I made this cartoon for IfNotNow on Twitter after they showed how proud they were to stop traffic on Friday to the block where Taglit Birthright has its offices in New York.
Since the group has such a finely tuned sense of justice, I asked them this question in a meme I created:
Finally, I asked them a question about their purported "Jewish values":
Hey @IfNotNowOrg , when King David conquered Jerusalem and declared it the capital of his kingdom, was he acting in accordance to Jewish values?
If not, please give me the sources you use for the "Jewish" values you were raised on.
Of course, IfNotNow - which falsely claims that Birthright does not answer any questions about Palestinians on its trips - doesn't respond to any questions asked about it.
Transparency is only for one side, it appears.
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While the previous and current president have often spoken of greatly reducing America’s involvement in Middle Eastern affairs, the events of the past several years have time and again shown that doing so often causes grave problems. While cautioning against excessive ambitions, Hal Brands argues that Washington has no choice but to remain engaged in the region:
[It] is a fantasy to think that the United States can disengage from the Middle East without consequence. This is because America still has pressing interests in that region—and because those interests are as unlikely to protect themselves today as they ever have been in the past. Growing Russian influence, Iran’s hegemonic ambitions, the potential resurgence of key terrorist organizations, and the massive political instability and violence that plague large swaths of the region are real problems that demand competent management. America’s partners in the region can do more to manage those problems than they have done to date, but they remain manifestly incapable of doing so without significant U.S. support.
[Furthermore], hasty withdrawals are likely to be followed by hasty re-engagements. After the United States left Iraq in 2011, the state nearly collapsed, Islamic State surged to prominence, and an emergency military intervention—which has now lasted nearly five years—was needed to repair the damage. If the United States disengages from Syria and Afghanistan today and the result is a significant terrorist attack, the pressure to get back into the region and take decisive military action will be strong indeed—even if that means shortchanging other geopolitical priorities. If America goes home from the Middle East, it will sooner or later face pressures to go in big.
Taking UNRWA at its word, the loss of US support in 2018 may have helped its overall funding efforts.
At this moment, it does not appear that the Trump administration’s decision to cut off funding to UNRWA has had a negative impact on UNRWA’s operations.
However, an Al Jazeera report in September claimed that the United States allowed Gulf states to fund UNRWA in 2018, but that funding in 2019 “will be subject to agreeing with the US demand to count only 500,000 refugees out of the five million” claimed to exist by the agency.
At this time, UNRWA has not reported any pledges from Gulf states.
Withholding funds to UNRWA satisfies those that have advocated for an end to sending US taxpayer dollars to such an “irredeemably flawed” organization. However, the funding cut in 2018 came with no policy success to show for it.
The Trump administration should work with Congress to condition future funding to UNRWA on its acceptance that “Palestine refugees” refers only to the original refugees from the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Then, their descendants should be categorized as “other Palestinians in need.” This would be consistent with US policy towards those seeking refugee status in our country.
This approach would put the onus on UNRWA to refuse US funding, and may spur other donors to do the same. Right now, UNRWA is winning this definitional battle. A shift in strategy, however, can help us win the war over fake refugee status.
On April 8, 2019, President Trump announced the designation of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), including its Qods Force (see Appendix).[1]
This report will discuss the impact of the designation, economically and militarily, both within Iran and on the regional and international level.
The IRGC As An Economic Organization
The IRGC, part of Iran's military, is a huge economic entity; its economic arms are an integral part of Iran's strategic infrastructure in construction, energy, communications, and agriculture. Designating the IRGC as an FTO will be a tremendous blow to its economic might within Iran and to its ability to operate outside Iran.
The Economic Aspect Of Designating The IRGC As An FTO
Thus, designating the IRGC an FTO constitutes a continuation of the Trump administration's policy that focuses on economic sanctions against Iran. If the U.S. sanctions to date have mainly concerned the oil sector – the main sector of Iran's economy – and banking, the sanctions will now harm the Iranian regime's most vital economic entity.
This move appears to be aimed at thwarting Iran's partial consent to the guidelines of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF)[2] aimed at fighting money laundering and terrorism – guidelines which Iran has so far rejected for fear that by consenting to them it will expose the IRGC and its organizations to direct harm. Under European pressure, Iran has so far obtained a series of postponements for the imposition of FATF guidelines on it, and there is now a fear that Iran will obtain special status, in the framework of which it will be required to comply with only some of the FATF laws and regulations. The Trump administration's move at this time to designate the IRGC an FTO appears to preempt the possibility that Iran will accept such a special arrangement, which would allow the IRGC to continue its activity in the country and across the region.
It says it is a picture of mosque under southeast of the Temple Mount.
This appears to be part of the Marwani Mosque.
It is clear that the tunnel under the Mount was ancient, but the contents were scooped out in the 1990s by bulldozers, eradicating hundreds of tons of priceless archaeological data that showed a Jewish presence on the Mount that pre-dates Islam by over a thousand years.
