Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, February 11, 2025

Trump is right and the @NYTimes is wrong on clearing explosives from Gaza

The New York Times has a "gotcha" article aimed at Donald Trump: How can Gaza be cleared of explosives when the US has stopped funding NGOs that do exactly that?

The article does not mention the thousands of houses booby-trapped by Hamas; only the unexploded ordnance from Israeli actions. This bias is a major reason the article is highly deceptive. It talks about the difficult work of deminers who have to find and neutralize explosives, but when you include explosives that are deliberately hidden in the walls of residential buildings, you realize that this job goes way beyond the painstaking job of traditional deminers employed by NGOs.

Hamas booby traps are at least as much of a danger as unexploded Israeli ordnance. Many IDF soldiers who were trained to be careful for booby traps were killed by them during the war. The IDF reported in early January that Hamas had booby trapped nearly every building left standing in northern Gaza. Some estimates say that 40% of the buildings in Gaza - some 95,000 buildings - are booby trapped.

In an urban area filled with bombs, it is far safer to raze the entire area than to try to clear each explosive individually.

In 2010, the New York Times knew this. It reported that American forces were razing neighborhoods in Kandahar, Afghanistan, because the homes were so heavily booby-trapped. In that case, the newspaper praised the operation as saving lives. (Interestingly, the NYT has removed the "To Save Lives" part of the original headline.)

In the newly won districts around this southern city, American forces are encountering empty homes and farm buildings left so heavily booby-trapped by Taliban insurgents that the Americans have been systematically destroying hundreds of them, according to local Afghan authorities.

The campaign, a major departure from NATO practice in past military operations, is intended to reduce civilian and military casualties by removing the threat of booby traps and denying Taliban insurgents hiding places and fighting positions, American military officials said.

...In recent weeks, using armored bulldozers, high explosives, missiles and even airstrikes, American troops have taken to destroying hundreds of them, by a conservative estimate, with some estimates running into the thousands.

As bad as Kandahar was, the cities of Gaza are worse.

In a case like this you don't employ NGOs to clear the area. The work that deminers do would take centuries to clear Gaza. The State Department description of how much time it takes to detect and destroy mines on relatively easy terrain shows how absurd it would be to try to duplicate that in tens of thousands of buildings:

Manual humanitarian demining generally proceeds as follows: wearing personal protective equipment, the deminer approaches the edge of the hazardous area with vegetation cutting tools, probe, excavation tools, a tripwire feeler, a metal detector, mine tape, and mine markers, and begins to clear a lane. The deminer visually scans an area approximately one meter wide by half a meter deep, looking for evidence of landmines. Satisfied that no mines are present on the surface or in the vegetation, the deminer sweeps the area with a tripwire feeler. The deminer carefully removes all vegetation to ground level, using a variety of cutters to ensure no piece of brush falls onto the ground and gently places any brush fragments behind him or herself. The deminer uses a metal detector and, if a signal is heard, sweeps the area with the detector to identify the center and edge of the target. A marker is placed at the target location. The deminer then backs off from the marker approximately 20 centimeters and begins probing for the suspected mine at a 30 degree angle. If a mine is found, the deminer excavates sufficient space to place a demolition charge. It is often safer for deminers to destroy the mine in place, using an explosive charge at the end of daily operations. Neutralizing or defusing mines is avoided when possible, as these procedures carry a greater risk of physical harm. This process is repeated meter by meter until the ground is determined to be free from known hazards.

To perform this level of care when there are thousands of bombs hidden in buildings is impossible. Even for deminers, it is safer to explode the bombs than to remove them, meaning the buildings would be heavily damaged or destroyed anyway.

The bombs embedded in the buildings that are still standing are more of a potential risk than the unexploded bombs dropped by the IDF, although both are of course deadly. The Guardian mentioned on January 15

To properly clear Gaza of explosives, you need to practically flatten Gaza. You need an army. You need armored bulldozers and bombs.

It is not only the New York Times. The mainstream media has all but ignored Hamas booby-traps in Gaza houses and buildings, only reporting on them when they kill IDF troops. The Guardian mentioned that a UN official estimated it would take a decade to remove all the explosives in Gaza - and he said that nine months ago before the extent of Hamas booby-traps were known.

Donald Trump called Gaza is a demolition site, and he is correct. If the NYT would look back on its previous articles and deign to report on Hamas booby traps, it would know that this is true.

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

A selection of antisemitism in Turkish media this week

Yeni Akit:

Did you say Jews? They are the cursed ones who do not hesitate to set the world on fire to fry eggs.

Also Yeni Akit:

It is not possible to come across any other nation other than the Jews that has been consistently exiled throughout the recorded history of humanity, whether known or claimed to be known.

Regardless of the nation, humanity has performed various surgical operations throughout history to rid its body of this malignant tumor, and whenever it has said it is free and left these diseased types behind, the cancer has spread and found no other solution than exiling it once more.

Corum Haber:

If I am not mistaken, almost all of the 124 Nobel Prize winners are Jews. The most loyal nation in the world to their religion is also the Jews. Because according to the Jewish belief, according to the distorted (altered) Torah, the God of the Jews created all people to serve the Jews. If we may say so, the Jews are the masters and the others are their servants, which is the Jewish terminology. In other words, the dominance of the world belongs to the Jews. The Jews are after achieving this in the world. This is the reason why they work day and night without rest. Today, there are 15 million Jews in the world. The State of Israel was 3-3.5 million, but they rule 8 billion people with the power of money. There is a fact that is beyond reason and logic in Judaism. That is, why are the 15 million Jews not increasing? Because in order for a person to be Jewish, one of the parents or, if I am not mistaken, one of the parents must be of Jewish origin. This situation prevents the increase of the Jews. When examined, it will be seen that the Jews are the rulers of the world economy. Jews fill the population gap with subsidiary organizations, civil society organizations, the general name of which is Masoxuzan. Dozens of associations serve Judahism under the guise of various humanitarian purposes.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

02/10 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: What Israel is really up against; The strange reluctance to see Jews as victims; Beinart goes down a rabbit hole; USAID’s demise is nothing to mourn

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: What Israel is really up against

In short, Palestinian society is entirely constructed around a poisonous and murderous hatred of Jews and the desire to remove them from the face of the earth.

