Friday, February 28, 2025
Elder of Ziyon
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| This one went viral. Hundreds of thousands of views. |
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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Friday, February 28, 2025Elder of Ziyon
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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Friday, February 28, 2025Elder of Ziyon
What if faith can influence a billion people and inspire them to feed the hungry after fasting the whole day?What if religious conviction can cause a community to become more altruistic and give to welfare and charity for a month?What if the practice of faith can inspire a billion people to become forgiving of each other’s mistakes?What if a noble civilisation of over a billion people can dispel the myth that human beings cannot live without violence, looting, robbing and killing?
April 7, 2022: The young man, Raad Hazem (29 years old), left his home in the Jenin camp (northern West Bank) until he reached Dizengoff Street. Hazem opened fire on those in the street, leaving behind 5 dead and 6 wounded.
In 2016, the resistance carried out 10 suicide operations, ranging from shooting to stabbing, killing 6 Israelis and wounding 15 others. The most serious of these operations occurred when Muhammad and Khalil Makhamreh, cousins from the town of Yatta in the West Bank, entered the Sarona shopping mall near the headquarters of the Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv and opened fire on settlers, killing 4 and wounding 40.In 2015, a shooting took place near the Dolev settlement, near Ramallah, at point-blank range, targeting a settler’s car. One settler was killed and another was injured.In 2010, resistance fighters opened fire on a settler’s car in Hebron, killing four of them.In 2002, resistance fighters Akram al-Hanini, Walaa Surur, and Dhiab al-Muhtaseb carried out an operation against settlers from Kiryat Arba near Hebron, killing 12 soldiers and settlers and wounding 18 others, 4 of them seriously. In the same year, the martyr Sami Abu Halil from Hebron detonated his explosive belt on Mexico Street in Jerusalem, killing 12 Israelis and wounding 47 others.Ramadan 2001 was crowded with resistance operations. The martyr Maher Habesha from Nablus carried out a bombing operation on a Haifa bus, killing 16 Israelis and wounding 55 others. When his comrades brought him breakfast, he refused, saying, “I will break my fast tonight in heaven.”Also in Ramadan 2001, the two martyrs Osama Bahar and Nabil Halabiya carried out their double operation against an Israeli army site in Jerusalem, killing 11 Israelis and wounding 190 others. [It was the Ben Yehuda Street pedestrian mall - EoZ].The two resistance fighters Jihad al-Masri and Muslima al-Araj also stormed the “Eli Sinai” settlement north of Gaza, killing an Israeli nuclear scientist and wounding 5 others.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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Friday, February 28, 2025Elder of Ziyon
Paul O’Brien, executive director of Amnesty International USA, said military action is not a legally sufficient answer to accusations of genocide at a Harvard Law School talk Wednesday afternoon.An HLS alum, O’Brien said he came to the Law School to preview a forthcoming article in the Harvard Human Rights Journal about laws surrounding genocide and their application to Israel’s war in Gaza.“There can be multiple intents. A military actor who has legitimate military goals can intend the genocide in order to accomplish those goals,” O’Brien said at the talk, hosted by the HHRJ. “It can be a means to a military end.”Based on this reading of human rights law, O’Brien and Amnesty International published a report in December that argued Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza....According to O’Brien, Amnesty eventually established that Israel had “a disregard, and credibly, an intention to destroy the civilian population” in Gaza — a conclusion that allowed the organization to publish its findings.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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Noa Argamani, the Israeli hostage who was rescued from Gaza by the Israel Defense Forces last June, addressed the U.N. Security Council this week. She spoke about being abducted into a “world of torture and humiliation,” where she tried to comfort two small girls who had been dragged with her into the darkness of the Hamas tunnels and where she saw her fellow hostage, Itai Svirsky, brutally murdered.Seth Mandel: Trauma Envy and the Campus Intifada
Her boyfriend, Avinatan Or, who was dragged into the Gaza Strip with her, remains in captivity. Of the 63 remaining hostages, 36 are believed to be dead.
Argamani’s raw testimony was a necessary corrective to the unconscionable indifference in the halls of the United Nations to Israeli suffering and its shocking embrace of Israel’s genocidal attackers.
