Thursday, January 02, 2025

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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London, January 2 - Supporters of the Palestinian cause who take fabricated reports of Israel targeting innocents at face value, resulting in what they claim to be hundreds of thousands of deaths, and who therefore demand that the international community act to aid the helpless Palestinians, simultaneously believe that the Palestinian militant group fighting against Israel kills Israeli soldiers at will and has sent them packing not just from battlefield after battlefield in Gaza, but from Israel itself.

"Stop the Genocide!" and "Victory is imminent from the River to the Sea!" cries emerge concurrently from the same quarters the world over, as activists struggle to decide on which message will resonate with the target audience: Hamas prowess or Palestinian victimhood. They therefore proclaim the slogans of both axioms.

The cognitive dissonance necessary to engage in both rhetorical avenues appears not to trouble those who engage in both lines of argument at the same time, observers say. "Hamas is this powerful military force that can strike the deepest fear in Zionist soldiers," noted journalist Hoyt Petard. "At the same time, every single Gazan is a journalist doctor humanitarian aid worker pregnant child woman. So who's killing all the Zionists?"

"What are the Zionists fleeing from?" wondered Dilly Hussein, a keyboard activist. "We have all these credible reports of Israelis crowding the airports to leave because of October 7 and rocket attacks and the Resistance, but of course there are no acts of violence by Palestinians, who are totally innocent and blameless. Do the glorious rockets exist? Only if you think you're talking to people who can either be intimidated or already want to back a strong horse. Otherwise, the rockets are either a desperate response to oppression which somehow succeed in striking enough terror into Jews to make large number of them level, but not enough terror to get them to stop the genocide."

A puzzled Hussein appeared stunned into silence by a reporter's suggestion that mighty Hamas do something to protect Gazans from the Israeli onslaught, the death toll from which ranges from somewhere around 40,000 - about half of them Hamas or affiliated men, according to IDF sources - to in the hundreds of thousands, as some activists seem to want.

After several moments, Hussein responded. "Since when is it an elected government's responsibility to provide for and protect its people?" he demanded. "What universe do you even live in that that's an expectation?"



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  • Thursday, January 02, 2025
  • Elder of Ziyon


Yes, we know that he praised October 7. Yes, he's compared Israel to Nazis and teaches that comparison to his students.   Yes, he espouses the discredited and antisemitic Khazar theory that Jews aren't really Jews. 

But that's when Joseph Massad is speaking to a Western audience and he doesn't want to look like a Jew-hater in public. He always skated right up to the line where he could claim that he was only talking about Zionists or something.

But in an interview last March with a Pakistani podcaster, Massad drops any pretense. 

He starts off by asserting lots of things that are simply not true, which is a pattern we've seen from him before.
Zionism of course begins perhaps in its earliest manifestations in the Crusades of the 11th century. After all it was the Crusades who began to also refer to Palestine as the holy land and the idea at the time was that uh you know and the major sort of papal announcement of the Crusades, the idea was that Palestine had to be cleansed of um its uh both Muslim and non-Catholic occupiers.
This is not only false but insane. Massad is defining Zionism as "ethnically cleansing Palestine" so therefore the Crusaders, who murdered tens of thousands of Jews, must have been Zionists. 

Saying that the Crusaders coined the term "the Holy Land" is also wrong. The Vulgate Book of Wisdom (1st century BCE or CE)  explicitly calls the Land of Israel "terra sanctae," the Holy Land. At the time it was not a typically Hebrew phrase which would call it "the Promised Land." 

The holiness of the land was never in question for Jews, though - there are many laws from the Torah and elucidated in the Talmud that only apply within the borders of the Promised Land, the reason being precisely because of its sanctity.

Massad is an ignoramus whose view of history is colored exclusively by his hate for Jews. 

He goes on:
Remember Judaism had been a missionary religion since its inception and continued to be so through another of the early part of the 11th 12th and 13th centuries and in that sense the idea that European Jews are somehow direct descendants of the ancient Hebrews is of course a bogus  claim...
The Talmud quotes a Baraita (2nd-3rd centuries CE) that explicitly says to discourage converts to Judaism. The rabbis are instructed to tell the would-be convert, "What did you see that motivated you to come to convert? Don’t you know that the Jewish people at the present time are anguished, suppressed, despised, and harassed, and hardships are frequently visited upon them? "

Does this sound like missionary religion to you? 

Again, in his zeal to demonize Jews, Massad makes up history.
What is special here about Zionism is not only the invention of Ancient Israel and the invention of Jews as descendants of the Ancient Hebrews – it is almost like a Hitlerian project to speak of Jews genetically in this fashion. It only becomes fashionable, of course, in the 19th century, with the rise of racial science and the biological sciences.
So tracing your origins is now "Hitlerian?"  

How about the Muslims who use the title "Sayyed" to indicate that they are direct descendants of Mohammed - are they Hitlerian too? Or the many Palestinians who proudly trace their origins to the Arabian Peninsula, preferably Mecca and Medina, but many from Yemen, and who keep track of all their families and tribes - are they "Hitlerian"? 

Or is that term only to be used for the people who were the victims of Hitler, not the people who want to continue Hitler's goal of exterminating the Jews?

Massad is no scholar. He is a professor who uses the trappings of scholarship to promote antisemitic propaganda.

