Historian Kobby Barda has found a lost chapter of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: After World War II, the U.S. gave Israel and Arab nations $1.5 billion to solve the Middle East refugee problem. But only Israel lived up to its end of the deal.
Kobby Barda couldn't believe what he was seeing. While researching the establishment of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee under the auspices of the Ruderman Program for American Jewish Studies at the University of Haifa, Barda found his way to the personal archive of one Isaiah Leo "Si" Kenen, a Canadian-born lawyer, journalist and philanthropist who was one of the founders of the pro-Israel lobby.
Among the many documents that record in detail Kenen's work in the first years of Israel's existence as a state, Barda discovered a lost chapter in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At the start of the 1950s, in addition to pouring money into the Marshall Plan to rehabilitate Europe after World War II, the U.S. decided to provide money to Arab states and Israel so they could find a solution to the refugee problem created by the 1948 War of Independence.
The American aid earmarked to solve the issue of Middle East refugees was supposed to have been split evenly between Israel and the Arab states, with each side receiving $50 million to build infrastructure to absorb refugees. The money to take in the Arab refugees was handed over to the U.N. agency founded to address the issue of Palestinian refugees, and the Americans gave Arab countries another $53 million for "technical cooperation." In effect, the Arab side received double the money given to Israel, even though Israel took in more refugees, including ones from Arab nations – Jews who had been displaced by the regional upheavals. The amount Congress allocated to provide for Middle East refugees – Jewish and Arab – at the request of then-President Harry Truman was equal to $1.5 billion today.
We all know that the Jeremy Corbyn cult uses smear tactics. It can be well highlighted by this case study. It is a worthwhile exercise to show just how empty and crudely constructed these smears can be.
My website was attacked on the evening of the 22nd December. It was down for several hours and when the server restored the site, it remained unstable as the new security systems were configured. I have ample proof of the attack. For example there are numerous emails from the host company as they attempted to deal with the problem, including one that confirms a DDOS attack. Someone also kindly archived how the website looked at the time of the attack:
The antisemitic mindset of the Corbyn conspiracy cult
Everyone knows there are bad people in the world who pose a danger. But for the antisemite, this does not hold true for the Jews. In the eyes of the antisemite, the Jews *are* what is bad in the world. So when Jews complain they’ve been hacked, they are lying. When they say they are victims of antisemitic abuse, they are conspiring to smear someone, and even when six million of them ‘go missing’, they have somehow deceived the world just to gain power and make money. It does not matter that in some cases the antisemite has replaced the word ‘Jew’ with ‘Zionist’, the seams always show where it has been stitched in.
So through the eyes of the antisemites, the attack on my website could not be real. It did not take long for someone to write up a version that turned the DDOS attack into a conspiracy to smear Jeremy Corbyn supporters, and of course being Jewish, make some money whilst I did it. On 30th December, the Prole Star upload an article that did just that:
The Prole Star and its editor
The Prole Star is a Jeremy Corbyn support media. It self references as a socialist site ‘counteracting mainstream media bias’. The Facebook page has 6000 followers. On Twitter, they have another 10,000. It seems to rely on freelance writers desperately seeking media to publish their articles. The Editor and chief contributor is Maria Roberts. Roberts has been writing for the Pole Star for over two years.
I don’t know much about her. Her Facebook friends include Jacqueline Walker, Tony Greenstein, Piers Corbyn, Jon Lansman and Grahame Morris MP. Beyond her editorial role at the Pole Star, her profile also suggests she is a Director at a Company called ‘Red Letter Ltd‘. Company House has her using the names ‘Jeanne Roberts‘ and ‘Jeanne Maria Roberts‘. She is listed as holding ‘overall control’. The accounts and Confirmation Statement are also both overdue, so if you are reading this Maria – chop-chop.
