Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, May 06, 2024

Logical fallacies that Israel-haters use, part 2

A continuation of a series about the many, many logical fallacies that we hear in anti-Israel arguments. When academics or supposedly wise pundits engage in these fallacies, it shows that they do not have any real arguments. Part 1 here.

16. Big Lie technique. "Israel is an apartheid state." "Israel is committing genocide in Gaza." "Most Palestinians are against terrorism." "Most Palestinians support a two state solution." "Hamas has shown flexibility in its demands." "Israel is the obstacle to peace." "There were no rapes on October 7." "Israel bombed the Al Ahli hospital." "Fatah is moderate." etc. etc.

17. Blind Loyalty fallacy: "I don't know enough about history or current events, but everyone else on campus/my favorite professor says Israel is evil."

18. Blood is Thicker than Water fallacy: "As a Muslim (or Arab,) I support Palestinians no matter what they do."

19. Brainwashing: "There is only one solution, Intifada Revolution" chants repeated over and over. Or this:

20. Calling "Cards": "Zionists on campus are playing the antisemitism card."

21. Circular reasoning: "We know Israel is so evil, it has been trying to wipe out Palestinians for 80 years. Israel is performing genocide, which proves Israel is evil."

22. Complex Question or Loaded Question: "Why do you support Israel's genocide of Palestinians?"

23. Confirmation Bias: "I read about a study that says all Ashkenazi Jews come from Europe; that proves they cannot be real Jews." "All the evidence Amnesty/HRW gathered proves Israel is an apartheid state" without mentioning all the counter-evidence they ignored.

24. Default Bias: "Israel cannot stop Palestinian terror/'resistance' so it must learn to accept it."

25: Nihilism: "Everything is Israel's fault. Dismantle it."

26. Defensiveness: " I supported Hamas' pragmatism and how they appeared to care about Gazans. After October 7, I still support Hamas' decision to start a war that destroyed Gazan's lives."

27. Deliberate Ignorance: "Why am I protesting Israel? Don't ask me, ask one of the leaders."

28. Diminished Responsibility: "After decades of occupation, what else can you expect from Palestinians?"

29. Disciplinary Blinders: "Modern Middle East studies discount the idea that there was ever a powerful Jewish kingdom in the region, so we can ignore recent archaeological evidence to the contrary."

30. Dog-Whistle Politics: "She's a Zionist. Enough said."

Lots more coming.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

05/06 Links Pt1: Genocide Enablers; Why the Left failed on October 7; Hamas says it has accepted Egyptian cease-fire proposal; Alternatives to Replace UNRWA Immediately

From Ian:

Genocide Enablers

The man who ignored the information which arguably could have saved nearly a million lives was Kofi Annan, then U.N. under-secretary general for peacekeeping operations. Annan told PBS in 2004 that he ordered Dallaire to share his intelligence with the genocide’s architects because “sometimes it is a very good deterrent” to inform rogue states that “we know what you are up to”—as if such a tactic has ever worked before or since. Not surprisingly, during Belgian government investigations into the Hutus’ murder of Belgian peacekeeping soldiers, Annan blocked Dallaire from testifying, and declined to testify himself.

Annan made another telling remark in the PBS interview. Pointing the finger at Security Council members, the former secretary general noted that, although these states had even better intelligence than his office, he knew the “mood in the council”: The members, Annan said, were not going to say, “We are going to send in the brigade” or “send reinforcements to General Dallaire.” While clearly self-serving, Annan’s remark is a reminder of the complicity of the so-called “international community,” including the U.S., which, at the time, did not wish to even utter the word “genocide.” “If we use the word ‘genocide’ and are seen as doing nothing,” Susan Rice, then director for international organizations and peacekeeping at the National Security Council, said, “what will be the effect on the November [congressional] election?”

The author who later excoriated Rice for this comment was none other than Samantha Power, who, two decades later, would nevertheless join Rice in government as ambassador to the U.N., when the Obama administration was abetting the mass slaughter in Syria. In her current role as USAID administrator, Power, in order to advance the Biden administration’s obscene policy of “surging” aid to Gaza, has falsely claimed that Israel is causing a “famine.”

Annan’s boss during the genocide, then-Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, was the one responsible for covertly selling the Rwandan government much of their weapons stockpile in the first place. That $26 million worth of weapons, approved by Boutros-Ghali while still Egyptian foreign minister in 1990, made up a large part of the supplies the U.N. blocked Dallaire from seizing. Boutros-Ghali later dismissed Dallaire’s original fax as merely one among many “alarming reports from the field,” thus not worth serious consideration at the time. Once the genocide was in full flood, however, all Boutros-Ghali and Annan allowed Dallaire to do was attempt to negotiate an impossible cease-fire between the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front and the very government slaughtering their kin. Though he admitted to PBS in 2004 that “I failed in Rwanda,” he never truly took personal responsibility. When he traveled to Rwanda in 1995 and reluctantly visited the site of the barbaric Nyarubuye church massacre, he toured the untouched mounds of putrefied innocents for 18 minutes, told the living to be of good courage, and then left.

Current U.N. secretary general, Antonio Guterres, did something arguably worse 28 years later. Barely two weeks after Oct. 7, he appeared to give subtle justification to Hamas’ own Nyarubuye massacre of Jews, saying that it “did not happen in a vacuum.”

Still, perhaps the most stunning correlation between the U.N.’s abetment of genocide in Rwanda and in Israel 30 years later is its insistence upon “humanitarian” support for mass murderers and their civilian accomplices. A less-remembered side effect of the Rwandan civil war was the exodus of around a million Hutus into Tanzania and Zaire, whom the U.N. and international community aided lavishly. Many of these refugees were known at the time to have either supported the genocide’s aims or personally been part of the Interahamwe death squads, but they were given food, medicine, and shelter anyway. The thousands of killers among them became community leaders within the refugee camps and then, when the genocide was over, returned to their villages to live in sight of those few who had survived their butchery.

Today, the U.N. demands that Israel supply food, medicine, and shelter to people who passionately support Hamas and their genocidal exploits. Under severe U.S. pressure—including threats of stopping arms supplies, sanctions, and support for ICC prosecution of Israeli officials and IDF soldiers—Israel has been forced to oblige, even though they know that Hamas will steal the aid for itself, as it habitually does. The Biden administration has even begun constructing a $320 million pier to supply the terror group’s enclave, and is demanding Israel protect the aid convoys replenishing its enemy.

Nevertheless, there is one difference between the U.N.’s perfidy in Rwanda and hostility toward Israel. In Rwanda, the U.N.—even while often refusing to use the word—did understand that Hutus were, in fact, committing genocide against Tutsis. Today, however, the same U.N. actually accuses the victims of an act of genocide of being the murderers, while blessing the act’s perpetrators as the true victims.

It is only fitting, then, that one U.N. official reportedly described pointless cease-fire talks between the RPF and Hutu killers as “rather like wanting Hitler to reach a cease-fire with the Jews.” No observation could better encapsulate three decades of moral depravity dressed up as idealistic decency.

The women cheering on Hamas rapists are an insult to feminism

For all the loathing she received on social media, Karen was harmless. Her successor is not. This woman throngs university campuses, leading protests, wrapped up in keffiyehs and a face covering, passionately crying out for what she calls freedom fighters and their “just war” against Zionist apartheid, genocide and occupation, and the general existence of the Jewish state.

