Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, December 27, 2019

Chanukah music video night 6: Hanukkah, Oh Hanukkah! By Tragedy: Heavy Metal (plus bonus video)

I prefer original songs every year but this is definitely a different take on a classic.

Bonus: This is the most over-the-top dramatic rendition of "I Have A Little Dreidel" that I have ever seen.

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12/27 Links Pt1: The ICC, settlements and the Orwellian denial of the Jewish presence in Israel; Netanyahu vows to ‘finalize borders,’ get US to back annexation; Glick: Fighting Iran's undivided and indivisible regime

From Ian:

The ICC, settlements and the Orwellian denial of the Jewish presence in Israel

SINCE THE question in this narrative is to determine who the first occupant was, this implies that historical Jewish presence must be denied and that, as a corollary, Palestinians need to prove that they were the first occupants. The consequence of this narrative is that anything Jewish is erased from the history of the country.

For example, recently, Palestinian academics denied archaeological evidence of Jews in Israel, part of a narrative to portray Jews as recent invaders. More generally, this creates an impossible historical conundrum, since the presence of an Arab population emerged as a notable community in the territory of Israel after the Muslim conquests of the seventh Century and that, thereafter, this population always cohabited with the Jewish and Christian communities that remained after the conquests.

More specifically, the aspect of this broad narrative relating to the inherent illegality of Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria implies a certain view of the history of the past century. One could even say that this narrative requires a sort of Orwellian rewriting of the past, to erase key moments that fit uneasily with such a narrative.

Indeed, it requires a rewriting of the recognition of a Jewish right to self-determination that followed the Balfour Declaration of 1917. It ignores the conditions under which Judea and Samaria, as well as Gaza, were occupied respectively by Jordan and Egypt from 1947 to 1967. It ignores the circumstances of the 1967 Six Day War when Israel took control of this territory in a defensive war. It ignores the negotiated terms of the Oslo Agreements in relation to the distribution of authority in Judea and Samaria and the lack of final status of both borders and territories.

The wide-sweeping argument of illegality per se also ignores the diverse nature of each individual presence in these territories, in terms of where it is, how it came into existence, what legal regime applies to it, etc.

As in a courtroom, the issue comes down to the identification of competing narratives before the international community acting as a judge. Each side is therefore faced with the choice of which narrative to choose from. Some narratives can be reconciled. Others cannot.

The fact remains that the position that settlements are illegal as such serves a war-like narrative that denies any legitimacy to Jewish presence on the entire territory of Israel, as exemplified by numerous declarations, including a recent declaration by a Fatah official that Palestinian people will not relinquish a grain of soil from the land of historical Palestine from the [Mediterranean] Sea to the [Jordan] River.

The December 20 announcement by the ICC prosecutor that she is ready to open a formal investigation with settlement-related activities at its core will undoubtedly be seen as a first narrative victory for those challenging Jewish presence in Israel. This can only be countered if another narrative is presented, not just in public discourse, but at the ICC itself, which provides genuine procedural opportunities for participation in the judicial debate, as we noted in an editorial last September.

Col. Richard Kemp The ICC decision on Israel would make Himmler proud

The ICC prosecutor accuses Israel, during the 2014 Gaza war, of using disproportionate force, willfully killing and injuring civilians, and intentionally attacking protected individuals and locations. She also alleges that the IDF committed war crimes against Gazans violently attempting to breach the border into Israel in 2018 and 2019.

I was present during these conflicts, witnessed, and was extensively briefed on IDF operations. I was a member of an investigation into the 2014 Gaza war by the High Level Military Group, an independent body of retired generals from Western armed forces and human rights experts. The group unanimously concluded that: "The IDF not only met its obligations under the Law of Armed Conflict, but often exceeded these on the battlefield."

Gen. Martin Dempsey, at the time Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, commented: "Israel went to extraordinary lengths to limit collateral damage and civilian casualties." My first-hand observations during the Hamas-instigated Gaza border violence in 2018-19 echo these assessments.

The allegation that Israel committed war crimes by transferring parts of its civilian population into occupied territory can only be described as outrageous. The West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza are not "occupied territories." The suggestion that willing tenancy on this land by Jews is intrinsically illegal sees the ICC prosecutor adopting the Nazi concept of Judenrein, cleansing an area of Jews.

