Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, February 06, 2017

Remember Qaradawi when comparing Jewish and Muslim refugees (Petra Marquardt-Bigman)

Nobody can know how the Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust would feel about the now so fashionable use of their despair and suffering for the benefit of today’s mostly Muslim refugees. I have repeatedly tried to explain why I think the comparison is inappropriate; but even though more influential writers have also adamantly opposed this facile “lesson of history,” it only seems to become more popular. One notable example for this trend is the Twitter account St. Louis Manifest: set up for the recent International Holocaust Remembrance Day, it quickly gained almost 74,000 followers by combining the commemoration of the Jewish refugees on board the St. Louis, who were denied entry to the US and later killed by the Nazis, with the message #RefugeesWelcome. In the same spirit, columnist Peter Beinart decreed on Twitter that it was completely unacceptable for Jewish organizations to commemorate the Holocaust without forcefully rejecting the Trump administration’s recent “Muslim ban” (which isn’t really a “Muslim ban”).

In a probably futile attempt to make the virtue-signalers think twice, Lee Smith argued in Tablet that if today’s Syrian refugees are the “new Jews,” we should urgently figure out who are the new Nazis. According to Smith, it is Iran and “its crack troops, the Quds Force,” as well as Iranian proxies like Hezbollah and Assad ally Russia “that hunted Sunni Arabs like animals and slaughtered them or sent them running for their lives. These are the Nazis. That’s who sent the Syrians running for their lives like Jews fleeing Hitler.”

Writing at The American Interest, Walter Russell Mead and Nicholas M. Gallagher make a similar argument:

“The refugee question is not the only uncomfortable parallel between the 1930s and our own time. The real problem in the 1930s wasn’t the lack of compassion for Jewish and other refugees; it was the feckless appeasement of Adolf Hitler and the unwillingness to confront him that empowered the Nazi persecution of the Jews and created hundreds of thousands of refugees. So today the true villain of the Syria story—aside from Syria, Russia, and Iran—is the feckless Obama foreign policy that allowed a cyst to metastasize into a cancer, just as Britain, France, and America once allowed Hitler to grow into the master of Europe.

The Obama officials and cheerleaders now guilt-tripping the country over ‘heartlessness’ toward Syria refugees are giving hypocrisy a bad name. Bad foreign policy is the cause of the heartbreak in Syria today, not bad immigration policy. The world does not need lectures from Susan Rice and Samantha Power on what we should do about Syrian refugees; the best way to deal with refugee flows is to prevent them from happening. The Holocaust was not caused by the Reed-Johnson Act [which sharply curtailed immigration since 1924]; it was caused by Nazi hatred, enabled by naive liberal illusions about the ‘arc of history’ that prevented the West from mobilizing against Hitler when he was weak and [could have been] easily defeated.”

But current controversies about Muslim immigration are of course not just about Syrian refugees, and arguably, everyone who is eager to cite “lessons” of the 1930s and 1940s should be confronted with the fact that the murderous Jew-hatred of this time remains not only fairly popular in the Muslim world, but is further fortified by ancient Islamic enmity to Jews. While there is plenty of evidence for these unfortunate facts, the perhaps best example is the popular Muslim leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi. It is crucial to understand how enormously influential Qaradawi is: A 2009 book entitled “The Global Mufti” asserts that “Qaradawi is unquestionably the most important Sunni religious figure in the world today,” and a Huffington Post/World Post list of Arab “thought leaders” ranks the now ninety-year old cleric as number three for 2016.

According to the Huffington Post, Qaradawi is best known for his program “Sharia and Life,” which is broadcast on Al Jazeera and has an estimated audience of 60 million worldwide; he has also published more than 120 books, and helped found the popular website IslamOnline, for which he has long served as “chief religious scholar.”

Interestingly, even the Huffington Post notes in its short biography on Qaradawi that due to some “controversial” views, he was refused entry to the UK (2008) and France (2012). One could add that also his US visa was revoked already in 1999, and he has even become controversial in the Arab world because many regard him “as the religious voice giving power to people in Arab countries to rise against their oppressive rulers.” Along with many Muslim Brotherhood members, an Egyptian court sentenced Qaradawi (in absentia) to death in 2015; Georgetown professor Abdullah Al-Arian denounced the sentence in his Al Jazeera column and praised Qaradawi as “possibly the most prominent religious authority in the Sunni Muslim world.”

Westerners who are eager to use the victims of the Holocaust for today’s political debates should be familiar with some of the relevant views of this highly influential Muslim scholar, who – as Al-Arian illustrates – has also well-placed admirers in the West.

In a speech broadcast on Al Jazeera TV on January 30, 2009, Qaradawi declared:

“Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them – even though they exaggerated this issue – he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers.”