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A guest speaker for the South African Union of Jewish Students (SAUJS) at the Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) was escorted off the Wits University campus on Thursday, April 4, after it was found that she is a soldier.
Ashager Araro, a well-known Israeli-Ethiopian Zionist and reserve soldier of the Israeli Defence Forces left the campus surrounded by private security after supporters of the Palestinian Solidarity Committee (PSC) confronted her about her military role.
PSC and SAUJS supporters found themselves in a heated and tense exchange over Araro as both groups of students converged on the piazza in front of the Chamber of Mines building.
“You guys are letting soldiers on to our campus now, we’ll note this,” said a Palestinian supporter to Jabu Mashinini, senior programme adviser for student governance, in reference to Araro.
Apparently, both the Jewish/Zionist students and the Israel haters had informally agreed that no military personnel would be allowed to participate.
But explicitly supporting terrorist is perfectly fine.
Look how upset these people are at a proud, black Jewish Zionist woman. This anger in the video has nothing to do with "justice" or supporting Palestinians - it is pure hate that someone who passes all the intersectionality victimhood rules disagrees with them.
Previous years of IAW and Wits had actual violence and antisemitism against the Jewish and pro-Israel students, with no consequences. Showing the flag of Hezbollah, a terror group whose logo features a gun, is perfectly fine.
Here is video from IAW 2017:
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In a recent radio interview, Tunisian actor Walid Nahdi recently accused Jews of having a distinctive body odor.
"When I was young we had Jewish neighbors whose smell I could not bear," he said on RadioMed.
"Jews have a special smell," he added.
"I can not stand sitting next to a Jew .. or a homosexual," Nahdi continued.
The Tunisian Minority Support Association filed a complaint against the actor for his comments against Jews and gays.
Ironically, his Instagram includes these memes:
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In January 2009, a long-range missile from Gaza was fired into Israel. This has been a common occurrence ever since Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. As a child, I was taught at school to immediately run to a bomb shelter if sirens go off, so I did that.
I was home alone in my room and quickly ran to the shelter we had in our house. It was 9:30 a.m. Normally, I would stay in the shelter and wait for the sirens to stop, as rockets rarely reached my town of Gedera. Unfortunately, this day was different. A mere two seconds after I entered the shelter, I heard a loud boom, and felt my home collapse. After leaving the shelter, I saw the rocket had hit my bedroom and killed my dog Rosie. I was only 12 years old.
The story of my home in Gedera is not unique. It resonates with tens of thousands of Israelis who have been under a constant threat of rockets from Gaza over the past 18 years. According to the Israeli Center for the Treatment of Psychotrauma, 40 percent of the children in the Israeli border town of Sderot suffer from PTSD. This is what happens when, at any moment, you could be given only 15 seconds to run for shelter. The rockets often come unprovoked, as we witnessed as recently as two weeks ago: A long-range missile was launched from Gaza and flew over Tel Aviv, hitting the community of Mishmeret and wounding seven Israeli civilians.
But rockets are not the only threat from Gaza. In 2018, hundreds of hectares of Israeli fields were burned in the area surrounding Gaza because of burning kites and explosive balloons released from Gaza. In the poverty-stricken Gaza Strip, where 1.8 million Palestinians are crammed into 140 square miles and unemployment is over 50 percent, Hamas brags about having a tunnel system twice as large as the Viet Cong. Hamas is said to have spent between $30 million and $90 million and used 600,000 tons of concrete to build these tunnels. In 2006, Hamas used the tunnels to kidnap the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. In July 2014, Hamas militants used a tunnel to prepare an ambush in the fields of Kibbutz Nir-Am, but the Israel Defense Forces stopped them.
These examples are not meant to compare suffering with suffering, or military might with military might — a framing the BDS movement relentlessly tries to push. The people of Palestine are suffering, and deserve a chance at a peaceful life with dignity. They need a country, but it doesn’t have to replace our own.
Purporting to speak for young American Jews, IfNotNow, and other radical organizations are running the #YouNeverToldMe Campaign, accusing Jewish institutions of not sharing the full story of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As a Jewish educator, I feel guilty as charged.
As a proponent of this campaign put it on Twitter
“The #YouNeverToldMe campaign was born out of a pattern of realizations that the education we receive about Israel is one-sided and incomplete. @IfNotNowOrg has developed a syllabus that includes Palestinian narratives and an honest look at the Occupation.”
Indeed, we Jewish educators are guilty of not sharing the full story. This is why I decided to launch the #WeNeverToldYou campaign, for Jewish educators and professionals, to help alleviate this crisis.
#WeNeverToldYou that in 1948 just three years after the end of the Holocaust, Palestinians joined a proud campaign that openly declared it wanted a second Holocaust, to annihilate all the Jews between the river and the sea.