Despite situations where such crimes have actually occurred, including Northern Cyprus and Crimea, no prosecutions for war crimes in this category have ever been brought against anyone. Special treatment is reserved for the Jewish state.

"The IDF takes more steps than any other Army in the history of warfare to preserve the lives of innocent civilians on the battlefield" @COLRICHARDKEMP @i24NEWS_EN pic.twitter.com/ORw3M45Ixt
— Jeff Smith (@JeffSmithi24) December 26, 2019

Nitsana Darshan-Leitner: Israel's Defensive Arguments Fell on Deaf Ears at the ICC

Since September 2012, when the Palestinians' status was upgraded in the UN to an observer state, they have repeatedly warned that if Israel does not submit to their demands, they will turn to the International Criminal Court in The Hague and formally submit war crimes complaints.

Israel tried to persuade ICC Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda that the tribunal has no authority to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, since Israel is not a signatory to the Court's Rome Treaty and the Palestinians are not a state. Israel correctly argued that it has a strong and independent judiciary investigating every incident, and does not hesitate to prosecute and frequently convict whenever there is even the shadow of a violation of law. As such, the ICC has no authority to act as a super-review court for the Israeli justice system.

Every IDF tank and helicopter has an on-call legal advisor who is relied upon to instruct the units whether to shoot a shell or fire a missile when there is even the slightest question concerning collateral damage to civilians. But all of these defensive arguments seem to have fallen on deaf ears. The writer, an Israeli civil rights attorney, is president of the Shurat HaDin Law Center.

Mahmoud al-Habbash is Mahmoud Abbas's adviser on religious and Islamic affairs and also the chief Islamic judge of the Palestinian Authority.

Yesterday he greeted a delegation of Christian. human rights and interfaith leaders from Belgium, where he assured them that "Palestine" has nothing against Jews and that the conflict is not a religious one.

As usual, the delegation didn't research who they were meeting with beforehand, and eagerly lapped up Habbash's words.

Habbash, who tells non-Muslims that the Palestinians are not interested in religious conflict, in 2014 he said that Jihad should be directed toward Jerusalem. "Jerusalem is still waiting. Jerusalem is the direction. Jerusalem is the address," Habbash stressed, adding that "evil hands" (Jews) were "conducting a filthy game" intended to weaken the Islamic nation and "to divert the compass away from its true direction."

In 2018 he was even more explicit that there was a coming religious war between Islam and Islam's enemies, which presumably include the people who visited him from Belgium:

As always, these delegations from around the world are so thrilled to meet with Palestinian leaders - but they never check out these very same leaders' hate beforehand. In the end, they legitimize it.

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Jordan's deal to buy natural gas from fields off Israel's coast is over five years old and the protests in Jordan to stop the deal have been going on for just as long.

They will be ineffective for a very simple reason: Jordan cannot keep the lights on.

This article from Ammon News describes which hours of the day the electricity will be shut off in Jordan's northern cities over the next several days.

In many areas there will be no electricity for between 3 and 6 hours today, Monday and Tuesday. They include most of Irbid, Ramtha City, the Jerash Governorate, the Al-Mafraq Governorate and elsewhere.

It does not sound like there is anything unusual in turning off electricity for a few hours a day.

Jordan is an energy-poor country and even if some people hate Israel so much to protest buying fuel from the hated Zionist entity, Jordan's king is not going to risk people rioting against him because they are freezing in the winter.

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RT reports that heavy rains caused a major landslide to destroy part of a Jewish cemetery in Beirut. Skeletons and gravestones collapsed into a major street, and municipal workers used heavy earth moving equipment to push the debris - and possibly the bodies - back into the cemetery.

Here's the video:

There are only a handful of Jews left in Lebanon.

The comments on YouTube from Lebanese citizens are almost uniformly disgusting and antisemitic. I only saw a handful of comments that were sympathetic to the tragedy. Most lookied like this:

This is the beginning of the collapse of Zionism, this is God's revenge for them

Let them take their graves with them, why leave them in Beirut
when the day comes, they say this is a Jewish land, and they demand that I give them their bones and save your soul

Jews 💀👽😢😔
My brother, even the grave rejects them

We will see in the near future this photo and hear the address saying its country is Israel has fallen and the Palestinians are now returning to their areas and lands and building Palestine again

Save the street, it has become impure

Glory to Allah

We wish to see the Jews killed in Palestine, God willing

Even the earth refuses their bones to be unclean to hell, sons of the Devil

Even the dead in the Arab countries are upset with her.