(h/t MEMRI)




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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

   
 

 

  • Thursday, January 02, 2025
  • Elder of Ziyon


Hezbollah used to publicly announce and celebrate all of its "martyrs." As of September 23, it said that it had lost 513 members, and as of that point the vast majority of deaths in Lebanon had been terrorist group members.

Since then, when Israel escalated its air and then limited ground campaign against Hezbollah, the group stopped admitting any deaths besides prominent leaders. Instead, it adopted the Hamas model of pushing a narrative of Israel killing nobody but civilians. 

Lebanon has announced 3,402 deaths between September 15 and the ceasefire on November 27. How many of those were terrorists?

L'Orient le Jour attempted to find out.

A Syrian researcher with the nom de plume of Qalaat al-Mudiq has been scouring Facebook to count the number of funerals held in southern Lebanon for Hezbollah fighters. So far, they count 1,742 Hezbollah members killed in that timeframe plus 80 members of other militant groups. However, they note that this is a conservative estimate: 
"Fighters whose affiliation with Hezbollah was unclear were excluded, making this a conservative estimate,” they explained.

They added, “The analysis indicates that Hezbollah has lost an average of nearly 20 fighters per day since Sept. 23, particularly Syrian war veterans and young reservists. The actual number is likely higher, exceeding 30 per day based on our monitoring, but we lacked the resources to verify all cases.”
If the number is 31 per day for those 65 days, then  at least 2,015 terrorists were killed - about a 1.4 to 1 ratio of terrorists to civilians. 

Lebanon says that 1,040 women and children were killed in that time period.

One other detail to note from the article is how many foreign forces allied to Hezbollah have been killed:
Although not exhaustive, L’Orient-Le Jour identified several dozen foreign combatants likely killed in Lebanon, despite Hezbollah's denial of deploying external forces.

Among them are five Yemeni fighters affiliated with Ansar Allah, the official name of the Houthi rebels, six Syrians associated with Hezbollah in Syria and Islamic jihad. Additionally, two Iraqis from Kata'ib Hezbollah, one Iranian from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and one Saudi member of the Saudi branch of Hezbollah have been documented. Various Palestinian factions present in Lebanon have also suffered losses.
At the moment, it appears that the ratio of militants to civilians killed exceeds 1.4 to 1; if you include all deaths since October 7 in Lebanon the ratio is closer to 1.9 to 1.

These numbers aren't perfect. A few dozen have been killed since the ceasefire, the total militant count includes about 40 Hezbollah members killed in Syria, and bodies are still being found in the rubble. But it seems pretty clear that this is an exceptional result for urban warfare and that Israel's warnings to civilians to leave areas saved thousands of lives that could have been lost if any other army was fighting under similar circumstances. 



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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

   
 

 

  • Thursday, January 02, 2025
  • Elder of Ziyon
The spokesman for Islamic Jihad's Al Quds Brigades attacked the families of hostages today by claiming, that one hostage who would have been released in the first round of a deal attempted suicide.

The statement said " the medical team succeeded in saving the prisoner's life after he attempted suicide due to his psychological state that deteriorated as a result of the Netanyahu government's decision, which set new conditions that led to the failure and delay of negotiations for his release."

The transparent lie is meant to cause pain to the suffering families of hostages and to use them to protest against the Israeli government, ultimately to allow a deal that will keep the terrorists in charge of Gaza.

The lie becomes obvious when we look at previous claims by Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

In a strikingly similar announcement in May, Hamas said “We rescued, a few days ago, in the final moments, one of the enemy's prisoners after he attempted suicide in his place of captivity. We hold the enemy and (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu personally responsible for the deteriorating physical and mental health of some of the enemy's prisoners.”

In July,  Islamic Jihad said, "Some enemy prisoners have attempted suicide as a result of the extreme frustration they are feeling due to their government's neglect of their cause." They also claimed that they started treating the prisoners the same as Israel treats their prisoners, resulting in the suicide attempts.

In all the cases the reasons given for the supposed suicide attempts happens to align with the political goals of the terror groups. Of course, they show no evidence that any of it is true.

Besides their cruelty, this is the definition of terrorism - they intend to terrorize the Israeli civilian population, desperate for any crumb of news about the hostages, for political ends.





Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

   
 

 

  • Thursday, January 02, 2025
  • Elder of Ziyon
One would think that the Jewish Voice for Peace Rabbinical Council would know at least a little bit about Judaism. Unfortunately, they are nearly as ignorant as the JVP members who celebrate Havdalah while the sun is out and say kaddish for dead terrorists.

For the last day of Chanukah, JVP's rabbis engage in a little revisionism of two millennia of rabbinic writings. 
Mai Hanukkah – “What is Hanukkah?” asked the rabbis of the Talmud. In answer to their own rhetorical question, they chose not to tell the story of the Maccabean victory over the Seleucid empire in 160 BCE. Rather, they offered the famous story of the rededication of the Temple and the miracle of the oil that burned for eight days. For the rabbis, the oil of the menorah symbolized hope and faith in the face of overwhelming odds, not the spoils of war. 
The phrase "Mai Chanukah" in the Talmud (Shabbat 21b) comes after a discussion of the mitzvah of lighting the menorah - including the famous argument between Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai on the number of candles to be lit each night. It is not the introduction to the topic. Which means that the phrase "Mai Chanukah" is asking what is the reason for the lighting of the candles, not what Chanukah is about.

The answer mentioning the cruse of oil also notes the military victory: "When the Hasmonean monarchy overcame them and emerged victorious over them, they searched and found only one cruse of oil..."

