Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Saturday, March 15, 2025

03/15 Links: The Coalition of the Sentimental and the Homicidal; How American Aid Has Subsidized Terror; U.S. kicks out South Africa's Hamas-linked ambassador

From Ian:

The Coalition of the Sentimental and the Homicidal

The short answer is peer approval, credibility, and a temporary sense of moral righteousness, purchased only at the cost of their prior principles. For these are people who, presumably, once upon a time, were morally opposed to rape, mass murder, and the taking of hostages.

That most of the campus protesters are to be found at the most expensive universities, and thus either come from wealthy families or are the recipients of highly prized scholarships, is not incidental to this hypocrisy; poshlost is a crime of privilege. It is a political statement that serves to please the issuer of the statement while not, in any way, advancing the interests of the cause it purports to represent. It is virtue-signaling in which the purpose is to impress oneself rather than change the opinions of others. It is selective sentimentality, frequently accompanied by astonishing callousness. It is an idle amusement, as it’s easy to cry crocodile tears about a conflict one knows nothing about when there is no job at stake, and no bills piling up, and there is the assurance that, if arrested, bail will be immediately available.

Thus, the term poshlost is even more apropos than Nabokov could have imagined and deserves acceptance as a new English-language portmanteau word: These posh and comfortable protesters, play-acting like children in their keffiyehs and waving flags whose meanings are unknown to them, are well and truly morally lost.

Many of these purveyors of poshlost are not merely falsely sentimental or insincere; they are deliberately manipulative in their lust for likes and clicks. They use their selectively empathetic personas in service of nakedly mercantilistic ends. One professional therapist writes: “Now that we are blocking all celebrities, influencers and businesses that do not support Palestine by speaking out and fighting to end the genocide in Gaza, might I suggest we start following those that do? Like, perhaps my small hypnotherapy practice.”

The novelist Milan Kundera, who well knew the horrors of totalitarian rule, has nicely skewered false sentimentality: “Two tears flow in quick succession. The first tear says: how nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: how nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass.” Put another way, “sentimentality is that peculiarly human vice which consists in directing your emotions toward your own emotions, so as to be the subject of a story told by yourself,” as the English philosopher Roger Scruton noted in his autobiography.

The sentimentalists are playing a double game: They are dispensing, and attracting, warm feelings and approbation for themselves and their kind, while at the same time providing cover for totalitarians and terrorists. Though some are well-meaning, and genuinely naive, the innocents among them have long ago been outpaced by the calculating cynics. The latter dress up evil in a manner no different from that of the directors of the Nazi-run Theresienstadt labor camp, where the Nazis planted pretty gardens and painted barracks in lively colors to dupe inspectors from the International Red Cross. (Not that the International Red Cross, then or now, has ever needed any assistance in overlooking Jewish suffering.)

To be clear, there are many different categories and types of lies about the conflict. The insincere sentimentalism about the Palestinians may not be the worst type, but it is the most insidious because it wraps itself in a phony cloak of decency and compassion that appeals to people’s innate moral narcissism. It infiltrates the psyches of the very people who think of themselves as the most kind, the most sincere, and ostensibly the most peace-loving.

They are, in fact, exactly the opposite of these things.

One folksinger on Instagram, who acknowledges living on Tongva land, sings a song referencing “from the river to the sea.” In a musical litany of complaints about capitalism, Covid, hurricanes, “policing gender roles,” climate change, and Israel’s supposed “pinkwashing,” the singer declares, “Lord, at least we have our souls.” This person, like so many of the poshlost army, has posted nothing about the October 7 massacre or the years of rocket attacks against Israeli communities. Which makes Scruton’s point that “a moral argument must be consistent if it is to be sincere.”

If you plant metaphorical gardens that obscure your view of actual murders and sing poshlost folk tunes designed to paint over and glamorize the likes of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, you have become morally bankrupt. Despite your guitar, your guilt, and your peer-approved opinions, you have long ago lost your soul.

The Bibas Children and Ivan Karamazov’s Rebellion

So powerful is Ivan’s argument that Konstantin Pobedonostsev, chief procurator of the Holy Synod governing the Russian Orthodox Church, wondered how Dostoevsky, whom he knew to be a Christian, could possibly answer it. Pause to consider that the strongest arguments against God ever made are advanced in the world’s greatest Christian novel. But that is the whole point: If one is intellectually honest, as both Ivan and Dostoevsky were, one does not refute one’s opponents’ weakest arguments—any fool can do that—but his strongest ones. And if they have not formulated the strongest arguments on their side, one should do it for them. Dostoevsky was proud that he had made a more powerful case against God than any enemy of religion had. The rest of the novel attempts to answer this case by following Ivan’s own method. It does not advance counterarguments but offers, or aspires to offer, pictures of goodness, love, and meaningfulness more powerful than any argument could be. Whether Dostoevsky succeeded in refuting Ivan is another question.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas went one step beyond those cultured and educated parents who tortured their little girl in secret, under cover of darkness. Hamas filmed and broadcast its crimes as if they were the highest moral feats. Recall the enthusiastic tone of that young man who called his parents to boast about his murders: “Open my WhatsApp now and you’ll see all those killed. Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!… Dad, I’m talking to you from a Jewish woman’s phone. I killed her and I killed her husband. I killed ten with my own hands! Dad, ten with my own hands!… Their blood is on my hands, put Mom on.”

His mother responded: “Oh my son, God bless you!”

“I swear ten with my own hands, Mother… . Dad, go back to WhatsApp now Dad, I want to do a live broadcast… . Mom, your son is a hero, kill, kill, kill!”

“Their blood is on my hands, put Mom on”: In America and elsewhere, Students for Justice in Palestine and other groups rushed to express their delight at the October 7 murders. The more Jewish blood, the better. And when Hamas returned the bodies of the strangled Bibas children, they did so as a great party. Parents brought their children to a baby-murder parade.

Even Hitler and Stalin never did this. They concealed their crimes. I recall reading that the Nazis taunted their Jewish victims that no one would ever find out what had happened to them. With the help of New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, Stalin succeeded in covering up the deliberate starvation of millions of peasants during the collectivization of agriculture. Photographed with a child hugging him, Stalin conveyed the image of himself as perfectly humane.

La Rochefoucauld famously remarked that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue: Even the vicious profess to believe in kindness. If so, Hamas—and their American followers—are no hypocrites. They flaunt their barbarity. And not just their leaders, but also ordinary people calling home to boast of killings or joyously celebrating the strangling of little children. Such souls are truly dark.

On October 7, and when the Bibas children were returned, I recalled how shaken I had been decades earlier to learn about the torture of Sylvia Likens and to visit what remained of Auschwitz. We often hear of events that partake of evil, but watching Hamas, I felt once again I had touched on evil’s very heart.

How American Aid Has Subsidized Terror

These legitimate strategic objectives are undermined when aid falls into the wrong hands. The Middle East Forum’s research has identified approximately $164 million in USAID and State Department grants flowing to organizations with extremist ties, with at least $122 million directly benefiting groups aligned with designated foreign terrorist organizations. The systemic nature of these failures is particularly concerning. As mentioned, World Vision continued its relationship with problematic partners even after the Islamic Relief Agency scandal, and the warnings about the terror links to Helping Hand for Relief and Development were ignored while funding continued.