God's curse on the Zionists and the stinking Netanyahu

God willing, the Israeli settlement in Palestine collapses like the cemetery, say Amen, Lord of the Worlds 🤲

There is no god but God and
Muhammad is the Messenger of God, may God’s prayers and peace be upon him ...
There is neither power nor strength except in God the Most High, the Great ...
Praise be to God, Lord of the worlds ...

may Allah help

Thank you, a strong storm that annihilates Jewish impurity

God's wrath

Glory be to Allah

bones? We thought the Jews were slugs 😀😀

God is great and praise

My Lord is angry at them even when they are dead, Latif.
And you are healed, and there is no temple, as liars

Glory be to God, and with His praise, Glory be to God the Most High, Glory to the Holy One, Lord of angels and spirit

The land of Bilad al-Sham rejects Jews living and dead

Ha ha ha ha

May God curse them all, alive and dead

Divine justice does justice to our brothers in all the Arab countries that are oppressed by the stormy Jews. They did not destroy a single house and came to most of the cemetery. Glory be to God.

Now the Zionists will say that (the Temple of Solomon) is in Beirut .😅

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Chanukah music video night 5: The Dreidel Song (Yiddish) די דריידל ניגון - Shmueli Ungar

Who says Yiddish is a dead language? (There is one stanza in English as well.)

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12/26 Links Pt2: UNRWA’s ex-spokesman Chris Gunness glorifies Hamas hanging “collaborators”; Sky News Arabia blames Israel for Jewish exodus from Arab lands; Israel’s Eurovision show voted best of decade

From Ian:

UNRWA’s ex-spokesman Chris Gunness glorifies Hamas hanging “collaborators”

In a December 23, 2019 tweet that was just deleted today, Chris Gunness, the spokesman of UNRWA from 2007 until his departure earlier this year, made light about the hanging of “collaborators” by Hamas:

Why is a former top UN official glorifying murder?

This latest rant by Gunness is hardly his first:

2. In May, Chris Gunness went on a crazy rant about 'Judeo-Nazis'. When we sent him our 130-page report on UNRWA teachers who glorify Hitler, he lashed out at us. https://t.co/D197La4zRr

A reminder how some use the veneer of 'pro-Palestinian' to mask their hate. pic.twitter.com/55dOKe14g7
— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) December 26, 2019

Gunness has previously justified the stabbing of Jews, even as he pretended that he didn’t:

Why do the EU, Germany, Britain and Canada give tens of millions of dollars annually to UNRWA, even though its leading officials glorify murder?

DELETED: Tweet by Chris Gunness, ex-UNRWA spokesman, glorifying Hamas hanging "collaborators." https://t.co/BIdA1zmpN3

Time and again he covered up for dozens of his UNRWA teachers who glorified Nazism, praised Hitler, spread genocidal antisemitism & incited Jihadi terrorism. pic.twitter.com/JhpW1athFr
— UN Watch (@UNWatch) December 26, 2019

Fatah set to celebrate 55 years since its first terror attack (not its founding)

Here's the logo for Fatah's 55th anniversary being celebrated on January 1:

Look at the map and see exactly how much Fatah wants to live side by side with Israel.

As we point out every year, January 1 is not the anniversary of Fatah's founding. That happened in 1959 according to Wikipedia, possibly a few years earlier.

No, it is the 55th anniversary of its first terror attack, an attempt to sabotage Israel's National Water Carrier.

Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah doesn't celebrate its actual birth. It celebrates terror.

Every single year.

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If Arafat Were Alive Today He'd Be Horrified To Find Himself Entombed by Marwan Barghouti (Preoccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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If Arafat Were Alive Today He'd Be Horrified To Find Himself Entombed

by Marwan Barghouti

: Credit: BDalim via Wikimedia Commons

Kishon Prison, December 26 - Much has changed since our beloved Raïs passed away in 2004, some of which he would appreciate, and some of which he would decry. But perhaps the most important thing the legendary Yasser Arafat would notice if he were among the living today, and which would spark his unmitigated disapproval, is that he lies interred in Ramallah.