What she is doing – perfectly explicitly in many cases – is teeny-bopping for Hamas, as girls used to yell and scream for the Beatles. It’s truly chilling. In the sick world of too many pro-Hamas, pro-Palestine women protesting, the acts of sexual violence carried out by Hamas on October 7 are Zionist fabrications, designed to further deepen the Israeli stranglehold on Palestinian self-determination and freedom. Others know perfectly well that the rape, torture and abductions happened, but seem to think it’s all wonderfully noble “resistance”.

A sick irony lives in the fact that these protest babes, ardent, self-righteous, self-avowed progressives, are cheering on terrorists who, when not raping women, insist on a brutal patriarchal society.

Do these women really want an Isis-style caliphate? Do they want rape and the threat of murder as an instrument of control as the framework for society in which all must live? Or do they only want these things for the “Zionists”?

Perhaps they don’t really know what they’re wishing for, but they should be careful nonetheless. They might just get it.

Why the Left failed on October 7

A sentence I never imagined I’d write: I now think Jeremy Corbyn did Jews in Britain a favour. His time as Labour leader, between 2015 and 2020, was an extremely weird one for British Jews, but eye-opening all the same: I now think it prepared many of us for the Left’s reaction to October 7, whereas American Jews seemed far more surprised. The gaslighting (the attack didn’t happen), the defences (if it did, Jews deserved it), the hectoring moral superiority (how can you care about that when this is so much more important?): all that we saw after October 7, we had seen under Corbyn.

Now is not the place to rehash the many examples of Corbyn’s jaw-dropping attitudes towards Jews, never mind Israel, ideas some of us naively thought had died out with Stalin. Those are specific to Corbyn, whose political relevance is now, thankfully, in the past. But two general truths emerged from that era that would prove extremely relevant after October 7.

The first was how little people across the Left cared when Jews pointed out the obvious antisemitism they saw in the Labour Party. In 2018, 86% of British Jews said they believed Corbyn was antisemitic; and still the Left supported him, and still The Guardian backed him in the 2019 general election. Would they — good Lefties one and all — have done this if the vast majority of another minority said they believed Corbyn was bigoted against them? Would the Left have supported an Islamophobic leader in 2018? A homophobic one? A racist one? It’s hard to imagine. “What are Jews so scared of? It’s not like Corbyn’s going to bring back pogroms,” a prominent figure on the Left asked me. I briefly amused myself by imagining a response: “Why are black people so against the Tories? It’s not like they’ll bring back lynching.” But I stayed schtum. The Left doesn’t care about antisemitism if they deem it inconvenient to their cause. They just call it “anti-Zionism” and carry on, and that was — it turned out — a good lesson to learn.

There was another lesson, too. When Corbyn was pushed out of Labour in 2020, I dismissed him as a useful idiot, which was right. I also dismissed him as a blip, an aberration, one I needn’t think about again, which was wrong. Because then October 7 happened. I realised that the Corbyn era had opened a Pandora’s box and some ghosts cannot be controlled.

Antisemitism found a new point of entry through identity politics, which argues that in order to see the world clearly, we need to divide it up into particular group identities, specifically racial and sexual identities, and quantify the degrees of their oppression. As Yascha Mounk writes in The Identity Trap, adherents of identity politics believe that, in the name of fairness, liberal democracies need to jettison universal values such as free speech and respect for diverse opinions — values long championed by the Jewish Diaspora. Instead, we should now see everyone through the prisms of race and sexual orientation and treat them differently, depending on their identity group and how much oppression they have historically suffered.

To make this simplistic ideology even more simple, identity politics divides the world into two racial categories: “white” (defined as colonising oppressors) and “people of colour” (the oppressed). This is how the Left pivoted from talking about class to talking about race. It is also why antisemitism is thriving again on university campuses, as supporters of identity politics combine with activists for black and Muslim causes, who see Jews as ultra-white and therefore oppressive. And to be clear, those activists aren’t necessarily Black or Muslim themselves; in fact, as multiple students have told me, they are often white, but see supporting these causes — and trashing Israel and Jews — as a means of proving their allyship and exonerating themselves from white guilt.

Middle East Eye, a UK-based web newspaper reportedly funded by Qatar, reports that Egypt has been creating an alliance to help stop any influx of Palestinians who want to escape Gaza in case of an Israeli invasion of Rafah:

Egypt’s military intelligence has held meetings with Sinai tribes in recent weeks to discuss their potential role in the event of an Israeli invasion of Rafah in southern Gaza, Middle East Eye can reveal.

At the meetings, Egyptian intelligence officers said they estimated a Palestinian influx of between 50,000 and 250,000 people towards Sinai if Israel carries out a ground operation in the Palestinian Rafah.

The meetings were held prior to the controversial creation of an alliance of tribal groups at the Egyptian side of Rafah, led by the influential pro-government businessman and militia leader Ibrahim al-Organi.

According to three Sinai tribal sources and one Egyptian security source, in the weeks leading up to the event, a number of meetings were held in North Sinai between senior members of Bedouin tribes, officers from the Secret Service apparatus in the military intelligence (known internally as Group 55), and others from the Second Field Army.

The main topic of these meetings was the possibility of the influx of a large number of residents of the Gaza Strip due to a potential Israeli military operation in the Palestinian city of Rafah, which now hosts about 1.5 million displaced Palestinians.

All sources spoke on condition of anonymity fearing reprisals from the Egyptian army.

According to three people who attended these meetings, the army and intelligence officers emphasised the necessity of assisting the armed forces and security agencies in “monitoring any infiltration of Palestinians” towards the villages and centres of North Sinai should this displacement occur, and warned against harbouring any of them and immediately reporting any movement of unfamiliar individuals in the areas close to the border.

According to the three Sinai sources, during meetings between Group 55 and Sinai tribal leaders, a number of attendees said it would be difficult to comply with official demands to prevent the entry of Palestinians into Sinai and report any movements across the borders, even with promises that the government would accommodate all displaced individuals. They highlighted their familial ties and relationships with people in the Gaza Strip, particularly Rafah, stating that it would be against their honour and Bedouin and tribal traditions to refuse hospitality and reception to them.

Egypt tries hard to say that they want Gazans to stay put fo rthe good of all Palestinians, but n Arabs seem to buy it. At the same time, no one wants to say otherwise out loud at the risk of being accused of being a Zionist.

One story later in the article sheds some new light on what some Gazans thought of "occupation:"

During one of his meetings with the tribes, General Shousha shared an anecdote with the participants, asking them not to publish it, dating back to 2005 when the Egyptian border was breached by large numbers of people from Gaza following the Israeli withdrawal from the Strip. At that time, he was the commander of the border guard forces.

Hold on: Israel withdrew from Gaza and a large number of Palestinians fled to Egypt? Even before Hamas took over the sector?

Why?

Apparently, they felt that Israeli "occupation" was far preferable to any Palestinian self-rule.

This is the sort of story that gets suppressed by the media because it doesn't follow the narrative. As a result, politicians make decisions based on incomplete information.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

An analysis of where @RutgersU caved to the demands of protesters

As part of the agreement to dismantle the anti-Israel encampment at Rutgers, the university gave in to a number of protester demands.