The Trump 47 administration, in coordination with Elon Musk’s review at DOGE, has frozen or reassigned many staff positions at USAID, pending a thorough evaluation of who is responsible for these abuses. Spreadsheets posted by the administration to show the extent of foreign-aid spending have been criticized as “wild” or “inaccurate.” Yet the broad brushstrokes are accurate: Billions have gone to questionable projects, and no single line item enumerates them. That is partly because some managers awarded money to unnamed or shadowy organizations, hidden behind the aforementioned “miscellaneous foreign awardees” category.

Eliminating such chaos will take more than new guidelines on paper. A cultural shift must accompany it. If top-level administrators remain committed to certain ideological crusades at the expense of U.S. security, no new rule will suffice. Some staff may need to be replaced or face criminal investigation. Several subcommittee members demanded that the State Department and USAID begin to itemize every last grant, sub-grant, and sub-sub-grant of the past decade. If that demand is met, the public might be shocked by the individuals or organizations that have lined their pockets.

Several U.S. statutes may apply to these cases. The first is 18 U.S.C. § 2339B, which prohibits material support to designated terrorist organizations. Another is 50 U.S.C. § 1705 under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which criminalizes violations of sanctions against terror groups. Additionally, false statements to obtain federal funds (18 U.S.C. § 1001) and fraud in federal programs (18 U.S.C. § 666) might be relevant where organizations concealed extremist ties to secure grants.

The reform agenda must be comprehensive. Officials should create an organized “Do Not Fund” list merging data from the State Department, Treasury designations, intelligence agencies, and the Department of Justice. If an organization or its top personnel have documented links to extremist networks, they should land on that list. The system must track sub-grantees, not just direct recipients. Enforceable rules should require prime awardees to itemize every downstream partner and publicly file that information. Meanwhile, robust audits must confirm that an NGO cannot claim ignorance about its sub-sub-grantees.

Foreign aid is one of the noblest expressions of American leadership when it is spent wisely. In past decades, it helped defeat Soviet influence, curb infectious diseases, and lift whole regions from poverty. But the hearing on February 26 laid bare a darker side of modern foreign aid. The subcommittee’s findings were a clarion call for a reset. If U.S. assistance does not serve strategic interests and genuinely support threatened populations, it devolves into a slush fund that underwrites our foes or promotes fringe obsessions.

No one wants children to starve in war zones or real disasters to go unaddressed. Nevertheless, if long-standing agencies have indeed participated in funneling support to radical outfits—among them Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda’s affiliates, or Lashkar-e-Taiba—under a cloak of “humanitarian” assistance, then the time has arrived for serious housecleaning. This is bigger than petty politics. The United States’s credibility and citizens’ safety hang in the balance.

A betrayal of American generosity has occurred, but it need not continue. With bold legislative steps, transparent accounting, vigorous vetting, and swift punishment for wrongdoers, the system can be reoriented to its original mission: harnessing American compassion and strategic sense, not abusing them.

“The U.S. has Become One of the Largest Financiers of Global Islamism” - Middle East Forum Report

When we talk about terrorism funding, Iran and Qatar often take the spotlight for their support of extremist groups. However, according to a recent Multi-year study from Middle Easter Forum, in recent decades, the U.S. has quietly become one of the largest funders of global Islamism, channeling billions of taxpayer dollars through its foreign aid programs. Investigations have shown that they frequently end up supporting groups tied to terrorism, with little accountability or oversight. The State Department and USAID have knowingly funded terrorists and their proxies with hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.

Over the years, the U.S. government has become one of the largest financial backers of global Islamism, with federal funds flowing to Islamist organizations both domestically and abroad. Violent extremists have thrived under U.S. aid programs, often with the agencies’ knowledge. Despite warnings from internal records and watchdogs, little has been done to address this.

A recent investigation by the Middle East Forum revealed that
- $164 million in federal grants: The Middle East Forum's study uncovered that USAID and the State Department approved $164 million in grants to radical organizations, with at least $122 million directed to groups linked to designated terrorists.
- Lack of vetting: Billions of taxpayer dollars have been given to major American aid charities that consistently fail to vet their local partners, many of which have links to terrorism.
- Hamas funding: USAID has funneled millions directly to organizations in Gaza controlled by Hamas, with U.S. officials even visiting terror proxies' offices and launching joint programs.
- Incitement of violence: USAID beneficiaries have called for "cleansing" lands of Jews, with some charity staff openly praising and encouraging violence against Jews.
- State Department funding radicals: The State Department has provided funds to radical domestic groups like the Tides Foundation, accused of supporting pro-Hamas, anti-Jewish violence on U.S. college campuses.
- Complicit charities: Aid organizations such as World Vision, Catholic Relief Services, and advocacy groups like InterAction have acted as vehicles for terror-tied Islamists, knowingly or unknowingly, both in the U.S. and abroad.
- Domestic Islamist funding: Federal funding has subsidized domestic Islamists involved with Hamas, Jamaat-e-Islami, and the Turkish regime, undermining rules designed to combat terror finance in the U.S.
- Lack of transparency: Records of federal funding, especially through USAID, are obscured by poor disclosure practices and deliberate attempts to evade transparency, with millions going to anonymous beneficiaries in terrorist-affected regions.
- Internal concerns at USAID: USAID’s Office of Inspector General has raised alarms about the agency’s failure to properly vet recipients for links to violent extremism and the risk of abuse by armed groups. If USAID merges with the State Department, it is crucial that these concerns are not lost.

03/14 Links Pt2: Irving Howe: “In That Basic Sense the Zionists Were Right”; Mahmoud Khalil and the Red-Green Assault on American Sovereignty; Peter Beinart, Pundit (Declined)

From Ian:

What’s Worth Dying For?

In her new book, “The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West — and Why Only They Can Save It,” Melanie Phillips takes a candid look at the corrosion of the West and the hard road back.

For life to have meaning, it needs a sense of purpose. In recent decades, however, the West has taught itself that life is purposeless. There is nothing beyond ourselves. Life, the universe, and everything are the result of accidental developments. The appearance of design in the universe doesn’t mean there’s a designer; in Professor Richard Dawkins’s famous image, the watchmaker is blind, working without foresight or purpose.

For Dawkins, facing up to the randomness of existence is a heroic act. For countless others, however, it is a recipe for despair and demoralization. Random developments produce unforeseen consequences that we are unable to affect in any way. By contrast, moral agency means we make a difference through how we choose to behave. Our actions matter.

Moral agency is therefore a principal source of individual power; but the West has dispensed with moral codes as a curb on the freedom of the individual. So the paradox is that the more freedom we have, the less point there is to anything. Without moral agency, we become powerless, the plaything of determinist forces beyond our control. Human beings are helpless, in the grip of uncontrollable forces whether they be — as Marx, Darwin, and Freud told us—economic, biological, or psychological.

If the human being is nothing more than a sack of atoms whirling through space and time, if our consciousness is nothing more than the snapping of synapses and selfish genes, existence is random and therefore pointless. The resulting sense of powerlessness is a recipe for exponential misery, a ratchet effect of unrealistic expectations and the creation of permanent disappointment, dissatisfaction, and disillusionment.

This has driven, in turn, increasing attempts to forge a meaning to life beyond both religion and the satisfaction of the individual self.