The Arch of Titus
The Jewish people have over a 3000 year connection to the land of Israel. The Arch of Titus in Rome, which showcases the Romans expelling the Jews after destroying and looting the Second Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, serves as one of the main pieces of evidence that the Jews have an undeniable long history in Israel.
Explaining his support for a one-state solution, Feiglin contended that over 90 percent of Palestinians in Gaza and 65% of Palestinians in the West Bank would already prefer to emigrate, making it possible to maintain a Jewish majority in an expanded sovereign Israel between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. (He did not specify a source for the statistics and the Zehut party was not able to provide one either.)
I don't know where he got his numbers from either.
The latest PCPSR poll of Palestinians notes 50% of Gazans and 22% of West Bankers say they want to emigrate, a far cry from Feiglin's assertion. It is possible that he is stretching the interpretation of the answers, because while I don't have the details of any recent surveys, older ones when asked the question had two separate answers "do not seek to emigrate" and "certainly do not see to emigrate," and it is possible that the Zehut party is choosing anyone who didn't say "certainly" as being a potential emigrant.
There is always the question of where they want to emigrate to. In Jordan, one third of citizens want to emigrate themselves, including nearly half with university degrees.
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Most of the kids marching against Israel on college campuses
today were not even born in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed, meaning they
have little to no idea how much their rhetoric and actions are built on nearly
150 years of political tactics honed during the near 150 year "Age of
Ideology" that began in the mid-19th century and ended with the
demise of the USSR.
But the behaviors we see among anti-Israel activists today
did not emerge from thin air. For just
as current Students-for-Justice-in-Palestine types insist that any true liberal
must embrace their agenda (the PEP
argument noted previously),
Marxist ideologues in previous eras scoffed at progressives who
"merely" wanted to improve the lives of workers or solve pressing
social issues, rather than replace the entire capitalist system through a spasm
of revolutionary violence.
And once it turned out that the "Dictatorship of the
Proletariat" was only ever going to be a dictatorship, the ruthlessness of
Soviet action was matched by a ruthlessness of language in which their every
crime was denied and every accusation against it buried in a mountain of
rhetoric insisting that the Marxist cause by judged solely by its theoretical
goal of creating heaven on earth.
In service to the cause, nothing was off limits: not civic
society within the USSR and not multi-national institutions outside of it,
which is why tyrannies allied with the "movement" were so successful
in corrupting virtually every organization dedicated to human rights and
international law, turning them from potential moderating influences in an
increasingly interconnected world to weapons of war.
Accusing those that created and perpetuated this system of
cynicisms would be an error, for the people who split progressive and labor
movements for their own ends, who ardently rejected any criticism of their
crimes (while perpetually attacking their opponents) were driven by fanaticism
that more resembled religious fervor than rational calculation.
The Jews played an unusual set of roles during this Age of
Ideologies. While Medieval religious
anti-Semitism was still rife when the political terms "Left" and
"Right" were first coined (they applied to which side of the king one
sat at the National Assembly at the time of the French revolution, BTW), by the
time Karl Marx was writing what would become the sacred texts of the Marxist
faith, negative reaction to Jews were being cast in economic and political vs.
religious terms.
To Marx (a German who had long ago abandoned his own Jewish
heritage), the continuation of the Jews for nearly two Millennia after the fall
of the Jewish state was a political aberration growing out the need of powerful
Christian elites for a class of moneylenders, rent collectors and economic
middlemen to do their financial dirty work.
This allowed kings and clerics to gather their rents and borrow the cash
needed for their lifestyles and wars.
And when their own loans came due, they could always sick the mob on these
despised Jewish landlords and "loan sharks," and begin the cycle anew
with a new set of Jews ready to play the game of politically powerless
financial middlemen.
This novel description of Jewish history was fleshed out in
Marx's famous essay On the Jewish
Question, a work that today seems rife with anti-Semitic stereotypes,
portraying Jews as congenial "hucksters" whose One God is actually
Mammon. But when he wrote it, Marx had a
different agenda in mind. For, according
to the theories he was developing, the capitalist system was in the process of
replacing the Jewish middlemen of antiquity with a class of capitalist (consisting
of people of all faiths) which (according to Marx) meant the economic
deformities once managed by a persecuted Jewish minority was now becoming the
cornerstone of the modern political system.
Thus his call to free Europe from the Jew was really a call
to free society from the "hucksterism" represented originally by the
Jews but which now infested all of capitalist society. And what of actual Jews who (like Marx's
parents and grandparents) were not simply economic abstractions? As with most human beings, they had a role to
play within Marx's developing theoretical framework. In this case, they (meaning the Jews as a
distinct people) were meant to disappear once their economic role became irrelevant
as man passed into a new post-capitalist era.
To someone like Marx, this proposition was not entirely
fanciful. For hadn't many people born
into Jewish families (including Marx himself) shed their religious identity
once they encountered European enlightenment?