The emaciated figures who staggered out of their Gaza hellhole have illuminated the obscenity of the way in which so much of the west has behaved — trying to minimise, sanitise or excuse what the Palestinian Arabs have done to the Israelis; representing them as victims of the Israelis they have so viciously attacked; and demonising the Israelis with murderous falsehoods for the apparent crime of defending themselves against this genocidal onslaught.

Now we can see the monstrosity of the way the Biden administration bullied and blackmailed Israel into allowing Hamas to survive.

Now we can see the moral depravity of all those in the west — including Biden, Sir Keir Starmer and other western politicians, NGOs like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty, and the wretched prelates of the Church of England — who have accused Israel of causing starvation in Gaza. The Gazan mobs who menaced the terrified Israeli hostages as they were released were well fed, plump, even obese; it’s the Israeli hostages who have been deliberately and murderously starved — by the people who have been promoted as victims by the west’s Israel-bashers.

This moral bankruptcy towards Israel is nothing new. It has characterised the so-called civilised world for almost a century. The Arabs of pre-Israel Palestine should have been dispersed after 1948 when their side lost the war of extermination that was mounted to destroy at its rebirth the fledgling State of Israel.

Instead, those Arabs were fashioned into a weapon against Israel’s existence by being turned preposterously into permanent refugees. The entirely spurious claim of a Palestinian national identity was cooked up in the 1960s between the terrorist leader Yassir Arafat and the Soviet Union as a strategy to destroy the Jews’ homeland, steal from them their own history in the land and re-label it “Palestinian” history, and fry the brains of the west in order to undermine it and soften it up for its destruction. That strategy has been carried out to the letter.

And the west, led by Britain from the 1930s onwards, has consistently rewarded and incentivised mass murder against the Jews while upending international law by promising those waging this genocidal war a part of the Jews’ own historic and legally pledged homeland as the route to “peace” in the Middle East.

The only moral course of action, the only way this century-old war to exterminate the Jewish homeland will be brought to an end in a just way, is to say to the Palestinian Arabs that it’s all over. They will never get a state; they don’t deserve a state; they never wanted a state, other than as a springboard to destroy Israel; and if they persist in their aim to destroy Israel and kill Jews, they will be treated henceforth as pariahs.

And so should all who support them be treated. The obscene Palestinian cause is worn as the badge of conscience by the west’s progressive classes. That illustrates instead their repudiation of conscience. The Palestinian cause has destroyed the moral compass of the west.

If Trump’s musings about a “Gaza Riviera” signal an equivalent strategy towards the Palestinian cause as a whole, he won’t just reshape the Middle East in a way that will bring it peace and justice. He will start to haul the west out of the moral abyss into which it has fallen.

Western Media turns October 7 grief into anti-Israel propaganda

This dehumanizing phenomenon needs to be viewed within the context of a larger narrative that seeks to paint Israelis as uniquely malicious and violent actors on the global stage. Whereas other countries conduct military operations, Israel does “bloodletting,” notes Brendan O’Neill in his book, After the Pogrom.

This language is common. Other nations respond to threats; Israel carries out “state-sponsored terrorism.” Other countries inevitably cause civilian casualties; Israel wages “war on children.” Other countries eliminate terrorists; Israel carries out “wanton assassinations of [...] activists.” Other countries go to war; Israel commits “genocide.”And while other nations mourn their collective tragedies, Israelis use their own tragedies as a weapon.

After the 9/11 attacks, America was gripped by national trauma, grief, and unity. The names and faces of many victims became ingrained in the national consciousness. Survivors’ testimonies were recorded, documentaries were made, and public commemorations were held.

While the US government certainly used 9/11 to justify policy decisions – some controversial – it would be obscene to claim that America’s collective grief was an insincere, orchestrated effort to push a war agenda. The sorrow of families who lost loved ones was not a weapon or a “ticking time bomb” set to incite violence – it was a human response to an atrocity.

But in the case of Israelis – and Jews more broadly – the radical anti-Zionist set, and even some mainstream commentators, who engage in a toxic form of victim-blaming, where Jewish suffering is never just suffering – it’s a maneuver, a ploy, a trick. This is part of a much older pattern, a millennia-old cycle of delegitimization, in which Jews are seen as schemers and manipulators.

The same people who tell Israelis they’re weaponizing the Bibas family’s tragedy are the ones who claim Jews weaponize antisemitism, and a subset of them are people who believe a deceitful cabal of Jews control the world. Some things never change.

At the end of his post on X, Fischberger wrote, “Next up: How Jews weaponize their existence.” His quip cut to the heart of it. Denying a group the right to grieve is a violation of a fundamental human right, akin to denying one the right to self-defense, and thus the very right to exist.

Brendan O'Neill: The strange reluctance to see Jews as victims

There was actually something worse than moral indifference following the release of these cadaverous men – there was moral deflection. Anti-Israel activists clogged up social media with images of released Palestinian prisoners. None looked anywhere near as sickly as the three Israelis, yet the message was as clear as it was sinister: ‘Never mind those Jews, look at these Palestinians.’ Like 21st-century Lord Haw-Haws, they endeavour to distract the world’s attention from the crimes of a fascistic army.