In general, as I've argued, any concession to students violating policy is an invitation to further and more extreme violations down the road, and I believe that any concessions sends a wrong message. In this case, some of the concessions are problematic and a couple of them are window dressing. even so, the optics is that the protesters achieved complete victory, which is the wrong message to give.

Here are the protester demands and Rutgers' responses, followed by my comments:

1. Divest from any firm or corporation materially participating in, benefitting from, or otherwise supporting the state of Israel's settler colonialism, apartheid, and genocide of Palestine and the Palestinian people, in accordance with the principles for divestment listed in University policy 40.2.14.

A request from the Endowment Justice Collective to divest from companies doing business in Israel was received on April 2, 2024, and is undergoing the review process that is outlined in the university’s investment policy. The University President and the Chairman of the Joint Committee on Investments will meet with no more than five student representatives to discuss the divestment request provided the end of encampment.

In this case, the request for divestment was done in accordance with university policy before the encampment began. That is the proper way to do it. The meeting with the protesters to discuss it after the encampment ends does not seem to be problematic.

2. Terminate its partnership with Tel Aviv University including in the HELIX Innovation Hub.

Agreements with global partners are a matter of scholarly inquiry.

This is a flat-out "no."

3. Accept at least 10 displaced Gazan students to study at Rutgers University on scholarship.

Rutgers University has a close partnership with Scholar Connections and will work with a committee of students, faculty, and staff to implement support for 10 displaced Palestinian students to finish their education at Rutgers.

The only problem with this is that it was agreed to as a concession to policy violators. It is ironic, though, that the protesters are asking for support for those who they would have preferred to remain in Gaza.

4. Provide resources for Palestinian and Arab students in the form of an Arab Cultural Center on each Rutgers campus.

We will develop a plan for the creation of an Arab Cultural Center with designated physical space and a hiring plan for administrators and staff by the start of Fall 2024 semester at New Brunswick.

Who will fund this? What is the purpose of these centers? Will they allow freedom of expression? Will they be allowed to explicitly support Hamas terror? There are more questions here than answers, so it is difficult to know how problematic this might be.

5. Establish a Memorandum of Understanding to establish a long-term educational and collaboration partnership with Birzeit University, Ramallah, Palestine -- in accordance with precedent set by William Paterson University

Rutgers-New Brunswick will revisit and follow up on the relationship established in 2022 with Birzeit University to explore avenues of research collaboration and scholarly exchange, and the feasibility of student exchange and/or study abroad through RU Global Studies

This is completely unacceptable. Birzeit University students perennially elect Hamas groups in student elections, the university is proud that it has terrorists among its alumni, it censors speech from its own faculty, and in every sense it is pro-terror and antisemitic. Rutgers should never consider any link whatsoever with a pro-terror university.

6. Name "Palestine" and "Palestinians" in all future communications related to Israeli aggressions in Palestine (as opposed to "Middle East" "Gaza region" etc.), and release a statement from the Office of the President acknowledging the ongoing genocide against Palestinians, its impact on the Palestinian community at our university, and advocating for a ceasefire.

The Chancellor will continue to name Palestine, Palestinians, and Gaza in future communications.

This sounds like a "no."

7. Hire senior administrators with cultural competency and knowledge about Arabs, Palestinians, Muslims, anti-Palestinian racism, and Islamophobia.

Rutgers–New Brunswick will work to develop training sessions on anti-Palestinian, antiArab, and anti-Muslim racism for all RU administrators & staff. We also commit to the hiring of a senior administrator who has cultural competency in and with Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian communities in the Division of Diversity, Inclusion, and Community.

This looks like a backdoor way to entrench antisemitism at Rutgers. It makes the assumption that there is Islamophobia at Rutgers, and who engages in such activities? Jews!

Rutgers should explicitly say that anyone they hire must not have antisemitic or anti-Zionist biases.

8. Hire additional professors specializing in Palestine studies and Middle East studies, institute a center for Palestine studies, and establish a path to departmentalization for Middle East studies.

The Office of the Chancellor will convene a working group to conduct a feasibility study for the creation of a Department of Middle East Studies and hire faculty. The first task of the committee is to identify gaps in the current faculty and make recommendations.

In theory, this is not problematic; in fact, it is, as most Middle East studies departments are virulently anti-Israel and most are antisemitic, teaching slanders about Israeli Jews. Any such department must be carefully set up so as not to just contribute to more hate on campus. There is no indication that Rutgers is even thinking about that.

9. Display the flags of occupied peoples - including but not limited to Palestinians, Kurds, and Kashmiris - in all areas displaying international flags across the Rutgers campuses.

The Office of the Chancellor will take stock of flags that are displayed across Rutgers New Brunswick campus, and ensure appropriate representation of students enrolled in academic and other spaces.

This could easily be a slippery slope. Would Rutgers display the older Iranian flag for Iranian dissidents who don't accept the current regime? Would it display "flags" for hundreds of native American tribes? Would it display Hamas or PFLP flags for those who oppose the Palestinian Authority? Once a clear policy to only display national flags is changed to where any self-defined group can insist on representation, it could turn to chaos - and it could easily turn into a hostile environment for Jews and others.

10. Provide full amnesty for all students, student groups, faculty, and staff penalized for exercising their First Amendment right to protest Rutgers University's support for Israeli human rights violations, and voice support for faculty and staff who have been publicly targeted for exercising their academic freedom.

No member of the Rutgers–New Brunswick community-including faculty, staff, graduate students, undergraduate students, or alumni-found to have been involved in the encampment or related activity will face retaliation from the University, including termination of employment or reduction in compensation. Retaliation shall be defined as any adverse action outside of normal business practices taken for the sole reason that the individual was involved in the encampment activities. Individual students who have been involved in any activities related to the encampment or support of the encampment, including presence in the encampment area, remain subject to the procedures of the Code of Student Conduct as communicated by the Office of Student Conduct. The commitment to end the encampment through this agreement will be considered a favorable mitigating factor in the resolution of those matters. This agreement further recognizes that reports of bias, harassment or discrimination must continue to be investigated by the appropriate offices. This agreement does not pertain to Code of Student Conduct violations that occur or come to be known after this agreement, nor shall the review and resolution of any such individual conduct matters alter or invalidate this agreement.

This sounds like a polite "no." Rutgers is saying that merely attending the encampment would not result in any punishment, but any violation of policies still could. This can be read as saying that the organizers could be subject to disciplinary action, as well as anyone who intimidated Jewish students.

The devil is in the details, of course. Rutgers is not showing that it learned any lessons when it blocked a planned kosher barbeque at the same location as where the encampment was, forcing it to move:

Rutgers University refused to let a Jewish group hold a pro-Israel barbecue on the campus’ Vorhees Mall, despite allowing pro-terror protesters to camp there for days, emails obtained by The Post claim.

Rutgers Associate Dean of Students Kerri Willson refused to allow the Jewish students to gather at the spot, saying no events could be held on campus after the last day of classes on Monday, April 29 — despite allowing the encampment to drag on until May 2.

The Kosher cookout was set to mark the end of a grueling semester for Jewish students at Rutgers, which has seen pro-Hamas students plaster a pro-Israel student’s picture all over their dorm; spray paint pictures of Palestinian terrorists on campus sidewalks; and scream “Hitler would have loved you” at Jewish students.

And that is the main reason for caution at Rutgers' response: what statement is Rutgers making to ensure the safety of its Jewish students, the students who followed the rules and didn't violate policies in their own protests of Hamas?