Abu Amar, as we often called him, came to personify the Palestinian national struggle; despite his bitter differences with leaders of other factions among our people, no one before or since could make a more convincing case for the last, and perhaps only, consensus figure among our leadership. If he lived and breathed now, he would certainly find discouraging the worsening divisions between, for example, Fatah and Hamas, and the fact that we stand nowhere appreciably closer to the hoped-for liberation of our homeland than when he departed this mortal coil. That, and the fact that he wouldn't be living and breathing for long under all that dirt and concrete.

Some might try to alert the Raïs to the momentous departure of Israel, settlers, soldiers, and all, from the entirety of the Gaza Strip in 2005, presaging, we all hoped, a similar development in the rest of Palestine. I contend he would remain unswayed by that observation, for three main reasons: no such retrenchment of Zionist settlements has followed - the opposite, they have only expanded in the decade-and-a-half since; Fatah lost its short-lived control of the Gaza Strip soon after, as irreconcilable rifts widened between the movement and Hamas; and his attention would be unable to focus on any supposed victories while entirely occupied by the dark, airless tomb in which he would find himself.

What would our larger-than-life, legendary leader say if he came back to life today? Would he marvel at the new town of Rawabi? Would he nod approvingly at the continued misery of those who dwell in refugee camps after four generations rather than admit the attempt to drive in the Jews into the sea in 1948 has failed? Would he criticize his political heirs' enriching themselves on funds provided for the benefit of ordinary Palestinians, when those leaders, after all, are just following his example? Would he see as wisdom or folly the continued refusal of any Palestinian leadership to outline a feasible, reasonable resolution to our conflict with Israel? In my assessment, he would panic at being entombed, and soon suffocate back to death.

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12/26 Links Pt1: JPost Editorial: European hypocrisy; Is Building Homes a War Crime?; Greenblatt: What Would America Do If It Was Attacked by Rockets?

From Ian:

JPost Editorial: European hypocrisy

These are countries that wrongly believe Israel’s presence in the West Bank is illegitimate. But these are also countries whose official policy is Israel and the Palestinians should pursue a negotiated two-state solution. What kind of negotiation can take place with a partner like the Palestinians, who are taking punitive unilateral steps?

Of course, they are not just dissembling when it comes to the ICC. When European countries say they want a two-state solution, the aim is supposed to be peace. Yet European donations to so-called human rights NGOs that have ties to terrorists are commonplace.

Many of the Palestinian groups working to have Israelis prosecuted for war crimes share personnel with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Just last week, the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) arrested PFLP members in the West Bank who were part of a 50-person terrorist network. One of them was responsible for murdering 17-year-old Rina Shnerb in August. He and several others work for a number of European-funded NGOs, including in top financial positions, while being leaders of the PFLP.

The PFLP is recognized as a terrorist organization by the EU, and these revelations about their work in NGOs are not new, but these European countries keep funding them.

The hypocrisy is so screamingly obvious that it is practically smacking the staffers at various development agencies run by European governments in the face. It’s hard to understand how they can live with the cognitive dissonance. And yet they’ve been doing this for years, although research institutions and Israeli government officials from the Strategic Affairs and Justice Ministries have brought these issues to their attention.

These countries need to decide: Do they want a negotiated settlement or punitive unilateral Palestinian action? Do they oppose or support terrorists? They say one thing, but their money talks, and it says the opposite.

European Countries Allow Oppressive Regimes to Manipulate the ICC

Most of the regimes that shape international bodies and legal tribunals have no respect for the values of peace, tolerance, and human rights, resulting in the manipulation of the ICC and other bodies.

European countries that join forces with oppressive regimes in these bodies grant them legitimacy. Without this legitimacy, the international bodies would have been dismissed as nothing more than a circus that should be ignored because they are being controlled by outcast regimes. But the Europeans have systematically stood by those who distort the very values they have championed.

The European elites continue to live according to the illusion that the world will embrace Western values and be built under the auspices of international law using global legal and political bodies. If you confront European countries with the reality that there are major cultural gaps between Europe and most of the world, you will be dismissed as racist.