So apparently, Qaradawi would prefer to see Muslims not as the new Jews, but rather as the new Nazis.

A few weeks before Qaradawi expressed his hope that Muslims would follow in Hitler’s footsteps, he also prayed in a Friday sermon that was aired by Al Jazeera TV:

“Oh Allah, take the Jews, the treacherous aggressors. Oh Allah, take this profligate, cunning, arrogant band of people. Oh Allah, they have spread much tyranny and corruption in the land. Pour Your wrath upon them, oh our God. Lie in wait for them. […] oh Allah, take this oppressive, tyrannical band of people. Oh Allah, take this oppressive, Jewish, Zionist band of people. Oh Allah, do not spare a single one of them. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them, down to the very last one.”

These kind of fervent prayers calling on Allah to kill all the Jews are not uncommon – here is a selection: a Palestinian preacher (2010); a Hamas imam (2011); a Spanish imam (2014); an Italian preacher (2014); an imam in Berlin (2014); a Qatari sheikh (2014); a Palestinian sheikh (2016).

As far as Qaradawi is concerned, he had freely promoted his intense Jew-hatred already for years. In 2003, he published a book (in Arabic) explaining his “rulings” on Palestine; the book was translated to English in 2007. In this book Qaradawi warns Muslims not to be friends with “Jews, in general, and Israelis, in particular;” he describes Jews as “devourers of Riba (usury) and ill-gotten money” and as “true examples of miserliness and stinginess;” he also claims that Jews “have killed Prophet Zakariyya and Prophet Yahya and wove conspiracies against Jesus Christ.”

However, as Mark Gardner and Dave Rich noted in their review (full pdf text), the “most striking part of the book” is Qaradawi’s discussion of a notorious hadith [i.e. records “of the traditions or sayings of the Prophet Muhammad” which are viewed “as a major source of religious law and moral guidance, second only to the authority of the Qurʾān”] that also appears prominently in the Hamas Charter and reads:

“The last day will not come unless you fight Jews. A Jew will hide himself behind stones and trees and stones and trees will say, O servant of Allah [or O Muslim] there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.””

Qaradawi describes this hadith as “one of the miracles of our Prophet” and elaborates:

“[W]e believe that the battle between us and the Jews is coming. Such a battle is not driven by nationalistic causes or patriotic belonging; it is rather driven by religious incentives. This battle is not going to happen between Arabs and Zionists, or between Jews and Palestinians, or between Jews or anybody else. It is between Muslims and Jews as is clearly stated in the hadith. This battle will occur between the collective body of Muslims and the collective body of Jews i.e. all Muslims and all Jews. (p. 77).”

Gardner and Rich argue that Qaradawi “personifies the combination of theological anti-Judaism, modern European antisemitism and conflict-driven Judeophobia that make up contemporary Islamist attitudes to Jews.” But given the fact that Qaradawi has long been recognized as “possibly the most prominent religious authority in the Sunni Muslim world” – to quote Georgetown professor Abdullah Al-Arian – it is by no means clear that only “Islamists” would share his views on Jews. And indeed, there is plenty of evidence that antisemitism is not only rampant in the Arab and Muslim world, but also prevalent in Muslim communities in the West.

I would have thought that if we want to draw “lessons” from the Holocaust, one of the most important would be to never again ignore incitement to murderous Jew-hatred. But the recent International Holocaust Remembrance Day was just one of many occasions to realize that I’m apparently wrong.

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02/06 Links Pt1: The Choices Palestinians Make; 'Hamas cell planned terror attacks at synagogue, train station in Israel'

From Ian:

The Choices Palestinians Make

The notion that the Israeli pilot is the only one who has any responsibility for the child's death is simply false. A lot of bad choices were made — by Palestinians — prior to the death of the young child and Atef Abu Saif knows it; he just can't — or will not — address these choices, at least not in this text.
The reality that Saif will not confront in his book [The Drone Eats With Me] is that Hamas, the terrorist organization that controls the Gaza Strip, bears a huge measure of responsibility for the suffering he documents. Hamas has repeatedly started wars that it cannot win against a country that cannot afford to lose.
During these conflicts, it has launched rockets from schoolyards and has used hospitals as command centers for its leaders, putting civilians on both sides of the conflict at risk. When children are killed by Israeli strikes in Gaza, Hamas puts their bodies on display to demonize Israel, and writers such as Saif assist in this tactic.
During the war in 2008–2009, Hamas... used cement and other building materials allowed into the Gaza Strip—ostensibly for the benefit of Palestinian civilians—in order to construct tunnels that could penetrate Israel and serve as a means to kidnap Israeli soldiers and civilians.
During its 2012 fight with Israel, Hamas leaders declared that killing Jews is a religious obligation. Hamas promotes a genocidal organization that seeks Israel's destruction and yet Saif does not speak a word about this lethal ideology or actions before or during the 2014 war.
Honesty requires that the deaths of these Palestinian children serve to drive — not obstruct — the conversation toward Palestinian abilities and responsibility.

