Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, December 29, 2024

12/29 Links: Israel to submit report to UN adviser about Hamas torture of hostages; Nasrallah underestimated Israel’s willingness to assassinate him

From Ian:

Herzog: UN ‘morally obliged’ to help free Hamas hostages

The United Nations is “morally obliged” to help secure the release of the 100 hostages being held by Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said on Sunday.

“Torture. Physical and psychological torture. Starvation. Sexual abuse. Beatings. Branding. Just some of the horrific words that jump off the pages of the Ministry of Health’s submission to the U.N. on the horrific ordeal endured by the hostages at the hands of Hamas terrorist murderers and rapists in Gaza,” said Herzog.

The Israeli Health Ministry will submit a report this week detailing the “torture and atrocities experienced by Israeli hostages since Oct. 7, [2023],” including “abhorrent instances of sexual violence,” to Alice Jill Edwards, the U.N. special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, the Israeli mission to the world body told JNS on Saturday.

The report will include “many testimonies of the hostages who returned from Hamas captivity” and “descriptions of the horrors Hamas terrorists inflicted on the hostages, including sexual abuse, starvation, neglect and humiliation,” the Israeli delegation said.

“These are the testimonies of those who have been released and rescued. But still, for 450 days 100 innocent men, women and children, babies and the elderly, have been held hostage in Gaza. With the winter upon us, their lives are in imminent danger,” said Herzog.

“The U.N. has the facts. It is morally obliged to do everything in its power to bring the hostages home now,” he added.

The report has two parts, the Israeli Health Ministry said.

“The first section details the neglect, abuse, torture and humiliation suffered by the hostages who were released or rescued from captivity in Gaza, as well as the impact of these experiences on their physical and physical and mental condition,” the ministry said.

“The second section of the report discusses rehabilitation models that have been deemed appropriate for the returnees, drawing on data collected from primary care nurses, physicians and mental health professionals who have been providing ongoing care, including through specialized clinics for returnees,” it added.

Uriel Buso, the Israeli health minister, said that the report “is a harrowing testimony to the brutal experiences suffered by the hostages in Hamas captivity—cruel violence, psychological abuse, physical torment and acts that defy comprehension.”

David Collier: BBC News bias – the tale of the three religious leaders

Anti-Israel bias at BBC News runs so deep that most people don’t see more than the tip of the iceberg. And while the Jews (the victims of BBC anti-Jewish racism) have grown tired of making complaints that are always ignored, the racist perpetrators (the elitist British supremacists and their Islamist ex-Al Jazeera buddies at BBC News) have grown so confident in their untouchability – they no longer bother to hide the bias. Anti-Jewish racists inside the BBC are now so embedded, they are trying to hound their Jewish colleagues out of their jobs.

December 23rd provided a perfect example of inexcusable anti-Jewish discrimination. I picked up on it because of a Facebook post by a Jewish Rabbi based in Jerusalem. He had been interviewed by BBC News and was annoyed at how he was treated. I went digging to see if he had cause. And this shocking exclusive is the result – the story of when the Jew, the Muslim and the Christian, were interviewed by BBC News.

A Jew, a Muslim and a Christian walk into a studio…
The starting point was this FB post by Rabbi Gideon Sylvester from Jerusalem. The post stated he had been invited to talk about celebrating Chanukah during wartime but instead had faced hostile political questions.

Rabbi Gideon Sylvester handled himself very well but given the invitation asked him to appear to talk about Chanukah – the tone and questioning of BBC’s Ben Brown seemed seriously out of place (more on this later).

In the opening Ben Brown said that they had already heard ‘from leaders of different faiths including a Christian Reverend, and a Muslim faith leader at the Al Aqsa Mosque.’ This meant that the Rabbi was the third of a set. And this presented a rare opportunity. If I tracked down the other two interviews – then I could compare the manner in which all three interviews were handled. Unlike a standalone article, a direct comparison could be made – and all things being equal – the three interviews should have been handled in a similar fashion.

It took some time because the interviews were spread out over more than three hours of BBC News reports (12:20-15:30 on the 23rd) – but what I found should be enough even for the most sceptical of audiences (uploaded in full to YouTube).

The BBC News bias hidden in plain sight

Before I break down the three interviews, there was bias hidden in plain sight that needs to be addressed. It is true that one leader from each of the three main Abrahamic religions were given a platform. But the interviews were really all about the conflict – not communities. So it wasn’t a Muslim, Christian and Jew being interviewed – it was two Palestinians, and an Israeli.