The only test that Rutgers needs to pass is to ensure the campus is as safe for Jewish students as it was before October 7. Anything less than that is a victory for the antisemites - and it is a victory that Rutgers chooses to allow.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Mass rally inside and outside Madison Square Garden against the Holocaust, July 31, 1944

The best evidence that even the college students who joined the anti-Israel encampments don't really believe that there is a genocide in Gaza comes from the students themselves.

These camps were not places of anguish, but parties.

I write from the encampment, where students and faculty gather in hopeful clusters and echoes of laughter cut through the night. (Harvard)

About 70 tents are spread around U-Yard and H Street that range from single-person sleepers to 10-person tents. Around the encampment, people are sitting in circles, a pair played chess and another group watched a movie on a laptop. The sounds of quiet conversation and laughter traveled through the air. (GWU)

The encampment had a wonderful environment with food, friends, and laughter. (MIT)

Light chatter and frequent laughter echo across Cannon Green, where 40 protestors remain camped for the night. (Princeton)

Around 5:35 p.m., participants in the encampment opened a circle in the middle of South Lawn. A group of students danced an Indian folk dance with neon pink and yellow sticks. Onlookers cheered, clapped, and whistled in support of the dancers, with some shaking tambourines and playing drums. (Columbia)

Or the University of Chicago "protest" where the students apparently went way beyond laughter and dance in requesting dental dams, Plan B and HIV tests.

Sex for Palestine. That will save Gazans!

Compare with the protests seen in the 1940s against real genocide.

December 1942, Palestine:

The week of mourning for the Jewish victims massacred by the Nazis in occupied Europe concluded in Palestine last night with a huge demonstration in Tel Aviv culminating in a bonfire on Habimah Square at which a crowd of more than 100,000 persons burnt the Nazi swastika and an effigy of Hitler.

In Jerusalem thousands of Jewish children marched to the Wailing Wall while their parents crowded the synagogues and rocited prayers for the Jews of Europe. Work stopped in all Jewish establishments except those engaged in manufacturing war materials. Black candles were lit in the old Bukharian synagogue, while aged Kabbalists gathered in their house of prayer in the old city and proclaimed anathemas upon Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, Himmler and other Nazi leaders.

In Safed, Jews donned yellow Mogen Dovid badges. Jewish women in Safed and Tiberias marched in spontaneous demonstrations to holy graves there and lit candles on the tombstones. Similar mourning demonstrations are reported from all over the country.

December 1942, USA:

The Jewish Labor Committee today announced that it has decided to issue a call to all Jewish workers throughout the country except, those in factories engaged in war industry – to suspend work in order to demonstrate organized Jewish labor’s protest against the Nazi wholesale murder of Jews in Europe. An emergency meeting of the executive of the Jewish Labor Committee will be held on Tuesday to consider the latest reports of the Nazi massacres of Jews.
At a conference of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of America and Canada held in New York, it was decided to proclaim Wednesday, December 2, as a day of mourning in the United States, in accordance with a similar decision adopted by the Rabbinate in Palestine. The Union will issue an appeal to all Jewish enterprises throughout the country to join in the mourning by closing their businesses on Wednesday for a half-hour.

February 1943:

The members of the Workmen’s Circle, a Jewish labor fraternal organization, will gather simultaneously in 100 meeting places in Greater New York tomorrow to voice the protest of Jewish Labor against the Nazi butchery of Jews in Europe.

The protest meetings which have been called jointly by the Workmen’s Circle and the Jewish Labor Committee will mark a “Day of Protest and Mourning” proclaimed by the national executive committee of the Workmen’s Circle in the name of its 75,000 members in the United States. Similar protest demonstrations will take place tomorrow throughout the country.

March 1943:

More than 75,000 Jews and Christians attempted to enter Madison Square Garden last night three hours before the opening of the demonstration against the Nazi extermination of Jews, the New York police authorities estimated today. In addition to the 20,000 who succeeded in entering, thousands stood outside the building listening to the speeches which were conveyed from the platform through loud speakers while tens of thousands of people at home heard the proceedings which were broadcast over a nation-wide hook-up.

July 31, 1944:

The differences couldn't be more striking.

For a real genocide, there was sadness, anger, organization, desperation, and the knowledge that every single day of inaction by the Allies meant thousands more murdered. The 1940s protesters begged to get the Jews out of Europe by any means possible to save their lives.Vast sums of money were raised to help any Jews caught in the maelstrom. They didn't feel it was necessary to deface government buildings, destroy property or hold rallies without permits.

For the fake "genocide" that is really an excuse for public antisemitism, there is laughter, dance and semi-public sex - and not a finger lifted to actually help Gazans escape from where they are supposedly being targeted for complete annihilation. The privileged students who pay some $90,000 tuition each year didn't raise any significant funds for Gazans but instead solicited donations for their own protests.

Deep down, everyone knows that almost none of these students felt that they were helping Palestinians in any way. They were there to denounce the Jewish state, not to help any Gazan who might not have adequate food or shelter, let alone any Gazan who is trying to raise funds to pay bribes to escape to Egypt.

Gazans? Who gives a damn about Gazans? Send the laughing students more dental dams!

This is why the very use of the word "genocide" against Israel is a perverted slander and an act of unbridled bigotry and antisemitism. The accusation gives todays' protesters an excuse to party, not a compulsion to save a single Palestinian life.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Logical fallacies that Israel haters use, part 1

I expect most anti-Israel voices to be idiotic, just as I expect more antisemites to be idiots.

But especially since October 7, we have seen lots of academics making arguments against Israel that violate basic logical fallacies. One would think that educated people, especially those who teach students, would be embarrassed to say these arguments out loud.

From a master list of logical fallacies found at the University of Texas- El Paso website:

1. Token Endorsement fallacy: "We cannot be antisemitic because we have some Jews who agree with us."

2.Affective fallacy: "I feel Israel is wrong, so it must be true."

3. Alternative Truth fallacy: "Palestinians have their narrative and it is just as valid as any other."

4. Appeal to Closure fallacy: "Israel must concede land because otherwise the conflict will never end."

5. Appeal to Heaven fallacy: "The Hadith says that the last hour won't come before the Muslims would fight the Jews and the Muslims will kill them."

6. Appeal to Pity fallacy: "Palestinians are weaker than Israel so we must support them.." "Palestinians are suffering so they must be right."

7. Appeal to Tradition fallacy: "Jews prospered in the Diaspora and therefore they should properly stay there."

8. Appeasement fallacy: "Divest from Israeli companies and the student protesters will stop destroying the campus."

9. Argument from Consequences fallacy: "Israel cannot possibly have any legal right to the West Bank because then Palestinians will have nowhere to go."

10. Argument from Incredulity fallacy: "We are supposed to believe that Jews have rights in the land because the God of the Bible says so?"

11. Argument from Inertia fallacy: "Jews weren't allowed to pray on the Temple Mount for centuries so we must keep the status quo."

12. Argument from Motives (reverse) fallacy: "Too many Palestinian men beat their wives and children, but it is understandable because they live under occupation."

13. Argumentum ad Baculum: "We can silence Zionist voices by bullying them and anyone who wants to listen to them."

14. Hyperbole Bias: "Israel has wreaked more destruction on Gaza than any war in history." "Israelis are worse than Nazis."