And if Marx and others he traveled with were able to successfully toss
aside their Jewishness, wasn't that the ultimate solution to "The Jewish
Problem" once a classless society freed from capitalism eliminated the
need for Jewish middlemen and Jewish "husksterism" (whether practiced
by Jews or Christians) entirely?
In one of his last works, From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, the
Jews and Israel, Robert Wistrich uses "ambivalence" to
describe Leftist attitudes towards Jewish questions, given Marx’s predictions
of the historic inevitability of Jewish assimilation and disappearance. In theory, this meant outright hostility
towards Jews as Jews did not need to play much of a role in the political
movements inspired by Marx’s works.
But this also meant that actually defending Jews against the racism being directed against them (especially
by purely anti-Semitic political parties emerging in countries Germany and
France in the decades following Marx's death) was equally irrelevant to the
Marxist-informed Left. This is why you
began to see condemnations of anti-Semitism (insults and violence directed at
the Jews) balanced by equally vehement condemnations of
"philo-Semitism" (attempts to defend Jews from these racist attacks),
with arguments that Jews defending their own interests were guilty of
parochialism and selfishness echoing to today.
As already noted, Marx's theories about the redemptive power
of Jewish assimilation and disappearance were confirmed by his own experience,
as well as the experience of other hyper-assimilated Jews attracted to various
Socialist movements. But as these
"enlightened" Jewish and non-Jewish Socialist began to encounter
unassimilated Jews (especially those of Eastern Europe) and as Eastern and even
Western Jews began to advocate for distinct Jewish political and even national
rights, ambivalence turned to hostility which became more and more virulent as
the "inevitable" world revolution never materialized, shaking
Communist faith to its core.
Like so many disappointed millennialists, the revolutionary
Left had someone to blame and a new cause to believe in (hostility to the Jews
and their state) once their original Messiah failed to appear. How this played
out will be covered next.
To be continued…
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The founding Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) Charter in 1964 specifically excluded any PLO claim to sovereignty in Judea and Samaria.
In the 1967 Six Day War Israel captured Judea and Samaria from Jordan. The PLO – claiming Jordan and Israel to be one indivisible territorial unit – removed its non-claim to sovereignty from the revised 1968 Charter.
In September 1970 the PLO unsuccessfully tried to overthrow Jordan’s Hashemite ruler King Hussein. Israel helped save Hussein.
Israel and Jordan signed a peace treaty 1994 (Peace Treaty) – which has withstood many events that could have seen its termination.
That Treaty is again under threat – as Jordan has:
indicated it is not prepared to renew an expired 25-year lease of Jordanian sovereign territory farmed by Israelis and
given the PLO 40% representation on the body charged with administering the Moslem Holy Sites in Jerusalem – breaching the Washington Declaration and the Peace Treaty.
Jordan’s resistance to negotiating with Israel on Trump’s plan could see Trump shelving it and abruptly ending the 2018 five years $1.275 billion America–Jordan Memorandum of Understanding underpinning Jordan’s security and stability.
The PLO – as in 1970 – is waiting in the wings as current ongoing unrest in Jordan is destabilizing continuing Hashemite rule there.
Abdullah might find that spurning Trump and Israel could see him facing the PLO on his own.
Full Text:
A strong fight for the right of Jews to settle in Transjordania was put up at the last session of the League of Nation’s Mandates Commission, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency learned today, although minutes of the session will not officially appear before September. The fight was conducted mainly by the Dutch representative, D. Van Rees, vice-chairman of the Mandates Commission, who demanded an explanation of the British Government’s opposition to Jewish settlement of Transjordania.
Van Rees emphasized that the mandate does not exclude Jewish immigration in the Transjordan area, and he indicated that the population of Transjordania is in favor of Jewish settlement there. Van Rees pointed out that Transjordania is double the size of Palestine, but has only 300,000 inhabitants at present, while Palestine has 1,000,000.
LAND SALE PROHIBITION
“Besides, why prohibit sale of land there to Jews when the Emir Abdullah of Transjordania desires it?” he asked.
He also pointed out that many Jews living in Palestine at present are not Palestinians, but are still subjects or citizens of countries belonging to the League of Nations. Considering the principle of equality for the citizens or subjects of all countries which are members of the League, it would be impossible to prevent these persons from settling in Transjordania, Van Rees stated.
Like Haviv Rettig Gur in “How and Why Israelis Vote,” I, too, think the advantages of Israel’s parliamentary system outweigh its disadvantages, and for essentially the same reason: because it keeps a great many people in the political system who would otherwise remain outside it.
Critics of the system’s plethora of small parties—as Gur notes, no fewer than 43 parties have been vying for Knesset seats in this year’s election—maintain that it should be streamlined and redesigned so that only big parties would be able to enter the Knesset. In that case, the critics argue, people who currently vote for small parties would simply switch their votes to large ones.