Palestinian Christian: Reverend Dr Munther Isaac
Palestinian Muslim: Dr. Imam Mustafa Abu Sway
Israeli Jew: Rabbi Gideon Sylvester

Both Munther Isaac and Mustafa Abu Sway are well known activists for the Palestinian cause. Which means the Palestinian voice was given twice as much airtime as the Israeli one. There are Christians who are far more balanced than Munther Isaac. And given there are about 4x as many Christians in Israel, as there are Christians left in the PA areas – it must have been a deliberate choice to run with a Palestinian. You may try to excuse the BBC, arguing that picking a Christian from Bethlehem is a no-brainer – but why is it never a Christian from Nazareth? Is Nazareth not part of the Jesus story?

Make no mistake about it – Israeli Christians in Nazareth have endured a terrible year – not that the BBC would ever tell you about it.

It isn’t difficult to understand. If far more Christians live in Israel – but every single time the BBC speak to a Christian they speak to one from the Palestinian Authority – it cannot be perpetually excused. Israeli Christians are being no platformed by the BBC. These things have become so normalised nobody even notices.

Blame Hamas and Hezbollah for Civilian Deaths, Not Israel

Whether it is using schools, hospitals and other public buildings that are supposed to be afforded immunity in conflict under international law, or simply using Palestinian civilians as human shields, Hamas terrorists have consistently jeopardised the well-being of those they purport to defend.

Another area where Hamas deliberately intensifies the suffering of Palestinian civilians as a means of pressuring Israel to end its military offensive is by denying Palestinian families access to much-needed aid supplies.

When the Gazans, for whom the aid is intended, try to approach it, there have been reports of Hamas operatives shooting them.

If the Biden administration and its allies in the media, the United Nations and the European Union really want to see a peaceful resolution of the conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon, then they should direct their criticism of the wilful mistreatment of civilians towards Hamas and Hezbollah, and their backers, not Israel.

Ending the malign operations of terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah is the best means of ending the conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon respectively, and providing ordinary Palestinians and Lebanese with a genuine opportunity to make a better life for themselves.

A map that proves, yet again, how antisemitic the UN is

Out of all the nations in the Middle East and North Africa, Israel is the only one that has never been elected to a rotation on the UN Security Council.

Must be because of human rights or something.

(h/t Irene)

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Here are the most popular EoZ posts for 2024:

10. Let's compare how much Syrian territory Israel controls with how much Turkey illegally occupies

9. Jews are being bullied out of professions. The days of routine antisemitism are returning to the US.

8. Biden buys a book by contemptible lying Palestinian BDS propagandist Rashid Khalidi, who falsely asserts that Jews and Arabs had no conflict before Zionism

7. Hamas is executing hostages. "Human rights" groups are silent. Because, to them, Jews are less than human.

6. Evidence mounts that the @NYTimes published faked X-ray pictures of bullets in Gaza children (update)

5. It took Hamas 22 months to admit Israel was right in how many terrorists were killed in Operation Cast Lead

4. Lebanon shows us how the world betrayed Gaza by insisting no Palestinians could flee to safety

3. Based on its track record, the US has no business chastising Israel about accidentally killing civilians

2. The evidence to the "massacre" that the @NYTimes believes

1. 88% of the Arab world supports the 10/7 massacre as "a legitimate operation"

The top post by a columnist was:

Dr. Elana Heideman: Our fight against Jew-hatred begins with respect for the Jew (Judean Rose)

The top guest post was:

Calling All Jewish Democrats: It's An Emergency (Guest post)

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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Over the weekend, we saw more proof that the only time the world cares about Palestinian civilians are killed is when there is a way to blame Israel.

The New Arab reports:

A Palestinian journalist was shot and killed outside her family's home in the northern West Bank town of Jenin late Saturday, where Palestinian Authority (PA) security officers, backed by the Israeli military, continued their crackdown on Palestinian resistance fighters.

Shatha al-Sabbagh, 22, was killed by a sniper with the Palestinian security forces while she was with her mother and two small children, her family told The New Arab's Arabic language edition Al-Araby Al-Jadeed.

She added that there were no fighters in the area at the time.

Sabbagh's brother-in-law, Suhaib al-Mura'i, said a sniper stationed inside a nearby house - which was seized by the PA forces and turned into a military post - had fired at her as she left his home with her two small children, her mother and sister.

The Palestinian Authority has been attacking terrorists in Jenin over the past several weeks. They vehemently deny that they had anything to do with her death, instead condemning "outlaws" - meaning Jenin's armed groups - for killing her:

The official spokesman for the Palestinian security forces, Brigadier General Anwar Rajab, condemned in the strongest terms the heinous crime committed by outlaws on Saturday evening in Mahyoub Street inside Jenin camp, which resulted in the killing of journalist Shaza Sabbagh after she was shot in the head, and inflicting severe material damage to a house that was burned and randomly shot at .