Shortly afterward, however, someone else addressed the Security Council. This was Daniel Levy, the British former Israeli peace negotiator and now president of the U.S./Middle East Project think tank.
Referring to Kfir and Ariel Bibas, the murdered Israeli infant hostages who were buried in Israel in heartbreaking scenes the following day, he said: “A minute of silence for each of the Bibas children would be appropriate, as would a minute of silence for each of the more than 18,000 Palestinian children murdered in Israel’s devastation of Gaza. That silence would extend to over 300 hours.”
What a breathtakingly vile comment. Hamas terrorists murdered 9-month-old Kfir and 4-year-old Ariel with their bare hands and mutilated their bodies to conceal the crime. How could anyone equate this monstrous depravity with the fate of children in Gaza killed unintentionally in a war to defend Israel against genocide—killed, moreover, because Hamas uses Gaza’s children as human shields and cannon fodder?
Moreover, the 18,000 figure is merely a claim by Hamas that notoriously makes no distinction between dead civilians and combatants, has reclassified numerous adult fatalities as children and includes as “children” teenagers who serve as Hamas gunmen.
Worse, Levy said all this in front of Argamani herself. As she stared at him, Levy claimed sanctimoniously that it was “important to hear your testimony of an awful experience to which no human should ever be subjected”—and then went on to diminish that experience by equating it with a stream of distortions and unverified Hamas propaganda claims.
He hailed as an equivalent victim Dr. Hassan abu Safiyeh, director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital, who he said was still being held in detention by the Israelis and mistreated.
The IDF, however, raided that hospital because it was a Hamas hub under the terrorist group’s control. One terrorist arrested there admitted to the IDF that abu Safiyeh had been “orchestrating the terror and Hamas activities within the compound.”
In other words—and this is the key point in understanding the escalation—these students at Columbia University and other expensive universities have been the most pampered young adults in the history of the universe. Though of course there will be individual exceptions, as a group these folks have been handed more and asked to do less than anyone who walked the earth before them.The truth about ‘No Other Land’
The students themselves unintentionally acknowledged this generality last night. After they left their occupation, many of them made a circle outside and cultishly chanted a bunch of slogans, including: “We have nothing to lose but our chains.”
I don’t know how people who have actually been kept in chains would feel about this kind of appropriation by the ultra-privileged, but it tells us something important about the mindset of the comfortable elite: They find themselves and their lives utterly boring.
These activists’ anger at previous generations isn’t for withholding opportunity, it’s for the opportunity itself. There are two kinds of Columbia students who talk unironically about losing their chains: those who know they are privileged and pretend otherwise as a form of escapism, and those who actually think being told to go to class at their expensive private institution is what everybody in history has meant by “chains.”
In the past, this kind of progressive trauma envy took the form of poverty tourism. A trip to Cuba to gawk in admiration at the victims of your own ideology, before getting on a plane and going back to your Manhattan apartment, has long been practically a rite of passage, the closest thing the American left has to a bar mitzvah.
But the mixing in of Palestinian nationalism adds a new and escalatory element to this worldview.
Palestinian advocacy too often teeters into trauma envy. The most obvious example is the obsession with claiming that Jews are perpetrating a Holocaust against Arabs in the Middle East, a lie whose overuse is entirely intentional on the part of anti-Zionists. Holocaust envy has only become more explicit: We see Palestinian journalists and activists calling themselves a “Holocaust survivor” or saying “everyone in Gaza is a Holocaust survivor” and declaring they “will proudly wear the Palestinian Keffiyeh to work, especially during the Palestinian Holocaust, just as I would have worn the Star of David during the Jewish Holocaust.”
To underline the point, “pro-Palestinian” activists in the West routinely vandalize Holocaust memorials, protest Holocaust museums, and fetishize the appropriation of Anne Frank to an uncomfortable degree. Last month, the UK’s Islamic Human Rights Commission went so far as to explicitly say Holocaust commemorations that do not include ceremonies for Gaza should be boycotted.
But it isn’t just the Holocaust. In the early part of the 20th century, Arab leaders openly acknowledged the Jewish connection to the land. When that morphed into Palestinian nationalism, suddenly it became obligatory to deny that history and to perform a sort of Replacement Theology whose writers embarked on an ambitious appropriation project: The Wandering Jew became “The Wandering Palestinian,” Palestinian rewrites of iconic novels like The City Without Jews appeared, Golda Meir’s quotes were repurposed against the Jews.