But JVP then says that celebrating the military victory is a Zionist invention that Jews didn't consider before the 19th century.
This inspiring sacred message of Hanukkah lasted centuries, until it was subverted and overturned by political Zionism.

Tragically, the Zionist movement chose to put its faith in human power and national territorial sovereignty, seeking to create a “Third Jewish Commonwealth” in historic Palestine. In so doing, it forged a wholly new Jewish identity: an internalization and inversion of European antisemitic themes of Jewish feebleness. This ideal prioritized physical strength and militarism, and was often exemplified by the revival of the Maccabees as Jewish heroes, forsaking the miracle of the oil for a focus on violent militarism. 
Al Hanissim in 1642 siddur

Wow. The authors  of the Al Hanissim prayer (found in prayerbooks from the 9th century) who spelled out the miracles of Chanukah didn't know that. The prayer thanks God for the military victory - and doesn't mention the miracle of the oil at all!

Zionists!

Similarly, Maimonides (Rambam) in his Mishneh Torah (12th century) discusses the military victory before the miracle of the oil. (The 17th century Pri Chadash explains that, according to the Rambam, the first day of the celebration was instituted in appreciation of the military victories, and the remaining days to commemorate the miracle of the oil. This is one of hundreds of answers to the age-old question of why Chanukah is eight days long, not seven.)

"HaNeirot Halalu" from a
1684 prayerbook

The song sung during the lighting of the candles, HaNeitor Halalu,  which is centuries old, also calls out the military victory.

It is true that early Zionists emphasized the military victory and downplayed the miracle of the oil. That was a fairly temporary phenomenon. But the JVP "rabbis" are truly the modern Hellenists, doing everything they can to replace Jewish concepts like celebrating God's help in a military victory of the "few against the many"  with their own false gods of anti-Zionism and the pretense of caring about human rights. 

And to justify their Jewishly indefensible position, they have no problem twisting and rewriting 2,000 years of Jewish history. 









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

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Wednesday, January 01, 2025

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The truth of the Palestinian cause
The only proper response is to call out these Palestinian lies. But instead of regarding them as a collective psychopathology, politicians and media stoke the flames of Jew-hatred by themselves parroting the propaganda about Israel behaving unconscionably.

Left-wing governments that ideologically support the Palestinian cause and also kowtow to Muslim constituencies in which Jew-hatred is rife, shockingly recycle the lies about Israel. The worst offenders have been the governments in Britain, Australia and Canada. No surprise, therefore, that Jew-hatred in those countries is now so brazen, pervasive and extreme.

Alas, too many Jews are also part of this madness. They support the Palestinian Arab cause out of a misplaced sense of fairness, a craving for fashionable approval or extreme ignorance about Jewish and Middle East history. So instead of calling out genocidal acts and fabricated claims of Palestinian Arabs, these co-called “moderate” Jews redouble support for a “two-state solution” as a response to exterminatory aggression.

Jew-hatred has not only been normalised. It’s been rebranded as social justice because support for Palestinianism, which seeks to write the Jews out of their country, their history, and the world, is what now passes for a moral sense among swathes of the public, the entire intelligentsia and even — heaven help us — many Jews.

Let’s not hear any protests that you were once a member of Habonim or have a holiday home in Herzliya or have had to unfriend former chums on Facebook because they’ve callously ignored the Israeli hostages. If you support the Palestinian Arab cause today, you are facilitating deranged and murderous Jew-hatred. Own it.
What Does “Globalize the Intifada” Mean and How Can it Lead to Targeting Jews with Violence?
Since Hamas’ massacres against Israelis on October 7 and Israel’s following attempts to free hostages and eliminate the threat posed by Hamas, Jewish individuals, synagogues, and cultural institutions have been the target of violence in the name of protests against Israel. These are in addition to anti-Israel protesters targeting corporations that do business with Israel.

A social media post from the anti-Israel group Within Our Lifetime, a self-described Palestinian-led community organization, was headlined with the phrase “Globalize the Intifada” and had examples of Israeli and U.S. companies and transit hubs, the locations included The New York Times, Penn Station, Grand Central Station, the BlackRock investment firm, and the Israeli tech company Check Point.

“Each of the locations on this map reflects the location of an office of an enemy of both the Palestinian people and colonized people all over the world. Today and beyond, these locations will be sites for popular mobilization in defense of our people,” the group wrote.

“May this map serve as a call for every struggle to act in their own interest,” the group said in its call to action. “As we do so, we uplift one another’s struggles and free Palestine from the river to the sea.”

Everything you need to know about this antisemitic term.

AJC CEO Ted Deutch said: “This is not promoting peace. This is an incitement to violence against Jews and it must be taken seriously.”

That map was one of several posted by the group, which has supported the October 7 Hamas massacre as “whatever means necessary it takes” to achieve Palestinian liberation and has held numerous street protests denouncing Israel.

Other posts displayed additional maps with pins showing the locations of several Jewish and Jewish-led organizations.

If the New York mapping strategy feels familiar, it should.

In June 2022, an anti-Israel campaign dubbed the “Boston Mapping Project.” claiming to show the ties between various Massachusetts institutions and “support for the colonization of Palestine,” raised alarms over its dangerous targeting of the Jewish community. The map put a target on the backs of Jews who were already feeling highly concerned about their safety.