No doubt, some voters would do so—but many others would not. There are at least three groups among whom turnout would plummet if niche parties became by definition unelectable: Arabs, Ḥaredim (including some ḥaredi Zionists), and the protest voters who, in every election, propel a new “fad” party into the Knesset. (In 2015, as Gur writes, the fad party was Kulanu. This year, it’s been Moshe Feiglin’s pro-marijuana, libertarian, right-wing Zehut party, which Gur doesn’t discuss although polls have consistently showed it gaining five to seven seats.)
Together, these three groups constitute roughly a third of the country, and all three are to some extent alienated from the mainstream. If they were no longer even participating in elections, that alienation would grow.
Why does this matter? In answering that question, I’ll focus mainly on Ḥaredim and Arabs, the most significant and also the most stable of the three groups (protest voters being by nature amorphous and changeable).
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Haaretz has an article on a photo exhibition showing pictures of the Temple Mount since the dawn of photography at Jerusalem’s David Citadel Museum. (The article can be seen for free here.)
The article notes:
In the years to come (after 1967) the Temple Mount was photographed by countless Israelis who toured the place. In those years the Waqf didn’t seem to uphold the current so-called “modesty” regulations. Many men and women are seen strolling on the site in shorts, some holding souvenirs or bags after shopping in the Old City.
In the ‘70s the site was used by photographer Mula Eshet as a set for fashion photos for Gottex. In the display, a model wearing a blue dress is photographed on the background of the blue decorations of the Dome of the Rock – a scene hard to envision today.
These details show that the "status quo" of the Temple Mount that is supposedly upheld by the Jordanian Waqf never was. The restrictions on Israelis and Jews visiting the site that exist today, both in terms of clothing and in terms of carrying bags, didn't exist.
One more thing about that 1976 photo of the model.
I have noted on occasion that the Dome of the Rock has throughout the centuries been overrun with weeds, hardly how one would expect a Muslim holy site to be treated. Here's an example from the 1950s:
The Gottex model picture shows that there were weeds pushing through the pavement in the area even as late as 1976.
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Arab media is abuzz with rumors that the US purchased large parts of the Sinai adjacent to Gaza to move Palestinians to. There's even a map:
There have been rumors like this for years, and former Egyptian president Mubarak claims that Netanyahu asked him to give parts of the Sinai to Palestinians in 2010. He says that he resisted such plans since the 1980s when the Americans suggested relocating Palestinians from Lebanon to the Sinai.
The rumors resurfaced in the past two years in context of the Trump "Deal of the Century."
Now they have come up again. The map shown above was supposedly published by YNet in Israel but I cannot find it; it appears to be a screenshot of a video. According to this map and the rumors, the US would pay Egypt billions to purchase massive amounts of the Sinai which would become attached to Gaza in exchange for Israel annexing parts of the West Bank.
Israeli analysts bring up versions of this idea every so often. Just this week the BESA center published an article noting that Gaza's situation is partly the result of the Israel-Egypt peace plan in 1979:
Gaza could no longer develop westward into the potential open space between Rafah and El-Arish. The Strip was thus closed in the Egyptian direction and deposited on Israel’s doorstep as an urban pressure cooker on the verge of explosion.
The Palestinian media is of course against the idea, because even expanding their territory is anathema if it would help Israel. Some are even arguing that the boundaries of British Mandate Palestine are sacrosanct and must never be changed an inch, as they are burned into the consciousness of all Palestinians.
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The funny thing is, it makes just as much sense as most "intersectional" gibberish.
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The extent of antisemitism raging in the British Labour party was displayed once more on Sunday morning, when The Sunday Times published an article exposing shocking messages Labour members shared online without being sanctioned.
The report titled "Labour’s hate files expose Jeremy Corbyn’s anti‑semite army" revealed how Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn's office actively interfered, delayed and disrupted the inquiry into the hate-filled and conspiratorial posts by many Labour members.
Some examples of such posts include "Heil Hitler," Jewish MPs being accused of being "Zionist infiltrators," and blaming Israeli Jews for the 9/11 attacks. Complaints about these posts have been filed a year ago, yet none of the authors of these posts have been suspended from the party.
According to internal documents obtained by the paper, Cobyn's office interfered in 101 of such complaints.
The confidential emails and database which was last updated March 8, brought to light the antisemitic messages and the handling, or lack thereof, of the Labour Party under Corbyn's leadership.
One Labour member was returned to the party ranks after his message blaming Jews for the 9/11 attacks was exposed.
Ahed Tamimi, the Palestinian teen who slapped an Israeli soldier and called on others to become terrorists, has called the United Kingdom “racist” and “completely controlled by Israel” even though she is planning to study English here.
Asked a question about British exports of weapons to Israel, Tamimi replied saying, “The UK government is completely controlled by Israel, who are the biggest supporter of terrorism. They encourage the killing of Palestinian people.”