The BBC couldn’t resist implying a moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel. Following the release of the three Israelis, it said there are ‘concerns about the condition of hostages on both sides’. Hostages? It is a scandal that our public broadcaster is referring to Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, some of whom are guilty of acts of extreme violence, as ‘hostages’. It later walked back its comments, issuing an on-air correction. CNN, too, seemed incapable of focussing on the shocking condition of the three Israelis. Released Palestinians have also looked ‘emaciated’ and ‘weak’, it rushed to say. You can almost hear the thought process: ‘People are sympathising too much with Israel – quick, dig out an image of Palestinian pain.’

It’s like our opinion-forming classes have an instinctual aversion to empathy for Israelis. It makes them nervous. It threatens to unravel their morally infantile narrative about Israel being the most beastly of states and the Palestinians being the most oppressed of peoples. So they fiercely police public compassion, ensuring that even the dystopic image of Jews starved by sworn Jew-haters is countered by a reminder that Palestinians have a hard time, too. There is a ‘strange reluctance to see Jews as victims’, in the words of Hadley Freeman. Jews, alone among minority groups, are ruthlessly deprived of victim status, in this case to sustain the cultural elites’ self-flattering narrative about problematic Israel and benighted Palestine.

The sick reality is that there are people out there who will have seen those three stricken Jews not as brutalised human beings deserving of our solidarity, but as an unwelcome intrusion into the childish morality tale about Israel-Palestine. As a vexing reminder that things are more complicated than we are told. As stark, gaunt proof of the crimes against humanity committed by Hamas, which were the source of this war that our cultural elites shamelessly blame on Israel. This is how intense Israelophobia has become in influential circles – they are now willing to sacrifice Jews to ideology, to discourage solidarity with wronged, ravaged Israelis in order that their moral narrative might be protected against the impertinence of nuance. In the past, people looked the other way when Jews were dehumanised because they wanted to save their skins – now they do it to save their fake virtue.

We live in an era of the most rank moral inversion. No one doubts that Palestinians in Gaza have suffered enormously as a result of the war started by Hamas. This will include malnutrition, a scourge that has attended every war in history. But time and again, Israel is accused of the very crimes committed against it by Hamas. It is called fascistic, when in truth it was attacked by a neo-fascist army. It is called genocidal, yet it’s Hamas that was founded with the genocidal intention of destroying the world’s only Jewish nation. It is accused of intentionally starving Palestinians by a terror group that intentionally starved Jews. Tell us what you accuse the Jewish State of, and we’ll tell you what you are guilty of.

02/10 Links Pt1: The Chilling Implications of Hamas’s Suspension of Hostage Releases; The strange reluctance to see Jews as victims; PA to drop pay-for-slay … if US repeals Taylor Force Act

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The Chilling Implications of Hamas’s Suspension of Hostage Releases

Throughout the period of the current cease-fire, Hamas has been systematically dismantling its own side’s propaganda. The claim of Israeli “genocide” was always false, but Gaza officials acknowledging that the enclave’s population increased during the war, and that Israeli bombs were mostly dropped on uninhabited neighborhoods, and that Hamas had been using hospitals and humanitarian zones as active war bases made it clear that Israel’s defenders were telling the truth and Hamas’s fans were lying all along.

Then on Saturday Hamas released a propaganda video showing its men keeping Sharabi, Or Levy, and Ohad Ben Ami in a claustrophobic, airless underground cell. We’ve seen Hamasniks driving a fleet of well-maintained vehicles through Gaza and past its gleaming buildings.

At the release ceremony itself, the viewing public was treated to watching well-fed Gazans taking selfies while the gaunt hostages could barely stand. We had already known that Israel had allowed into Gaza enough food for each Palestinian to have 3,000 calories per day. But now we were seeing proof that full-bellied Gazans had been spending the war guarding starving Israeli hostages.

Every claim made against Israel was projection. Hamas had been doing all the things it accused Israel of, accusations that the media gleefully echoed like pet-shop parrots.

And so there was a collective gasp from the world, and a backlash. A gentle backlash, but a backlash nonetheless. Hamas’s co-conspirators in governments and NGOs and news organizations around the world were exposed to their own reflections, and they recoiled.

So how can Hamas release the next round of captives in five days without building on the backlash? Well, it can release non-tortured, non-starving hostages—if it has anyone who meets that description in its dungeons.

There is also the fact that the cease-fire deal had one key strategic advantage for Hamas baked in: Israeli troops were agreeing to withdraw from the Netzarim Corridor, a military road that bisected the enclave and enabled the IDF to protect some parts of Gaza from Hamas’s return to full strength. On Monday, Israel reportedly withdrew from the corridor.

Israel still has plenty of incentive to hold up its end of the deal—especially now that we know the hostages are clinging to life in Hamas’s torture cells. But what is Hamas’s incentive? If the IDF is out of the Netzarim Corridor, Hamas has been handed back the Gaza Strip. Hamas may decide it has more to lose than to gain from continuing to release hostages.

Perhaps this is the end of the cease-fire, perhaps not. But there’s no going back to a time when one could pretend Israel was the villain here.

Heidi Bachram: Colours of rage

The three men had lost half their body weight. They were starved. Hung up by their legs. Chained. One only walked for the first time on the day he was released. He had to learn how to use his feet again. They were strangled, beaten, burned. The hostages were supposed to be the terrorist’s grand plan, their prize assets. Yet they treated them with malice and brutishness. Part of the strategy with the men could have been to weaken and humiliate them deliberately as psychological warfare. To show well-fed gun-wielding Palestinian terrorists in contrast to frail and thin Israelis. All it did was expose the lie of famine and reveal who was actually starving in Gaza.

Hamas is always speaking to many different audiences, often with opposite messaging. To Arab countries a show of strength and intimidation. To the West an exploitation of sympathy. To Gazans a signal of dominance. The releases have been challenging to satisfy all those needs and Hamas finally succeeded in displaying for the West the true psychopathic nature of their organisation. In a way they could not ignore. Though some still are determined to look away and continue the narrative of victimhood. It is becoming more difficult with every abused innocent.