15. Bandwagon Fallacy: "We are on the right side of history!" "Most young people now support Palestinians."

There are lots more where these come from. This will probably be a four or five part series.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

05/05 Links: Netanyahu to Holocaust survivors: If need be, Israel will stand alone; The Indelible Stain of Antisemitism: The Failure of ‘Jew-Washing’

From Ian:

Ruthie Blum: Never again?

Sadly, the obligatory Holocaust Remembrance Day mantra rings hollow in the wake of the Simchat Torah bloodbath. With 132 hostages still languishing in Hamas captivity, a ground operation in Rafah repeatedly postponed and an explosion of antisemitism around the world, it seems that a genuine renewal of the vow—not simply a chanting of the mantra—is in order.

Nevertheless, in “Oct. 6 mode,” Halevi went on to reiterate it.

“Never again will the Star of David be a mark of shame,” he declared. “Instead [it is] a symbol that proudly flies on the nation’s flag. Never again will we be a scattered, homeless and persecuted people in exile, [but rather] a strong and independent people united in its land and homeland. Never again will we be a nation without a force to protect it, but…[one] whose ranks include heroes and heroines who stand tall and proud, fighting shoulder to shoulder as part of the IDF.”

All true, but utterly out of place in the midst of a battle that even our closest ally, the United States, is preventing us from executing properly, let alone winning. The words are especially jarring in view of the way in which Washington is forcing Jerusalem to engage in “negotiations” with Hamas’s Hitler in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, for a “ceasefire” that doesn’t necessarily include the release of all the hostages.

Halevi ended his missive by paying homage to those who perished at the hands of the “German inferno” and the survivors who “mustered the rest of their strength to take part in establishing a state for the Jewish people.” It’s in their name, he said, that the IDF continues to stand strong.

Invoking the “just war” being fought right now—peculiarly against a vanishing perpetrator—he said that the memory of those Jews should be the “source of our strength and a reminder of the importance of maintaining a protective force for our people.”

Yes, he concluded, “We shoulder the responsibility to continue fighting for the freedom of the people of Israel and to ensure: Never Again!”

Whether he will be as forthcoming during a post-war investigation about “shouldering the responsibility” for the Oct. 7 fiasco—the victims of which included Holocaust survivors and their families—remains to be seen. But what became painfully clear seven months ago is that the mass slaughter of Jews can and did happen again.

Netanyahu to Holocaust survivors: If need be, Israel will stand alone

In a meeting ahead of Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Day, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told survivors of the Shoah that the Jewish state would stand alone if necessary to defend its very existence.

“If we need to stand alone, we will stand alone,” Netanyahu told the Holocaust survivors gathered at his office in Jerusalem on Thursday. “If it is possible to recruit the nations of the world, how much the better. But if we do not defend ourselves, nobody will defend us,” he added.

The premier’s remarks came during an annual event where Israel’s government leaders meet with the Shoah survivors selected to light torches at the official state ceremony on May 5 marking Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

This year’s torch lighters include Itzhak Kabilio and Michael Bar-On. Netanyahu referenced comments from the survivors highlighting the reality that Israel is the sole guarantor of the Jewish people’s safety.

“Izi [Itzhak Kabilio] said here: ‘The State of Israel is the one and only sanctuary of the Jewish people.’ This is so correct,” he stated. “And Michael said: ‘We cannot rely on the nations of the world who make promises.’”

The Israeli leader then cited the examples of former U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill during World War II, arguing that even those powerful figures failed to take critical action to try to save Jewish lives during the Holocaust.

“Great leaders like Roosevelt, who was told what was happening at Auschwitz and Birkenau and in the [other] death camps. They told him and he knew. His answer was that he would be not prepared to lose a single pilot and he also refused to accept the Jews,” Netanyahu said. “Churchill, who I greatly admire, tried to involve his army, but his army rebelled against him.”

Israel marks first post-Oct. 7 Holocaust Remembrance Day

Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day began at Sundown on Sunday, with the official state opening ceremony taking place at 8 p.m. in Warsaw Ghetto Square, Yad Vashem, on the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem.

Israel’s President Isaac Herzog and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were both set to deliver remarks at the ceremony. Yad Vashem Chairman Dani Dayan will light the memorial torch, and Haim Noy was selected to speak on behalf of the survivors, including Yitzhak Perlmutter, who was chosen to recite the El Maleh Rahamim prayer for the souls of the martyrs.

During the ceremony, Holocaust survivors Pnina Hefer, Allegra Gutta, Arie Eitani, Raisa Brodsky, Michael Bar-On and Izi Kabilio will each light torches.

The live broadcast will include simultaneous translation into English and Hebrew as well as French, Spanish, German, and Russian. Additionally, Yad Vashem will offer simultaneous translation in Arabic available on the Yad Vashem YouTube Channel in Arabic. The live feed will also be accessible via Facebook (only live in English and Hebrew).

“This evening we will honor the memory of our six million brothers and sisters who were murdered in the Holocaust,” Netanyahu stated in remarks issued ahead of Holocaust Remembrance Day.

“Last Thursday, my wife, Sara, and I met with the Holocaust survivors who will light the memorial torches this evening. We met with 96-year-old Izi Kabilio, a Holocaust survivor, from Yugoslavia. He told us about the horrors he, his family and his friends endured,” said the premier.

He continued, “Izi told us: ‘Today, the State of Israel is the one and only haven for the Jewish people.’

Experts had estimated tens of thousands of deaths in Gaza by now that never happened. Why does no one call them out?

In February, a group of experts from Johns Hopkins University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine analyzed the data from Gaza - mostly based on Hamas sources - and determined what they felt were the likely number of excess deaths in Gaza over the following six months, based on three scenarios: immediate ceasefire, status quo and escalation.

They were nice enough to break up the projections into two three-month chunks - meaning that we can see what their estimates of deaths would be from February 7 to today, May 6, and we can compare it with what the same Gaza authorities claim today.

As of February 7, Hamas claimed 27,708 deaths. Today, they claim 34,622, an increase of 6,914 from then.

Here are the estimates from the experts for the same time period:

If you assume that we have kept the status quo - there has been no ceasefire since February 7, and the IDF continues to attack Hamas - we see that the experts estimated over four times the number of excess deaths than the Ministry of Health has reported (including the ten thousand phantom deaths that the MoH now calls "incomplete data.")

If you only count their projections from deaths from traumatic injury - meaning, directly from Israeli fire - the numbers are still way, way above what even Hamas claims today for the past three months.

Their estimates of the number of people who would die from epidemics ranged from 0-30,540. The actual number is zero.

Now, when the study was released, it received plenty of attention from mainstream media. Now when we see that the projections are nowhere near the reality by anyone's numbers, no one bothers to correct the reports.

Even though the people behind the report created an entire website for it, they have not updated the website with newere numbers - because that would show that they were wrong. So the website of these supposedly unbiased researchers is frozen in amber, including the raw data they keep on GitHub.

As we've seen a number of times in this war, the supposed experts are quick to find reasons to believe Hamas numbers and very reluctant to correct their wrong data when the truth is found to not conform with their assumptions of Israeli evil. I have tried to contact a few of them, such as a Columbia professor who wrote in Newsweek with confidence that 30,000 had been killed in Gaza, asking specific questions about apparent problems in their methodology - and not one has bothered answering me.