There Are No Judges at the Hague

We know what the ruling will be: The ICC will become the first international tribunal to rule that the “state of Palestine” is sovereign over all disputed areas of Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem.

Just two weeks ago, the media reported that high-ranking legal scholars in Israel’s Attorney General’s Office had warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to take steps to apply Israeli law to the Jordan Valley, out of concern that the ICC would decide to launch an investigation against Israelis for that “crime” too.

It was obvious to anyone who keeps tabs on the ICC that there would be an investigation of Israel, regardless of whether sovereignty was applied to the Jordan Valley or not. The legal advisers’ warning not only demonstrated a total lack of understanding of the ICC, but also gave it more motivation to act against Israel by supplying it with proof that the court is influencing a state’s conduct with threats of legal action.

This was not the first time that legal authorities in Israel, including some at the top ranks of their profession, have operated in a manner that unintentionally spurs on the ICC to proceed with its anti-Israel actions. High-ranking legal authorities have talked about the Israeli legal system as a “defensive shield” against ICC investigations, as if the ICC were acting out of professional legal motivations rather than political and diplomatic ones.

As long as Israel continues to treat the ICC as a legal entity, and as long as it maintains relations with ICC staff under the assumption that their intentions are good, as long as Israel continues to make legal arguments as if anyone at the ICC is listening, it will continue to lose the battle. We must wake up and take more stringent political steps — as the United States already has — before the nightmare of indictments against Israeli soldiers becomes a reality.

Here's the very latest Jewish conspiracy theory to take over the world, courtesy of Youssef Nabil Fawzi at Sudanese news site Sudanile.

Donald Trump's "Deal of the Century" is a Jewish plot to destroy the Arab world, as originally written by Theodor Herzl.

Apparently, Herzl wanted to relocate the Palestinians to the Sinai. (Fawzi seems to be mixing up Herzl and a plan floated at a 2004 Herzliya conference.) But he does mention Herzl as being behind the desire for Israel to stretch from the Nile to the Euphrates as he supposedly said at the First Zionist Conference in Basel in 1897.

Fawzi says that Zionists adopted the geopolitical strategy created by Halford John Mackinder in 1904, which he summarized then as:

"Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland [from the Volga to the Yangtze and from the Himalayas to the Arctic.];
who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island [Afro-Eurasia];
who rules the World-Island commands the world."

Somehow, East Europe has been transformed into the Middle East.

Israel plans on using mercantilism, "a political idea in the basis that the amount of wealth is limited in the world and that the best strategies are to obtain the largest possible share of this wealth through colonialism or similar means in order to deprive countries of their resources..." So Israel's support of the Renaissance Dam in Ethiopia is really meant to subdue Egypt, for example.

Part of the plan is to redraw the borders of the Middle East, using Israel's evil "normalization" plan. What it really means is "normalization is carried out with countries close to the borders of Israel in order to preserve the safety of Israel. The demolition of the borders threatens states beyond and ignite the flames of war and where this is what actually happened in both the Sudan, Iraq, Libya and Yemen, while the countries that refuse normalization like Syria are completely destroyed."

We learn so much from this analysis: "Israel targets expanding its borders by seizing Sinai first, and then extending in all geographical directions to the north, south, west, and east, and then re-demarcating the borders to other countries after re-dividing those countries first into small states as happened in Sudan by its separation in the south and as it will also happen with the separation of its west, and as is currently happening in Libya. This explains that biblical plaque that was placed at the entrance to the Israeli Knesset where it is written: 'Your borders, Israel from the Euphrates to the Nile' so that they do not forget their first goal was the establishment of the State of Israel and then dominate the world and America itself."

How is Israel depopulating the Sinai in order to take it over? By helping ISIS, of course.

And this is only Part 1 of Fawzi's thesis!

Wow, those Jews are really smart, but not smart enough for the likes of Youssef Nabil Fawzi!

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Hamas and Fatah keep accusing each other over Jerusalem and elections

The Palestinian election sham continues.

As I have been reporting, Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah has been using its demands that elections be held in Jerusalem as an excuse to push elections off altogether.