Trauma envy, a direct outgrowth of progressive grievance culture, is warping minds at a rapid clip, spreading far and wide. But like most other forms of anti-Semitism, it’s just easier to see at Columbia.
The Oscar-nominated documentary “No Other Land” portrays the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the microcosm of a collection of Palestinian Arab settlements called Masafer Yatta. In that cluster of makeshift villages, the film gives the impression that impoverished Palestinians confront the oppression of Israeli military demolition crews in an existential struggle to prevent the destruction of Palestinian homes, the displacement of their people and the theft of their land. But ultimately, we are told, the righteous Palestinian resistance survives.
The reality of Masafer Yatta is altogether different. The history of that area exemplifies how Palestinians illegally seize plots of land in Judea and Samaria, and how Israel lawfully defends against these incursions.
The 1920 San Remo Treaty and 1922 Palestine Mandate, under the supervision of the League of Nations, created the state that became Israel. The West Bank, known historically as Judea and Samaria, was part of that allocated territory. These instruments of international law were justified by widespread recognition that the designated land was the ancestral homeland of the Jews.
The State of Israel emerged in 1948 and acceded to membership in the United Nations a year later. By that point, Jordan had illegally invaded and occupied the eastern portion of Jerusalem and land on the west bank of the Jordan River. However, in the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel liberated those territories from Jordanian occupation. Israel then validly applied its sovereign governance to eastern Jerusalem but decided to forego implementing its sovereign right to the so-called West Bank area pending negotiation of peace deals with its Arab rivals.
The Palestinians never had a state that could be occupied. They never even had a treaty or comparable agreement granting them legal ties to eastern Jerusalem, the West Bank or the Gaza Strip. On the contrary, the original 1964 Palestine National Charter of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) expressly disclaimed Palestinian rights to those three domains because they were occupied by PLO ally countries: Jordan and Egypt.
Israel and the Palestinians began an effort to make peace in 1993 when they signed the first of six agreements known as the Oslo Accords. In the area called the West Bank, the accords awarded Israel interim control over a territory labeled “Area C,” and granted the Palestinians interim control of Area A. Area B was marked as shared.
Masafer Yatta lies in Area C, which places it under Israeli civilian and security control.
About 200,000 Palestinians reside in Area C. Some of them live in Masafer Yatta. But in 1999, when Palestinians erected an additional batch of shacks in Masafer Yatta, they violated the Oslo Accords by failing to obtain building permits from Israel’s Civil Administration.
Palestinian Arabs have orchestrated many such unlicensed land grabs in Area C. Using slapdash combinations of cement blocks, mud bricks, corrugated metal sheets, plastic tarps and portable electric generators, they create chess pawns strategically positioned to block the buildout of Israeli communities and enlarge the pretense of “Palestinian land.” The decision to add Palestinian settlements in Masafer Yatta was especially provocative because that barren expanse had been classified in the 1980s as an Israeli military training zone.
Yisrael (Robert J.) Aumann was awarded the 2005 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contribution to Game Theory, a branch of applied mathematics that studies strategic interactions between individuals or groups.Hamas dropped its victim narrative with sadistic hostage releases
Aumann has said that if he could describe Game Theory in one word, it would be “incentives.”
JNS caught up with Aumann on Feb. 23 at his offices in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he is a member of the Einstein Institute of Mathematics and The Federmann Center for the Study of Rationality, to ask what he thought of the current prisoner exchange deal between Israel and Hamas.
The deal called for the release of 33 Israeli hostages in exchange for about 1,900 imprisoned terrorists, many of them murderers serving multiple life sentences.
In a word, said Aumann, “Crazy.”
“The basis of Game Theory is to give incentives to the other side to do what’s good for you,” Aumann told JNS. “And we keep doing the opposite. We are literally killing ourselves. We are killing our own children. It’s not only that they will kidnap more. We are incentivizing them to attack us again and again, to make war against us, to repeat Oct. 7,” he said, referring to the Hamas-led massacre of Oct. 7, 2023.
Q: Do we know the recidivism rates of these released prisoners who return to terror?
