a whole has been used by Israel’s leftist ruling class and Washington as a means to coerce successive governments and the unwilling public to maintain faith with the fiction that the P.A. is a stabilizing force, whether in Judea and Samaria or in the Gaza Strip.Khaled Abu Toameh: How Israeli Arab Leaders Betray Their Own People
Most of their efforts across the years were directed not against the Palestinians calling for the conquest of Jerusalem. Their chief foe (and the focus of their anger) has always been the Israelis—IDF officers, politicians, journalists, academics and regular citizens who have insisted on listening to the Palestinians and acting accordingly.
If the war is to end, Israel must win this battle in a manner that is not open to question. To win this war, Israel needs to dismantle not only Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, but the governing body that has cultivated and grown these forces. To win the battle for Jerusalem, Israel must dismantle the P.A.’s security forces and the notion that they are moderates, or that they aren’t fighting for Jerusalem.
The presence of advanced weapons and tens of thousands of men under arms supported by a society mobilized to use them to kill thousands of Israelis at the first opportunity has made the situation untenable. The government is well-advised to delay the reckoning until after Donald Trump becomes president in January and until after Halevi’s expected resignation in February. It is clear that the battle cannot be won so long as the IDF is led by a man who refuses to abandon the strategic conception that the P.A. is Israel’s partner, not its enemy.
In the past year and three months of war, the overwhelming sense has been that we are fighting for the survival not only of Israel but of the Jewish people. There is poetic justice, then, in the fact that the approaching battle for Jerusalem has come into view just as we celebrate the festival of Chanukah, the time when the Jews fought both their enemies and their internal demons to secure their religious freedom and restore Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem.
"For the longest time, I struggled with my identity. A Palestinian kid born inside Israel. Like...wtf. Many of my friends refuse to this day to say the word 'Israel' and call themselves 'Palestinian' only. But since I was 12, that did not make sense to me. So, I decided to mix the two and become a 'Palestinian-Israeli.' I thought this term reflected who I was. Palestinian first. Israeli second. But after recent events, I started to think. And think. And think. And then my thoughts turned to anger. I realized that if Israel were to be 'invaded' like that again, we would not be safe. To a terrorist invading Israel, all citizens are targets.... And I do not want to live under a Palestinian government. Which means I only have one home, even if I'm not Jewish: Israel." — Nuseir Yassin ("Nas Daily"), Israeli Arab blogger, the day after October 8, 2023.
These [Arab Israeli] leaders will do anything to grab the attention of the media – even if that means inciting against Israel. They know that when they deal with the real problems facing their Arab constituents – such as unemployment and poverty – no one will write about them in the media. Yet, when these leaders make fiery statements against Israel, they often win headlines and front-page stories. As far as they are concerned, "I don't care what you write about me as long as you spell my name right."
By engaging in anti-Israel incitement, these Israeli Arab leaders are causing huge damage to their own constituents. These leaders make the Israeli Arabs look as if they are a "Fifth Column" -- an enemy within. These leaders are stoking fear and mistrust between Jews and Arabs inside Israel, while ignoring that most Israeli Arabs say they feel comfortable living in the Jewish state.
If Israeli Arabs want to secure a prosperous future for themselves and their children, they need to get rid of extremist Arab leaders who speak and act against the interests of the Arab community inside Israel. If these Arab leaders are unhappy living in Israel, they are welcome to move to the West Bank, Gaza Strip or any Arab country -- where they will quickly miss Israel's democracy and freedom of speech.
- Thursday, December 26, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
humor, Preoccupied
Check out their Facebook and Substack pages.
Berkeley, December 26 - Jewish households continue in the coming evenings to kindle their octuple lamps with wax or oil in celebration of a rededication to purpose and holiness even amid rampant degradation and hopelessness - but one observer has determined that the ancient Jewish practice in fact marks something far more sinister: the addition of one light each night glorifies, by analogy, the growing number of Palestinian casualties in an ongoing genocide.
Hassan Phipps, 20, made his discovery through logical deduction. "Once you start with the axiom that anything Zionists do is evil, or motivated by evil," the Students for Justice in Palestine campus activist explained, "the truth emerges quickly. Start with the realization that what they do is nefarious and deceitful - so lighting the candles is never the innocent or pure thing they make it out to be - and then the possibilities are limited to the obvious conclusions."