Hamas has been calling Fatah out on this. A recent column in Hamas' Al Resalah says that, sure, Jerusalem is important, but by rights Arabs who live in Jaffa and Nazareth should vote as well, not to mention Palestinians who live abroad. Abbas' begging Israel for permission to hold elections in Jerusalem is a source of shame for Palestinians. If he wants elections, just do the elections where possible. "In the end, we affirm that the city of Jerusalem is the core of our Palestinian cause and should not be mortgaged to narrow factional interests as it is now used in the matter of elections," the article concludes.

The Palestinian Liberation Front, a recognized terror group that supports Mahmoud Abbas, responded on Voice of Palestine radio saying that when Hamas says that elections should be held without Jerusalem it means that they support Trump's Deal of the Century and the "occupation." It also said the PA leadership will continue its contacts with the international community to pressure Israel to remove obstacles to holding elections in Jerusalem.

Voice of Palestine also interviewed Palestinian official Adnan Ghaith who said that elections without Jerusalem would be a "stab in the side" of the Palestinian national project.

The official PA radio station continued on, with Adnan Al-Husseini, member of the Executive Committee of the PLO, agreeing that without Jerusalem there should be no elections.

How convenient that the person who has stayed in power for 15 years is unwilling to risk it all with elections - and remember that his party lost the last elections.

The entire dysfunction of the Palestinian leadership is apparently not a topic of interest to the hundreds of Western journalists in the region.

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Iranian ambassador blames Jewish media domination for Reuters story of 1500 protesters killed

Reuters reported:

After days of protests across Iran last month, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei appeared impatient. Gathering his top security and government officials together, he issued an order: Do whatever it takes to stop them.

About 1,500 people were killed during less than two weeks of unrest that started on Nov. 15. The toll, provided to Reuters by three Iranian interior ministry officials, included at least 17 teenagers and about 400 women as well as some members of the security forces and police.

Iran is very upset at this story. That discomfort has proven, yet again, that Iran is antisemitic.

The Iranian ambassador to the UK, Hamid Baeidinejad, tweeted:

Reuters News Agency, part of Thomson Reuters which was sold to a Canadian Zionist figure by its original British company several years ago, has unfortunately in recent years pursued a policy of prejudice and lies against Iran ...

Reuters policy is in line with the policy that [Rupert] Murdoch, the owner of the Zionist media empire, had formally stated years ago: Jewish-owned media in the world have a duty to support Israel. Not surprisingly, the same top priority today comes from Reuters' Canadian and Zionist owner from Toronto, supporting Israel.

An Iranian diplomat is tweeting antisemitic conspiracy theories.

The Canadian he is referring to is David Binet, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Woodbridge Company which controls over 60% of Thomson Reuters stock.

The only sources that Binet is Jewish comes from antisemitic sites, although some Jews do have that surname. I see nothing linking Binet with any Zionist causes or charities.Not to mention that Reuters is hardly Zionist!

If Iran was against antisemitism as it always claims, it would fire Baeidinejad. Instead, the official state media Tehran Times and Mehr News proudly reported on the tweets - scrubbing his mention of the word "Jewish" in their English translations, proving that the regime knows very well that the diplomat is an antisemite and repeating the official Iranian position that Jews control the media.

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Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

A recent news item indicates that among the candidates for seats in the World Zionist Congress – founded by Theodor Herzl in 1897 – are Peter Beinart and Jeremy Ben Ami.

To tell the truth, when I see the petulant babyface of Peter Beinart, I experience a feeling of nausea. A misozionist and tikkunist*, Beinart was one of the more successful figures at monetizing his brand with his 2010 article “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment.” It was followed by a book which expanded on his thesis that established American Jewish organizations were “failing” young liberal Jews because they were not sufficiently sensitive to the “fact” that Israel was viciously oppressing Palestinian Arabs.

Beinart continued to write and speak on this theme, and as often happens, as time passed he became more and more extreme in his anti-Israel expression. Nevertheless, he continues to insist that he is a Zionist. For someone like myself, who believes that the survival of the Jewish people everywhere depends on a strong Jewish state, the hypocrisy of a comfortable American Jew telling Israelis to commit suicide is infuriating.