A: We don’t have the exact number. It’s important. Someone should pull together those numbers. It doesn’t even require any analysis. It’s just a matter of gathering the available data. There are a lot of sources.
When it comes to recidivism, not every terrorist attack is successful. In fact, my subjective impression is that most terrorist attacks are not successful. Most of the time, they kill the terrorist, or they stop him before he manages to kill someone.
Let’s say the number of unsuccessful attacks is somewhere between 50% to 75%. But that leaves successful ones between 25% and 50%, and if you talk about 1,000 terrorists released, we get maybe between 250 and 500 successful terrorist attacks where they manage to kill somebody, at least one person. That’s at least 250 dead for 33 live hostages.
Just on that basis alone, it’s obviously a terrible deal.
But that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is that again and again we’re going to have people kidnapped. We’ve shown the enemy that it’s worth it, that we will completely give up and raise a white flag even if you abduct one, like with Gilad Shalit [an IDF soldier kidnapped by Hamas in June 2006 and exchanged five years later for 1,027 terrorist prisoners.]
We’ve given them incentives to go and kidnap more and more. And they’ve said they’re going to do it. They did it in the past. So we better believe them.
The summer of Gazan love has ended with a thud. The ability to scream about the resistance, about the river and the sea, along with the free-wheeling accusations of genocide, all without accountability, is over.Itzik Elgarat, Ohad Yahalomi, Tsachi Idan, Shlomo Mantzur murdered by Hamas terrorists
Hamas has, to no one’s surprise in Israel, made itself completely unpalatable, let alone heroic. It has required its fellow travelers to excuse, contextualize, or defend conduct that, were there no Jews involved, would be universally condemned and despised.
Hamas did it all by itself and to itself. It did it by showing its true colors and straightforward world view, on its own initiative. The morphing realities and narratives in Gaza
In this regard, the ironies are immense and all but overwhelming. That is because, with its discretionary handling of the return of the hostages, Hamas has just made Israel’s case for why it should be expunged from Gaza, and indeed from history.
What happened to the starving, bereft Gazans? We have morphed from pictures of bedraggled Gazans to pressed uniforms, cheering crowds, and an environment worthy of a Hitlerian rally in the 1930s.
All of this was to show the world that Hamas had won. This in and of itself undercuts the case of devastation that must be stopped, privation that must be addressed, and an all-but-eradicated people that must be rescued.
The face that Hamas has chosen to show the world is not one of “We survived Israel’s onslaught,” but in effect one of “Israel never laid a glove on us.” That, of course, beggars the imagination.
However, it is with its treatment of the returned hostages that Hamas has shown its true colors to any who would look objectively at its doings, and listen to what it is, in effect, saying.
Of course, the images of the returned hostages, particularly the men, speak for themselves. Those of us who are allergic to any analogies with the Holocaust nevertheless found ourselves invoking such comparisons when presented with pictures of some of the released men.
The world clearly saw the heinousness of Hamas, and, by extension, its formerly bereft but now screamingly happy acolytes, as Hamas stormtroopers orchestrated scenes that could have easily devolved into lynchings and certainly had all the feel of them.
The Prime Minister’s Office announced on Thursday that the deaths of Ohad Yahalomi, Tsachi Idan, Shlomo Mantzur, and Itzik Elgarat have been confirmed following forensic analyses.
“Following the completion of the identification process by the IDF, the Health Ministry National Center of Forensic Medicine and the Israel Police, IDF representatives have, overnight, informed the Yahalomi, Idan, Mantzur and Elgarat families that their loved ones—Ohad Yahalomi, Tsachi Idan, Shlomo Mantzur and Itzik Elgarat, of blessed memory—were murdered and have been returned for burial in Israel,” the PMO statement said.
“Pursuant to the intelligence and all of the information at our disposal, Ohad Yahalomi, Tsachi Idan and Itzik Elgarat were murdered while held hostage in Gaza. Shlomo Mantzur was murdered in the 7 October 2023 massacre and his body had been held in the Gaza Strip,” the statement continued.
“We share in the families’ sorrow at this difficult time.”
Kibbutz Nir Oz announced earlier on Thursday that Israeli hostages Elgarat and Yahalomi, whose bodies were among four returned to Israel overnight Wednesday, were murdered in Hamas captivity in Gaza.