The most obvious expression of this quest is the array of causes to which young people gravitate to find a focus for their idealism. One cause after the other claims to be about the betterment of the world — eradicating prejudice on grounds of race, sexuality, or gender, promoting the Palestinian agenda, saving the planet.

In fact, these causes are all based on demonizing and hating other people: white people, men, heterosexuals, Jews, and humanity in general.

Worse still, since these causes are utopian, they all fail to deliver the perfection of the world that they have promised. From multiculturalism to environmentalism to post-nationalism, Western progressives have fixated on unattainable abstractions for the realization of utopia. Since this inevitably results in disappointment, they consequently seek scapegoats upon whom they turn with a rage that’s as self-righteous as it is ferocious in order to bring about by coercion the state of purity that the designated culprits have purportedly thwarted.

Traditional liberal values, in the settlement that arose from the Enlightenment, involved tolerance, freedom, and the pursuit of reason. These values have come to characterize modernity in the Western world. Yet what’s called “liberalism” today has involved the repudiation of those virtues and replaced them with intolerance, oppression, and irrationality. Liberalism has mutated into its nemesis. These ideologies are all fueled by a rage against the world that exists and a desire to remake it anew. But rather than filling the existential vacuum, these ideologies merely deepen it.

“In That Basic Sense the Zionists Were Right”: A Conversation with Irving Howe

A truncated version of the following interview, conducted in 1986, first appeared in the Jerusalem Post on September 5 of that year.
—The Editors

America in the 20th century was a strange place. It could let a man spend 30 years writing essays, translating Yiddish stories, and editing a socialist magazine, which had few readers and barely paid the rent, and then, overnight, make him comfortable if not rich with a best seller about the vanished world of his immigrant parents.

Irving Howe (1920–1993), thanks to the commercial success of World of Our Fathers—his elegiac, not-so-sentimental account of the sweatshop Jews of Lower East Side—was able to move to the snazzier, safer side of Central Park. The book also made him, as he wrote in his autobiography, “famous for fifteen minutes.” Perhaps because his modest measure of money and fame came late in life, perhaps thanks to some strength of character acquired through early poverty, Howe’s popular success didn’t seem to have gone to his head.

As he answered my questions in his apartment in 1986, he was straightforward and serious, and as he stroked a fringe of white beard he seemed simultaneously bemused and grieved by what America had given him and what it had taken away from a generation of Jews like him.

He’d published more than 30 books on literature, politics, culture, and history. He taught English for many years at Brandeis, Stanford, and Hunter College. His wife, Ilana, was an Israeli, and he had two children from two previous marriages.

His autobiographical A Margin of Hope was a fairly honest and occasionally moving report on, among other things, Howe’s attempt to “reconquer” his Jewishness as “American socialism reached an impasse.”

The son of Yiddish-speaking garment workers, Howe was a Trotskyite in his youth, and even after World War II—during which he was in the army in Alaska—he clung to a vision of socialism in the New World.

He made his first mark among New York Jewish intellectuals by writing for Partisan Review, and Commentary. Soon, however, when he judged that they were celebrating America too uncritically, he launched his own magazine, Dissent, which for three decades had been trying to keep the ideals of socialism, or at least social democracy, fresh and bright. But, Howe admitted in his memoirs, Dissent was often boring.

Politically and culturally, Howe’s search for a Third Way had left him lonely—even stranded him. He broke with the New Left when it degenerated into tantrums, and was estranged from former friends and colleagues in the New York Jewish intellectual “family” who became neoconservatives and who flayed him for not learning all he should from his disillusion.

As for Jewishness, Howe had written that he, and others like him, long “avoided thinking about it.” He’d been, he said, rather indifferent if not actually cool to Israel—yet he’d relished the victory of the IDF in 1967. Howe, the ex-Trotskyite, had edited an anthology defending Israel and Zionism against the left. And he was known as an American supporter of Peace Now.

Peter Beinart, Pundit (Declined)

This brilliant essay first appeared in the print edition of Commentary magazine in 2010. We’re publishing it here on the occasion of Peter Beinart’s tour to sell his latest book, “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning”—another broadside against Israel. As part of the monthslong publicity jaunt, Beinart has launched attacks on, among other things, Purim, the Jewish holiday which begins tonight.

We were reminded of this essay while watching his press tour to promote himself and his book, which is only his latest episode in his ceaseless political transformation. —The Editors

Peter Beinart is one of those journalists, common in Washington, D.C., who is less interesting for what he says than for who he is, or who he wants to be thought to be. He’s an exemplar, and when, in May [2010], he published an essay in The New York Review of Books announcing that “morally, American Zionism is in a downward spiral,” he deserved the considerable notice that the article brought him. As a piece of reasoned argument, or even as an anguished moral plea, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment” was a mess: a goulash of overstatement, baseless accusation, statistical sleight-of-hand, strategic omission, and wince-making self-regard. As a piece of attention-getting, however, it was a masterstroke, and it’s on those terms, rather than its own, that the article and Beinart are best understood.

Beinart is well-known among Washington journalists as a quick-witted polemicist and a gifted stylist. He’s also regarded as one of the most energetic careerists anyone has ever seen. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! Banish careerists from the ranks of Washington journalism and the only people left would be a handful of newsroom librarians and a couple of copy editors from Human Events. What makes Beinart’s campaign of self-promotion conspicuous—week after week, year after year—is its utter lack of inhibition. There’s a kind of insouciance to it.

As far as I know, it first came to general notice in a brief biographical sketch that Beinart circulated early in his career. Having climbed over the bloody, dismembered carcasses of his co-workers and mentors, Beinart was named editor of The New Republic in 1999, at the dewy age of 28. His self-written bio made unsurprising mention of an undergraduate degree (Yale), a Rhodes Scholarship (Oxford), and a master’s degree in international relations (ditto). And then, deathlessly, there was this: “Beinart won a Marshall Scholarship (declined).”

That “(declined)” became a much-loved inside joke among Beinart watchers, a large and contented group who have known ever since that their man always repays scrutiny.

Back then, Beinart wanted to be thought of as a neoliberal, a “liberal hawk.” A neoliberal—you youngsters might want to listen up now—was someone who, although allied with the center-left, nonetheless thought of himself as tough-minded and wised-up, intent on beating down the pacifist illusions of his pantywaisted fellow Democrats. Irving Kristol, who had famously defined a neoconservative as a liberal who had been mugged by reality, said (not quite so famously) that a neoliberal was a liberal who had been mugged by reality but refused to press charges. To Beinart and his fellow neolibs, these were, appropriately enough, fighting words. They stormed the nation’s cable shows and editorial pages, launching precision-guided op-eds and multiple-warhead blog posts to demonstrate their eagerness to use American military might to advance the nation’s interests.

03/14 Links Pt1: Israel: Hamas offer to free hostage, four bodies is ‘psychological warfare’; It’s time to abolish the UN’s pro-Hamas bureaucracy

From Ian:

Bernard-Henri Lévy: ‘The war against Hamas and Russia is one battle against the same evil’

The greatest French-Jewish intellectual of our time has been trudging through the snow of Pokrovsk, an under-fire city near Ukraine’s eastern front.

It’s a dangerous place to go. But big thinkers, and Bernard-Henri Lévy is certainly one of those, know how to rise above the fear. And in the interview, it becomes clear that the conflict and its implications for Israel and the newly fractured West is at the top of his mind.