This is not how scholars are supposed to work. They are supposed to admit mistakes, or at least defend their methods from any reasonable objection.

But instead these supposed academics, scholars and experts stubbornly stick to their increasingly untenable analyses, and then hope everyone forgets about it.

Bias and science do not mix. These supposedly objective data scientists and statisticians, relying on bad data to estimate even worse projections, are not issuing corrections or mea culpas. Which makes them worse than journalists who at least sometimes are forced to make corrections.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Ninety members of the faculty of Connecticut College have signed a letter of "solidarity with student protestors" nationwide that not only ignores facts, and not only explicitly lies about Israel, but it even spreads the antisemitic slur that Jews engage in "Jewish supremacy."

The college has 187 full-time and 67 part-time faculty members, meaning that up to nearly half of the faculty there signed this letter.

Every paragraph includes lies and ignorance:

Institutions of higher education have never been apolitical spaces, and choosing to remain neutral in the face of a genocide is, itself, a political position.

There is no genocide by any definition of the term - except the attempted genocide by Hamas.

Criminalizing students for peaceful protest demonstrates these institutions’ deplorable commitment to the repression of academic inquiry and the shackling of critical thought.

If students are violating university policies, refusing to leave when requested, making areas of campus no-go zones for other students including Jews who support Israel, this is no longer peaceful protest. No one has a problem with peaceful protest.

The criminalization of nonviolent student protesters constitutes a willful and cynical flouting of the mission of universities as speech havens, where the strong protections of academic freedom must apply and be upheld.

Not a word about the suppression of free speech of Jewish students, of the intimidation of Jews on campus, of the violent attacks that some Jews have suffered. These teachers, in other words, don't give a damn about free speech except the speech they agree with, which means they don't care about free speech.

Divestment is a tried and true political strategy. Faculty play a crucial role in supporting student demands for universities and colleges to divest from companies supporting Israeli state violence, genocide, apartheid, and occupation.

For a letter from academics, there isn't even a pretense of evidence for the accusations. Like all good propagandists, they lie about "genocide" and "apartheid" and "occupation" as if these are established truths.

We also stand in solidarity with Israeli organizations and activists who oppose Israeli apartheid and Jewish supremacy such as Shoresh.

I had never heard of Shoresh, and for good reason: it was just founded after October 7 and it is not an Israeli organization at all, but a tiny group of a few ex-Israelis who live in the US. it was profiled by Al Jazeera in March, and that is about it. It doesn't have a webpage, just a page on Action Network where they describe themselves as pretty much an ex-Israeli JVP: "We offer a leftist vision for radical change between the river and the sea" where Palestinians would have a right to "return" but Jews would have no national rights. No names of the leaders, no official statements, no mention of where funding comes from, nothing. The very faculty that claims to care about transparency in college investments has no problems with propping up an alleged organization that is completely opaque.

But like JVP and Neturei Karta, they serve a purpose: to shield today's bigots from charges of bigotry. "See? I'm not antisemitic when I say there is 'Jewish supremacy!' I have an organization of Jewish Israeli expats who agree with me!"

There is no pushback I can find at Connecticut College except a single article in the campus newspaper by Professor Andrew Pessin condemning this letter. Besides the points I make, he emphasizes that a letter like this by itself chills the free speech of those who attend these people's classes:

In general I believe it is inappropriate for a mob of faculty to promote their opinions to you this way. There is a bullying process that goes into acquiring signatures that is inconducive to free and open inquiry. This document may also make some of you uncomfortable, and feel unsafe in the classrooms of those who signed it. Are these professors looking at their Jewish students, thinking about those Jews and their evil Jewish supremacy? How could you object to or protest this statement, and expect to prosper in that professor’s class, under the threat of the professor’s grade? For that reason alone I register my objection to it.

The rot in today's higher education is far worse than we knew before October 7.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Latest Hamas lie that the UN parrots: "Israel booby-trapping cans of food to kill kids"

Last week, UN-OCHA reported in their Flash Update #160 for the Gaza war:

On 29 April, the Government Media Office (GMO) reported that a 14-year-old boy was seriously injured, and sustained limb amputations, after opening a booby-trapped can of food found while looking for his belongings in his house that had been shelled by Israeli forces in Khan Younis. The GMO indicated that many people have been recently injured due to the explosion of booby-trapped canned goods, urging the population to exercise maximum care.

This is an obvious lie and an absurd antisemitic libel.

The GMO is Hamas, and they already have a seven month track record of making things up. But OCHA's mentioning it allows other media to quote the lie as if the UN is the one accepting the absurd allegations.

The UN is, as it has for months, launders Hamas lies to make them appear legitimate.

After OCHA published the accusation someone had second thoughts. But instead of pointing out that Hamas has a track record of making similarly slanderous accusations that have been proven false afterwards, they merely appended, "Booby traps are not a threat UN specialized agencies have documented in Gaza."

The rumor seems to have started in January. The Times of Gaza tweeted, "Israeli jets dropped explosives disguised as cans of food to lure in displaced people facing starvation in southern Gaza." Quds News Network added to the lie, saying "Two children, one man, and one woman were killed by the fake cans."

Of course, no names are given.

France24 debunked that video, as have others. The objects shown were fuses meant to explode mines but by themselves they were not dangerous, and they were not "disguised as cans of food." In fact, they are so small that no one would think they contained food.

So now Hamas has brushed off the lie and published it, and OCHA happily parrots whatever Hamas says, with the weak caveat of quoting the "Government Media Office" which sounds official but is some Hamas guy on Telegram.

Hamas lies every single day, and the media either ignores the lies or repeats them - but almost never points out the pattern of provable lies from that source that we have seen since October 7.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

05/04 Links: From Colombia to Columbia, an unceasing war on Israel; American Exceptionalism and the NYPD; Antisemitism not only sanctioned, but rewarded on college campuses;

From Ian:

FDD: From Colombia to Columbia, an unceasing war on Israel

Last Thursday, Colombia’s far-left president, Gustavo Petro, announced that he was cutting diplomatic ties with Israel—a move warmly lauded by Hamas, the Palestinian Authority and the Islamist regime in Iran. In a speech delivered at a May Day rally, Petro perfectly captured the left’s Palestinian fetish, along with the fervent belief that the defeat of “Zionism” will usher in a new era of people power. “Today the world could be summed up in a single word, which vindicates the need for life, rebellion, the raised flag and resistance,” Petro declared. “That word is ‘Gaza,’ it is ‘Palestine,’ they are the boys and girls who have died dismembered by the bombs.” Petro, who was elected in 2022, is a genuine revolutionary with the life experience of one, having joined the M-19 terrorist organization while still a teenager and having been tortured at the hands of Colombian military officers. Nonetheless, his words resonated deeply at the other Columbia—the Ivy League university in New York City—where pro-Hamas demonstrators playing at revolution while their parents pay exorbitant fees set up an illegal tent encampment.

They resonated as well in Tehran, where Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi lauded “the uprising of Western students, professors and elites in support of the oppressed people of Gaza,” while foreign ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani expressed satisfaction with “the awakening of global society … regarding the Palestinian issue and the depth of public hatred toward the crimes of the usurping Zionist regime and the genocide supported by America and some European governments.” Again, these are exactly the same sentiments being articulated at Columbia, at UCLA, at George Washington University, and at the other American campuses turned upside down by the wave of solidarity with Hamas.