Rajab said in a statement issued tonight that according to initial investigations and eyewitness testimonies, security forces were not present at the scene .

Nearly nobody in the Arabic media is believing the PA's claims. However, al-Sabbagh's family is not exactly impartial.

Her brother, Moatasem al-Sabbagh, was a Hamas Qassam Brigades terrorist who was killed by Israel last year as he was holed up in a house protecting Abdul Fattah Kharousha, the Hamas terrorist who murdered brothers Hallel and Yagel Yaniv in Huwara. The mother of the siblings expressed joy at the death of her son Moatasem, saying how proud she was of him and how he is going to Paradise while the Jews go to hell.

This is a big story in Palestinian media, with each news site following their own politics in how they report it and who they blame for her death.

But the international media has shown little interest in the story of an attractive, young journalist and student being executed with a gunshot to her head.

As always, it isn't that they care about innocent Palestinians being killed. They clearly don't. The world's media are only looking for reasons to condemn Israel.

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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

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The EoZ Chanukah Music Video: Al Hanissim

Music generated by AI but I had to massage it a bit.

Lyrics are a shortened version of this prayer addition during the holiday: It is thanking God for the miracles He does for us, and the video I made for the song is in appreciation for the miraculous events during the current conflicts.

I hope you enjoy it!

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

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12/28 Links: Palestinianism is violence against Jewish indigenousness in Israel; Why Israel’s Self-Defense Infuriates Europe; Why Benjamin Netanyahu Must Go to Poland

From Ian:

Palestinianism is violence against Jewish indigenousness in Israel

Over the past 15 years, and especially since the atrocities of October 7, annihilationist Palestinianism has become the rave in some “progressive” circles, especially among hard-left rioters on Western campuses.

This means dismissal of Jewish/Zionist rootedness in the Land of Israel and adoption of the Palestinian campaign to delegitimize and destroy Israel.

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

Palestinianism is an ideology and an identity invented by the KGB and advanced by Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas ever since he rejected John Kerry’s 2014 peace initiative. It makes conflict in the Land of Israel a zero-sum game.

It fabricates Palestinian inhabitance of Israel going back to the Canaanites and Philistines of the Bible; it inverts Arab rejection and invasion of young Israel in 1948 and the expulsion of Jews from Arab lands by claiming a Palestinian “Nakba”; it turns the Temple Mount into al-Haram al-Sharif (The Noble Sanctuary), denying any Jewish history in Jerusalem and the Land of Israel; and it converts genocidal assaults on the People of Israel, like Hamas’s Simchat Torah attack, into heroic acts that must be celebrated by all freedom seekers.

Palestinianism leads to antisemitism
In short, Palestinianism is violence against Israeli/Jewish indigenousness in Israel. It savages the core identity of Jews and Israelis. It is offensive to deny the most basic building blocks of Jewish connection to Jerusalem and Israel.

It seeks to strip justice and authenticity from Israel’s very existence and to upend its alliance with the human-rights-supporting, democratic world.

And as we have seen over the past year, it directly leads to violent antisemitic battering of Jews and Jewish institutions worldwide.

We got a whiff of what was coming back in 2018 when UNESCO passed – davka on Hanukkah – a series of nonsensical resolutions (proposed by Abbas), declaring Jerusalem an exclusively Muslim heritage city and criminalizing Israel’s custodianship of the holy city.

Most European nations, those great paragons of “peace” and “love” for Jews, went along with that affront, either voting for or abstaining on the denialist resolutions. Then, they doubled down on such perfidy by adopting a similar resolution in the UN General Assembly in 2021.

Then-US ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, responded to the UN disgrace by tweeting that “More than 2,000 years ago, Jewish patriots (Maccabees) captured Jerusalem, purified the Holy Temple, and rededicated it as a house of Jewish worship. The UN can’t vote away the facts: Jerusalem is the ancient and modern capital of Israel. Happy Hanukkah from this blessed city!”

Alas, the gangs rampaging today against Jews and Israelis in the streets of Berlin, London, Montreal, and Sydney have swallowed every bit of Abbas’s bile about exclusive Arab rights to Israel.

They ignore the fact that Abbas’s gangs have destroyed Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus, sought to destroy Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem, have run Christians out of Bethlehem, and have wantonly dug up and destroyed thousands of years of Jewish archeological treasures on the Temple Mount.