For Lévy – who was in Ukraine to chair a film festival, visit the front line and write it up for French and US newspapers – Israel’s war against Hamas and Kyiv’s struggle against Russia are two sides of the same coin: it is the free, democratic world against tyranny and evil. For this reason, he says, he is “terribly worried. You have here two fragile democracies. Two twin fights that should be fought together.

“That worries me: the fact that the US is separating the two struggles. They are thus playing into the hands of our common enemies.”

Lévy, who has been one of the key European voices speaking up for both Ukraine after the 2022 invasion and for Israel in the wake of October 7, has a bleak assessment of the direction of travel for European security.

“We know that Donald Trump’s America will not protect us if one of our countries is attacked. The comfort of the post-Second World War [era] is over. We must defend ourselves and build a European army.

“Europe may have done ‘a lot’ to support Ukraine. But has it done enough? No. Because doing ‘enough’ would have been to help Zelensky defeat Putin. We helped him resist, not win. We ensured that Ukraine was saved without, however, trying to bring about the collapse of Russia.”

What is more, for Lévy, Judaism – as a foundation stone of Western values – may well be in Vladimir Putin’s sights.

“He will destabilise Europe. Ukraine is, for him, only a step on a long road that ends in the weakening of Europe. That is not in doubt. Personal vengeance against countries deemed responsible for the collapse of the USSR? Hatred of Judaism and Latin Christianity? Hatred of the liberal model that remains an ideal in this part of Europe? All of this is part of the long-term war Putin has declared on the European Union and its values.”

Netanyahu compares Purim story to fight against today’s ‘Persian axis’

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu participated in the traditional reading of the Book of Esther during the holiday of Purim at the National Police Academy in Beit Shemesh, west of Jerusalem, on Thursday evening.

Addressing the police officers, the prime minister drew a comparison to the story of Purim, in which the Jewish people were saved from annihilation in Persia, now present-day Iran, to the modern Jewish state’s conflict with the Islamic Republic.

“Two thousand five hundred years later an enemy of the Jewish people arose in that land. He, too, wants to destroy and annihilate the seed of the Jews from the face of the earth,” Netanyahu said.

“Heroes like you have arisen—the heroes of our people. And with stratagem, heroism and courage we turned the tables upside down, and we are breaking the Persian axis,” he said, referring to Iran.

“That’s what’s happening these days. If history repeats itself, at least the people are the same people. This is the new miracle of Purim. This miracle is thanks to you; thanks to our heroic soldiers, our heroic fighters, the policemen and women, who stopped the disaster with endless heroism, and fought back,” he said, referring to the actions of the police on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas-led terrorists invaded the western Negev.

“We won our state; we won it with you. I am sure that each and every one of you will do your duty in performing the new miracle of Purim in our days. Happy Purim to all of you,” Netanyahu said.

It’s time to abolish the UN’s pro-Hamas bureaucracy

We are currently experiencing the worst surge of antisemitism in living memory. But that realization shouldn’t lull us into thinking that the world prior to October 2023 was a relative bed of roses for the Jewish people. From the end of the Second World War until the Hamas massacre in Israel, there were myriad episodes and events which underlined that hatred and suspicion of Jews as a collective did not die out with the Nazis.

Later this year, we’ll mark the 50th anniversary of one of the most heinous of those outbursts, whose fallout we are still living with: the passage by the U.N. General Assembly of Resolution 3379 of Nov. 10, 1975, which determined that Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jews, was a form of racism.

Israel and its allies have eight months to decide whether that anniversary will be marked as a posthumous victory or as a day of mourning.

Sure, one could argue that victory already came in 1991 when, in the wake of Iraq’s expulsion from occupied Kuwait and the consequent U.S. attempt to convene regional peace negotiations, American diplomacy—which, in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, was without a serious rival—secured the General Assembly’s repeal of its 1975 resolution. But that, sadly, was a fleeting victory for two reasons.

Firstly, the anti-Zionist ideology underpinning the resolution persists. Orchestrated by the Soviet Union, Resolution 3379 denounced Zionism as a “threat to world peace and security.” It drew an explicit linkage between Israel and the former white minority regimes in South Africa and Zimbabwe to demonstrate its charges of “racism” and “apartheid.” Those charges will sound eerily familiar to Jewish college students now weathering the pro-Hamas onslaught, all born long after 1975.

Secondly, while the General Assembly annulled Resolution 3379, the pro-Palestinian bureaucracy created within the United Nations at exactly the same time also persists. As a result, the world body still behaves as though “Zionism is racism” remains on the books. If the November anniversary is to carry any message of hope for Israelis and Jews, then it’s imperative to tackle and dismantle that bureaucracy, and its associated propaganda operation.

In the 18 months that have lapsed since the Hamas pogrom in Israel, we have seen that bureaucracy in action. UNRWA—the agency originally created in 1949 to deal with the first generation of Arab refugees from Israel’s War of Independence—has been a mainstay of anti-Israel messaging, unphased by the unmasking of dozens of its employees as Hamas operatives. The U.N. Human Rights Council, which dedicates an entire agenda item to Israel alone at its thrice-yearly deliberations while ignoring serial violators like Russia, Iran and North Korea, last week released a litany of fabricated accusations in the guise of a “report” that amounted to what Israel called a “blood libel.” One of the more noxious Israel-haters on the scene, Francesca Albanese, continues to serve as the U.N. special rapporteur on the “Occupied Palestinian Territories.”

Haman's wife Zeresh is a fascinating figure in the Megillah. When Haman says how much he hates Mordechai the Jew, she jumps in and says exactly what should be done: execute Mordechai, publicly, as a spectacle in front of the entire kingdom, and teach all his people a lesson.

As soon as Haman's fortune starts to fade, Zeresh suddenly has a different insight, seeming to say that the Jews are going to win and Haman will lose.

Zeresh is a skilled opportunist, sensing which way the wind is blowing and trying to take advantage.

But while Haman was not shy about his hatred of Jews and his desire to wipe them out, Zeresh hides her opinion behind plausible deniability. She hates the Jews as much as her husband, but she lets him appear to take the lead. She can frame the gallows as only to punish a man for not following a royal decree, not as an act against all Jews. She can then say that she supported the Jews all along. You can just hear her cry, "No guilt by association! I had nothing to do with Haman's plans!"

It is the sort of hair-splitting justifications we hear today: "Just because the only country I am obsessed with demonizing happens to be filled with Jews doesn't mean I'm an antisemite!"

But history judges Zeresh as just another Jew hater. The Shoshanat Yaakov poem sung after the Megillah is unequivocal: Cursed is Zeresh. Her equivocations and explanations and excuses don't stand up to the facts.

Just like today's "anti-Zionist" antisemites.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The @WashingtonPost Khalil article is a textbook example of media bias: cherry picking "experts" to come to a wrong conclusion

The Washington Post's official slogan is "Democracy Dies in Darkness." Outrageously, the newspaper actively contributes to the darkness it claims to dispel.

It writes, "Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest violates First Amendment protections, lawyers say." The article is written by the Post's Sarah Ellison, their "Democracy Reporter."

The article quotes four lawyers. Jeffrey Pyle, First Amendment specialist at Prince Lobel, says Khalil's detention is “as clear a First Amendment violation as any case I’ve ever seen.” Sonja West, First Amendment professor at (University of Georgia Law School, asserts the government “disappeared” Khalil for his speech. Stephen Vladeck, constitutional law professor at Georgetown, labels it a “core” First Amendment case, not fringe. The fourth lawyer quoted is Baher Azmy, from the Center for Constitutional Rights, who is on Khalil’s defense team.