PMW: Germany signs sports agreement with terror promoting PA official Rajoub

Last week, the head of the German representation in Ramallah, Peter Beerwerth, signed “the first bilateral cooperation agreement” in sports between the PA and Germany with Jibril Rajoub, the president of the Supreme Council for Sport and Youth Affairs in the Palestinian Authority.
In its recent report The Rajoub File, Palestinian Media Watch documented that Jibril Rajoub is an outspoken supporter of Palestinian terror attacks against Israelis and prohibits peacebuilding sports activities between Palestinians and Israelis. During the latest wave of Palestinian attacks against Israelis, Rajoub congratulated terrorist murderers, telling them that: “You are ‎heroes and we bless you... you are a ‎crown on our heads.” When a friendly football match took place between 11-year-old Israeli and Palestinian boys after the Gaza War in 2014, Rajoub called it a “crime against humanity.”
In addition, the Palestinian Football Association, which will be the beneficiary of a German football expert paid for by Germany, supervises an annual sporting event named after arch-terrorist Abu Jihad. According to the Palestinian Authority’s own documentation, terrorist Abu Jihad was responsible for the murder of 125 people.
The official PA daily reported that the new agreement between Germany and the PA is the result of “meetings between Rajoub and senior officials of the sports sector in Germany,” and that the German Olympic Committee and the German Football Association at these meetings had “demonstrated a willingness to contribute to the development of many sports branches in Palestine.” [Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Feb. 1, 2017]

As everyone on the planet knows by now, an executive order by the new US administration regarding immigration has triggered tsunamis of controversy across the globe. Given that we’ve been chest deep in commentary regarding that decision since it was made, I’ll forgo talking about debate over that policy in order to focus on one specific reaction to it.

Over the last week, more than 4000 academics have signed a petition calling on scholars to boycott academic conferences in the US until the immigration ban is lifted. As far as I know, that boycott does not extend to refusing Americans access to conferences outside the US, nor have I yet heard calls for international academics to shun their US colleagues by, for example, refusing to review or publish their research, or rejecting graduate students or grants applications based on nationality.

Still, this measured approach is grounded in the assumption that punishing American academics for actions taken by the US government is an appropriate choice of action. I’ve not yet heard that this assumption is based on alleged culpability of American academics (or academic institutions) for US policy. We’ve heard people make that case in other academic boycott debates by applying a principle that says any college or university taking government money or performing research that contributes to government decision-making is automatically complicit in the actions of that government. So far, however, the only direct criticisms I’ve heard are complaints that some academic associations have not taken official stands protesting Trump’s controversial immigration policy quickly enough.

Absent the assignment of blame, it might be that international academics – lacking other ways to protest US immigration policy – are doing what they can, regardless of whether it will have any impact on those setting that policy. In which case, American scholars are being asked to serve as “mere means” towards the protestor’s political ends.

Regardless of motivation, a principled stance against any academic boycott of any kind says that research, scholarship, and the free flow of ideas should transcend politics. Cary Nelson – former leader of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) – sums up this argument [behind a paywall, unfortunately], which should be read alongside his masterful work which provides the historic backstory to our society’s choice to grant one profession – academia – special privileges which fall under the category of “Academic Freedom.”

Given that it is academics who benefit most directly from special considerations granted to no other profession, one wonders why some of those academics seem so trigger-happy to act in ways that undermine this global societal compact by trying to punish or exclude one another on political grounds. As ever, the dynamite that has been laid which undermines an important principle of civil society is labeled BDS.

Recall that the only significant academic boycott over the last decade is the one directed at the Jewish state. And in this debate, none of the aforementioned cautions or qualifications are in place. One can argue whether a French academic refusing to attend a conference in Chicago is punishing someone else, or just making a personal choice. The same argument cannot be made, however, by those pushing academic institutions, associations and individuals to shun their Israeli colleagues in every possible way.

So if a conference boycott does take hold targeting American academic meetings, the gate is already wide open to escalate it to include all the things the BDSers want done to Israeli scholars (refusal to cooperate, rejection of papers, etc.). And as the construct of academic freedom unravels, what will keep others (including supporters of the current President) from calling for boycotts of other academic institutions or associations based on a different set of political gripes?

While we’re on the subject of BDS talking points, what about the argument that the proposed sweeping academic boycotts only target Israeli institutions and thus in no way should be seen as an attempt to punish individual scholars? Well academic conferences and the organizations that run them are also institutions, yet it’s hard to imagine that one can harm an institution that consists solely of people talking to each other without harming the participants in those conversations. This case study that describes the personal suffering caused by an “institutional boycott” of University of Illinois also provides an empirical nail for the coffin of the “intuitional-boycotts-don’t-harm-individuals” argument.