“The UK is completely occupied and controlled by Israel and it is supporting Israel to kill innocent people who are demonstrating for their rights,” Tamimi said.
Tamimi appears to be applying an anti-Semitic trope that Israel (or Jews) control foreign governments.
She turned further conspiratorial, saying, “The whole world is defeated, we are alone”, before declaring, “but I am pretty sure that the Palestinian people will bring back dignity to the whole world even to the UK who are supporting Israel. The UK brought Zionism to Palestine in the era of the British mandate. We will eventually end this occupation. Their power will not last forever.”
Ahed Tamimi then spoke of Israel’s actions on the Gaza border, falsely accusing Israel of wanting to “kill all Palestinians” – a blood libel.
“They (Israel) have no right to harm any Palestinian and this is another reflection to their terrorism. They want nothing but to kill all Palestinians so they can take all their land. They believe that all Palestinians should be killed, which also shows that they’re racist.”
Last weekend, Israel was attacked in a new way. No, I’m not referring to the horrific onslaught of rockets Hamas launched into Israel that left two children hospitalized and five others injured; the tens of thousands of rioters who tried to breach the Gaza border fence; or the three Palestinian youths who were killed.
I’m talking about an outlandish article published in The New York Times Magazine about the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement that evokes age-old anti-Semitic tropes to accuse prominent Jewish philanthropists, like Haim Saban, of holding the Democratic Party hostage on Israel — authored by a man with ties to one of the world’s biggest sponsors of terrorism.
Many rushed to shame the Times for welcoming writer Nathan Thrall’s “propaganda.” But it isn’t just the propaganda or anti-Semitism that should concern Jews everywhere – it’s Nathan Thrall himself and his alarming ties to Qatar. A deep dive by the Free Beacon revealed that Thrall is employed by an organization that receives funding from the Qatari government and has ties to several anti-Israel and anti-Semitic activists.
That’s right: The New York Times published an article written by someone connected to the Qatari payroll, who tars and feathers pro-Israel philanthropists, gives an international platform to the BDS movement, and devotes not a single of its 11,500 words to Qatar – the world’s central bank for terrorism and a known sponsor of Hamas.
David Brennan, a UK-based Newsweek reporter, somehow reported on an event in New York City last Friday - from London.
Anti-Israel organization IfNotNow held a rally in New York on Friday morning, blocking traffic fr a bit (to curses from commuters) and sitting at the entryway of the office building that houses Birthright, among scores of other offices.
Looking at Brennan's article, you see he has an entire interview with IfNotNow's spokesperson - which must have been done before the demonstration. He posted the article during the demonstration, and included a live feed from IfNotNow itself.
In other words, his article was an advertisement and press release for an anti-Israel organization, with no comment from anyone who opposes it.
The most ridiculous part was this pretense of even-handedness: the original version of the article said Birthright did not immediately respond to a request to comment. The article was datelined 9:08 AM EDT, Birthright wasn't even in their offices when and if he tried to contact them.
Since then the article has been updated with a comment, probably since I tweeted about his bias. But it doesn't mention that IfNotNow members were arrested by the police - because why wait until after a demonstration to report on it?
Of course, Brennan described IfNotNow as a "progressive Jewish" organization and not an anti-Israel organization, as its parent Jewish Voice for Peace is.
I remember when Newsweek was a respected news magazine.
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Islamic Jihad held a conference last week called Women of Jihad.
It shows the deep respect that Gaza jihadists have for women.
They proved that they can hold signs as well as any man can!
And they can even hold guns!
Whoa - they can hold guns while walking!
Yet, as this skit shows, they are still unparalleled at sweeping floors.
The women in the audience were enthusiastic. At least, we assume they were.
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You know those awful Israeli checkpoints that Israel-haters love to complain about?
It turns out that at the border between the West Bank and Jordan, the Palestinian Authority arrests hundreds of people every week - far more than Israel does!
Last week, some 34,000 people traveled to and from Jordan through the Allenby Bridge. 10 refused entry by Israel - and 184 wanted Palestinians were detained by the PA going in either direction.
The week before 252 were arrested out of 32,000 who crossed. all under the smiling visages of Yasir Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas.
Hundreds arrested every week at Palestinian checkpoints. Are they legitimately criminals? Are they political dissidents? No one seems to care. Only Israeli arrests of Palestinians are worth reporting by the media.
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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began a campaign over the weekend to take seats away from the Likud’s satellite parties on the Right, in an effort to win more seats for Likud than Blue and White in Tuesday’s election, and ensure that President Reuven Rivlin will ask him to form the next government.
As part of that effort, in an interview with Channel 12 on Saturday night, Netanyahu vowed to annex territories in settlements and evacuate the illegal West Bank herding village of Khan Al-Ahmar, if he wins another term.
“We are dealing [with the Americans] on exercising Israeli sovereignty on Ma’aleh Adumim and other things,” Netanyahu said. “Everyone understands the next term will be fateful for guaranteeing our security and our control over key territory in Judea and Samaria.”