The shock of seeing Jews so skeletal immediately evoked those haunted images of survivors in concentration camps. We just saw the 80th commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz. A camp that my husband Adam’s great grandparents were murdered in. To pause for one second on the thought of his cousin Tsachi being subjected to the tortures that the released hostages endured is to walk on emotional shards of glass. My jaw clamps and my body starts to shake. I have cried enough tears of sorrow and fury. There is only white, red and black rage now.

For those monsters in green.

When Hamas hands back coffins, will there still be crowds and celebrations?

The group has prided itself on turning hostage releases into a media spectacle, complete with orchestrated crowds and celebratory fanfare. But will those same crowds gather when the bodies of hostages, starved or tortured to death, are returned? Will there be certificates of release for the lifeless remains of a Holocaust survivor who survived the Nazis only to perish in Gaza?

The Hostages and Missing Families Forum issued an urgent call for action following Hamas’s announcement, demanding "swift assistance in finding an immediate and effective solution to restore the implementation of the deal."

The forum warned: “The hostages are out of time, and they all must be rescued from this nightmare urgently.”

Hamas's latest move should serve as a wake-up call. If this is how it behaves when the world is watching—stalling, posturing, and feigning moral outrage at supposed Israeli violations—then what horrors remain unseen? The terrorists claim that Israel is not fulfilling its end of the agreement, but it’s Hamas that has already shattered every basic standard of decency by taking civilians hostage in the first place.

One Israeli official told The Jerusalem Post that, in his view, Hamas did not attempt to sabotage the deal in its latest statement. Another dismissed the terror group’s claims as “fake,” suggesting that Hamas is attempting to reignite the conversation over a second phase of negotiations.

The images of the hostages this past weekend should have put an end to any illusions about their treatment in captivity. Now, the real question is this: When Hamas is done toying with its prisoners, when its propaganda machine can no longer extract value from them, will the world still watch in silence when the final "exchanges" are not hostages but corpses?

The official Palestinian Wafa news agency reports that the PLO will stop what is popularly known as "pay for slay," where terrorists and their families get paid by the PLO. Prisoners get salaries, they get do-nothing jobs when they are released, and those killed trying to murder Jews have their families paid.

The announcement says:

President Mahmoud Abbas, President of the State of Palestine and Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, issued a decree law revoking the articles contained in the laws and regulations related to the system of paying financial allowances to the families of prisoners, martyrs, and the wounded, in the Prisoners' Law and the regulations issued by the Council of Ministers and the Palestine Liberation Organizations.

Under the decree law, the computerized cash assistance program, its database, and its financial, local, and international allocations will be transferred from the Ministry of Social Development to the Palestinian National Foundation for Economic Empowerment.

Under these amendments:
1) All families that benefited from previous laws, legislation, and regulations are subject to the same standards applied without discrimination to all families benefiting from protection and social welfare programs, in accordance with the standards of comprehensiveness and justice, the conditions of which apply to all families in need of assistance in Palestinian society.

2) Under this amendment, the powers of all protection and social welfare programs in Palestine have been transferred to the Palestinian Economic Empowerment Foundation, which will assume the responsibilities of providing protection and social care programs to all Palestinian families in need of assistance and beneficiaries without discrimination.

The Palestinian National Economic Empowerment Foundation has an independent legal personality managed by a Board of Trustees appointed by the President. It operates in accordance with its law, tasks and transparent working mechanisms and is subject to administrative and financial oversight standards, including oversight by international institutions, to ensure transparency of procedures and fair distribution.

Accordingly, the Palestinian National Economic Empowerment Foundation will seek to mobilize all possible funds, grants and allocations for the various categories of our people, especially in light of the significant increase in the number of families in need of social welfare, support and empowerment after the war on Gaza and the West Bank, in a way that contributes to improving the living conditions of our people, similar to the various social welfare systems adopted by different countries of the world that have strong and institutionalized social care systems.

The PLO always called pay for slay a social welfare program. Now they are saying that they will support all needy families.

Will families of terrorists who are well-to-do no longer receive stipends? I find that hard to believe.

It is hard to know whether this is a major deception, as the PLO has done in the past - by transferring the payments from the PA to the PLO, for example - or whether it is legitimate. The Jerusalem Post says "This comes amid news that, on February, US courts will impose heavy fines - of about $200-300 million - on the Palestinian Authority – following lawsuits filed by families of terror victims. The PA is reportedly worried that this will lead to a financial crisis."

Right now Israel is withholding funds meant for the PA equivalent to the amount they pay terrorists and their families. It will be interesting to see if Israel loosens this up - and if so, whether it will pay the amount it already withheld that has already been paid to terrorists.

One piece of evidence that this is legit comes from the criticism from the terror groups. Islamic Jihad says, "The decision to stop the prisoners’ allowances, especially at a time when the resistance forces are recording a victory over the enemy by imposing an honorable prisoner exchange, is an attempt to weaken the morale of our people and a betrayal of the prisoners who are giving years of their lives steadfastly behind bars, and a punishment of the Palestinian people for their adherence to their legitimate right to resist and to cling to their land and rights."

The PA reportedly asked the US to cancel the Taylor Force Act as a result of this change, which blocks aid from the US to the Palestinian Authority as long as pay for slay exists.

In the past, Abbas indicated that he would never, ever abandon pay for slay. He said in 2018, “Even if we have only a penny left, we will give it to the martyrs, the prisoners and their families,” and he reiterated that position a number of times since.

Would this have happened under the Biden administration? It seems unlikely although the US court decision holding the PA financially responsible for the 2001 Sbarro bombing happened after the election, so who knows.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

One of the fascinating things about Donald Trump is that he can, and does, change the conversation with his way-out-there ideas and musings. Things that have been excluded from public discourse become ideas to be talked about, even if it is only to treat them dismissively.