"No one celebrated Hanukkah until the Zionists made it a thing, to establish a fake connection to Palestine," he elaborated, repeating a talking point popular among Palestine propagandists. "They also must have fabricated any ancient sources that talk about it. It's pretty straightforward. So what are they really celebrating? Palestinian deaths, as they always do. It's the only thing that animates them. Nothing else explains Zionist behavior."
Phipps found various details of Hanukkah observance that also bear out the perversity. "The whole dreidel thing - it's not a simple game of chance - it's about plundering Palestine," he asserted. "It was a peaceful place where everyone lived in harmony until the Zionists came and slaughtered everyone so they could take the olive oil. That's why so many Zionists insist on using olive oil, and not just plain candles, to light their menorahs."
"I don't know why people don't see it. It's staring them in the face."
The activist's circle of comrade in social justice have followed similar reasoning in analysis of other aspects of Jewish practice. "Jews stole victimhood from Palestine," stated Palestine Action activist Yusuf Massoud. "They invited the Holocaust to happen so they could have the moral high ground to then do the same thing to Palestinians, and they keep trying to pretend Jews are still in danger when we all know there wouldn't be any danger to Jews if the Jews would just let Muslims have what's rightfully Muslim, which is everything."
Massoud, Phipps, and their comrades refused to hear anything about the ancient sources that mention no such ideas, calling those sources "satanic and Talmudic."
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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- Thursday, December 26, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
The obligatory Maccabeats song.
Plus this medley of Yiddish Chanukah tunes.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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- Thursday, December 26, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
You can't make the Houthis back down, they are not afraidIran will continue to supply its Yemeni proxy with arms and directives to attack Israel until a cease-fire is reached in GazaSo far, Israeli strikes on Houthi military bases and targets in Yemen have not inflicted significant defeats on their leadership. Abdul-Malik al-Houthi and Houthi spokesperson Yahya Saree, in their bizarre, pompous appearances, continue to issue direct threats against the U.S., the UK and especially Israel.Until a full cease-fire is achieved in Gaza, Iran is expected to keep supplying the Houthis not only with weapons and military equipment but also with directives to persist in their attacks on Israel.Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week vowed that the Houthis would pay a heavy price for their attacks. Katz went even further with his threats. Yet Al-Houthi doesn’t seem fazed.The Houthis, as their statements imply, are preparing, recruiting and stay undeterred. Elizabeth Kendall, a leading American expert on Yemen, summed up the situation succinctly: "The biggest dilemma is that it looks impossible to influence the Houthis without military pressure, but it’s hard to see how military pressure can work.”
It is true that long distance Israeli strikes is unlikely to deter the Houthis. They are dedicated jihadists, dedicated antisemites and don't care about their own people but would happily use their suffering to get the world to condemn Israel for any attacks that kill civilians. After all, the Hamas playbook was fond to work quite well.
Worse, they know that they have relatively inexpensive weapons that can reach Israel and defending Israel from them is very expensive.
There are only two ways to deter the Houthis, and they follow the same playbook that worked against Hamas and Hezbollah: Attack their leaders and stop the supply of weapons from Iran.
Attacking the leaders from a distance is a Herculean task. Israel had years of intelligence to lean on when they chose that strategy against Hamas and Hezbollah; it would take time to build the same capacity in Yemen, although you can bet that Israel is working on it. Israel doesn't have years to build that intelligence infrastructure.
Which is why the deterrence must be not against the Houthis but against Iran itself.
Unlike their proxies, Iran has a lot to lose. The reason Iran has been distancing themselves from their proxies is because they don't want to be held responsible for their actions against Israel - in short, they are frightened of an Israeli attack that would cripple Iran's oil exports, the keystone to their economy.
The Houthis can shoot rockets and drones all day as long as Iran supplies them for free. Which is why Iran's economy must be attacked, not Yemen (except for specific strategic targets.)
Anyone could have foreseen that the Houthis would increase their attacks when Israel struck them. Honor/shame demands that. In fact, in some ways Israel's attacks on the Houthis increase their prestige because there is only so much Israel can do; it makes the Houthis look stronger.
But if Iran would tell them to stop attacking, and if Israel (possibly together with the US and European allies) blocks off the path of weapons exports from Iran to Yemen with either threats or with military action against their ports and airports, the Houthi calculus would change. They can act as belligerent as they want but they don't want to run out of arms.
As I've said before, Israel needs to make it publicly clear that it holds Iran responsible for every Houthi rocket and drone attacking Israel, and Iran will pay the price. And Israel must follow through.