To many Jews, all this will seem like a colossal failure—a failure of Holocaust education, which Jewish communities have been deeply invested in for several decades; a failure to accurately convey the true nature of Israeli society beyond the “settler-colonial” caricature pushed by much of the left and some far-right influencers; a failure to maintain constructive relationships with those other minorities where sympathy for Hamas and its atrocities is rife, particularly American Muslims, many of whom originate from non-Arab countries, and African-Americans. Perhaps the toughest aspect of all is the realization that debate and argument are fruitless, not least because refusal to communicate with “Zionists” has become an article of faith at the pro-Hamas rallies and demonstrations.

Still, at the same time, we need to shake off the myth that these demonstrations are an expression of “civil society”—individuals and volunteer groups mobilizing for Gaza out of desperation at the bloody scenes in that territory. From Moscow to Bogota to Ankara to Tehran, the world’s authoritarians are delighting in the opportunity to wield the language of human rights in the faces of gullible Westerners. Rather than persuading, we should be focused on defeating at the source. That means, in Colombia’s case, lobbying U.S. legislators to impose trade restrictions and other sanctions on its government for as long as it demonizes Israel, a democracy and a stalwart American ally, as a rogue state. Doing so will anger and alienate the left even more, but we have no choice. All we can do is act. And, from time to time, laugh

Seth Mandel: American Exceptionalism and the NYPD

One of the most telling aspects of the pro-Hamas student encampments is their participants’ pathological aversion to police—both for what it says about the campus bubble and for what it reveals about the demonstrators’ antipathy for Jews.

“I don’t really know how to process the fact that, at the bare minimum, there are going to be 100 cops at the [graduation] celebration,” Columbia student Suleyman Ahmed told the Wall Street Journal. Ahmed wasn’t part of the protests, the Journal explains, but when he heard there was going to be a police presence on campus through the end of the semester a couple weeks away, “he couldn’t concentrate on cramming.”

Whether that’s true—it’s hard to imagine a person carrying such exquisite fragility into adulthood—or whether Ahmed was just mimicking the debilitating sense of entitlement around him is less important than the fact that he was unashamed to say this sentence out loud to a newspaper reporter. In the bubble of “elite” campus culture, this is a normal thing to say. One is left wishing there were some institution that could prepare college graduates for the world.

Meanwhile, the reluctance to call in the police by campus administrators has, in roughly 100% of cases, proved not just foolish but dangerously irresponsible. At Columbia, about a quarter of those arrested for violently taking a campus building were unaffiliated with the university. At the City College of New York the same night, more than half of those arrested were unaffiliated with the school. Twenty-two of them violently impeded police clearing of an occupied building.

NBC’s reporting shows just what a tourist attraction these protests had become. One of those arrested was anarchist James W. Carlson, whose rap sheet over nearly twenty years of violent demonstrations includes aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and attempted lynching. Another arrestee had reportedly been fired from the New York Botanical Garden for cheering on Hamas’s campaign of mass slaughter, child murder and sexual torture on Oct. 7.

Two others have arrest records related to their behavior at various protests over the years. The cause isn’t what matters to these folks; what matters is causing violence and disorder. If you are the parent of a student at one of these schools, you have plenty of reason to wonder why the institution cultivated this atmosphere and then delayed allowing police to restore safety and remove violent trespassers from campus.

Andrew Neil: It's easy to mock the entitled know-nothing student protesters who couldn't find Gaza on a map. But they are useful idiots making common cause with genocidal Islamists who want to see Israel wiped out

There is increasing evidence in the U.S. that hardline agitators and anarchists are now orchestrating the protests, with privileged, naive students their useful idiots. A Leftist website, CrimethInc.com, run by veterans of BLM, Antifa and Occupy Wall Street, has been publishing lessons learned and coordinating activities across the country.

According to the NYPD, half the protesters arrested at Columbia and New York's City College were not students. They push for the occupation of buildings wherever possible — and that is when violence and vandalism are most likely to occur.

They were behind the occupation of Hamilton Hall, which was roundly trashed, and behind the wilful and appalling damage done to the library at Portland State University in Oregon.

There was a feeling in America this week that perhaps the worst was over. The university authorities had acted at last, major figures on the Left and Right had condemned the encampments, police intervention from Los Angeles to Texas to New York had been effective (and largely non-violent) and even President Biden was wheeled out to give his tuppence worth.

It was the first time we've heard from 'Silent Joe' since the campus unrest took root. He has proved strangely reluctant to condemn the protesters and even on Thursday did no more than spout a few mealy-mouthed platitudes about free speech and peaceful protest.

He needs the youth vote — essential to his victory in 2020 — to be re-elected in November and has been keen to court that vote with a $160 billion student debt write-off (with more to come before election day) and the reclassification of cannabis, effectively decriminalising it.

Saying a few robust home truths to student protesters has so far eluded him. And this could come back to hurt Biden.

If the protests continue and the Democratic convention in Chicago in August is hijacked by violent protesters, as the 1968 convention (also in Chicago) was by anti-Vietnam war protesters, then a sense of lawlessness would only help Donald Trump as it helped Republican Richard Nixon in 1968.

So Biden might have to stiffen his resolve and his response before the summer is out to secure his re-election chances.

More fundamentally, sensible politicians of all persuasions need to think seriously about why so many young Americans — especially the ones who are supposed to be the smartest — are so easily prepared to make common cause with a genocidal Islamism.

05/03 Links Pt2: Bibi Between a Rock and a Hard Place; Lawyer behind push for Netanyahu’s arrest defended Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks; Red Cross official exposed as Hamas stooge

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Bibi Between a Rock and a Hard Place

On a recent episode of the COMMENTARY podcast, Tablet’s Noam Blum made an astute point about Benjamin Netanyahu’s staunchest critics: Some of them dislike Bibi so much that they have convinced themselves he has dictatorial powers that mirror those of Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas terrorist leader on the other side of the hostage negotiations. According to this line of thinking, anything that happens—or doesn’t happen—can be blamed on Netanyahu, who governs according to his own will.

The May 2 Wall Street Journal gives us a perfect example of what happens when observers buy into that fallacy. The rather amazing headline is: “Fate of Gaza Cease-Fire Talks Hangs on Two Hard-Liners: Netanyahu and Sinwar.”

The article text is more nuanced, but it still follows the same flawed logic. Here is the crux of the argument as it relates to Israel’s prime minister: “Netanyahu, who faced criticism within Israel over the security and intelligence failures around Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack that sparked the war, has seen his sinking polling numbers stabilize as the conflict drags on….He is now concerned about the possibility that the International Criminal Court could indict him for alleged war crimes, an outcome he has rejected as an assault on Israel’s right to self-defense. Stopping the fighting risks a political reckoning that could eventually push him from power.”

It’s true that “stopping the fighting” would start the clock on a wave of political pressure and possibly an election season, if the coalition dissolves. But this framing puts Bibi between a rock and hard place: If he had finished off Hamas already, he would have done so over the objections of the Biden administration. In patiently placing the overall war on pause in order to get more humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip and to maximize the chances at a deal with Hamas, Netanyahu (along with the war cabinet) is doing what every world leader, but especially Biden, wants him to do. Yet in acquiescing, he is accused of drawing out the war so that he doesn’t have to face a “political reckoning.”