Trump's moves to close USAID might have a ripple effect on similar development agencies in Europe.

Hundreds of millions that have flowed readily to anti-Israel NGOs might start to be questioned by citizens of Western Europe who are concerned about what their own taxes are paying for, and if the recipients align with their own national interest.

The UK's Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office spends about $2 billion annually on NGOs. A roughly similar amount is spent by Germany's Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ). France, Sweden and Canada also give a lot of money to international NGOs.

USAID was the 900 pound gorilla for international development aid, giving over $25 billion a year to NGOs, about 60% of its total outlay. NGO Monitor identifies some of the grantees and sub-grantees, such as:

Palestinian NGO Juzoor for Health and Social Development received millions of dollars as a sub-grantee on USAID-funded projects during the period reviewed in the GAO audit. Both prior to and during the grant period, Juzoor ran a program that arranged meetings between teenagers and convicted Palestinian terrorists; in addition, its staff members glorified violence against Israelis.

Cutting so many programs at once carries some risks, but there is really no way to streamline and fix their existing problems otherwise. The question is how many other countries will now consider doing something similar?

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Last Thursday, Iran's president Masoud Pezeshkian promised to enter into a dialogue with the West on Iran's nuclear facilities. On Saturday, Donald Trump said he would prefer to make a deal with Iran rather than “bombing the hell out of it.”

But on Sunday, Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Khamanei quashed that idea, saying negotiations with America “are not intelligent, wise or honorable” after President Trump floated the idea.

By itself this story wouldn't be important. Khamanei has blown hot and cold on the topic for years.

But the concerning part is what The Telegraph reported Saturday:

Iran’s supreme leader must revoke a fatwa banning the development of nuclear weapons if the regime is to survive, his top military commanders have said.

In an extraordinary intervention by leaders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was told that Iran must have nuclear weapons to face down “existential threats” from the West.

The Telegraph can reveal that several senior commanders have U-turned in recent months, since the election of Donald Trump, and are now pressing for the development of an atomic bomb.

An Iranian official told The Telegraph from Tehran, the capital: “The leader has forbidden negotiations with the Americans and the development of nuclear weapons, which seem to be the only ways for survival [of the regime], and he’s driving the regime toward collapse.”

“We have been just a few button presses away from building a nuclear weapon for some time now, but the pressures and justifications for having one are greater than ever.

“The existential threat we now face has led several senior commanders – who previously insisted on following the supreme leader’s guidance – to push for making an atomic weapon.”

Notice that the idea that Iran should abandon its nuclear weapons and uranium refinement program to stop Trump's sanctions is not even considered.

There is brinksmanship going on here, and it is a high stakes game. But the real difference is whether Iran's development of nuclear weapons is public or clandestine, as it has been. Israel's bombing of the secret nuclear research site in Parchin in October proves that.

Incidentally, I had missed this story but Mohammad Javad Zarif, former Iranian foreign minister, admitted that Israel had placed explosives in nuclear refinement materials that Iran had purchased. In the aftermath of the supply-side pager attack:

“This is part of the damage of sanctions, that you are forced to receive (purchases) through multiple dealers instead of buying from a factory directly,” Zarif said. “If the Zionist regime can infiltrate one of the dealers, then it can do anything and install anything.”

He added: “For instance, our friends at the Atomic Energy Organization (of Iran) had purchased a platform for centrifuges in which (the Israelis) had installed explosive material.”

Cool!

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

A simple question that proves @UNRWA's worthlessness

Last week, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini tweeted:

The rights of the Palestinians continue to be violated.

Since the war began, people in #Gaza have undergone systematic dehumanization.

Palestinians do matter, including those in Gaza.
Their rights, lives & futures matter.

Human rights cannot be applied selectively.

As the UN Secretary General said: “Peace requires ending the occupation, and the establishment of an independent Palestinian State, with Gaza as an integral part; a viable and sovereign Palestinian State side-by-side with Israel”.

At @UNRWA, our teams are committed to continue providing critical assistance to #Palestine Refugees who need us most until empowered Palestinian institutions become a lasting & viable alternative.

Let's look at that last sentence a little closer.

UNRWA spends about $133 million a year on services in areas under full Palestinian Authority control. The PA is now over 30 years old. They can and do provide services to all their citizens, which include everyone registered with UNRWA.

The UNRWA recipients who live in the West Bank are not "refugees" by any normal definition. They live within the borders of British Mandate Palestine. They have a government that works on their behalf.

UNRWA runs a hospital in Qalqilya and numerous health clinics. Why? They are a wasteful duplication of administrative overhead from what the PA is already meant to provide.

Same for UNRWA schools. They use the PA curriculum and the PA provides public schools for all citizens. As far as I can tell, they do not refuse services to "refugees."

So why does UNRWA exist in the West Bank? The PA schools and hospitals are empowered, today, to provide all the services, and international aid to UNRWA could easily be directed to the PA to more than make up for any shortfall because of this parallel social services provided by UNRWA today.

By Lazzarini's own standards, UNRWA should have been dismantled in the West Bank back in the 1990s. And by UNRWA's own original mandate, it should not be providing services to people who do not need them anymore. Being a citizen of the "State of Palestine" which is recognized by over a hundred countries certainly qualifies.

But his statement here goes way beyond UNRWA's mandate as stated by the UN. UNRWA's mandate is for it to be a temporary agency. Its UN mandate and funding is renewed every few years, a vestige of the fact that it is not meant to be permanent. The 1949 resolution 302 that created it says "continued assistance for the relief of the Palestine refugees is necessary to prevent conditions of starvation and distress among them and to further conditions of peace and stability, and that constructive measures should be undertaken at an early date with a view to the termination of international assistance for relief."

But the UNRWA website shows that it has expanded its own mandate to exist "pending a just and lasting solution to their plight." That language is not in any UN resolutions on UNRWA that I am aware of.