The Hostages and Missing Families Forum and Idan’s family shortly thereafter confirmed the identification of Mantzur’s and Idan’s remains, respectively.
The terrorist organization handed over to the Red Cross what it claimed were the bodies of the four Israelis at around midnight in Gaza.
Thursday, February 27, 2025Elder of Ziyon
humor, Preoccupied
Check out their Facebook and Substack pages.
Nidal Radwan, owner of the now-rubble "Hitler 2" clothing store in this city before the current war, sent messages to friends, business contacts, and former customers today, to the effect that Hamas will help pay to rebuild the store. He credited the organization with committing to provide more than $75,000 to make Hitler 3 a reality. A spokesman for Hamas "Liked" one of the posts announcing the project on social media, and another commented that the movement has chosen Hitler 3 as one of its flagship reconstruction tasks.
Hitler 2 met a dusty, violent end last year during the IDF's ground operations in Gaza to locate hostages and smash Hamas's fighting ability in the territory. The cause of the destruction remains uncertain: Israeli airstrike, Israeli artillery, house-to-house fighting, or booby-traps could each serve as plausible explanations. All the areas in which the IDF fought were crisscrossed with Hamas tunnels and bunkers, making all the structures above them likely targets.
Reconstruction of Gaza remains an uncertain and contentious issue, as does its future governance. Israel failed to dislodge Hamas from its position as the ruling entity, but powerful international interests have stated they will not accept that situation for long. Various governments have voiced hesitation to fund building in Gaza again if it will all get demolished in yet another war several years hence - Hamas has repeatedly insisted it will attack Israel again and again, making destructive retaliation an inevitability. Partly to cement its position as the only credible Gaza governance option, the organization has begun to assert itself in the role by announcing several reconstruction initiatives to which it wants to call attention, among them Radwan's Hitler store.
"These projects showcase the priorities of the Resistance in rehabilitating Gaza," explained a movement spokesman. "Of course we will rebuild facilities and positions of military significance. But the morale dimension also requires attention. Rebuilding Hitler - as many times as necessary - is a statement that the enemy cannot defeat us, that our movement is anchored in history, and that we cannot be deterred from continuing Hitler's work."
"But those mannequins were butt-ugly," he added, "and we will insist that Mr. Radwan not use them this time."
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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Thursday, February 27, 2025Elder of Ziyon
This year marks the first time any party group has had majority-level unfavorable ratings of Israel, with 60% of Democrats expressing that view. Forty-four percent of independents also have an unfavorable opinion of Israel.Democrats’ and independents’ sagging views of Israel have pushed its favorability to 54% among all Americans, its lowest rating since January 2000, when it was also at 54%. The last time Americans had worse opinions of Israel -- 48% favorable -- was in February 1992. The all-time low was 45% favorable (and 45% unfavorable) in 1989.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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Thursday, February 27, 2025Elder of ZiyonForest Rain, OpinionBatman weeps: A mother’s fight, two little lions, and
a nation forever changed
How much impact can a
person have on the world when they are only given four years to live?
Words shape reality.
They give form to our emotions and channel their power. That’s why I believe it
is so important to articulate what we feel in response to the murder of Shiri,
Ariel, and Kfir Bibas.
I’ve seen it written
that Ariel loved Batman. I didn’t know him, so I don’t know how deep that love
ran. Did he dress up as Batman often, or was the video we’ve seen of him in his
Batman costume from one Purim? I don’t know.
I do know that the
image of Batman crying for the little boy who is no longer here felt like a
stab in my heart.
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| Painting by Elisabetta Furcht |
Ariel—his name itself carries weight. A combination of "Arieh" (lion) and "El" (God), it is one of the many names of Jerusalem. A powerful name for a little boy who might have dreamed of being a foreign superhero—only to become a symbol for an entire nation.
So much horror has
unfolded. Why, among all the pain, has our nation focused so intensely on this
one family?
If we limit our
emotions to pity or even rage at their murderers, we do a disservice to
ourselves and to the Bibas family. There is more here. Within this terrible
loss, there is also a gift.
Ariel and Kfir were
the youngest hostages taken by the Gazans, but they were not the only child
hostages.