The Massachusetts map, published by anonymous supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, was promoted by anti-Israel groups such as Boston BDS and Massachusetts Peace Action
Jesus was Palestinian? That really would be a miracle
Grylls subsequently removed the reference to Mary being Palestinian and clarified his position, saying she was “clearly Jewish”. So why call her Palestinian in the first place?

After more than a year of pro-Palestinians telling Jews that their historical and biblical links to Israel were irrelevant (in an attempt to delegitimise the Jewish state) it turns out that historical and biblical links really are important, so long as they don’t involve Jews. Now Jesus is Palestinian, the theory goes, it’s completely fine to argue that “some” of those who inhabited the region 2,000 years ago do have a claim on the land after all. Placards at marches read “Jesus is Palestinian” or “Jesus, the most famous Palestinian”.

There is, of course, a deeper precedent for this, in that Jesus’ Jewishness has been played down since the third century, when Christianity proliferated into Roman society. Then, even more so when his death became an excuse for anti-Semitism in the Middle Ages. In that sense, this attempt to politicise him is nothing new. There was also a certain German group you may have heard of from the 1930s and 40s who were very keen to eliminate any link between Jesus and his Jewish identity. It’s in this long, troubled context that we should see the potential harm this idea possesses.

There have been nativity scenes with the baby Jesus wrapped in a Palestinian keffiyeh across UK and US towns recently, following the “Nativity in the rubble” concept that began in Bethlehem, along with assertions that he was born in “occupied Palestine”. This concept hit the jackpot when it appeared in the Vatican in a scene blessed by Pope Francis himself (although it was later removed following criticism that it portrayed Palestinians uniquely as the victims).

If you leave aside the theological and historical absurdity – equating a Jewish man from 2000 years ago with a political identity that didn’t exist – this is the nub of the problem. It promotes the idea that Jews are systematic baby killers. This is the sort of thing that is screamed at elderly people on the streets of London, Glasgow and Brighton. That’s not something Jesus would have approved of. He was Jewish, after all.

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

Jimmy Carter died, but few Jews mourn him. Carter’s animus toward the Jewish people is by now, legendary. Elder of Ziyon offered an overview Carter’s overt Jew-hatred in Jimmy Carter, antisemite. Saving the worst for last, Elder detailed Jimmy Carter’s plea for leniency for Martin Bartesch, a former SS guard at the Mauthausen work camp during WWII:

The single most damning example of Carter's antisemitism comes from an incident in 1987.

Neal Sher was the head of the Office of Special Investigations, the Justice Department’s Nazi prosecution unit. They had iron-clad evidence that a Chicago resident, Martin Bartesch, a member of the SS Death’s Head Division at the Mauthausen concentration camp, was a war criminal and a murderer.

Bartesch's family started a huge campaign against the OSI, writing letters to members of Congress and other prominent people asking for help. Most politicians contacted the OSI to find out the details, OSI provided them with evidence of his guilt, and they would drop the matter.

But, Sher says, not Jimmy Carter.


During a 2007 Israel National Radio interview, Neal Sher went into some detail about a letter he received from Carter (emphasis added):

“In 1987, Carter had been out of office for seven years or so,” Sher recalled. “It was a very active period for my office. We had just barred Kurt Waldheim – he was then president of Austria and former head of the United Nations – from entering the U.S. because of his Nazi past and his involvement in the persecution of civilians during the war. We had just deported an Estonian Nazi Commandant back to the Soviet Union after a bruising battle after which we were attacked by Reagan White House Communications Director Patrick Buchanan.

“Also around that time, in the spring of 1987, we deported a series of SS guards from concentration camps, whose names nobody would know. One such character we sent back to Austria was a man named Martin Bartesch.

“We had an extraordinary piece of evidence against him – a book that was kept by the SS and captured by the American armed forces when they liberated Mauthausen,” Sher said. “We called it the death book. It was a roster that the Germans required them to keep that identified SS guards as they extended weapons to murder the inmates and prisoners.

“We kicked him out and he went back to Austria. In the meantime, his family – he had adult kids – went on a campaign, also supported by his church, to try to get special treatment. In so doing they attacked the activities of our office and me personally. They claimed we used phony evidence from the Soviet Union – which was nonsense. They claimed he was a young man of only 17 or 18 when he joined the Nazi forces, asking for some sympathetic treatment and defense from our office, which they claimed was just after vengeance.”

The family approached several members of Congress. “The congressmen would, very understandably, forward their claims over to our office and when they learned the facts they would invariably drop the case,” Sher recalled.

“One day, in the fall of ’87, my secretary walks in and gives me a letter with a Georgia return address reading ‘Jimmy Carter.’ I assumed it was a prank from some old college buddies, but it wasn’t. It was the original copy of the letter Bartesch’s daughter sent to Carter, after Bartesch had already been deported.

“In the letter, she claimed we were un-American, only after vengeance, and persecuting a man for what he did when he was only 17 and 18 years old.

“I couldn’t help thinking of my own father who returned home with shrapnel wounds after he joined the U.S. Army as a teenager to fight the Nazis and hit the beaches at Normandy at that same age on D-day.

“On the upper corner of the letter was a note signed by Jimmy Carter saying that in cases such as this, he wanted ‘special consideration for the family for humanitarian reasons.’

“I didn’t respond to the letter – the case was already over and he was out of the country – but it always stuck in my craw. A former president who didn’t do what I would expect him to do - with a full staff at his disposal – to find out the facts before he took up the side of this person. But I wasn’t going to pick a fight with a former president. We had enough on our plate.”