Why Israel’s Self-Defense Infuriates Europe

Drawing on the ideas of the French philosopher Pierre Manent, Richard Reinsch II examines why the Jewish state’s battle for survival has provoked such extreme, even unhinged, opposition in the West—from the polite, moralistic condemnations of heads of state to the fury of street protesters.

The proud nation-state [of] Israel represents the opposite lesson of what European humanitarians have drawn from the history of Jews in modern times. Israel has been built by struggle, sacrifice, and pride. The near destruction of the Jewish people by Hitler’s Germany is frequently invoked as the founding impetus for the unifying goals of the European Union. The villain in the EU’s political narrative of unity is the nation, the so-called springboard of naked aggression and warmongering on behalf of the superiority of a people. Brussels promises to bring this to an end with the promise of endless union and unification of peoples.

Israel’s defense of its collective existence could portend not only the defeat of its enemies but also remind a deeply confused and morally troubled West that it cannot hide behind humanity and escape from itself. In a recent lecture in Paris, Manent poignantly offered that a Europe that turns its back on Israel forfeits its soul.

Why Benjamin Netanyahu Must Go to Poland

Every enemy of the West has tried to bring Israel down, but Israel has done what others were too afraid to do. Hamas is crippled. Hezbollah is reeling. Assad’s Syria has collapsed into irrelevance. And the Houthis, along with their Iranian backers, are next. Israel is fighting the battles the West refuses to fight, defending not just itself but the values and security of the free world.

The United States has long opposed the ICC’s outrageous overreach and its obsession with targeting Israel. That opposition must not waver now. This is not just an attack on Israel — it is an attack on the moral foundations of America’s closest ally and, by extension, on America itself.

To allow Benjamin Netanyahu — the elected leader of the Jewish state — to be barred from a Holocaust memorial is to embolden those who seek to delegitimize Israel and the West. Now is the time to act. Diplomatic channels must be mobilized immediately to ensure Netanyahu can attend this memorial unimpeded and unmolested. To do anything less is to send a message that antisemitic agendas dressed up as international law can go unchallenged — and that message must never be sent.

If Netanyahu does not attend, history will record a disgraceful spectacle — the leader of the Jewish state, the only Jewish country in the world, absent from Auschwitz while nations that turned their backs on the Jews, or worse, actively aided their murder, take center stage with sanctimonious speeches and hollow gestures. The optics are not just nauseating — they are a betrayal of memory and truth.

Prime Minister Netanyahu, ignore the threats. Defy the antisemitism masquerading as justice. Show the world that Jews will never again be humiliated — not by violence, not by persecution, and certainly not by the hypocrisy of international institutions hiding behind the veil of legality. Let your presence at Auschwitz declare that the Jewish people have endured, they have survived, they have rebuilt — and they will never be erased.

Light the menorah. Be Judah Maccabee — bold, unyielding, and fearless. The Jewish people — and history — demand nothing less.

Chanukah music video night 4: Di Chanukah Licht - Motty Ilowitz & Shir V’shevach plus Hila Ben David - "Arise, wake up!"

This year the Yiddish speaking community has created a number of videos.

And for something completely different than that....

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

12/27 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: The real message of Chanukah; Europe’s blindspot over antisemitism; Mila Kunis reflects on her USSR-repressed Judaism

From Ian:

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.

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.

Aviva Klompas: Jew hatred is not just a Jewish problem. It's a Canadian problem

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.

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.

Centenarian Jewish D-Day veteran ‘doubts’ sacrifice was worth it

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.”

12/27 Links Pt1: How the international community funds the Hamas war machine; The Truth About That Famine Report; Holocaust survivor murdered in terror stabbing attack

From Ian:

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.

“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.”

Seth Mandel: It’s Against the Rules to Win

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.

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.

Brendan O'Neill: This year, Israel showed us what anti-fascism really means

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.

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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Newest Hamas lie: "Israel burned a hospital." The media repeats the lies without question.

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)

Trump declared Houthis to be terrorists. Within weeks, Biden reversed it. 3 years later, Biden partly restored it. There's a lesson here.

On January 10, 2021, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement:

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)

This morning in Herzliya., a Palestinian man stabbed an 83-year old woman, Ludmila Lipovsky, to death. She was waiting outside her assisted living facility for her daughter to take her to a doctor.

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.

Hamas-linked Felesteen Online's headline is "A settler was killed in a heroic stabbing operation near Tel Aviv" calling the victim a "Zionist settler" and not mentioning that she is a woman.

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?

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Here's a heartwarming video of a teacher returning to the classroom after her reserve duty in the IDF. Her adoring students all embrace her.

But look at her students!

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?