Finally, one of the reasons I described that argument made by AAUP’s Cary Nelson argument against all academic boycotts as “principled” is that it is universal, which allows him to consistently fight against academic boycotts of Israel and the US, Trumps immigration ban, and other issues that stand in the way of scholarly discourse.

In contrast, look at how much the boycotters must tie themselves into knots trying to jibe their claims to stand for universal principle (like human rights and academic freedom) with the narrowness of their target list (currently standing at one, maybe two, with the greatest abusers of scholars, students and free inquiry permanently off their agenda).

As noted previously, academic freedom is not a natural phenomenon like gravity or even a natural corollary of the Rights of Man, but remains a relatively recent social invention that benefits scholars by preventing the vagaries of politics from impacting their work. To throw all that away in the name of “Israel Must Go” seems a pretty big sacrifice for such ugly and immoral ends.

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The entire reason that UNRWA has different definitions of "refugee" than the rest of the world is because UNRWA existed for a year before the UN Refugee Convention was drafted, and the Refugee Convention included an exception in its definition of refugee to accommodate UNRWA's somewhat different definition. The UNHRC, when it was created, understandably didn't want to leave hundreds of thousands of needy people who were already defined as refugees by the UN without protection, so the Refugee Convention allowed for this differing definition of UNRWA's to be allowed for very specific circumstances.

Here is the wording of the UNRWA exception (it also applied to an agency that was meant to help Korean refugees, UNKRA), in Article 1, paragraph D, "Definition of the term'refugee'":

This Convention shall not apply to persons who are at present receiving from organs or agencies of the United Nations other than the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees protection or assistance.

When such protection or assistance has ceased for any reason, without the position of such persons being definitively settled in accordance with the relevant resolutions adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations, these persons shall ipso facto be entitled to the benefits of this Convention.

The wording makes it sound like UNRWA's definition is only valid under this exception provided by UNHCR. In other words, the UNHCR definition of "refugee" is the only operative definition, and UNRWA's exception is part of the Refugee Convention. It isn't an independent definition but is dependent on the conditions that the Refugee Convention allows it.

Those conditions include a crucial phrase, "persons who are at present receiving from organs or agencies of the United Nations other than the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees protection or assistance. "

"At present" seems to me to mean that only those UNRWA refugees who were alive in 1951 are granted the exception to be defined as refugees by UNRWA.

UNRWA only officially added descendants to its definition of refugees later in the 1950s, after the Refugee Convention. But if I am reading this correctly, UNRWA never had that right to begin with. It could not redefine "refugees" outside of the Refugee Convention framework to include unborn people who were not receiving protection at the time of the drafting of the Convention. The writers of the Refugee Convention certainly did not intend for the UNRWA exception to last for decades and to have an entire class of millions of "refugees" created under the narrow exception they granted to UNRWA-protected refugees. The UNRWA exception was meant to be a stopgap until there were no longer any refugees being supported by UNRWA; the drafters did not intend for UNRWA to create new definitions that would increase, rather than decrease, the number of refugees under its purview.

In short, the Refugee Convention does not give UNRWA the right to further expand its definitions of "refugee" beyond the exception explicitly allowed in its language - applying only to those living UNRWA refugees receiving assistance in 1951 and no one else.

Beyond that, there is another contradiction between UNHCR's exception and UNRWA's definitions that seem to indicate that there are far fewer "refugees" than UNRWA claims. UNWRA's definition of refugee includes anyone descended patrilineally from people who lived in Palestine from 1946 to 1948. But that includes people who left the five areas of UNRWA control (Gaza, West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria) who returned. But the UNHCR says explicitly that if anyone loses that protection - for example, by moving to a Gulf country or Europe - they are no longer allowed to return to become protected by UNRWA, but rather their status becomes defined by UNHCR. Meaning that for them to be considered refugees, they must adhere to the much more stringent definition of UNHCR's. UNHCR does not allow people who left UNRWA's places of operation to return and claim refugee status from UNRWA.

Moreover, the phrase "When such protection or assistance has ceased for any reason" says that anyone who ceased to be under UNRWA protection cannot regain that protection - and this would include a fortiori those who never had such protection to begin with, namely those who weren't born.

I cannot find any language in the 1967 Refugee Protocol (which extends the definition of refugee beyond the specific World War II refugees that were the subjects of the 1951 Convention) to contradict what I am saying here. In fact, it would seem to strengthen my argument a bit, in the absence of any clarifying language.