That is how to deter the Houthi threat.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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- Thursday, December 26, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
By Forest Rain
The Maccabees’ Sister
Centuries
of living in strange lands led Jews to change the focus of the Chanukah story –
emphasizing the miracle of light and by default, minimizing the war fought and
won against abusive occupiers who stole Jewish freedom.
The oil
that should have lasted one day and lasted eight is not the point of the
Chanukah story – it’s a symbol of what faith and effort can achieve, even
against impossible odds. The real story is that of the war the Maccabees
fought, against the greatest empire at the time, which did everything possible
to stamp out their Judaism, to make the Jews forget their uniqueness and become
“citizens of the world”. There were Jews who were willing to put aside their
identity in hopes of being embraced by the “enlightened” ones, in hopes that
submitting would put a stop to their abuse.
Sound
familiar?
The
story of Chanukah is that of the Maccabees who refused to submit, who clung to
their faith and the dignity of their people, our people, and against impossible
odds – won.
That is
what the oil is – a symbol of the light of our people that should have died out
but thanks to those who clung to their faith and fought against all odds,
didn’t.
The
Maccabees were the warriors who led the revolt but there is a story that is not
often told of the Maccabee who insisted that fighting was necessary. Because
why fight against impossible odds? It’s easier to turn a blind eye and pretend
that you don’t see abuse and oppression.
But
doing so facilitates even greater evils.
Did you know that the Maccabees went to war to protect
their sister and the other women of Israel from RAPE by their oppressor?
It was
Hannah, the Maccabees’ sister who demanded Jewish dignity. Hannah
the Maccabee SPOKE when all others remained silent.
She forced her brothers to look at the ugly reality of
what was happening to the women of Israel and once they saw, they had to act.
According to the midrash, the Jews, then living under
Greek Seleucid rule, had remained silent for three years; three years in which
every woman who married would first be raped by the local Greek governor before
she could enter her husband’s house. This is how the midrash describes it:
“When the Greeks saw that Israel was not affected by their decrees, they stood
and decreed upon them a bitter and ugly decree, that a bride would not go in
[to her husband] on her wedding night, but rather to the local commander” [all
quotes from Midrash Ma’aseh Chanukah “alef,” A Tale of the People’s Resistance
to the Seleucid Greek Occupation].
It is awful to imagine how many women underwent this
violation and humiliation. The midrash tells us that the men of the Hasmonean
family did nothing. And the women of Israel fell victim again and again to the
abuse.
Then came the wedding day of Matityahu the Hasmonean’s
own daughter Hannah. This time, Hannah decided to put an end to the ongoing
atrocity. In the middle of the wedding banquet, while all the distinguished and
important guests were eating and enjoying themselves, she stood up and ripped
off her wedding dress, leaving herself naked in front of her family and
friends.
“And when everyone was sitting down to eat, Ḥannah,
the daughter of Matityahu, stood up from her palanquin and clapped her hands
one on the other and tore off her royal garment and stood before all of Israel,
revealed before her father and her mother and her groom!”
At first, her brothers reacted with anger and shock.
They wanted to kill her for having disgraced them and for shaming the family
and herself.
But she, in turn, scolded them for turning a blind
eye, all the while knowing what awaited her that night at the governor’s
palace. Not one of them had raised a finger, not one had stood up to protect
her dignity. She reprimanded her brothers for being angry at her nakedness in
front of them, even as they remained calm at the thought of her having to go
later that night to the governor who would sexually assault her.
“She said ‘Listen, my brothers and uncles! So what—I
stand naked before you righteous men with no sexual transgression and you get
all incensed?! And you do not become incensed about sending me into the hands
of an uncircumcised man who will abuse me?!’”
She forced them to face up to the bitter truth.
According to the midrash, this was the moment her Maccabee brothers first
raised the flag of rebellion.
The stories of Israel repeat themselves. Then, like
now, once the horror is SEEN, the People of Israel understand that it cannot be
unseen. We must act to change the reality and ensure safety for all of Israel.
On October 7th the People of Israel were forced to see
that we cannot live with monsters on our borders. That it is deadly to pretend
that the monsters don’t exist or want things other than what they openly
declare about themselves. That it doesn’t matter how mighty our enemies are, or
even if the Superpowers of the world tell us we must not defend ourselves. It
is up to us to be Maccabees..
And with strength of spirit, and our warriors, and by
the grace of God, we will win. We have no other choice.
And as we light the Chanukah candles, we thank God for the miracles granted to
our ancestors in those days and in our days.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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