The mention of hypocrisy immediately brings to mind the organization J Street, which was midwifed in 2007 by a large infusion of cash from groups connected to George Soros (an infusion that J Street lied about until it was exposed). J Street, which also took money from individuals connected to Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia to lobby the US Congress, claims to be “pro-Israel and pro-peace,” but its consistently anti-Israel actions have proven it to be neither. Like Beinart, J Street appeals to American Jewish progressives and liberals, who either don’t see or don’t care that the objects of their support are enemies of the Jewish state.

J Street is led by Jeremy Ben Ami, who is himself a study in hypocrisy (or psychopathology of another sort). His father, Yitzhak Ben Ami, was a member of the etzel, the underground army organization led by Menachem Begin that fought the British and the Arabs to create the state of Israel. He came to America during the Holocaust as part of the “Bergson Group,” in an attempt – scuttled by the liberal Jewish establishment of the time – to mobilize support to rescue the doomed Jews of Europe. Thus, Jeremy is on the opposite side of his father’s struggle.

Beinart and Ben Ami are two of a type that has begun to flourish in recent decades: Jews that make a career for themselves – either for money, academic advancement, fame, or all of the above – by exploiting the fact that they have Jewish parents to give them an aura of authority with which to attack the state of Israel. Although they have no personal stake in the consequences of their advice, they give it with a pretense of great moral weight.

Beinart’s complaint (unfortunately) no longer makes sense. In recent years, many “establishment” Jewish organizations in the US – the ADL, Hillel International, the Federation system, the Union for Reform Judaism, and others have moved farther and farther away from supporting Israel. In some cases the reason is simply practical fund-raising: they would like to be acceptable to a new group of donors who are less pro-Israel than their parents, a consequence of the concentrated anti-Israel indoctrination they have received in American universities. In other cases, like the ADL, the dominant personalities in the organizations have been replaced by political operatives with a leftist (and anti-Israel) orientation.

I think that the Obama Administration also had much to do with this, providing support for J Street as their go-to Jewish group, as well as generating a continuous flow of propaganda against the Netanyahu government. The theme was “we love and support Israel, but Netanyahu is making it a racist theocracy.” Liberal American Jews seem to have been very susceptible to this approach.

The change stood out for me when I reread Beinart’s seminal 2010 article. I don’t think that today he would be able to say that the “American Jewish establishment” univocally supports Israel. Indeed, the truth is closer to the opposite. And the “establishment” has been joined by groups like J Street and If Not Now; even Jewish Voice for Peace is being treated as a legitimate representative of a segment of the Jewish population. None of this is an accident: a great deal of money has been expended by anti-Israel foundations like the Ford Foundation and Soros-connected foundations in order to accomplish this. And Beinart himself has been a tireless soldier in this campaign.

***

The World Zionist Congress consists of delegates from all over the world, in proportion to the Jewish populations of various countries. An election will be held to select them this January, and American Jews can vote for one of several slates of candidates. One is ironically called “Hatikvah”; its platform is a politically-correct compendium of left-wing causes, and its slate contains Beinart and Ben Ami, as well as the full panoply of American Jewish virtue-signalers and opportunists. For those Liberals/Progressives who can’t quite stomach Beinart or Ben Ami, there is a very slightly less aggressively left-wing platform and slate provided by the Union for Reform Judaism.

With due respect for Herzl, I think that the World Zionist Organization and its Congress have outlived their usefulness now that the Jewish state has been reestablished and is thriving. Israel does not need financial contributions from the diaspora, and it needs advice and political pressure even less. The WZO should dissolve itself and turn over whatever resources it has to the true Zionist entity in the world (just ask the Iranian regime), the State of Israel.

For now, I recommend that American Zionists vote for the Herut Zionists, which – unlike “Hatikvah” and the Reform slate, does espouse true Zionist goals like the ingathering of exiles and the development of all of Eretz Yisrael.
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* Misoziony (pronounced mis-OZ-yoni) is the extreme and irrational hatred of the Jewish state. It is antisemitism raised up one level of abstraction, although almost all misozionists are antisemites as well. Tikkunism is the ideology that replaces the traditional mitzvot of Judaism with an imperative to engage in left-wing social action

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Chanukah music video Night 4: Elena of Avalor | Disney Junior "On Hanukkah"

Elena of Avalor is the first Jewish Disney princess.

There are some mistakes, but altogether it is refreshing.

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