UNHCR certainly interprets the 1951 Convention to exclude any Palestinian in the areas of UNRWA operation. It says in its 2011 interpretation of the Refugee Convention:

143. With regard to refugees from Palestine, it will be noted that UNRWA operates only in certain areas of the Middle East, and it is only there that its protection or assistance are given. Thus, a refugee from Palestine who finds himself outside that area does not enjoy the assistance mentioned and may be considered for determination of his refugee status under the criteria of the 1951 Convention. It should normally be sufficient to establish that the circumstances which originally made him qualify for protection or assistance from UNRWA still persist and that he has neither ceased to be a refugee under one of the cessation clauses nor is excluded from the application of the Convention under one of the exclusion clauses.

But this may be more convenient than legal. UNRWA has no cessation clauses, and the "circumstances which originally made him qualify for protection" do not seem to apply. They should not apply to those who are descendants of original Palestine refugees who didn't exist when the Refugee Convention was written. And they certainly should not apply for Palestinians who are citizens of Jordan (Jordan gave them citizenship after UNRWA was created) nor for those who live in the areas of British Mandate Palestine - which the UN itself now calls "the State of Palestine." All of these are conditions that did not exist when UNRWA originally created its criteria for eligibility and therefore should not be applicable to continue to define these people as refugees after the Refugee Convention and 1967 Protocol have become international law.

I once again emphasize that I am not a lawyer, but perhaps some international lawyers can shed light on this. Because it sure looks to me that UNRWA's ability to expand its definition of refugees is a violation of the terms given for the exception grandfathered in by the Refugee Convention.

Which would mean that the legal refugees under UNRWA's definition (which cannot exist outside the Refugee Convention framework) would only include people who are now over 66 years old, never having lived anywhere outside the five areas of UNRWA's operations.

UNRWA can give services to non-refugees if it wants to, of course. But unless I'm missing something, it does not seem to have the right to refer to those people as refugees under international law, it cannot fund-raise by referring to them as refugees, and UNHCR should be the agency that provides services to Palestinians who have fled from Syria, not UNRWA, since their refugee status is not determined by events of 1948 but by events of recent years.

Any legal experts are invited to comment, of course.

(h/t Daled Amos)

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From Iran's FARS News Agency:

A senior member of the Iranian parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Commission and former Islamic Revolution Guards Corps official warned that the slightest aggression by Washington against Iran will be responded by razing to the ground the US military base in Bahrain.

"The US army's fifth fleet has occupied a part of Bahrain, and the enemy's farthest military base is in the Indian Ocean but these points are all within the range of Iran's missile systems and they will be razed to the ground if the enemy makes a mistake," Mojtaba Zonour, a former advisor to the Iranian Supreme Leader's Representative at the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), said on Saturday evening.

Stressing that Tehran has prepared its forces for asymmetric war and attained great achievements in the missile field, he said if the enemy fires a missile against Iran, the country will immediately retaliate it with firing a missile at Tel Aviv.

"And only 7 minutes is needed for the Iranian missile to hit Tel Aviv," Zonour said.

His remarks came after US officials repeated threats to Iran in the last few days.

Yesterday, Commander of the IRGC Aerospace Force Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh played down the recent allegations by the US officials against Iran's defense program, but meantime warned Washington to avoid hostile action or wait for a harsh response.

"If the enemy makes a mistake our roaring missiles will hit their targets," General Hajizadeh told reporters on the sidelines of massive military drills dubbed 'Modafe'an Harim-e Aseman Velayat' (Defenders of the Velayat Skies) in Semnan province in Northern Iran on Saturday.

No one seems to ask why Iran would attack Israel if they are responding to perceived US actions.

Saudi Arabia is also an ally of the US, and they aren't threatening to hit their much closer neighbor in the event of the US doing something they don't like.

The reason that they choose to threaten Israel is because the West is worried that Israel would fight back and it would escalate into a major conflict rather than a regional one. Iran knows that the West, especially Europe, is frightened of war, so the threat against Israel is meant to be heard not so much by the White House or Israel, but by Europe to beg the US to keep on Iran's good side.

There is also a subtle threat of terrorism here. When it mentions "asymmetric war" that is not a war of missiles against missiles - it is a threat of terrorism, via Hezbollah.

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Who's the war criminal? (poster)

A poster in response to yet another tweet by Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch about how terrible it is for Jews to live in Judea and Samaria.

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"International Conference on the Suffering of the Palestinian Child Under Israeli Occupation" scheduled for May

Kuwait will host the "International Conference on the Suffering of the Palestinian Child Under Israeli Occupation" in the first half of May.

Really.
The conference will be held under the auspices of the Emir of Kuwait, the Secretary General of the Arab League, and they will invite Arab foreign ministers and the ministers of social affairs in the Arab League countries, along with "experts" in the field of children's rights.

The conference is not about the suffering of the Palestinian child under Lebanese rule, where they are forced to live in overcrowded camps by Lebanese law.