Sarah Ellison started her research from the premise that this is a First Amendment case and only interviewed lawyers with a First Amendment focus.

They didn't interview a single expert on immigration law.

As I've shown, a strong case can be made that Khalil should be deported under existing immigration law because he is a representative of a political, social, or other group that endorses or espouses terrorist activity. No one can claim he is not a representative of Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) and it is difficult to argue that CUAD does not endorse or espouse terrorist activity. They handed out "newspapers" with an ad showing Hamas embarking on their October 7 pogrom saying "Victory to the Resistance" and they praised the terror attack in Tel Aviv last October that murdered seven civilians.

There are other reasons that examining this case through the lens of the First Amendment is false. Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained this on Wednesday:

When you come to the United States as a visitor, which is what a visa is – which is how this individual entered this country, on a visitor’s visa – as a visitor, we can deny you that visa. When you tell us when you apply, ‘Hi, I’m trying to get into the United States on a student visa. I am a big supporter of Hamas, a murderous, barbaric group that kidnaps children, that rapes teenage girls, that takes hostages, that allows them to die in captivity, that returns more bodies than live hostages,’ if you tell us that you are in favor of a group like this and if you tell us when you apply for your visa, ‘and by the way, I intend to come to your country as a student and rile up all kinds of anti-Jewish student, antisemitic activities, I intend to shut down your universities,’ if you told us all these things when you applied for your visa, we would deny your visa....If you actually end up doing that once you’re in this country on such a visa, we will revoke it, and if you end up having a green card, not citizenship, but a green card as a result of that visa while you’re here doing those activities, we’re going to kick you out. It’s as simple as that. This is not about free speech.

It is journalistic malpractice to characterize this as a free speech issue in an article published a day after the Secretary of State explicitly says why it isn't.

Moreover, the Post also ignores reports of Khalil’s national security investigation, as Rubio notes.

There are other legal issues even beyond Rubio's and my earlier points that transcend free speech. For example, last November, CUAD handed out flyers that, according to some, may be considered material support for a terror organization:

A coalition of anti-Israel student groups at Columbia University distributed pamphlets just outside of the school's Morningside Heights gates encouraging attendees to "get involved" with the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, an anti-Semitic organization recently sanctioned in the United States for providing material support to terrorists. In doing so, the students themselves may have provided support to terrorists, one expert told the Washington Free Beacon.

Members of Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) distributed the pamphlets—which were labeled "CUAD's Guide to Operational Security" and listed an email address associated with CUAD's "collective defense team"—just outside of the campus gates on Tuesday afternoon, sources said.

Similarly, last March, CUAD hosted Khaled Barakat, a leader of the US-designated terror group PFLP, who praised airplane hijackings while his wife from Samidoun praised Hamas tunnels and the October 7 attack itself, as this video shows:

This may all constitute material support for terror, a crime. While some claim this is protected speech, Holder (2010) ruled that coordinated advocacy for a designated terror organization, like platforming a PFLP leader, constitutes material support, not free expression. It is not a slam-dunk but it is definitely a legal issue - one that the Washington Post's "legal experts" completely ignore.

In fact, instead of even noting CUAD's clear and unambiguous support for the most heinous terror attacks, the Post sanitizes them by saying things like "The First Amendment protects the right of citizens and noncitizens alike to criticize government policies and positions. " This is a little worse than criticizing the US government - it is a celebration of, and arguably a call for, murdering Jews.

This indicates that the article is not journalism - it is propaganda that is meant to hide the truth, not shine a light in the darkness.

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

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It occurred to me during Thursday night's Megillah reading that, personality-wise, King Achashverosh (Ahasuerus) is a lot like Donald Trump.

If you disrespect him, you an get your head (metaphorically) chopped off.

To be in his inner circle you have to not only fawn over him but also you have to know exactly how.

Once you gain his favor, he trusts your judgment and let you act largely independently.

Also, for those he trusts, they can gain a great deal financially.

If you cross him, his punishment is immediate and overwhelming.

He will eagerly move assets from his perceived enemies to his friends.

Finally, he really loves to send out executive orders to the nation that cannot be easily be rescinded while he is in charge.

UPDATE: One more hit me duuring the morning reading of the Megillah: They both sponsored beauty pageants!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

03/13 Links Pt2: Phillips: Democrats’ Israel betrayal; Cardinal Dolan: The Evils of Antisemitism; Peter Beinart’s bewildering path; Lawyer for Mahmoud Khalil Repped Al Qaeda Members

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Democrats’ Israel betrayal: How the party flipped on its staunchest ally

The Palestinian cause has become for all liberal progressives the must-have badge of moral worth. But this cause is based on the demonisation of Israel.

This poison has infected the universities. Overwhelmingly dominated by liberal progressives, they have turned a blind eye to or actively connived at the hate marches, demonstrations and encampments that have turned so many of them into crucibles of Jew-hatred.

Rather than come to the defence of Jewish students running this gauntlet of hate, Democrats actually reinforced it.

In the face of the sometimes violent “occupations” of US campuses that consistently called for the end of Israel, President Joe Biden said the protesters “have a point,” while Vice President Kamala Harris said of one protester accusing Israel of genocide: “Listen, what he’s talking about, it’s real.”

Trump has vowed to deport foreign students and imprison “agitators” involved in “illegal protests”. The administration announced last week it’s rescinding $400 million in federal grants to Columbia, accusing it of failing to fight antisemitism on campus.

This is extremely welcome. But generations have been indoctrinated with propaganda demonising Israel and sanitising the exterminatory Palestinian cause.

And violence and intimidation have increasingly become tolerated over a range of issues such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa as well as Gaza.

These ideologies are all anti-West and anti-America. As I write in my new book, The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West — and Why Only They Can Save It, Jewish values are at the very heart of western and American culture.

Concepts at the core of democracy — limited government and the rule of law founded in the consent of the people — were introduced to the world by the Hebrew Bible.

They were explicitly drawn upon by America’s Founding Fathers when they laid down the principles of the US Constitution and defined the American nation. That nation and its foundational values have been under sustained assault by liberal universalists led by the Democratic Party.

Scratch an opponent of Israel, and you’ll find someone who believes the worst of the West and rubbishes its institutions. Scratch a protester against the West, and you’ll find an enemy of Israel.

The war against Israel is a war against the West; and the war against the West is a war against the Jews.

Michael Oren: Our choice between ‘never again’ and ‘again’

Israel declared its independence in 1948, but 77 years later, has largely forfeited it. From American leaders participating in our war cabinet meetings to our dependence on foreign arms and military aid, Israel has hemorrhaged sovereignty. Though we will remain a small nation navigating between superpowers, we must nevertheless strive to achieve the maximum degree of freedom in our decision-making and our ability to implement it. No longer must Israeli citizens feel compelled to appeal to a president to do what their own government appears incapable. Israeli officials must work to regain the basic trust of our people, even those who oppose their policies, and their respect for the democratic system. We must once again take pride in, and zealously preserve, our sovereignty.