In weekend interviews with Channel 13 and the right-wing Makor Rishon and Israel Hayom newspapers, Netanyahu vowed to not permit a single settlement or a single resident of them to be evacuated.
“That [evacuation] will not be happening,” he told Channel 13. “If that’s the plan, there will be no plan.”
In the Makor Rishon interview, Netanyahu promised more clearly than ever that he would form a government with right-wing parties and not invite Blue and White to join his coalition.
“Anyone with a brain understands that a unity government cannot be formed,” he said.
In the same Times article, a “former member of the Obama White House” (sounding an awful lot like Rhodes) revealed that the Obama administration played a central role in that U.N. Security Council vote against Israel in the autumn of 2016.
You remember that one. It was a run-of-the-mill U.N. resolution declaring that the Jewish presence in the Old City of Jerusalem was “illegal.” The kind of resolution American presidents routinely vetoed many times in the past. But not President Obama. He had secretly decided to abstain, so that the resolution would pass.
The problem for Obama was the timing: The vote was scheduled to take place shortly before that year’s presidential election. So the Obama team manipulated the schedule. “There is a reason the U.N. vote did not come up before the election in November,” the anonymous “former official” told the Times. “It was because you were going to have skittish donors. That, and the fact that we didn’t want [Hillary] Clinton to face pressure to condemn the resolution or be damaged by having to defend it.”
At the time, of course, Team Obama loudly denied the Israeli government’s claim that the White House was secretly planning to let the U.N. resolution pass. Obama aides like Rhodes, on the record and off the record, vigorously attacked critics who raised such suspicions. But now we know that the suspicions were well-founded.
Why does any of this matter now, years after Obama left office?
First, it matters because Obama is still a major force in the Democratic Party. He will influence the outcome of the race for the Democratic nomination in 2020. His views on Israel will continue to shape the party’s position.
Second, it matters because it sheds some light on why Obama rushed to appoint Rhodes to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council in the waning hours before he left office—and why Rhodes wanted the appointment. Rhodes has harsh opinions about Israel. He seems proud that he helped trick the public into accepting the Iran deal. And he’s proud of his role in Obama’s policies towards Israel—in fact, he regrets that they weren’t harsher. Clearly, Rhodes wants a platform that will help keep him and his opinions in the public spotlight.
Serving on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council gives Rhodes cover as he plans his next move. You can almost hear him warming up the argument: “You can’t accuse me of being anti-Israel—I’m part of the leadership of the Holocaust Museum!” Sadly, Israel and American Jewry have not heard the last of him.
Raging Linda Sarsour recently tried to whitewash her buddy Omar's obvious anti-semitism in a recent speech:
But what has happened often from White Jews when they call you call an antisemite, is they look at Muslim women from an orientalist trope, that we are inherently antisemitic because we are Muslims, right?
"It's a stereotype that has been used often against the Muslim community. That we are antisemitic until proven otherwise. That we are guilty until proven innocent. It's not okay."
"She didn't know nothing in Somalia, about no antisemitism. This is something she is learning along the way now that she is a legislator
Where to begin? White Jews. Two of the most hated groups among leftists and Muslims like Sarsour and Omar evidently. The inclusion of the word white is an attempt I suppose to do the old good Jew Bad Jew thing; a common anti-semitic trope. This is also an attempt, like all the rants these bigots give, to mainstream antisemitic tropes.
Orientalist? Well, this is a reference to failed Jew hater and PLO member Edward Said's definition of "a way of seeing that imagines, emphasizes, exaggerates and distorts differences of Arab peoples and cultures as compared to that of Europe and the U.S. It often involves seeing Arab culture as exotic, backward, uncivilized, and at times dangerous" Exotic? Eye of the beholder. Backward, uncivilized, and at times dangerous? Well, look at what they do and say. Geeze, a whole Arab nation, Brunei has progressed so much it is now stoning gays in 2019. If that ain't backward, uncivilized and dangerous, I don;t know what is.
Stereotype? Well, if it walks like duck....show me a Muslim that isn't Pro-BDS or or anti-Israel and I'll show you a Muslim that isn't antisemitic. Until then, the shoe fits Linda.
Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw defeated Democrat Todd Litton in Texas’ 2nd Congressional District in the 2018 midterm elections to replace retiring Republican Rep. Ted Poe.
He was catapulted into the spotlight by “Saturday Night Live” actor Pete Davidson, who made fun of the patch that Crenshaw wears over his right eye, which was lost after the Navy SEAL was injured by an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan in 2012 during his third of five tours overseas (Davidson offered an apology to Crenshaw, who accepted it and even took some zingers at him, along with conveying a unifying message for the audience).
Along with five then-incoming freshmen members of Congress, Crenshaw participated on a trip to Israel in December organized by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s American Israel Education Fund to learn about the U.S.-Israel relationship.