It is not about the suffering of Palestinian children under Syrian rule, where they don't know if they will be able to eat tomorrow.

No, it's about these kids, having fun in a water park:

Or these kids enjoying a day in Jericho.

This is what the Arab League wastes its money on. All because of hate of Israel.

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02/05 Links: Five myths about anti-Semitism; Sam Harris: Left Has Allied With Islamists

From Ian:

Yair Rosenberg: Five myths about anti-Semitism

For a phenomenon often dubbed “the world’s oldest hatred,” anti-Semitism is not well understood. From top Iranian officials who blame the Talmud for the international drug trade to British political activists who claim that the Mossad is stealing their shoes, anti-Jewish bigotry can be bewildering and bizarre. But given the prejudice’s longevity, virulence and recent resurgence in Europe and America — witness the waves of bomb threats against dozens of Jewish centers nationwide in the past month and the controversy over the Trump administration’s repeated refusal to include Jews in its Holocaust memorial statement — it’s well worth debunking common misconceptions that impede our ability to fight it.
Myth No. 2 Anti-Semitism comes predominantly from the right.
This past election season, the ascendant alt-right, a band of reactionary white nationalists with a penchant for harassing Jewish journalists, filled Twitter with neo-Nazi memes, Photoshopped reporters into gas chambers and concentration camps, and chanted anti-Semitic slogans at political rallies. (My critical reporting on Trump made me the second-most-harassed Jewish journalist on Twitter, according to an Anti-Defamation League study.) One could be forgiven for assuming that such bigotry flows from one primary political source.
But anti-Semitic outbursts were taking place on the left at the same time. At liberal Oberlin College, a writing instructor named Joy Karega shared Facebook memes about Jewish control of the global economy and media, alongside posts asserting Israeli responsibility for the Islamic State and 9/11. Yet when school officials and others criticized her conduct, the student council dismissed it as a “witch-hunt.” In New York, despite a local outcry, the hip leftist hub Brooklyn Commons hosted Christopher Bollyn, a conspiracy theorist who argued that “Zionist Jews” were behind 9/11. During the Democratic primaries, Jewish candidate Bernie Sanders was confronted by a questioner who declared that “the Zionist Jews . . . run the Federal Reserve, they run Wall Street, they run every campaign.” Surveying this scene, TBS comedian Samantha Bee aired footage of an anti-Semite ranting at a Trump rally, then cracked, “To find anti-Semitism that rabid, you’d have to go to, well, any left-leaning American college campus.”
This bipartisan bigotry shouldn’t surprise. Anti-Semitism could never have attained its impressive influence without forging coalitions across ideological and religious lines. Hatred of Jews has long thrived on its ability to ensnare utterly opposite worldviews. Thus, the 2013 E.U. survey found that Italian and Swedish Jews perceived more anti-Semitic statements coming from the left, Hungarian Jews heard them overwhelmingly from Christians and the right, and French Jews reported abuse largely from Muslim extremists. It’s tempting to cast anti-Semitism as the sin of other people, but that’s usually a way to avoid confronting the problem within one’s own community.

WaPo Ignores Islamic/Muslim Anti-Semitism

Later in the article, Rosenberg acknowledges how French Jews’ report their experiences with anti-Semitism as "largely [coming] from Muslim extremists.” His next sentence, however, warns readers against “[casting] anti-Semitism as the sin of other people [in order to] avoid confronting the problem within one’s own community.” In other words, Rosenberg is uncomfortable with acknowledging anti-Semitism as a pathology more virulent among certain cultural, religious, and/or ethnic groups than others.
Anti-Semitism, according to Rosenberg's implication, is somehow equally distributed across all political, religious, cultural, and ethnic groups.
While touching on anti-Semitism in Europe, Rosenberg ignores its worst recent manifestations, all of which were functions of Islamic terrorism.
Rosenberg similarly ignores the relationship between modern anti-Semitism on American campuses and the rapid growth of America's Muslim population in recent decades, particularly with respect to student bodies across the country's universities and colleges. He neglects to mention the Muslim Students' Association - an anti-Zionist, left-wing, and Democrat-aligned organization - as a primary driver of anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist agitation across American campuses:

Illinois warns European Union on boycotting settlements

In the wake of the UN anti-settlements resolution, the governor of Illinois warned the European Union that companies complying with boycotts of Israel or of its West Bank settlements face divestment by the governments of Illinois and other states.
Gov. Bruce Rauner, in his January 31 letter to Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, outlines Illinois law banning state pension plans from investing in companies that boycott Israel.
“Under our law, the term ‘boycott Israel’ means ‘engaging in actions that are politically motivated and are intended to penalize, inflict economic harm on, or otherwise limit commercial relations with the state of Israel or companies based in Israel or in territories controlled by the State of Israel,’” Rauner wrote in the letter, which his office released to JTA on February 3.