“It always bothered me, but I didn’t go public with it until recently, when he wrote this book [Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid V.E.] and let it spill out where his sentiments really lie,” Sher said. “Here was Jimmy Carter jumping in on behalf of someone who did not deserve in any way, shape or form special consideration. And the things he has now said about the Jewish lobby really exposes where his heart really lies.”



As Sher states, the family of Martin Bartesch, launched a letter-writing campaign on his behalf. At that time, in 1987, the Washington Post saw fit to print Heinz Bartesch’s defense of his Nazi father:

'FALSE ALLEGATIONS' ABOUT MARTIN BARTESCH

Over the past several weeks The Post has carried the story of the Office of Special Investigations' prosecution of my father, Martin Bartesch. The misquotes and false allegations have been so great that what most Americans now know is a gross distortion of the truth and equals the disinformation campaigns of the KGB. Some of the falsehoods that have appeared in print:

It is alleged that Martin Bartesch lied on his immigration form. He didn't lie -- his immigration form clearly states his service in the S.S. in 1943-45. He did serve in the Prinz Eugene division. His only oversight was to not list his duty as guard at Mauthausen for three weeks. A questionable oversight, not a lie.

It is alleged that my father fled the country to avoid prosecution. He didn't flee but left as a free man with a valid U.S. passport, with full knowledge and consent from the government. He left willfully to avoid financial ruin from a trial which, under the Holtzman Amendment, would have been grossly unfair and therefore impossible to win.

It is alleged that he is accused of murder. As a guard, his duty was to shoot at escaping prisoners. He shot an escaping convicted felon. The Wehrmacht penal code clearly stated that failure to perform duties would result in execution. This is exactly the command that the American GIs had who did shoot and did kill escaping Japanese from our internment camps.

It is alleged that my father assisted in the persecution of the Jews. His only guard duties before fighting on the Russian front were at labor camps that contained prisoners of war, resistance fighters and convicted felons. It is a known fact that the subcamps where my father was stationed had very few Jews and no women and children. Most of the deaths at Mauthausen occurred at the end of the war, long after my father left in October 1943.

Martin Bartesch committed no war crimes -- the OSI knows this. The complaint against him never even mentioned any war crimes. Again, his only "crime" was a questionable immigration infraction.

These are not all, but certainly the biggest of the falsehoods presented in my father's case. What the OSI did to my father was unfair, cruel, immoral and very un-American. It is appalling that the media acted as a free public relations vehicle for the OSI to spread its lies. HEINZ H. BARTESCH Corte Madera, Calif.

Was Heinz Bartesch being honest when he claimed that Martin Bartesch didn’t lie on his immigration form—that he simply forgot to write that he was a guard at Mauthausen? Put simply: no. When Bartesch was deposed in 1986, he refused to answer questions about what he did during the war pleading the Fifth on the grounds that he feared foreign prosecution. This suggests that Bartesch intentionally omitted the same key information on his immigration form.

Bartesch wasn’t talking then. He sure wasn’t going to talk in 1986, when the US government—with darned good reason—was after him.

At that point, the US government took Bartesch to court, asking that he be compelled to provide answers to their questions. The court did so, noting that the deposition and Bartesch’s responses would be sealed to protect him from prosecution outside of the US.

From United States v. Bartesch (1986) (emphasis added):

*428 I. FACTS

The government filed this denaturalization action against the defendant Martin Bartesch on April 7, 1986. The government alleges that the defendant misrepresented his activities during World War II when he applied for and obtained immigration to, and citizenship in, the United States. As an alternative ground for denaturalization, the government alleges that the defendant acquiesced and personally assisted in persecution and conduct contrary to civilization and human decency on behalf of Nazi Germany during wartime. The wartime activities occurred during defendant's service as a concentration camp guard in the Totenkopf-Sturmbann (Death's Head Battalion) at the Mauthausen concentration camp system in Austria.

During his deposition conducted on June 2 and 3, 1986, defendant, on advice of counsel, asserted a Fifth Amendment privilege and refused to answer questions concerning his whereabouts and activities between July 1, 1943 and August 25, 1945. In addition, he refused to answer questions regarding his efforts to immigrate and obtain United States citizenship. Defense counsel stated that the invocation of the Fifth Amendment was not based on the possibility of prosecution in the United States, but rather on the possibility of prosecution in West Germany, Austria, or Romania.

Relying on his Fifth Amendment privilege, defendant refused to answer questions such as: (1) whether (during the period between July 1, 1943 and August 25, 1945) he had ever been at Mauthausen or any concentration camp; (2) whether he belonged to a Totenkopf-Sturmbann; or (3) whether he performed military service. With respect to his immigration and naturalization, defendant refused to answer whether he intentionally had provided false information to United States officials and whether sworn immigration documents placing him in the SS combat division "Prinz Eugen" were correct. These questions are some examples of the questions which defendant refused to answer in his deposition.

Defendant did answer "no" to the following questions: (1) whether he had ever mistreated, shot, or killed a prisoner; (2) fired a weapon; (3) touched a prisoner; and (4) was ever present at a hanging. Defendant's answer to the complaint, filed on June 13, 1986, took a similar approach. In all, defendant invoked the Fifth Amendment in response to 21 paragraphs of the complaint (paragraphs 7, 9-11, 14-15, 18, 22, 36, 42, 48, 53, 55-58, 65, 70, 75-76, 79).