Alan Dershowitz: Comparing Trump to the Nazis Is Holocaust Denial
Professor Alan Dershowitz joined FOX and Friends on New Year's Day to discuss a new poll that finds most children are completely ignorant of the Jewish Holocaust in World War II. Dershowitz then went on to say that any of the people today who compare the current US political climate to the Nazis are basically Holocaust deniers. (h/t jzaik)
Jews are white when the left wants to exclude them from
participation in, for instance, the Women’s March. Jews, on the other hand, are
anything but white when the right wishes to exclude them from normative
society.
Fellow white Jews: can we please stop embarrassing ourselves by arguing we aren't white or don't benefit from white supremacy? Read this 👇👇👇 https://t.co/389lmWGWtp
Isn’t it nice that we’re so
malleable a people that you can make us be whatever you want to fit your own personal
dynamic—to exclude us from all your ranks at either end of the spectrum?
How accommodating of us.
The truth is, of course, that
Jews can be any color of the human rainbow. The first Jews were nomads in the
Middle East, so they were likely somewhat dark in color. Then as now, however, color
was an unimportant factor in determining one’s Jewish identity. What was and is
important is a belief in one God, matrilineal descent or conversion, and
circumcision for males. These beliefs and activities, rather than the color of
one’s skin, determine whether or not one is a Jew.
If you are a Jew, or you become
a Jew, you were standing there at Mt. Sinai when God gave us the Torah and the commandments.
There was no white privilege in play. We all received the same Torah, the same
commandments. We all said naaseh v’nishma:
we will do and we will listen. We were as one and our God was/is/and always
will be one (and not some trisected or multiple being).
Professor Gunnar Heinsohn,
of the University of Bremen makes the case that Jews were murdered in the
Holocaust not because of race, but because of their Torah values. It makes
sense if you think about it: if the Final Solution had been about skin color,
blacks, Asians, and Hispanics would have been killed in the same numbers, in
the same fashion.
Professor Gunnar Heinsohn
This was obviously not the
case, which leads Heinsohn to view the Holocaust as an event that is uniquely
unique, and not comparable to any other genocide. Hitler’s real goal, according
to Heinsohn, was to exterminate the Jewish people so as to erase Judaism from
world memory as an ethics system. This would enable the Germans to break
whatever commandments they liked with a free conscience. They could do whatever
they wished: murder entire groups of people, weak people, handicapped people,
and minorities; and plunder and conquer territory, without being hampered by morals
or a guilty conscience, all the while claiming superiority over other beings.
Heinsohn lays out his evidence
in a paper called “Hitler
and the Jewish People.” He explains, for instance, that Hitler didn’t
believe in a racist antisemitism, sharing from a letter written to Martin
Bormann, on February 3, 1945:
I have never been of the opinion that the Chinese or Japanese,
for example, are racially inferior. Both belong to old cultures and I admit
that their tradition is superior to ours. […] I even believe that I will find it all the easier to come to an understanding with the
Chinese and the Japanese, the more they persevere in their racial pride. […]
Our Nordic racial consciousness is only aggressive toward the Jewish race. We
use the term Jewish race merely for reasons of linguistic convenience, for in
the real sense of the word, and from a genetic point of view there is no Jewish
race. Present circumstances force upon us this characterization of the group of
common race and intellect, to which all the Jews of the world profess their
loyalty, regardless of the nationality identified
in the passport of each individual. This group of persons we designate as the
Jewish race. […] The Jewish race is above all a community of the spirit. […]
Spiritual race is of a more solid and more durable kind than natural race.
Wherever he goes, the Jew remains a Jew […] presenting sad proof of the
superiority of the ‘spirit’ over the flesh.
Only when it comes to blacks,
in fact, does Hitler betray a streak of honest-to-goodness racism, as in this
passage from Mein Kampf:
From time to time magazines call the attention of the
bourgeoisie to another case of the first Negro
ever to have become a lawyer, teacher, even a pastor or star tenor or the like.