Independence must reign not only in Israel’s foreign relations, but, even more pressingly, in our domestic affairs. South of Beersheva — 62 percent of the country — there is minimal enforcement of Israeli law. Gun and drug trafficking, illegal building, are rampant. An additional 13% of the country’s population, the ultra-Orthodox, also rejects the state’s authority, if not its very legitimacy, refuses to serve in the IDF, and to provide a basic modern education for its youth. In Judea and Samaria, a minority of Israeli citizens flagrantly, and occasionally violently, defy Israeli law. Just as a state that does not safeguard its external freedom cannot fully defend that of its inhabitants, neither does a state that cannot govern itself retain the resilience necessary for national defense.

Resilience — khosen, in Hebrew — is essentially a prerequisite for keeping any promise of “Never again.” As captured Hamas documents agonizingly attest, the political divisions within Israeli society prior to October 7 rendered it vulnerable to large-scale attack. While democratically elected governments have every right to pursue their chosen policies, they also have the duty to maintain a basic degree of unity. America might be able to afford extreme political polarization; not so, Israel. Thus, though almost all of the security chiefs forum’s two dozen participants are outspoken critics of the government, the government must heed the forum, which warned that further efforts to weaken judicial checks on elected officials would again weaken Israel’s resilience. Unlike the United States, where the president is also the commander-in-chief, Israeli leaders cannot simply order Israelis to fight; rather, they must convince them. Conserving those powers of persuasion is critical for the state’s security and its ability to ensure “Never again.”

Seeking realistic peace options with our neighbors, strengthening our bonds with world Jewry, rebuilding ties with nations alienated by the war — all are essential if we are serious about averting “Again.” We must work to narrow what has become one of the world’s widest income gaps and to make our minority communities part of the Israeli story. Most crucially, we must struggle relentlessly against the sin’at chinam — gratuitous hate — that plagued our society prior to October 7. There is a dark and direct connection between the fighting that broke out around the Yom Kippur services in Dizengoff Square on September 25, 2023, and the catastrophe that befell us less than two weeks later.

The choice is ours. Only we can determine whether “Never again” remains merely a declaration and a vision that the state will stay ill-equipped to uphold. The founders of 1948 made a pledge and went to vast lengths — fighting off invaders, absorbing immigrants, forging a nation — to fulfill it. We now must do the same. We alone can decide if the next picture presented in the Oval Office shows, alongside those of Holocaust survivors, the images not of the defenseless victims of terror, but of Israelis standing indomitable, unified, and secure.

Cardinal Dolan: The Evils of Antisemitism

The Church’s stance on antisemitism is unequivocal. Our Savior was a faithful Jew killed by the Roman occupiers of Judea. He died for the sins of all mankind. According to our faith, Jesus brought about a New Covenant that exists side-by-side with the Old Covenant between God and the Jewish people. As Pope Saint John Paul II often observed, “God’s covenant with the Jews is unbreakable.”

We also believe that every human life is created in the image of God, regardless of race, religion, or ethnicity. As Pope Saint John Paul II said, “The Church rejects racism in any form as a denial of the image of the Creator inherent in every human being.”

John Paul II’s words do not exist in isolation. In the Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, also known as Nostra aetate or In Our Time, that seminal document of the Second Vatican Council, the Church tells us to decry “hatred, persecutions, displays of antisemitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.”

In 1986, John Paul II reiterated that statement while visiting the Great Synagogue of Rome. “I repeat,” he said, “ ‘By anyone’.”

Fourteen years later, when he visited the Western Wall in Jerusalem, he left behind this prayer: “God of our fathers, you chose Abraham and his descendants to bring your Name to the Nations: We are deeply saddened by the behavior of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer, and asking your forgiveness we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the Covenant.”

Pope Benedict XVI, John Paul II’s successor, likewise reaffirmed the incompatibility of antisemitism and Christianity.

“The rulers of the Third Reich wanted to crush the entire Jewish people, to cancel it from the register of the peoples of the earth. . . . Deep down, those vicious criminals. . . wanted to kill God,” Benedict XVI said while visiting Auschwitz in 2006.

“By destroying Israel, by the Shoah, they ultimately wanted to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith and replace it with a faith of their own invention,” he added.

I hope this message is clear enough: Antisemitism is a grave sin, the work of Satan himself. The devil hopes to divide God’s people, to make them fear and eventually hate each other. In rejecting Satan’s lies and empty promises, as Christians are called to do this Lent, in the weeks before Easter—and as our Jewish neighbors prepare for Passover—we renounce his plans to divide the children of Abraham from one another.

Not long after the October 7, 2023 atrocity in Israel, which irrationally unleashed a new viral strain of Jew-hatred, I received a letter from a Jewish mom on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Every morning she would walk her little daughter to school and would smile at her neighbor as that mom walked her two children to the nearby Catholic school. “That Catholic mom must have noted my anxiety and fear those dreadful days after the attack,” the Jewish mom wrote, “because she came up to me and whispered, ‘Why don’t we all walk together?’ ”

For any Jewish people who might be reading this, please know: The Catholic Church stands with you in the struggle against antisemitism. And for those on social media who call themselves Christians but spread hate against Jews, we say that they have become blinded to core tenets of the faith they proclaim; that we are all equal in the eyes of God, that Christianity is a stem that grows off the good olive tree that is the Jewish faith, and that in the words of Pope Francis, “a Christian cannot be an antisemite.”

“Rather,” the Holy Father added, “we are called to commit ourselves to ensure that antisemitism is banned from the human community.”

03/13 Links Pt1: Phillips: The West is facing an Islamic holy war; Navi Pillay’s antisemitic commission of infamy; The International Red Cross: Exposed.

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The West is facing an Islamic holy war

The Palestinian cause is being used as a wedge issue to weaponize Western antisemitism against Israel and the Jews, whose destruction is viewed as an essential front in the wider war against the West, Christianity and the entire non-Islamic world.

In the West itself, this war is being waged by the Muslim Brotherhood—a covert, Sunni Muslim group aiming at global Islamic domination. The Brotherhood shrewdly calibrates its activities to vary between terrorist violence and the subversion of Western societies through immigration and a high birthrate, political entryism and intimidation.

A report published in 2020 by the British think tank Policy Exchange noted that the Brotherhood’s goal is “to capture power in order to make governance more Islamic” and to “seek to mobilize Muslims behind an agenda of communalism, sustained by a narrative of grievance and victimhood, in the service of an ideology that at its heart contests the legitimate foundations of the modern Western state.”

Shia Iran is also intent on Islamizing the rest of the world. In Britain, alarm by the security service over potentially violent Iranian infiltration has reached such heights that all organizations connected to the regime in Tehran are now required to register with British authorities.

Yet even now, the British government refuses to ban the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or the Muslim Brotherhood. Across the West, governments and the public alike persist in a state of lethal timidity and denial.

There have been no massive street demonstrations against the Syrian atrocities. There have been no protests at the massacres of Christians, not even by the church itself. The war to destroy Christianity across Africa and Asia is never even mentioned. The only outrage is against Israel for defending itself against these horrors.

Why is this? In part, it’s through ignorance about the Middle East and Jewish history. In part, it’s antisemitism. In part, it’s the pernicious belief that people with brown or black skins can never be criticized—even when they are slaughtering others with brown or black skins. In part, it’s through simple fear and funk.

It’s also because it busts the narrative about Israeli “colonization” and reveals instead that there is a massive worldwide problem with Islam.