UNRWA cannot, by definition, change its own mandate without a UN resolution. . But this is what UNRWA has done. And when Lazzarini says UNRWA must exist "until empowered Palestinian institutions become a lasting & viable alternative" he is making up a new mandate again. It is probably illegal, because UNRWA should not be able to go beyond the mandates that create and continue to fund it. Yet this is exactly what it is doing.

UNRWA itself defines whether its services are needed, and it adjusts its own mandate to allow it to continue to exist, instead of following UN resolutions.

The continued existence of UNRWA in the West Bank, and to a large extent Jordan (which also extends citizenship and protection to most of its Palestinian residents) proves that UNRWA has become a parody of what it was created for. By Lazzarini's own words, it should not exist in the West Bank even today.

This is far from the only reason to dismantle UNRWA today. But it is enough of one.

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Here's a little detail about the movement of Palestinians in Gaza that no one is reporting.

While it was widely reported that over half a million Gazans moved back to northern Gaza when circumstances allowed, what is not mentioned is that some 45,000 of them - as of February 5 - decided to go back south.

From UN-OCHA:

Since 30 January, SMWG [Site Management Working Group] observed that more than 45,678 people have been moving southwards. The Protection Cluster notes that this is due to the lack of services and the overwhelming destruction of homes and communities in the north, leaving people without viable shelter options. With more than half a million internally displaced persons (IDPs) estimated to have returned to Gaza and North Gaza governorates, the need for food, water, tents and shelter materials in that area remains critical. According to the Shelter Cluster, despite the entry of a large volume of supplies since the ceasefire took effect, priority was given to food during the first two weeks, significantly limiting the entry of shelter assistance.

It is interesting that when Israel set up humanitarian zones they ensured that there would be adequate tents and infrastructure - and yet Israel was blamed when things weren't to the Gazans' liking. But now when the UN and Hamas are in charge of supplies, and they are found inadequate, they simply keep the issues as quiet as possible.

(h/t Irene)

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02/09 Links: No one can now deny the evil that is Hamas; Trump creates task force to prosecute October 7 perpetrators; Erin Molan: Failure on a global scale

From Ian:

Stephen Pollard: No one can now deny the evil that is Hamas

The only difference was the presence of their Hamas captors; the Nazis had fled the camps by the time they were liberated.

Hamas, on the other hand, stood proudly by as the emaciated, almost crippled bodies of the hostages were forced by their captors on to a stage to take part in the latest of the terrorist organisation’s sick propaganda stunts.

I am not religious. But I know that evil exists and we have once more seen it on display.

Or Levy is just 33 years old. His only crime was to have gone to a music festival and to have been Jewish. Hamas murdered his wife and starved him for 491 days. There is only one word for the people that did this to him: evil.

Ever since October 7 we have heard glib platitudes from around the world about “peace”, about reaching an accommodation with Hamas and about Israel needing to accept a “two-state solution”.

But there will be no peace – indeed, there should be no peace – when that necessitates accepting the presence of evil.

As Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog put it: “This is what a crime against humanity looks like. The entire world should look at Ohad, Or and Eli – who returned from the hell of 491 days in captivity, painful, emaciated and wounded, and were used in a cynical and evil ritual by damned murderers.”

Throughout the war brought on by Hamas’s massacre we have been told by much of the media – and by Hamas’s useful idiots protesting on the streets and on campus – that the real criminal is Israel.

Look at the aid shortages! The simple fact is that, far from blocking aid, Israel has gone out of its way to facilitate its arrival in Gaza.

But just as Hamas deliberately uses Palestinian civilians as human shields for its propaganda so it can accuse Israel of targeting civilians, so too it both blocks aid from being distributed (often destroying it) and seizes it for its own use.

If you want to see what real targeted starvation looks like, look at the pictures of the Israeli hostages.

Brendan O'Neill: Who really wants ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the Middle East?

What’s exasperating about all this is that we’ve just come through 16 months of shameless agitation for the end of the Jewish State. Modern anti-Israel activism, at root, is a dream of ethnic cleansing. Consider Columbia. Its woke students are fuming over Trump’s Gaza idea. Yet this is a campus where apocalyptic Israelophobia has run riot since Hamas’s pogrom 16 months ago. Campus activists referred to Israel as ‘the pigs of the Earth’ and fantasised about a future when it would die. ‘We don’t want no two states / We want ’48!’, they cried, referring to 1948, when the modern state of Israel did not yet exist. Plainly put, they want the obliteration of the Jewish homeland.

‘Crush Zionism!’, the West’s activists cry. ‘End Zionism!’, their banners demand. They want the very belief in a Jewish homeland – which is all that Zionism is – killed off and buried. You should be grateful we’re not ‘going out and murdering Zionists’, said a spokesman for Columbia’s Gaza encampment last year. Trump might want to put up some plush condos in Gaza but at least he hasn’t raised the prospect of murdering everyone who believes in Palestinian statehood. Hostility to Israel’s right to exist is entirely commonplace on demonstrations in the West. That’s what ‘From the river to the sea’ means – the complete excision of the Jewish nation and its replacement by Palestine.

Anti-Israel agitation is the first ‘peace movement’ in history where the aim is not just to stop a war but also to stop the existence of a country. People have even chanted in favour of the Houthis, whose flag literally says ‘Death to Israel’. In polite society too, at literary soirees, at dinner parties, the question goes out: ‘Should Israel exist?’ These dreams of cleansing are incredibly influential. Hence, headlines like ‘Most young people think Israel should not exist’, after a poll of youthful Brits found that 54 per cent of them thought Israel should be brought to an end. And its people? What happens to them? Fuck off back to Poland?