Maher & Sam Harris: Left Has Allied With Islamists; "Self-Loathing" Liberals Think We're Just As Bad

Maher said people need to stop equivocating the Ku Klux Klan to radical Islamic armies.
"And again, size matters," Maher said. "There are entire terrorists armies -- ISIS, obviously, Boko Haram, al-Qaeda. People talk about the KKK like it's an equivalent. The KKK is not seeking nuclear weapons."
"When you take jihadists and Islamists who want Sharia law, they just want to use the leverage of a state that are not committing violence immediately, and then you have a larger subset of conservative Muslims who may not have any alliance to jihadists they still have attitudes about free speech and the rights of women and the rights of gays that are deeply at odds with our own and we have to win a war of ideas with these people. This is not -- we don't fly drones to solve this problem. And so this is why we need to empower real reformers.
Harris admonished Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian-American who often appears on MSNBC and spoke out the D.C. Women's March, for defending Saudi Arabia for giving women work leave for pregnancy, defending Sharia law, and attacking "a real feminist hero" like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, telling her she needs an ass-whipping. Harris said Sarsour is a "theocrat."
"I know you were having a bit of a Twitter spat sometimes with this woman Linda Sarsour," Maher said to Harris. "She was at the march and you mentioned that she tweets things that are semi-supportive of Saudi Arabia because they give women maternity leave more than we do."
"This is a problem," Harris said. "The left has allied themselves with Islamists and closet Islamists. She's not too closeted. She has an hijab and the hijab was promoted as one of the empowering symbols of feminism in this march and she was in the march."

Real Time with Bill Maher: Sam Harris: Winning the War of Ideas

This is the most pathological moment in US political history since 1968.

I come out of the progressive-left, but the movement lost me when I started noticing Nazi Swastikas entwined with Stars of David at anti-war rallies in San Francisco.

Once it became clear that anti-Zionists were making homes for themselves within the Obama administration, I knew that it was time for me to leave the party. Asking Jews to sit across the Democratic Party table from anti-Semitic anti-Zionists, such as Linda Sarsour, is something akin to asking black Americans to sit across the Democratic Party table in political kinship with the Klan.

It is suggesting common-cause with an anti-Zionist seeking to bring Sharia into the United States under the cover of feminism. (Of feminism, for chrissake.) This is not a criticism of Muslims as people, but it is very definitely a criticism of Sharia. Whatever else Sharia may be, it is a theological-political ideology and thus open to public scrutiny and criticism. This is particularly true when the head-chopping of non-submissive women or the throwing of Gay people off of rooftops is seen

as a moral imperative for so many within the Islamic faith.

Jewish people need to draw the line at anti-Semitic anti-Zionism of the type represented by Sarsour who once twittered that "nothing is creepier than Zionism."

In the meantime the progressive-left, the Democratic Party, and Clinton Incorporated have turned Trump into the Devil, but what they fail to understand is that their intense and overblown hatred immunizes the guy from their own criticisms.

Whenever they lambaste Trump as a "fascist," or something akin to Hitler, he garners quiet sympathy while making his accusers look malicious, ignorant, and untrustworthy in their conclusions.

The Accelerating Ideological Drumbeat

The intense hatred for Donald Trump is, in part, a result of the accelerating ideological drumbeat around issues of race, gender, and class as derived from the New Left and the Vietnam War. During the 1960s we saw the rise of Second Wave Feminism, the anti-war movement, Gay rights, environmentalism, Black Power, Brown Power and on and on. This churning political chaos blended progressive-left identity politics with socialism eventually resulting in the remarkable challenge by Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2016.

There are, quite obviously, very good historical reasons for all of this. Does anyone really need reminding of how long women in the United States were non-citizens? Or how long black people were slaves? Thus, the New Left take-over of the universities was a response to centuries of unjust marginalization and displacement of the allegedly inferior other.

The problem is not that in speaking up for women, or in opposition to war, or in favor of minority rights, that the Left had nothing to say. They clearly had plenty to say. The problem is that they refused to acknowledge their winnings on the table.

That is, the less racist and sexist the West became in recent decades the harder and faster the drumbeat of race, gender, and class became, eventually emerging, during the Obama administration, as the high-pitched shrill of identity politics that we know today.

And that really is the saddest part.

The faltering liberal West represents the most socially just and welcoming form of political organization in human history, yet it is lambasted by a significant portion of its own citizenry as among the very worst.

Instead of joining with the white American middle-class for the purpose of moving forward in relative harmony, the progressive-left demonized those people, particularly the conservatives among them, as precisely what is wrong with the West today.