While the feeble-minded bourgeoisie marvels at this miraculous feat of trained
performance, full of respect for this fabulous result of present-day pedagogy,
the Jew slyly takes advantage of the opportunity to construct new proof of the
correctness of his theory of the equality of human beings which it is his
mission to hammer into the heads of the nations. It does not dawn on the
degenerate bourgeois world that in truth what we have here is an offense against
all reason, that it is outrageous lunacy to keep drilling a native anthropoid
until one is convinced of having made a lawyer of him.
Hitler’s racism was real, but racial
theory, says Heinsohn, fails to explain the Holocaust. “According to the logic
of the racist theory, Hitler’s main war should have been waged against black
Africans. But since it was waged against Jews, reasons other than those of
racism must be investigated.”
No. It wasn’t racism, but
something else. Hitler wanted to be free to act without conscience, free to
violate the commandment: “Thou shalt not kill.”
In the first edition of Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that
infanticide is preferable to the modern practice of prophylactic birth control.
“The exposure of sick, weak,
deformed children, i.e. their annihilation, was in reality a thousand times
more humane than the deplorable lunacy of our present-day time,” writes Hitler,
who goes on to speak of an emerging “obsession” with:
“Saving” even the weakest, even the sickest, at all costs. […]
A stronger race will banish the weaker ones, for in the end the instinct to
survive will always break the ridiculous bonds of a so-called humanity of the
individual, allowing the humanity of nature to take its place, a humanity which
destroys the weak to provide space for the strong. Therefore, he who wants to
ensure the existence of the German nation through a self-limitation of its reproductive
process is depriving it of the future.
In case you were wondering,
Hitler tells us straight out where this, in his opinion, false humanity, comes
from. “In recognition of the consequences [of birth control], it is not,
coincidentally, the Jew above all who so skillfully sets about embedding such
mortally dangerous ideas in the minds of our people,” writes Hitler.
At the 1929 party convention in
Nuremberg, Hitler publicly condemned the Jewish way of thinking, in preference
to what he suggested was an older, Indo-Germanic right:
If one million children were born in Germany per year and
700,000 to 800,000 of the weakest eliminated, the final
result might possibly even be an increase of strength. The worst danger is that
we are interrupting the natural selection process ourselves (by caring for the
sick and weak). […] The most far-sighted racial state of history, Sparta,
systematically implemented these racial laws.
Hermann Rauschning, the Nazi
leader of Danzig, wrote a book about a meeting with Hitler in the early 1930’s.
Rauschning summarized Hitler’s remarks in his report as follows:
Our lawyers and lawmakers make a fundamental error in assuming
that one can create life with a code of laws and a constitution. Our revolution
is not merely a political and social one. We face a tremendous upheaval of
moral principles and the spiritual orientation of man. With our movement the
intervening age, the middle age, has come to its end. We terminate a wrong path
of mankind. The Tables of Mount Sinai have lost their validity. Conscience is a
Jewish invention. It is our duty to depopulate, just as it is our duty to provide
appropriate care to the German population. We will have to develop a technology
of depopulation. What do I mean by depopulation, you will ask. Do I intend to
eliminate entire peoples? Yes, more or less. That is where it will lead to.
Nature is cruel. We therefore have the same right. […] For centuries people have
been driveling on about the protection of the poor. The time has come to
address ourselves to the protection of the strong from the inferior. One of the
most important tasks of an eternally valid German politics will be to use every
possible means to prevent the further growth of the Slavic peoples. Natural
instinct commands every living being not only to defeat the enemy but to destroy
him. In earlier ages there existed the good right of the victor to exterminate
entire tribes, entire nations.
Hitler saw Jewish values as a
kind of infectious organism that prevented lebensraum
and with it, Aryan national survival. As early as August 7, 1920, Hitler wrote:
Do not think that you can fight
a disease without killing the causative agent, without destroying the bacillus,
and do not think that you can fight racial
tuberculosis without seeing to it that the nation is freed from the causative
agent of racial tuberculosis. The influence of
Judaism will never fade as long as its agent, the Jew, has not been removed from
our midst.