Imagine the gall it takes to accuse others of ‘ethnic cleansing’ after you’ve spent more than a year mingling with people who lust after the wholesale dismantling of Jewish nationhood. If I had attended protest after protest at which people waved placards saying ‘Keep the world clean’ alongside an image of the Jewish flag being put in the bin, I’d probably stay quiet about Trump’s dream of making a holiday resort in Gaza. At least his proposal has proven controversial. In contrast, hatred for Zionism, and even calls for its ideological annihilation, have been mainstreamed these past 16 months. That terrifies me far more than Trump’s Gaza bluster.

Not one Palestinian should be forcibly removed from Gaza. Gaza is not America’s plaything and its people are not America’s property. They have a right to live in the towns they built over the decades, many of them sadly now destroyed in the war Hamas started with its pogrom of 7 October. But the West’s opinion-formers can’t have it both ways. They can’t treat Gaza’s inhabitants as a fundamentally homeless people, as permanent refugees, as the generational victims of the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, and then reach for the smelling salts when Trump proposes rehousing them. Both the Israelophobic activist class and blundering Trump seem to think Gazans don’t truly belong in Gaza, and that is not conducive to the building of a free state there post-Hamas. For that’s what really needs to be wiped out: not Gaza, not Israel – Hamas.

Seth Mandel: The Conflict in Three Images

The third image is blood-boiling but important, and it was easily missed in the chaotic scene in Gaza. It is of a Red Cross official shaking hands with a Hamas terrorist in front of a banner that reads “We’re the flood,” which is both a celebration of Oct. 7, 2023, and an acknowledgement that so long as Hamas is in power, Oct. 7 is its North Star. The handshake is taking place in the presence of an emaciated Israeli hostage, a monument to the failure of the International Committee of the Red Cross to uphold its founding and guiding principles—or what we were told were its guiding principles.

The Red Cross did not so much as feign interest in the fate of the Israeli hostages held by Hamas. When one hostage’s mother pleaded with the Red Cross to try and deliver medicine her daughter needed daily, the Red Cross officials scolded her: “Think about the Palestinian side. It’s hard for the Palestinians, they’re being bombed.”

During the current ceasefire, the Red Cross has played a highly visible role as Hamas props. Its officials continue to willingly participate in Hamas’s pre-release ritual humiliation ceremonies—itself a violation of the rules governing the treatment of detainees. During the war, its employees had access to the hospitals where Hamas was holding hostages and between which Hamas fighters were moving freely. Despite this, the Red Cross denounced Israel’s attempts to clear those terrorists out of the medical complexes.

The scenes from the hostage releases reinforce what we already know, and why Israel exists: “Never Again” is an empty slogan to everyone but the Jewish people. If a nation wants a future, it must secure that future for itself.

We need to talk about being angry (Forest Rain)

By Forest Rain

We need to talk about being angry

This is for the nice people, angry that Hamas cruelty has made them hate

I know a lot of nice people. Really nice people. Some of them have expressed anger that the barbarism and cruelty of Hamas has made them hate – and they do not want to hate.

Most of us were taught to be kind. To love. Not to hate. In some of our families even expressing anger was considered inappropriate. Being raised this way creates people who are very gentle and nice.

The problem is, what do you do when you are confronted with evil?

Many of us end up having difficulty recognizing the situations when it is necessary to destroy evil – because we do not want to recognize them. The violence and harshness necessary to destroy evil is repugnant to people who were taught to be nice. We are “nice”. “We don’t do things like that.”

And this conditioning is so deep that we forget that if evil is ignored, it grows. That letting evil slide because the actions necessary to stop it aren’t “nice” creates evil that is stronger and more dangerous.

That is what righteous anger is all about. It’s not anger for the sake of being angry. It’s anger, even rage, evoked from the recognition of injustice and evil.

Like the anger we felt at seeing men of Israel starved, as Nazis starved Jews when there was no Israel to protect them.

Like the anger we felt at the look of terror in Shiri Bibas’s eyes when she was ripped from her home with her two babies in her arms.

The question is, do we have enough love for our own in order to set aside our fear of harsh emotions, feel the rage, and put it to use?

Turning the other cheek is not a Jewish idea. Jews believe in justice and that God helps those who help themselves.

Turning the other cheek is an idea that can work when confronting people who come from the same cultural and ethical background and can be shamed into setting aside cruelty and violence. That was how Mahatma Gandhi shamed the British Empire.

IT DOES NOT WORK WHEN BATTLING EVIL THAT IS COMING TO DESTROY YOU AND YOUR CHILDREN.

Rage is the difference between the IDF soldiers on the battlefield and the highest ranks of IDF Command (who are now being replaced for their failure to attain victory). Our soldiers saw the results of the October 7th invasion. They saw their sisters defiled and thrown aside like rag dolls. They saw homes destroyed, babies burned, and fathers who couldn’t save their wives and children. They felt the rage and they knew what was necessary. That is why they fought on when friends were killed. That is why when injured in battle, many of them went to the hospital, recuperated and RETURNED TO THE BATTLEFIELD.

Our soldiers do not love war. They love us enough to do what it takes to make sure this doesn’t happen again. They love us enough to sacrifice themselves to rescue hostages and redeem the dignity stolen from our nation.

They saw what happened and they understood that Amalek must be destroyed. Those who did not see with their own eyes could pretend that they did not know. That the perpetrators are not Amalek. That it is ok to allow them to live – and fight another day.

Those who were there, and saw, know better - and frankly, I don’t think we are anywhere near angry enough.

When confronted with evil it is necessary to feel anger. Even rage. That is the energy that must be channelled, to create justice. To make sure that NEVER AGAIN is more than an empty slogan.

Dear nice people, you are lovely. But it isn’t “nice” to let evil survive.

Ignoring evil because confronting it necessitates violence, harshness, or unpleasantness means that you are not just allowing it to grow, you are excusing it, strengthening it.

And that isn’t nice at all.