Other babies were
murdered. Rescue teams found families burned alive in an embrace—parents
shielding their children with their own bodies, older siblings covering the
youngest in a desperate attempt to protect them.
We saw Shiri’s terror,
captured on camera. That split second of horror as she found herself alone,
surrounded by the invaders, with no one to help her or her babies. Other Jewish
mothers had that same moment, but we didn’t see them live on TV.
We saw Shiri again on
video, in Gaza, wrapped in a blanket, still clutching her two boys as she was
dragged into captivity. Carrying a four-year-old and a nine-month-old is
difficult even in normal circumstances. How long did she hold them in her arms?
How long before she no longer could?
Now, in death, she
carries them still. They were buried together, forever locked in that embrace.
And Yarden? We saw his
abuse. The beating as he was ripped from his family. The starvation in the
tunnels. His torment when his captors told him that his beloved wife and babies
were dead—and then shoved a camera in his face, forcing him to beg for them to
be returned to him.
Now, we see his
dignity and heroism. In the instructions he gave us—to tell the world what was
done to his babies. In the way he articulates his love for them. In his wonder
and appreciation that our Nation is trying to wrap him in love. And in his
quiet acknowledgment that this enormous love, is not the simple love of his
beloved, the only love he really wants.
The Bibas family
captured our hearts because they are special. But also because they have become
symbols that help us live with our own trauma.
The mind cannot
comprehend the enormity of what we have experienced—what we are still
experiencing. There are not enough tears for all the children. For all the
broken families. For all the survivors struggling not to be swallowed by the
abyss.
But we can cry for
Ariel and Kfir. Little lions who will never grow up. (Kfir is the Hebrew word
for lion cub.)
It is easy to call the
murder of babies evil. The very idea of a grown man choking an infant to death
fills us with revulsion. It is paralyzing to imagine men mutilating the body of
a dead child—to frame the murder in a way that serves their twisted narrative.
The dead child feels no pain. But what does it take for someone to look at the
lifeless body of a baby and still feel that it is necessary and good to smash
it?
We need to think of
Ariel and Kfir because we cannot take into our hearts the evil unleashed on so
many others. The children tortured in front of their parents before being
butchered. The children forced to watch their parents being tortured before
they too were killed. The children found tied together and burned.
The soul screams, and
the mind shuts down. It’s too much. We don’t want to know. We can’t take it all
in.
But these things
happened. And the world needs to know.
That is why Shiri,
Ariel, and Kfir are so important. And Yarden too.
For their family and
friends, they remain their private, individual selves. But for the rest of us,
they are symbols—symbols we desperately need.
They allow us to
grieve. We cry for them while crying for all the others.
They force the world
to see what evil looks like. There is no nuance, no excuses. Babies versus baby
killers is an equation no one can ignore.
Shani Louk, in her
grace and light, dancing at the Nova, contrasted with the hideous image of her
twisted, half-naked body paraded in a pickup truck—men cheering, children
spitting on her—made it impossible to ignore the sickness in Gazan society.
The Bibas family
clarifies this evil further.
Some have attempted to
excuse the horrors Gazans brought to the Nova might as generalized violence of
men against women, an outburst of bloodlust, facilitated by terrorists on drugs
with the opportunity to do whatever they want to the enemy population. The
Bibas family puts the evil in hyperfocus, in a way that is impossible to define
other than what it is - the deliberate destruction of Jewish families. A hatred
so deep that it erases all empathy, making it impossible to see a baby as a
precious form of life. Giving no respect for a mother battling to protect her
cubs. The evil that strangles and mutilates babies is not a fluke in the
system, it is the system. It is a building block in a society that seeks the
destruction of ours.
Batman became a
superhero after a terrible event in his childhood. His pain drove him to want
to prevent others from suffering. He didn’t have any special magical abilities.
He developed tools that enabled him to serve the people of his city, and most
of the time he did it alone.
What a terrible,
all-too-familiar burden.
Shiri and Yarden just
wanted to be parents. Ariel and Kfir just wanted to be themselves—happy,
exploring, growing boys, wrapped in the love of their family.
Who wants to become a
symbol? Particularly not one born in trauma and horror. No one wants to embody
the battle between good and evil, life and death.