The West won’t accept that it’s facing an Islamic holy war because it believes it can’t win against the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims. So it’s giving up without even putting up a fight, sheltering instead behind the comforting fiction that if Israel behaved differently everything would be absolutely fine.

It needs instead to take off its blinders, join up the dots and fight like Israel to survive.

Ruthie Blum: Navi Pillay’s antisemitic commission of infamy

A report issued on Thursday by the “U.N. Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel” is the world body’s latest assault on the Jewish state. And boy is it ever a brutal one.

No surprise there, given that the chairwoman of the pro-Hamas farce is former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay. The 83-year-old South African—who hails from Durban, home of two antisemitic “world conferences on racism”—was appointed to her current post nearly four years ago. That was when the commission was established by the U.N. Human Rights Council for the purpose of concocting a report to demonize Israel.

This aim, though transparent, wasn’t spelled out in Resolution S-30/1, adopted at the UNHRC “emergency special session” on May 27, 2021. But the gist was obvious.

The U.N.’s excuse at the time was “Operation Guardian of the Walls,” Israel’s 11-day campaign that month to defend its citizens and cities against the thousands of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad rockets launched from Gaza. Experts at distorting reality, Pillay and her team came up with the usual lies about Israeli “violations” of international law and “inherently discriminatory features that made the pursuit of justice for Palestinian victims extremely difficult.”

In sum, the Pillay dossier noted the “strength of prima facie credible evidence available that convincingly indicates that Israel has no intention of ending the occupation, has clear policies for ensuring complete control over the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and is acting to alter the demography through the maintenance of a repressive environment for Palestinians and a favorable environment for Israeli settlers.”

There’s a mendacious mouthful for you. On the other hand, it’s an honest rendition of what the commission has been about since its inception: siding with those whose raison d’être is killing Jews and annihilating the only democracy in the Middle East—one that constantly seeks peace with its Arab neighbors.

It doesn’t take a jihadist rocket scientist to realize this. After all, Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023—with thousands of terrorists and Gazan “civilians” committing the worst atrocities against Jews since the Holocaust—didn’t put a dent in U.N. hostility to the Jewish state.

On the contrary, the mass rape, murder and abduction perpetrated by Islamist barbarians on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah served only to enhance the antisemitism of people like Pillay. The neat trick she came up with to invert reality was to charge Israeli security forces with committing widespread sexual crimes against Palestinians throughout the ongoing war.

According to the commission’s Orwellian inversion, “Israel has increasingly employed sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence against Palestinians as part of a broader effort to undermine their right to self-determination and carried out genocidal acts through the systematic destruction of sexual and reproductive healthcare facilities.”

Daniel Pomerantz: The International Red Cross: Exposed.

In a groundbreaking new report, RealityCheck has uncovered specific evidence that the International Committee of the Red Cross (the “ICRC”) habitually violates its duty of neutrality, as well as its obligations under international law: putting Israelis, and the world at large, in danger.

The ICRC is a supposedly neutral, humanitarian body, tasked with protecting civilians in conflict zones. Yet Israelis have long been disturbed by a general sense that the neutral humanitarian body is neither neutral nor humanitarian, especially after its failure to visit Israeli hostages held in Gaza, and its participation in Hamas’s cruel “hostage release ceremonies.” The ICRC vigorously denies the allegations, stating that it has no choice or control over certain situations, and that it fulfills its duty of neutrality throughout. RealityCheck has, for the first time, proven the ICRC’s claims to be incorrect, with specific examples.

In our exclusive report, which is based on specialized OSINT (open source intelligence) and dark web research, we uncovered examples of ICRC officials discussing strategy and communications with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, speaking about the IDF and the Israeli government as an enemy, and prioritizing Palestinians (including terrorists) over Israeli civilians. The following are several notable examples.

Officially, the ICRC meets with armed non-state actors (including terror organizations) for the purpose of visiting captives and providing aid to civilians. The ICRC violated these standards in a meeting on February 18, 2020, when Gilan Devorn, Director of the ICRC in Gaza, his deputy Fayez Al-Aqraa, and ICRC Public Relations and Media Officer Youssef Al-Yaziji, met with senior leaders of the internationally designated terror organization, Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Specifically, the meeting included senior terror operatives Hajj Abu Wasim Al-Wadiyyah, Sheikh Khader Habib, Hajj Abu Hazem Badr, and Sheikh Omar Foura.

According to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Red Cross officials met with the terror leaders to discuss “the role of the International Committee of the Red Cross in pressuring the Israeli occupation” and “efforts to expose the crimes of the Israeli occupation.” The content of this meeting violates ICRC’s standards for appropriate interactions with non-state armed groups.

Another violation of the ICRC’s principles occurred on February 2, 2014, when its spokespeople Masada Saif and Youssef Al-Yaziji met with senior leadership of the internationally designated terror organization, Hamas. The meeting included Hamas’s Director of Public Relations and Government Media Office Ihab Al-Ghusain, who also served with the Hamas Ministry of Interior and National Security. Reportedly, the purpose of the meeting was to coordinate messaging, enhance cooperation, and provide training for journalists. None of these priorities fit the ICRC’s mission of meeting armed groups to further humanitarian goals, provide aid to civilians, or visit captives.

Press Coverage Of Move To Daylight Saving: Israel Steals Hour From Palestinians (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Press Coverage Of Move To Daylight Saving: Israel Steals Hour From Palestinians

Tel Aviv, March 13 - International media continued its customary framing of Middle East events today when reporting on the "spring forward" changing of the clocks this week by calling the onset of the "summertime clock" in the Jewish State an act of depriving Palestinians of sixty minutes of the day.

"Israel Takes Entire Hour Away from Palestinians," read the Reuters headline, while the Associated Press proclaimed, "Palestinians Struggle Under Netanyahu-Imposed Truncation of Morning Daylight Hours."

Al Jazeera devoted an entire six-minute segment to the travails of Palestinians suffering as a result of the onset of Daylight Saving Time in Israel. The segment went into close detail about the challenges "the Resistance" faces, in particular the need to ensure that timers on bombs aimed at Israelis explode at the scheduled time and not, as has occurred at least once in the last thirty years, prematurely and fatally for the bomb's planters.

Columnists in The Guardian called the annual phenomenon "yet another manifestation of the oppression of Israeli Occupation." Owen Jones characterized this year's instantiation of Daylight Saving Time in Israel as "a harsh reminder that Palestinians face genocide not just of their people, but of their very sense of orientation in the world as Israel brutally targets all their foundations of coherent human experience, among them time."

Guest opinion columnist, British Minister of Foreign Affairs David Lammy, dismissed observations that the hour gets "restored" in the fall when clocks are reset to standard time. "The Palestinians exiled in 1948 do not settle for mere compensation in kind," he noted. "Addressing the legitimate grievances of the people of Palestine requires the full dismantling of Zionist power structures, not mere real estate arrangements. Here, too, a simple readjustment of the clock each October does nothing to remedy the trauma, the displacement, and the chronologic cleansing. A full undoing of Zionist time offers us the only way to rectify this historic injustice perpetrated year after year after year."