Also among the falsehoods in the letter the Washington Post saw fit to print, Heinz Bartesch claimed that his father had nothing to do with the “persecution of the Jews.” Furthermore, wrote Heinz, there were “very few Jews” at places like Mauthausen. This too, is a lie.

From Yad Vashem (emphases added):

In May 1944, Mauthausen admitted large transports of Jews from Auschwitz. The number of Jews who died in Mauthausen that year topped 3,000. Many groups of Poles also arrived in Mauthausen in 1944, after the Warsaw Polish Uprising was suppressed, in October 1944. Many Polish students and underground members were killed soon after they arrived.

Almost 25,000 new prisoners came to Mauthausen in 1945, including a stream of Jewish prisoners from Hungary who had been previously interned in camps along the Austrian-Hungarian border, and forced to build a line of fortifications. As the battlefront drew closer, their camps were emptied out and the prisoners were marched on foot to Mauthausen. Many died en route.

The Jews interned in Mauthausen were treated much worse than the other prisoners. They were forced to dig tunnels at the sub-camps for underground ammunition factories and were expected to do so at an unbearably fast pace. After a month or so, the Jewish workers were so physically broken and exhausted they could hardly move.

On May 3, 1945, a police unit from Vienna took over the camp's security. The next day, all work stopped at the camp and the SS officers left. On May 5, American troops arrived and liberated the camp. Altogether, 199,404 prisoners passed through Mauthausen. Approximately 119,000 of them, including 38,120 Jews, were killed or died from the harsh conditions, exhaustion, malnourishment and overwork. Furthermore, the sick, weak and "undesirable" prisoners were taken to the nearby Hartheim Castle to be exterminated in the gas chamber during the periods of August 1941 to October 1942 and April to December 1944.

A US soldier looks at the Mauthausen crematorium during the liberation of the camp. Austria, May 1945.

A US soldier with liberated prisoners of the Mauthausen concentration camp. Austria, May 1945.

A pile of corpses at the Russian Camp (Hospital Camp) section of the Mauthausen concentration camp after liberation. Mauthausen, Austria, May 5-15, 1945.

A view of the quarry at the Mauthausen concentration camp, where prisoners were subjected to forced labor. Austria, 1938-1945.

So many lies from Heinz. Heinz wrote that “Martin Bartesch committed no war crimes -- the OSI knows this. The complaint against him never even mentioned any war crimes. Again, his only "crime" was a questionable immigration infraction.”

Again, false. As Neal Sher told Israel National Radio, the OSI had the murder book, the “roster that the Germans required them to keep that identified SS guards as they extended weapons to murder the inmates and prisoners.” That murder book identified Martin Bartesch as having shot and killed a French Jew.

From the NY Times (emphasis added):

One piece of evidence gathered against Mr. Bartesch by the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations was the Mauthausen ''Unnatural Death Book,'' a log kept from October 1942 to April 1945 of prisoner deaths.

Entry No. 300 shows that on Oct. 20, 1943, a French Jew named Max Ochshorn was shot to death at the main camp of Mauthausen by Pvt. Martin Bartesch of the SS, who was then 17.

There is much more to say about Martin Bartesch, for instance that he continued to collect social security after he was stripped of his citizenship and deported for a further two years until he died. (I hope it was painful.) Bartesch did evil and lied about it to get off scot-free. His family was complicit in covering up his crimes against humanity, because yes. Jews are human.

Martin Bartesch after the war

Which leads us back to Jimmeh and his little note in the upper corner of a letter from SS-Sturmmann Martin Bartesch’s daughter, asking for clemency for her father. The letter, similar to that of her brother Heinz, was one filled with lies. As Neal Sher related, without any fact-finding process whatsoever, the dead president decided to let the Nazi (unknown to Carter, already deported) off the hook. Why?

Because of “cases like this.” (emphasis added):

To director O.S.I.

     I hope that in cases like this that special consideration can be given to affected families for humanitarian reasons.
       Jimmy Carter


Now what are we to think when the “case like this” is, in fact, one in which someone killed a Jew (and probably more) and covered it up? In light of the now-dead president’s long history of, for example, cozying up to Jew-hating terrorists like Haniyeh and preaching against Jews in church, there can be only one conclusion. 

From the perspective of Jimmy Carter the antisemite, in the case where the murder victim is Jewish, the perpetrator (and his family!) deserve special consideration for “humanitarian reasons.”

That sure sounds a lot like “Final Solution.” Which makes sense: in the antisemitic world of Jimmy Carter—or rather the one he just left—liquidating the Jews is something people do for “humanitarian reasons,” i.e.; to benefit humanity. Which is why many of us Jews are not sorry Jimmeh has, in the inimitable words of Monty Python, joined the bleedin' choir invisible.

I don’t wonder what awaits—I hope he loves a good fire.



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From Ian:

Seth Frantzman: 2025 could see a wave of optimism spread across the Middle East
Last year began in the Middle East under the dark clouds of the Hamas massacre that had occurred in October 2023, and the resulting war in Gaza. New Year’s Day 2024 started with a large barrage of Hamas rockets being fired just after midnight – timed to try to show Israel that it could not win the war.

Hamas is still trying to fire rockets into Israel, a year on. On December 28 it fired two long-range rockets from northern Gaza, setting off alarms across communities between Jerusalem and Gaza.

These few rockets were likely from a stock of that have been sitting around since October 2023, buried and ready to be fired. Hamas has had a hard time rebuilding its rocket arsenal since. However, the terrorist group continues to hold 100 hostages.