“The Jewish race is above all a
community of the spirit,” wrote Hitler, almost 25 years later. In one of his
efforts to destroy this “spiritual bacillus” he ordered four priests hung in
Luebeck on November 10, 1943, because they distributed a sermon of Bishop von
Galen which spoke of the Lord pronouncing “Thou shalt not kill” “amidst thunder
and lightning on Sinai.” Their crime was WehrkraftZersetzung,
the destruction of a soldier’s will to fight and kill.
If Hitler served to dehumanize
Jews in the eyes of the people, it was only a means to an end: to motivate the people
to do away with the Jews, so that Germans could be free to murder and plunder
and have the world to themselves. They felt they deserved this, after so many
hard years with a busted economy. Annihilating the Jews was a means to an end.
By the same token, the
contemporary Jewish leftist wants to destroy Judaism and its brightest symbol,
Israel, in order to absolve himself of the guilt of not recognizing God and His
Torah. If Judaism is declared immoral, therefore moot, Jews on the left need
not feel guilty for not following the commandments. This tautology of the contemporary
Jewish left offers a perfect dovetailing with Hitler’s 20th century Nazi
ideology.
Hitler gave the Germans permission
to be morally bankrupt. The fact that they fell in with him so easily, and
cooperated so well, speaks not to Hitler’s force of personality, but to the
fertile ground of the German soul, so conducive to breeding greed, hate,
licentiousness, and murder—as long as all is done in an orderly fashion and
properly recorded for posterity.
What then, is the excuse of the
Jews?
h/t Quirinus Amsterdam
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Tel Aviv, January 2 - Activists and media figures voiced bewilderment today following a display of real, verifiable moral fiber and character on the part of a person showcasing a public measure of care for the oppressed, social justice warriors are reporting.
Witnesses at a rally for the rights of migrant workers in the southern neighborhoods of this Mediterranean city recalled a woman holding a sign that railed against the racism, xenophobia, and other ills plaguing the mostly-African group that arrived illegally over the last decade, who intervened with her body when a migrant attempted to assault a photojournalist who had captured images of other migrants assaulting an elderly woman. The incident shook them, the activists confessed, as they had rarely, if ever, encountered someone who defends the rights of the oppressed yet expects the oppressed to still behave with some sense of decency.
"I'm confused right now, and a little, a little shaken," stammered one demonstrator. "That's not what I'm used to. I still have to process what happened here today. I didn't think anyone was supposed to display any kind of moral consistency or courage in this milieu. My understanding has always been that ethical behavior was something you only demanded of others, and certainly not of the oppressed people with whom you're showing all-important solidarity and allyship."
"It's weird - I don't think I've seen this before," added a second. "Intersectionality's hierarchy implies that you can't require the oppressed to behave by the same standards as the class of oppressors, since those standards are just ways in which the oppressors cement their privilege. That's not what this woman - forgive me for assuming her gender, we just don't know - assumed, obviously, and that's a challenge to our paradigm that I'm having difficulty assimilating."
A third demonstrator contrasted the woman's behavior with the more typical model common in the progressive social justice realm. "Virtue is for signaling, not for practicing," she insisted. "That's why it was OK for Omar Barghouti to pursue a degree in ethics from Tel Aviv University while spearheading the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions movement against Israel. It's about the noise you make, not the life you lead. It's why Linda Sarsour led the Women's March and bellowed 'MeToo' even as she defended an accused sexual harasser on her staff and refused to believe the accuser. What I saw today made me profoundly uncomfortable, and some of us are going to have to sit down and hash out today's episode so we can decide whether we need to wreck this traitor's life and reputation for her treason."