President of Ireland Michael D. Higgins called on the international community to punish Israel for depriving Palestinians of an hour of morning daylight - even if that hour now occurs in the afternoon or evening instead. "The disposition of Palestinian hours is not for Israel to decide," he intoned. "The United Nations and the global powers must unite to enforce Israel's compliance with basic norms, which it has flouted for far too long, and suffered no adverse consequences. At the very least, we must withhold, uh... all the watches we export there? Someone help me out. What does Ireland produce?"

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

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This academic paper from 2013, Purim in the Public Eye: Leisure, Violence, and Cultural Convergence in the Dutch Atlantic, by Aviva Ben-Ur, is blowing my mind.

The Jewish holiday of Purim as celebrated in Suriname and Curaçao in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was neither a private occasion nor limited to Jews. Instead, Jews and Christians, along with the enslaved and manumitted peoples who outnumbered them, participated in public holiday revelry with abandon. In Suriname, Purim lasted nearly a week and sometimes longer. Crowds of masked Jews, young and old, poured into the streets of Paramaribo, yelling out obscene declarations against Christianity. Surrounding them were bands of field slaves pulling wagons laden with costumed Jews and their domestic bondsmen. Sometimes these bondsmen circled the masquerading Jews, shouting and singing through the streets. Intoxicated Jewish men dressed up as armed soldiers, sailors, and even Maroons and Indians, and women donned men’s clothing, their female slaves following suit. Christians purchased masks from Jewish vendors and disguised themselves, with the suspected intention of attacking their enemies incognito. In Curaçao, meanwhile, Jews stretched out the observance of Purim to eight or ten days. Each year, masked youths paraded through the streets of Willemstad, dancing and singing to the tune of an accompanying band and visiting Jewish homes. The carousing included a magnificent fireworks display, the firecrackers bursting into the air or zigzagging erratically across the ground. Purim in Curaçao, one observer remarked in 1853, “constituted carnival.” In both colonies, not only the Jewish community’s ruling institution, the Mahamad, but also successive colonial governors stepped in to curb such public displays of boisterous commotion and intemperance.

The Jewish community in Suriname from the17th-19th centuries had more autonomy than anywhere else, possibly in the world. They were one third to one half or so of the "white" population (although most were Sephardic) and some established an autonomous territory in the rainforest that later became known as Jodensavanne ("Jews’ Savannah".) They had their own court system for civil affairs and even their own militia in Jodensavanne. This relative power, plus economic power, influenced everyone else - and the Dutch Indies Purim, in some ways a Carnival, reflected that.

If we consider the enthusiastic participation of the enslaved, it is clear that Purim in Suriname from the second quarter of the eighteenth century had become an Afro-Creole festival, akin in many ways to what scholars and many contemporary observers in the Caribbean have understood as a local variety of carnival. Within the synagogue, Purim retained its characteristics as a classical Jewish holiday celebrated by Jews. But once it took to the streets, its ethnic applicability broadened. Its masquerade and crossdressing, the relaxation of social boundaries, and dancing and singing through the streets invited the participation of others... The holiday by the early 1800s had become a joint cultural production with strong West African overtones.

Ben-Ur says that Purim was given outsized importance by the local Jewish community because so many of their members descended from crypto-Jews who had hidden their religion for so long: they identified with Esther, who also hid her religion in the king's palace.

(The image is AI-generated of what Purim might have looked like in Jodensavanne.)

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Teaching hate in Palestinian books for small children

Here is a video that sarcastically goes through a picture book to teach children to hate Israel. I can't add too much to the dry wit of the narrator.

Notice that there is very little here about how wonderful "Palestine" is, instead it is how awful Israel is.

I found a book with a similar theme, written within weeks of October 7 2023: "Eliyas Explains What's Going On in Palestine."

It is available for free online from Muslim Children's Books.

The book teaches Muslim kids that all of Israel is "occupied" and illegal:

Mum began, "Well, in our times, Palestine has been occupied by the state of Israel." ..."It's when the military of a country takes control of the land of another country. Palestine is under the control of the Israeli army, which it doesn't belong to.
..."That's not fair!" I protested, bouncing out of my seat, "Why doesn't someone do something? Are they allowed to do that?"
"Of course Not," Dad shook his head, "the occupation of Palestine has been recognised by international law as an illegal occupation,"

Here is how it describes October 7:

"This time, it was with force." Yeah, a Palestinian shoved an Israeli.

Note that they are saying Israel is committing "genocide" only days into the war.

There are many, many books like these that are brainwashing Muslim children - and many of them are aimed at brainwashing everyone else.

(h/t Jill)

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

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I found this article quoting London newspapers in 1774 (The Caledonian Mercury, Apr 04, 1774):

From the London Papers, March 29.
Rome, Feb. 26.
A Decree of the Vicar General was published here the 22d inst. forbidding the Jews, under the penalty of corporal punishment, on occasion of their approaching feast of Purim, (called by abuse, their Carnaval,) to wear masks either within or out of their houses, to give feasts, balls, or any other public diversions, of whatever kind, whether Christian or Jewish, to receive into their houses any Christian of any state, sex or condition. This declaration further gives notice, that any that shall contravene the above order, whether Christians or Jews, shall be rigorously proceeded against by the Inquisition.

What was the Church's problem with Purim celebrations in Rome, and why were they so concerned about mingling between Jews and Christians specifically on Purim? After all, Jews lived in the ghetto, and social interaction would be expected to be minimal outside of business dealings.

My theory is that Purim celebrations were looked upon as a serious temptation for Christians to violate the restrictions of Lent.

Outwardly, Purim celebrations resembled Carnaval in Rome, which also involved drinking, costumes, masks, feasting and public performances ahead of Lent. In 1774, Purim was celebrated during the second week of Lent. The Papal leaders may have been concerned that the boisterous Jewish celebrations would tempt Christians to join in. It is similar to how Muslim countries today ban all public eating during the days of Ramadan, even by non-Muslims.

Even though the Jews were largely confined to the ghetto, their Purim-spiels - the comedic Purim plays that Jews would perform - likely attracted non-Jews. These plays, influenced by Italian Commedia dell’Arte , drew in Christians over the years in other parts of Europe. Encyclopedia Judaica notes, " The printed version of the Akhashverosh-shpil was burned by the city fathers of Frankfort presumably because of the play's indecent elements. This was probably the reason for a public notice of 1728 in which the leaders of the Hamburg community banned the performance of all Purim-shpils."

In 18th century Rome, theatres were closed during Lent and public performances were restricted or banned. A Purim spiel, even in the ghetto, would have been a strong attraction for Christians.

Moreover, by that time period, Purim-spiels had evolved from satires of the Book of Esther into other topics. It can be assumed that by 1774, these plays satirized contemporary issues, lampooning Christianity and political leaders. When the decree mentions "public diversions" it almost certainly refers to the Purim-spiels - and possibly plays that were subversive.

Not only that, but Jews in Italy - like the Christians during Carnaval - would wear costumes and masks during the holiday. Christians who chafed under Lent restrictions could don masks to disguise themselves to enjoy a night out during Lent.

Tonight, as we celebrate Purim 250 years later, this decree shines a light on a hidden moment in history. The Church wasn’t just worried about Purim-spiels or satire—they were worried about losing control during Lent. By banning Purim celebrations, and emphasizing that the ban is not only for Jews, they tried to stop Christians from skipping the fasting and joining the party in the ghetto. This shines a light on a previously unknown chapter in Jewish-Christian relations in the Papal States during the 18th century.

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)