But that is what they
have become.
I cannot undo what was
done to them. I cannot ease their suffering.
But I can be grateful
for what they have given us—a way to express the emotions that are too vast for
our small nation to contain. A defining truth, for us and for the world, of
right and wrong, good and evil. The ultimate line that must never be crossed.
Proof that no justification or excuse can ever make it acceptable to allow
monsters to live on our doorstep.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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Thursday, February 27, 2025Elder of Ziyon
The BBC has been accused of “whitewashing” the views of participants in its controversial Gaza documentary after repeatedly mistranslating references to “the Jews” and omitting praise of “jihad”.The Telegraph can reveal that on at least five occasions the words Yahud or Yahudy – Arabic for “Jew” or “Jews” – were changed to “Israel” or “Israeli forces”, or were removed from the subtitles altogether.An interviewee praising Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader, for “jihad against the Jews” was also mistranslated as saying he was fighting “Israeli forces”.
Definition of Jihad (المطلب الأول: تعريف الجهاد)
Linguistic Definition (تعريف الجهاد في اللغة):
- Jihad is derived from the root word "جاهد" (jaahada), which means to exert effort or struggle.
- It is used to describe fighting an enemy or exerting effort and energy to repel an opponent.
Technical Definition (تعريف الجهاد اصطلاحًا):
- According to Hanafi School (تعريف الحنفية):
Jihad is calling people to the true religion and fighting those who refuse to accept it.- According to Maliki School (تعريف المالكية):
Jihad is fighting a non-Muslim who does not have a treaty with Muslims to exalt the word of Allah.- According to Shafi'i School (تعريف الشافعية):
Jihad is exerting effort in fighting disbelievers to support Islam.- According to Hanbali School (تعريف الحنابلة):
Jihad is specifically fighting disbelievers.Chosen Definition (التعريف المختار):
After reviewing the definitions from the various schools of thought, the paper adopts the following definition:
- "Jihad is exerting one's utmost ability, effort, and energy in fighting disbelievers—after inviting them to Islam and their refusal—in order to elevate the word of Allah and honor His religion.
The paper specifically addresses the obligation of jihad against Israel and its goals:
Resisting Occupation and Expelling the Invader (مقاومة الاحتلال ودحر المحتل):
Purpose and Justification:
- An enemy may occupy Muslim lands for various purposes, such as:
- Eradicating Islam and its followers.
- Exploiting natural resources of Islamic countries.
- Occupying lands that were historically under Muslim rule.
- Facilitating immigration and creating favorable living conditions for settlers from the occupying state, leading to the displacement of the indigenous Muslim population, as happened in Palestine.
Objective of Jihad Against Occupation:
- If the occupier's objective is to achieve any of the aforementioned goals, then expelling the occupier becomes a legitimate objective of jihad in Islam.
- In this case, jihad becomes a compulsory duty (fard ‘ayn) on all Muslims by the consensus of the following schools of thought:
- Hanafi
- Maliki
- Shafi'i
- Hanbali
- Zahiri
Obligation of Defense:
- It is obligatory for the inhabitants of the occupied land to use all their means to repel the aggressor.
- If they cannot achieve sufficient defense, then the obligation of jihad extends to neighboring Muslims, then to those beyond them, until the enemy is expelled from Muslim lands.
- This is based on the principle of collective duty (fard kifaya) becoming an individual duty (fard ‘ayn) when the threat is imminent.
The word "jihad" in this context explicitly means a religious obligation to attack every Jew (disbelievers include civilians) and to expel every Jew from the land.
It means genocide.
Translating that as "struggle" is not at all accurate.
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What about the "greater jihad" that so many use to say that jihad is primarily an internal struggle?
That interpretation comes from a hadith which is considered weak or non-authoritative in mainstream Islam. The idea comes from Sufi Islam but has been more widely adopted colloquially among Sunnis. Some traditionalists and Salafists critique this interpretation of jihad altogether, saying it is purely military.
In this context, however, it is clear that "jihad" means nothing less than a holy, total war on Jews in Israel.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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Thursday, February 27, 2025Elder of ZiyonU.S. tech giants have quietly empowered Israel to track and kill many more alleged militants more quickly in Gaza and Lebanon through a sharp spike in artificial intelligence and computing services. But the number of civilians killed has also soared, fueling fears that these tools are contributing to the deaths of innocent people.