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Israeli planners may soon have to understand that the efficacy or credibility of their country’s nuclear deterrence posture could vary inversely with enemy views of Israeli nuclear destructiveness. However ironic or counter-intuitive, enemy perceptions of a too-large or too-destructive Israeli nuclear deterrent force, or of an Israeli force that is not sufficiently invulnerable to first-strike attacks, could undermine this deterrence posture.
Also critical, of course, is that Israel’s current and prospective adversaries see the Jewish state’s nuclear retaliatory forces as “penetration capable” — meaning they are capable of penetrating any Arab or Iranian aggressor’s active defenses. Naturally, a new state of Palestine would be non-nuclear itself, but it could still present a new “nuclear danger” to Israel by its impact upon the more generally regional “correlation of forces.” Thereby, Palestine could represent an indirect but nonetheless markedly serious nuclear threat to Israel.
There is still more to be done. Israel should continue to strengthen its active defenses, but Jerusalem must also do everything possible to improve each critical and interpenetrating component of its nuanced deterrence posture. The Israeli task may also require more incrementally explicit disclosures of nuclear targeting doctrine, and, accordingly, a steadily expanding role for cyber-defense and cyber-war. And even before undertaking such delicately important refinements, Israel will need to more systematically differentiate between adversaries that are presumably rational, irrational, or “mad.”
Overall, the success of Israel’s national deterrence strategies will be contingent upon an informed prior awareness of enemy preference and of specific enemy hierarchies of preferences. Altogether new and open-minded attention will need to be focused on the seeming emergence of a “Cold War II” between Russia and the United States. This time around, the relationship between Jerusalem and Moscow could prove helpful rather than adversarial. For Jerusalem, it may even be reasonable to explore whether this once hostile relationship could turn out to be more strategically gainful for Israel than its traditionally historic ties to the United States. At this transitional moment in geostrategic time, when Donald Trump’s often incoherent alignments could multiply or escalate, virtually anything is possible.
In any event, it is essential that Israeli planners approach all prospective enemy threats as potentially interactive or even synergistic. If a formalized state of Palestine does not readily find itself in the same ideological orbit as Iran — now an increasingly plausible conclusion in view of still-accelerating Shiite-Sunni fissions in the Middle East — the net threat to Israel could become more perilous than the mere additive result of its pertinent area enemies. All things considered, in approaching the possible simultaneity of Iranian nuclear weapons and Palestinian statehood, Jerusalem must consistently bear in mind that the adversarial “whole” could prove palpably greater than the calculable sum of its belligerent “parts.”
For 2019, there could be no more important security consideration.
Thank God, it's over. When 2018 ended, Israel's withdrawal from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization took effect. Don't feel bad. Under existing conditions, there was no reason to keep our place at the table with the gang of hypocritical liars that every few months rewrote another chapter of the history of the land of Israel and the Jewish people, and coopted it for the Palestinians. Rather than thrilling at the glorious cultural, religious, historic, and archaeological legacy of the Jewish people in the land of Israel, the organization chose time and again to adopt "fake history" and give its seal of approval to more fabrications from the Palestinian pack of lies.
UNESCO questioned Jewish ties to the Temple Mount and the Western Wall. It treated us as if we were occupiers in our own capital, even though Jerusalem in all its holiness was never a capital – in terms of either politics or conscience – for any Arab or Muslim ruling entity. Even the Jordanians, who together with the Palestinians prompted UNESCO to pass resolutions hostile to Israel – never used Jerusalem as their capital in the years in which they occupied the city. They desecrated the places that are holy to Jews, and in violation of agreements we signed with them, even denied us access to those places. Back then, the Jordanians and the Palestinians – before they invented themselves as a "people" – cited the Temple Mount as the location of Solomon's Temple on their maps and in their writings. Today, they boldly deny ever doing so and UNESCO is helping them by partly adopting their denial.