JNS talked with Crenshaw in person. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: What’s your overall stance on the U.S.-Israel relationship since being there in December?
A: I’m supportive. It doesn’t get any simpler than that. We need to support the U.S.-Israel relationship. It’s important for Israel, our allies, but also for the U.S. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship.
Q: How’s it mutually beneficial?
A: Conflict in the Middle East never stays contained in the Middle East. The world is a small place, and so U.S. leadership abroad has always been an important part of maintaining the liberal global order that has been underwritten by the United States since World War II. With that in mind, we should always be looking for strong allies that share our values. The Jewish state clearly shares our values, so we should support it for moral reasons, and we should support it for strategic reasons.
Q: Having served abroad, were you able to see Israel’s threats firsthand?
A: My deployments in the Middle East gave me an insight into the human element there, gave me a more realistic understanding of what Israelis are dealing within the context of Middle Eastern politics and how different that is from Western civilization. A lot of people who are skeptical of Israel and the United States, who are forming a BDS movement, are operating in a fantasy world where they actually don’t understand what the Middle East is all about.
Being in Israel, you get a much more direct look at what they’re dealing with. You’re in a country whose population is close to that in my county. That’s pretty significant especially when you’re surrounded by your enemies. It’s hard for many Americans to imagine what that might be like; you really have to go there to understand that. You have Hamas fully in control of the Gaza Strip—well-armed, raining down rockets on Israeli civilians indiscriminately. You have Hezbollah to the north—digging tunnels to the Lebanese border, trying to infiltrate Israel for no other purpose than to kill Israelis. You have ISIS in Syria. There’s a long history of Israel’s Arab neighbors attempting to invade and end the Jewish state, so, for good reason, we should be worried about Israel’s security. And Iran, a powerful country that seeks to destroy Israel—and says as much and funds proxies both with Hamas and Hezbollah in order to meet those ends.
A prominent anti-Israel barrister has been jailed for six months after she was videoed ranting drunkenly on an Air India flight about how she was “an international criminal lawyer for the f***ing Palestinian people”, and spat in the face of a member of the cabin crew.
Simone Burns from Hove, also known as Simone O’Broin, was sentenced at Isleworth Crown Court on Thursday, having pleaded guilty to both assault and being drunk on an aircraft at her trial last month at Uxbridge Magistrates Court.
In footage of the incident filmed by a fellow passenger, Burns can be seen remonstrating with a member of the flight crew after being refused a fourth bottle of wine on a flight from Mumbai to London last November.
“I’m a leader of the f***ing boycott movement", she shouted at a member of the cabin crew.
“If I say "boycott" - f***ing Air India, done… I'm a f****** barrister. A human rights lawyer, and an international criminal lawyer.”
She also called airline staff “Indian, money grabbing c****," smoked a cigarette in the toilets and spat in the face of a female member of staff who refused to serve her more alcohol.
She was arrested by the police when the flight landed at Heathrow.
Burns has previously written a paper accusing Israel of genocide over its treatment of the Palestinians, whom she described as "a group struggling for self-determination against a colonial, racist regime”.
CAMERA has hung a giant, 35-foot billboard directly outside the New York Times building that spotlights the paper’s biased coverage against Israel.
CAMERA’s billboard looks into the New York Times newsroom in Manhattan.
At the center of the billboard is an image of a Molotov cocktail whose wick is lit by a flaming New York Times article with the headline: “Israel Bulldozes Democracy.”
Around the incendiary device, which is a favorite weapon of Hamas rioters, it says: “While Hamas firebombs Israel… The New York Times inflames with biased coverage.”
Andrea Levin, executive director of CAMERA, says that the Molotov cocktail in the ad is a symbol with a double meaning.
“One meaning is, obviously, to remind Times’ staff that Hamas is violent—violent against both Israel and its own people,” Levin says. “The Times absolutely needs this reminder because far too often their reporters ignore Hamas’s violent theocracy in the Gaza Strip.”
Levin points to a New York Times headline, published during the Palestinian riots on the border between Gaza and Israel, which said: “Battle Weary, Hamas Gives Peaceful Protests a Chance.”
“The headline is ludicrous,” Levin says. “Has Hamas traded in its rockets for John Lennon’s anti-war music? Those so-called peaceful Hamas protests include rocks, firebombs and explosives hurled at Israelis. Not to mention recent rocket fire into the Tel Aviv area.”
4500 new settlements? Wow, with say 10,000 people per settlement, that's 45 million Jews immimently ready to move to the West Bank! https://t.co/2QhQ0g3vjd
You are ignorant and hateful and don't give a damn about most of your fellow Jews. You coddle people who want to exterminate the Jews. You know nothing of your heritage or history and have no pride in Judaism.
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This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For 20 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.
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Tuesday, April 09, 2019
Elder of Ziyon