The continuing war in Gaza is, of course, not the only thing taking place in the Middle East. The Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen continue to attack both Israel and shipping in the Red Sea. Hezbollah is still making trouble in Lebanon.

But there are bright spots. The Assad regime in Syria was overthrown on December 8. It melted away and seemed to fall apart within a few days, almost as if it had never existed.

This was a strange way for the regime to collapse and is a reminder that authoritarian structures rot from the inside and can appear stronger than they really are. The Assad regime survived with backing from Russia and Iran. It was propped up with the help of Iranian-backed militias in Iraq. However, it was a rotting door and all that had to be done to destroy it was to kick it in.

The fall of the Assad regime could bring some hope to the region. Perhaps things can change. Perhaps Hamas might collapse as well, with the right sort of decisive action. Iran is weakened by the decline of Assad and other problems it faces economically.
The new scramble for the Middle East
In the summer of 2023, Syria and the wider Middle East seemed more stable than at any point in recent memory. It was telling that, in May of that year, the Arab League, a regional organisation of Arab states, welcomed Bashar al-Assad’s war-torn Syria back into the fold after over a decade of isolation. Four months later, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan memorably declared that the Middle East ‘is quieter today than it has been in two decades’.

Fast forward to the end of this year, and Sullivan’s judgement looks more than a little hasty. The long-standing shadow war between Israel and Iran has since erupted into open conflict, with Israel carrying out high-profile assassinations in Damascus, Tehran and Beirut, and Iran launching massive missile and drone barrages at Israel on at least two occasions. And right at the end of this year, Assad’s brutal, yet seemingly stable, Syrian regime fell to a militia headed up by an ex-member of al-Qaeda. As we head into 2025, the Middle East has rarely sounded quite as noisy as it does right now.

The conflict between Israel and Iran and the fall of Assad are directly related. On the eve of Hamas’s barbaric attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, Iran was in a position of relative strength. Through political alliances and a network of militias known as the ‘axis of resistance’ (including Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and assorted Shia groups in Iraq) it exerted considerable power throughout the region. And nowhere more so than in Syria, where Iranian proxies, with help from Russia, were effectively propping up Assad’s dictatorship.

Hamas’s attack on Israel changed everything. It ignited a conflict that has ultimately destroyed the balance of power in the region. Over the past 15 months, Israel has decimated Iran’s militias. It has crushed Hamas in Gaza, crippled Hezbollah in Lebanon and carried out air strikes and assassinations in Iraq and even Iran itself. The Israeli pounding of Iran’s proxy forces has not only impacted Tehran – it has also undermined those dependent on Iranian support for their very survival, such as Assad’s Syrian regime.

Hezbollah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, aided and abetted by the Russian military, had shored up Assad’s government from the 2011 popular uprisings onwards. It’s now clear that without the military force of his backers, Assad’s authority rested on very little. Russia’s decision to move some of its forces from Syria to the frontlines of the war in Ukraine undermined Assad and increased his reliance on Iran. So when Hezbollah was forced to redeploy its Syrian forces to Lebanon in October this year, it effectively gave Assad’s opponents in the north-west province of Idlib the green light to launch an offensive. Which, after a two-month delay, they finally did on 26 November.

It took this several-thousand-strong militia, headed up by Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), just two weeks to take Damascus and topple Assad. In that time, these militants barely encountered any resistance from Assad’s regime as they drove their motorbikes and pick-up trucks through Syria. It’s now clear why. Without Iranian support, Assad had very little resistance to offer. HTS knew this, hence its decision to mount the insurgency after the withdrawal of Hezbollah. Israel’s pummelling of Iranian forces, proxy or otherwise, had unwittingly paved the way for an Islamist takeover of what is left of the Syrian state.
  • Wednesday, January 01, 2025
  • Elder of Ziyon


Plus Lechtele - לעכטעלע (Prod. By Yufeh Productions)








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  • Wednesday, January 01, 2025
  • Elder of Ziyon
If anyone still takes Normal Finkelstein seriously, two recent interviews he has done with Hamas supporters should destroy any respect anyone has for him as a scholar - or as a human being.

Speaking to Middle East Eye, Finkelstein says that "Jewish supremacist billionaires" are calling the shots in the US:


The Jewish supremacist billionaire class exploited this alleged - in my opinion - completely fabricated and fake fear of Jewish students that their lives were in danger. The Jewish supremacist billionaire class exploited it and then they had money and they had power behind them.
So the presidents of Harvard and University of Pennsylvania were not forced to step down because they looked like fools to Congress and didn't protect Jewish students - they were forced out by Jewish supremacist billionaires!

This is the type of thing you'd hear on neo-Nazi broadcasts.

Finkelstein has been pushing the "Jewish billionaire class" conspiracy theory since October 7. He has also refused to condemn Hamas for the massacres and compared the terrorists raping Jews to Holocaust victims who escaped concentration camps. 

He then went on to be interviewed by Dilly Hussain of 5Pillars, an Islamist organization that has not only trafficked in antisemitism - the British media group Impress, YouTube and others have found that they spread hatred of Jews - but they even invited far-Right figures to be interviewed because their antisemitism and that of the far-Right coincide. 

Add Finkelstein to the mix of honored guests on 5Pillars' podcast:


Finkelstein shows his ignorance of the IDF, Gaza, modern warfare, and the basic consuming of news. How has Israel lost hundreds of soldiers if they are fighting in Gaza via remote control? 