Militaries have for years hired private companies to build custom autonomous weapons. However, Israel’s recent wars mark a leading instance in which commercial AI models made in the United States have been used in active warfare, despite concerns that they were not originally developed to help decide who lives and who dies.
“This is the first confirmation we have gotten that commercial AI models are directly being used in warfare,” said Heidy Khlaaf, chief AI scientist at the AI Now Institute and former senior safety engineer at OpenAI. “The implications are enormous for the role of tech in enabling this type of unethical and unlawful warfare going forward.”
What does she mean by "directly"? Israel would not use commercial software for actual warfare, for the simple reason that commercial software is not designed for that - the requirements in warfare are far stricter.
As the article says later, Israel's use of Microsoft Azure is mostly for translation, transcription and searching huge amounts of data. That is not "direct" use in war. The quote is either a lie on her part of AP's not telling her what it knew itself.
But Khlaaf is not exactly an impartial scientist.. She called the war in Gaza a genocide - on October 13, 2023.
As U.S. tech titans ascend to prominent roles under President Donald Trump, the AP’s findings raise questions about Silicon Valley’s role in the future of automated warfare.
The Israeli military says its analysts use AI-enabled systems to help identify targets but independently examine them together with high-ranking officers to meet international law, weighing the military advantage against the collateral damage. A senior Israeli intelligence official authorized to speak to the AP said lawful military targets may include combatants fighting against Israel, wherever they are, and buildings used by militants. Officials insist that even when AI plays a role, there are always several layers of humans in the loop.“These AI tools make the intelligence process more accurate and more effective,” said an Israeli military statement to the AP. “They make more targets faster, but not at the expense of accuracy, and many times in this war they’ve been able to minimize civilian casualties.”
It’s extremely hard to identify when AI systems enable errors because they are used with so many other forms of intelligence, including human intelligence, sources said. But together they can lead to wrongful deaths.
“Should we be basing these decisions on things that the model could be making up?” said Joshua Kroll, an assistant professor of computer science.
The Israeli military said any phone conversation translated from Arabic or intelligence used in identifying a target has to be reviewed by an Arabic-speaking officer.
(I often use automated translation tools for my writing, but if anything seems off, I will verify with either other tools or with a human expert. My writings are not life or death. Anyone assuming that an army would kill someone based on a single tenuous piece of information is not an honest person.)
The article lists potential mistakes that anonymous IDF officers admit to have seen in AI, like mistranslations or mislabeling a spreadsheet. But these are errors that humans can do too - and worse - and in these cases, the human oversight found the errors. If IDF workers don't follow procedure and ensure that data is verified, that is a problem that must be solved, but it is no different from any other army grunt not following proper procedures.
AP also seems shocked that Israeli employees at Microsoft might be - shudder - patriotic:
Microsoft also operates a 46,000-square-meter corporate campus in Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv, and another office in Gav-Yam in southern Israel, which has displayed a large Israeli flag.
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Horrors! Israeli employees are Zionist!
Finally, the article quotes anti-Israel tech people to inject more fear in the reader:
Former Google software engineer Emaan Haseem was among those fired. Haseem said she worked on a team that helped test the reliability of a “sovereign cloud” — a secure system of servers kept so separate from the rest of Google’s global cloud infrastructure that even the company itself couldn’t access or track the data it stores. She later learned through media reports that Google was building a sovereign cloud for Israel.
“It seemed to be more and more obvious that we are literally just trying to design something where we won’t have to care about how our clients are using it, and if they’re using it unfairly or unethically,” Haseem said.
The entire point of sovereign clouds is for regulatory and security reasons. Some data is not allowed to cross national lines for various reasons, including higher security. It is not something Google created for Israel: all major cloud companies offer this option and it is meant to safeguard the data. Haseem is saying that cloud companies should be responsible for how their services are used and act as Big Brother to ensure that it fits their own standards.
If that was true, they would have no customers.
Altogether, this is a hugely biased article of the sort we've seen often in major media. There are no direct lies, but it was written deliberately to imply that something really evil is happening when there is none.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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