Meanwhile, virtually everyone involved is making it harder for Israel to actually get a deal in place. The anti-Netanyahu protests in Israel have come to serve as a release valve for a public stuck in a limbo mostly of Joe Biden’s making. Those protesters, as Blum mentioned, assume Netanyahu is the obstacle to a deal. But in fact, it is Hamas that has continually walked away from objectively generous deals and appears to be doing so again. Simply as a matter of strategy, the protests arguably contribute to the negotiating stasis, because Hamas interprets them as a destabilizing force in domestic Israeli politics. And Israel’s threats to go into Rafah, the last major Hamas redoubt in the Strip, are consistently muffled by the sound and fury of the Biden administration’s opposition to such an operation, making it less of a credible threat. Hamas can be forgiven for thinking time is on its side.

Seth Mandel: The Fight to Define Anti-Semitism

In January, the Forward carried a head-scratcher of a story: The Nexusites were—in the midst of a global hurricane of left anti-Semitism, no less—building a political operation to challenge IHRA and ensure not only that the American Jewish community spends resources fighting amongst itself but that this intra-communal fight would take on a political shade.

Now, when you read about the Jewish community preparing to punch itself in the stomach, the first question that comes to mind is, of course: How is J Street involved? And the answer is Kevin Rachlin, who announced he was stepping down as a top J Street lobbyist to take the helm of Nexus’s newly formed political operation.

“We’re not anti-IHRA,” said Rachlin about the organization created solely and specifically to oppose IHRA.

In any event, Democratic politicians loved the idea of being able to hand out “get out of anti-Semitism free” cards to party members who were poised to be like teenagers speeding down the highway with a PBA card in the glovebox. In December, reportedly on the advice of Nexus-affiliated activists, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) led a Democratic revolt against Republicans’ attempts to slap down rising anti-Semitism dressed up as criticism of Israel. I explained at the time how Nadler’s own argument disproved the point he was trying to make, but the effect was clear: Whatever semblance of a truce the American Jewish community had going since Oct. 7 was off. We’d been agreeing with each other far too much and it was giving Jerry Nadler indigestion.

Lawler’s bill, helped by Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer’s efforts, today overcame Nadler’s disapproval to advance a common understanding of anti-Semitism at a crucial time. But the Democrats have been unnerved by the so-called “tentifada”—the various Jew-baiting encampments springing up around college campuses—and a number of powerful politicians are very clearly terrified of the quad-dwellers occupying buildings and making demands.

The hope is that the bipartisan IHRA support can outrun its challengers, or build up enough momentum to shame Nexus into finding better things to do with its time and resources than politicize anti-Semitism and re-divide the Jewish community at a moment when doing so would be especially damaging.

Jonathan Tobin: The House bill will hinder campus antisemitism, not free speech

Faced with an opportunity to do something that would actually help give the federal government the ability to punish American universities that have let their campuses become hotbeds of antisemitism, a bipartisan majority of Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives did the right thing and passed a bill that can make that possible this week by a vote of 320-91.

But the number of “no” votes was still discouraging for two reasons.

It showed that 21% of House members aren’t willing to act on antisemitism, even in the face of the surge of prejudice and even violence against Jews especially on college campuses that has been on display since the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7.

Just as troubling is the fact that significant portions of both the Democrat and Republican caucuses opposed the act for different, albeit equally specious reasons. The strength of the opposition—both from politicians and pundits on both ends of the political spectrum—is problematic because it demonstrates how distorted the debate about the issue of antisemitism has become. Even worse, the fact that 70 of the 91 voting against it were Democrats may make it unlikely that the self-anointed shomer, or “guardian,” of Israel and the Jewish people in the Senate, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), will allow the law to come to vote in the upper body.

Civil rights also apply to Jews
The Antisemitism Awareness Act builds on the historic executive order issued by former President Donald Trump in December 2019 that echoed the past rulings of the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, and accepted in principle by the Biden administration, about dealing with Jew-hatred.

Trump mandated that the government extend the Title VI anti-discrimination in education protections in the 1964 Civil Rights Act to Jews and other minorities. He also took the important step of also ruling that the U.S. Department of Education must use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism when deciding whether to sanction schools that violate the rights of Jewish students by cutting off their federal funding. And that funding is the leftist educational establishment’s Achilles heel, since without it all but the wealthiest institutions would be brought to their knees.

While the Education Department has conducted a series of investigations into schools for such violations, which have grown in number and severity over the last two decades, to date no institution of higher education has yet received the ultimate penalty for violating the civil rights of its Jewish students by enabling an atmosphere of antisemitic incitement. As we’ve seen in recent weeks, intimidation, harassment and even violence against Jewish students by woke leftist mobs of students, professors and professional agitators have become endemic. With many school administrations, especially at elite institutions, paralyzed by their fear of offending the mobs and often seeking to appease them in ways that will only make the problem worse, stopping federal funding may be the only way to fix the problem in the short run.

Inside the College Democrats’ antisemitism problem

As anti-Israel encampments on college campuses sprung up at dozens of universities last week, the national leadership of the College Democrats of America (CDA) asked the group’s Jewish and Muslim caucuses to draft a statement condemning the antisemitism that was quickly appearing among some protesters.

The byzantine process that followed would lead the College Democrats’ top Jewish leader to accuse the influential organization of ignoring antisemitism at campus protests to further a one-sided, anti-Israel agenda, after the organization’s leadership nixed the inclusive statement that had been created by the top Jewish and Muslim activists in the group.

Allyson Bell, chair of the CDA’s national Jewish caucus and an MBA student at Meredith College in Raleigh, N.C., got to work writing a statement about antisemitism with Hasan Pyarali, the Muslim caucus chair and a senior at Wake Forest University. The two of them turned in a draft of a statement detailing antisemitism at Columbia University and stating that the College Democrats “absolutely and irrevocably denounce the antisemitism that has taken place at Columbia University and other college campuses over the past week,” according to a document shared with Jewish Insider.

But College Democrats’ national leaders weren’t pleased with this draft, Bell stated. “They wanted us to write a 50/50 approach, to both protect the peaceful side of the protesters and stand against antisemitism,” Bell told JI on Wednesday night. So she and Pyarali gave it another stab. (“It’s been really tough for people to work together on this issue, so I’m so glad that we’ve been able to work together,” Pyarali told JI.)

This time, the draft statement began with a denunciation of antisemitism and a statement of support for the “broad and interfaith coalitions of students who call for a ceasefire, release of the hostages, and a two-state solution where both Israelis and Palestinians can live side by side in peace.” This too, was voted down.

The statement that was ultimately released by the College Democrats on Tuesday ignored the middle path proposed by Bell and Pyarali. Instead, the statement described “heroic actions on the part of students around the country to protest and sit in for an end to the war in Palestine and the release of the hostages.” It called Israel’s war against Hamas “destructive, genocidal, and unjust” — language that Bell had never seen. An Instagram post with the statement touted the endorsement of Pyarali and the Muslim caucus, with no mention of the Jewish caucus — except a comment on the post from the Jewish caucus’ own Instagram account.

“This should not have ever been released without Jewish students’ support. Protect Jewish students, do better,” the College Democrats’ Jewish caucus commented.

“It’s a hurtful thing, not only to not feel heard, but also to know that the organization you’re in doesn’t believe that the antisemitism is happening and doesn’t care enough about it to even include the factual things that we’ve seen on video,” explained Bell.