One Reason Why Hillary Got Beat

In the months leading into te 2016 presidential election the tempo of progressive-left accusations of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, disaster capitalism, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and generalized badness, approached a crescendo.

One of my favorite examples was when transgender Inside Edition reporter Zoey Tur (née Robert Albert Tur) threatened violence against Brietbart-associated writer and radio talk show host, Ben Shapiro, because Ben referred to her as a "Sir" during a panel discussion on Caitlyn "Bruce" Jenner.

The rather burly Ms. Tur subsequently threatened Shapiro with a "curb stomping" which anyone who has ever seen the movie History X can tell you is a rather unpleasant form of getting one's ass kicked... if not, more likely, dead. Shortly thereafter Shapiro suggested that such brutality might be considered a tad "unladylike" thereby revealing that someone obviously needs to give him a good mansplaining.

Shortly after the election, the MTV "2017 Resolutions for White Guys" video nicely summed-up the progressive-left, politically-correct, coastal zeitgeist that nudged Trump into the winner's box.

While no one ever accused the people over at MTV of being big thinkers, the truth is that during the brief historical moment between World War II and the present the West actually made tremendous gains in social justice. Yet it is precisely at this moment that the cries of racism and sexism and fascism dramatically increased in direct proportion, ironically enough, to the diminishment of racism, sexism, and fascism.

Never before was a society so free and, yet, so despised by so many for its alleged lack of freedom.

In retrospect, therefore, it is not particularly surprising that as the Clinton campaign conjured the "alt-right" as an object of hatred with which to smear Donald Trump that many less partisan Americans refused to buy into that hatred.

The more the Clintonistas pointed the trembling finger of accusation toward all those politically-incorrect heinous "deplorables" - otherwise known as their fellow Americans - the more those people either adopted that attribution as a badge of honor or dismissed the Left as a bunch of anti-white racist, anti-American hate-mongers.

In other words, each time progressives spit the notion that regular Americans from places like Lexington, Kentucky or Provo, Utah or Ottumwa, Iowa were essentially a bunch of bigoted, heteronormative, neanderthal, pig farmers another Republican-operative angel received its wings.

Immunization

By turning Donald Trump into "Genghis Hitler," as my friend Trudy put it, the Left leaves no room for negotiation, discussion, or even thought. By accusing Trump of anything and everything - up to and including "golden showers" in Russian luxury hotel rooms - it immunizes the guy from genuine criticisms.

It means that people who seek some reasonable objectivity in their understanding of what is actually happening must slog through an endless miasma of bullshit to get at a kernel of truth.

And what this means is that the kind of key honest criticisms that could sway the general American citizenry back toward a left-leaning direction are lost in the political swamp, thereby freeing president Trump to do damn near anything he wants. After all, if almost everyone left-of-center is willing to string the guy up for putting his shoes on in the wrong order, why should he not just go forward and do whatever he wants, anyway?

An important question is, will this hatred topple the guy or will it feed his strength?

Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.

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Four babies have been deposited in front of mosques and social assistance centers in Gaza so far this year, and Arab media is buzzing about it.

The latest was on Saturday morning when a baby was found in front of a mosque in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood. The week before, a baby was left in front of an orphanage in Gaza City.

Gaza Sheikh Samih Hajjaj said that these children were probably illegitimate. He blamed the problem on a number of factors, including young people not complying with Islamic Sharia law, young men and women mixing in universities and other public places without any controls and without regard to the consequences, and a Turkish soap opera named "Forbidden Love" may be responsible for an increase in incest.

This 2012 article describes how popular Turkish soaps are in Palestinian Arab homes:

Palestinians are in rapture with Turkish soap operas. They do not merely provide nightly entertainment but their influence shapes the image and style of the young viewers. Shirts, dresses, tights, styles of clothes, handbags, belts, and jewellery worn in the Turkish soap opera are highly coveted among Palestinian young women. The image: what and how to combine items of clothing, how to comport oneself, how to walk and what to talk is a style gleaned from Turkish televised dramas. Young men design their haircuts in emulation of their heroes; they put on stylish jackets, shirts, and pants whose styles fluctuate with the seasonal changes of Turkish fashions. The diversity, range of characters portrayed, and endless twists and turns of the plot attract a great cross-section of Palestinian devotees. Palestinians of all ages - grandparents, husbands, wives, young men and women, adolescents, children, and even toddlers - congregate nightly to see a mirror image of their “life” reflected on the screen and idealised into a polished legend; a surrogate reality.

And here is how "Forbidden Love" is described:

Al Ishq el Mamnu’ [Forbidden Love] is a contemporary social drama of love and incest. It is the story of one big extended family all sharing the same rambling house, buzzing with incestuous desires. Samar, the heroin, falls in love with the much younger handsome nephew of her husband, hence the title “Forbidden Love.”

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