Of course Israel prioritizes the lives of their soldiers. As George Patton said, "No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country." It isn't cowardice, it is going to war to win. 

And what does this have to do with Israel being secular? Finkelstein is speaking to an Islamic supremacist (ironic given his "Jewish supremacist billionaire" rant) and admiring the Palestinian culture of martyrdom, of death. 

Judaism does not love death. It prioritizes staying alive over nearly everything else. If anything, "Westernized society" had learned the value of human life from the Jews. 

By Finkelstein's logic, developing and implementing Iron Dome is also cowardice. So are anti-aircraft guns. And helmets. And bomb shelters.  Brave Hamas doesn't bother to build those for its people!

No one loves death except for jihadists. Admiring that mentality is itself a psychosis.

I don't think he believes a word he is saying. He is human clickbait to promote his books. 





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Back in May, ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan made an odd comment. In a Sunday Times interview, he claimed that Israel should use more restraint--and Khan used Great Britain's reaction to the Irish Republican Army as an example:
“There were attempts to kill Margaret Thatcher, Airey Neave was blown up, Lord Mountbatten was blown up, there was the Enniskillen attack, we had kneecappings … But the British didn’t decide to say, ‘Well, on the Falls Road [the heart of Catholic Belfast] there undoubtedly may be some IRA members and Republican sympathisers, so therefore let’s drop a 2,000lb bomb on the Falls Road.’ You can’t do that.
Claiming a similarity between Hamas and the IRA makes for an odd comparison. The IRA was not dedicated to the destruction of England and did not massacre thousands of English citizens or kidnap hundreds. According to ChatGPT, a Hamas-style massacre in Great Britain would result in 8,155 people murdered and 1,165 kidnapped. Did the IRA do anything comparable?

Just what does Khan think he is comparing here?

ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan. YouTube screencap


Stephen Pollard also finds Khan's comparison absurd. He points out that Hamas is not just a terrorist organization attacking Israel.
It is a terrorist organisation committed by its charter to the elimination not just of Israel but of all Jews – all Jews, everywhere on the planet. It is, literally, genocidal in its aims.
Furthermore, the government of Northern Ireland was run by Great Britain. The IRA was an independent entity launching attacks. Contrast that with Hamas, which does run Gaza--and takes full advantage of that fact to hide among the civilian population, fully aware of the casualties resulting from that policy.

Then there is the Good Friday Peace Agreement. It was possible because the IRA was willing to agree to a political solution to its issues, realizing that it could not achieve its goals through terror. Hamas is not looking for a political solution--it is looking for a military solution, the destruction of an existing country. Can Khan really not see that? His claim that Israel is discriminantly dropping bombs is another worrisome indication of his failure to understand what is going on.

Melanie Phillips sees Khan's equivalence of the IRA and Hamas as proof of his loss of moral compass. The IRA's goal was the reunification of Ireland, a goal which on its own was not objectionable. The IRA's means for reaching that goal defined it as a terrorist organization. Even then, it did not set out to murder all British people. The Hamas goal, on the other hand, is the destruction of the Jewish state. 

In a key insight, Phillips notes that the very fact that Khan equates the IRA and Hamas reveals a serious flaw in the prosecutor's case:
To equate IRA terrorism with genocide shows that the ICC prosecutor doesn’t understand what genocide is.
Khan makes no distinction between Israelis deliberately massacred by Hamas terrorists and Gazan civilians killed inadvertently in a war to rescue hostages and defeat the terrorists who threaten to carry out more massacres. As she puts it:
Although Israel says it’s killed around 14,000 combatants — achieving a rate of civilian losses in Gaza vastly lower than achieved by any other country in time of war — Khan makes no distinction between civilians and combatants killed by Israel. Like Hamas, he doesn’t even mention the combatants Israel has killed. They’re all just “Palestinians”. [emphasis added]
Aside from the IRA comparison, there is the question of the prosecutor's advisory panel. According to Khan, "These are great lawyers I respect hugely who have stood up for principle throughout their life." Phillips is not as impressed:
But the panel contained several partisans for the Palestinian cause and vicious Israel-bashers. Khan says of one of them, the 94 year-old American-Israeli lawyer and judge Theodor Meron, that he can’t be antisemitic because he’s a Jew. But Meron has a history of virulent opposition to Israeli policies towards the Palestinians.
These questions of sloppiness in Khan's preparations for his case do not stop in May.

In November, Ynet News revealed that Khan had been using a pro-Palestinian law firm in connection with the case, raising questions regarding his impartiality:
ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan's engagement of Bindmans, a law firm linked to Palestinian advocacy, raises conflict of interest concerns, potentially undermining his impartiality in pursuing arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant

Bindmans represents several Palestinian organizations that have urged Khan to issue arrest warrants against senior Israeli figures. Notably, Tayab Ali, a partner at the firm, is the director of the "International Center of Justice for Palestinians," a London-based organization actively involved in international legal actions against Israel. Another partner, Alice Hardy, represents the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq, headquartered in Ramallah.
These two Palestinian organizations, closely associated with Bindmans, have submitted multiple notices to the ICC regarding Palestinian issues. 
As of yet, there has not been any update on any investigation into the possibility of a conflict of interest. But apart from issues of fact and of law that have been raised against the ICC's case of genocide brought against Israel, there are doubts about the very prosecution of the case itself. 




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