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The world claims to care about Gaza - but it doesn't send money to help Gazans. The probable reason? They know Hamas steals it.

In December, the UN issued a "flash appeal" for Palestinians saying that they need over $4 billion in humanitarian aid, 88% ($3.6 billion) earmarked for Gaza.

Nearly two months later, it has received only 3.6% of what it requested from the world, a mere $145.6 million as of February 4.

Why is the world so unwilling to help in what it claims is the most dire humanitarian crisis of our times? This is a situation that has taken over the bulk of the world media's international coverage, pushing Ukraine from the front pages for 16 months and relegating famine in parts of Africa and other crises as mere footnotes if mentioned at all in the media. How can we explain the disconnect between how much the world claims to care about Gazans and how little it actually wants to help Gazans who need help?

One obvious answer is that the world really doesn't care about Palestinians, and it is hate for Israel that fuels the coverage and attention, but not genuine concern for Gazans.

Beyond that, however, is probably a deeper reason.

The UN and NGOs insist that Israel is lying when it says that Hamas is stealing the aid and using it to finance its own operations, and they blame Israel for not allowing aid into Gaza even when the trucks were piling up inside the sector. Now there are few impediments to bringing in aid (Israel still restricts dual-use items but usually approves them after verification) and hundreds of trucks are entering every day, without any fighting or apparent security issues.

Yet despite the huge amounts of food being brought in, the price of food remains sky-high in Gaza. Food that is meant to be distributed for free to Gazans is being sold at inflated prices. The World Food Programme says that the price of the minimum expenditure basket (MEB) is up 552% compared to what it was before the war, but it should be practically zero because all the food staples in the basket are being donated to be given away for free to needy Gazans. Why are the prices still so high?

Because Hamas continues to steal the aid and then sell it at inflated prices, as they have done throughout the war. Everyone knows this.

This is why the world doesn't want to send more than a minimal amount of aid into Gaza. No one wants to waste money. But they don't want to admit this, so they obfuscate the truth by continuing to blame Israel.

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There have now been five hostage handovers from Hamas to the Red Cross.

Each has included scenes where the hostages are forced to promote Hamas propaganda and lie about how they were treated in captivity.

This is a direct violation of international law. The Geneva Conventions say that "outrages upon personal dignity" are war crimes.

In November 2023, before the first set of hostages were released, HRW said that forcing hostages to make videos is a war crime. Since then, I cannot find anything from HRW or Amnesty International that mention this again.

Now, we know the pattern. Israeli hostages are paraded around on stage, forced to make false statements that they were treated well, forced to hold "certificates" and to thank their captors, and forced to stand in front of Hamas propaganda backdrops.

NGOs are quite limited as to what they can concretely do to promote human rights. Their major weapon is to shame various parties to act humanely and follow international law. Hamas is very sensitive to being shamed. If major NGOs would directly and unequivocally condemn these staged events, Hamas would make sure that they aren't shamed again. Since we know that the same scenario will be acted out in the future, "human rights" NGOs are in a unique position of actually being able to do something good.

They choose not to.

Make no mistake - this is a choice. "Human rights" NGOs like Amnesty and HRW mount massive, expensive campaigns against Israel, but where they could actually do good - against Muslims who are sensitive to honor - they choose to respect their honor and downplay their criticisms, if they even say anything at all.

The ICRC, for its part, has only offered muted, ambiguous mumblings of concern. Their press release yesterday states, "The ICRC is increasingly concerned about the conditions surrounding release operations. We strongly urge all parties, including the mediators, to take responsibility to ensure that future releases are dignified and private. The ICRC has consistently conveyed this message privately and publicly. " By saying "all parties" they are equating Israel and Hamas, and therefore Hamas is not shamed - on the contrary, they are equating innocent hostages to convicted terrorists. It is true that the ICRC is committed to neutrality but that doesn't mean it cannot (and does not) call out abuses by one side when the abuses only happen on that side.

Most times that HRW and Amnesty condemn something, the event has already happened. Here the war crime is planned, scheduled, and livestreamed. This is one of the few times that the NGOs can influence Hamas to change its behavior ahead of time by publicly calling it out and demanding a change. That they choose not to do so tells you everything about how little they care about the human rights of Israelis.

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The Quran (62:5) says, "The example of those who were entrusted with observing the Torah but failed to do so, is that of a donkey carrying books. How evil is the example of those who reject Allah’s signs! For Allah does not guide the wrongdoing people."

Dr. Salama Dawoud, President of Al-Azhar University, says that this verse carries within it a great lesson about knowledge, learning, and benefiting from knowledge.

During an episode of the program “The Eloquence of the Qur’an and Sunnah,” broadcast on “Al-Nas” channel, Dawoud said that the comparison to a donkey carrying books is a very strange comparison, because it is not usual to see a donkey carrying books.

“The verse does not only refer to the Jews who carried the Torah, but to everyone who acquired knowledge but did not act upon it, whether in religion or in any other field. "

If the message was to all of humanity, why did Mohammed specify Jews as being the ones analogous to donkeys? In fact, the next three verses are also addressed to Jews specifically, saying that if they are really the chosen people, they should not fear death because paradise is automatic.

62:6 – Say, "O you who are Jews, if you claim to be Allah’s chosen ones, to the exclusion of (all) people, then wish for death, if you should be truthful."
62:7 – But they will never wish for it, ever, because of what their hands have put forth. And Allah is Knowing of the wrongdoers.
62:8 – Say, "Indeed, the death from which you flee – indeed, it will meet you. Then you will be returned to the Knower of the unseen and the seen, and He will inform you about what you used to do."

It is one of many examples where Islam applies its own peculiar worldview to Jews to define Jews as hypocrites. Jews value life because only in life can one do mitzvot and improve.

These verses are apparently the source of the bizarre taunt that Palestinians often say to Jews, "We love death and you love life."

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