But UNESCO has more than Jerusalem in its sights. Rachel's Tomb, which UNESCO decided to call, as the Palestinians term it, Bilal Ibn Rabah mosque, was never traditionally called that. Ibn Rabah, of Ethiopian descent, was one of the first muezzins who served the Prophet Muhammad. He was killed in Syria and buried in Aleppo or Damascus. Only when the Palestinian Authority realized it had failed to capture the site from Israel during the Second Intifada did they link Ibn Rabah to "Kubat Rachel," the Arabic name for the site that had been used for generations. In the case of Rachel's Tomb, UNESCO supported an attempt to take over people's minds in place of a physical occupation of the site which failed.
“Maybe they will learn a lesson,” a former Israeli ambassador to UNESCO told The Algemeiner on Tuesday as the Jewish state officially left the global cultural institution.
David Kornbluth — who served as Israel’s UNESCO envoy from 2005-2009 — said the country was pulling out of the body now largely because the US had scheduled to leave by the end of 2018.
“It’s completely in coordination with the United States,” he noted. “This is part of the reason also why it’s being done. Politically, it didn’t seem that we could stay in it if the United States is going, on our behalf as it were. Part of the reason they’re going is because of Israel.”
Israel and the US stayed in UNESCO for so long, he stated, “because they believed that once you leave these organizations, it’s much more difficult for Israel to get back in than the United States to get back in,” but the worsening situation had finally forced their hand.
“It was bad then,” Kornbluth said of his tenure. “It’s really nasty being attacked all the time, but was more manageable. But things got worse and worse, it just goes on and on and on, and politically it becomes just a bit disgusting.”
Asked whether the withdrawals will force UNESCO to change its attitude toward Israel, Kornbluth responded, “Hard to tell. The Israel-bashing thing has been going on forever, but the United States is staunchly with Israel and it’s quite true for many many decades already that Israel relies on the United States in UNESCO for the air it breathes. So I can’t tell if it will have a positive effect. It will have some effect. Since the United States and Israel came out two years ago with the intention to withdraw, UNESCO has moderated itself a bit towards Israel, but not sufficiently.”
This is the reason the Israeli Defense Forces @IDF IS the most moral army in the world: not because it fights with flowers (it doesn't), not because Jews have a unique moral DNA (no people does), but because the IDF is forced to carry out its missions under unparalleled scrutiny: https://t.co/fo2kH2mH5t
One of Netanyahu's undeniable successes as Prime Minister of Israel is his ability to increase the circle of Israel's friends. Part of his agenda to improve Israel's ties with other countries is his outreach to Eastern Europe. For example, he has extended Israel's friendship to Viktor Orban, the far right Prime Minister of Hungary. More than pursuing some vague, abstract goal, Netanyahu's actions can be seen as an attempt to weaken the EU's hostile strategy against Israel.
For their part, right-wing Eastern European leaders get a hechsher, "kosher certification" from Netanyahu that protects them from accusations of being antisemitic racists.
Now it appears that this wooing of Israel manifests itself not only on a global level but on a local level as well.
Across Europe, anti-immigration parties with ties to far-right movements have stepped up efforts to recruit supporters in the continent’s small Jewish community, often drawing on perceptions in that community about anti-Semitism among Muslims.
Jewish legislators in the Swedish parliament are members of the Sweden Democrats, a party with Neo-Nazi roots (that it has renounced).
Austria’s parliament includes Jews who are members of the Freedom Party, which was founded by former members of Hitler’s SS.
Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician and vociferous critic of Islam, has a Jewish legislator in his party.
In France, which has Europe’s largest Jewish community, about 10% of Jewish voters are estimated to support the National Front. The party has renamed itself National Rally.
Right-wing political leaders Ms. Marine Le Pen, Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban have all traveled to Israel, building ties with the Israeli government as well as with their local Jewish constituencies
Emanuel Bernhard Krauskopf and about 30 others recently founded a Jewish chapter of the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD), the largest opposition group in parliament, among whose members are people accused of being Antisemites and right-wing extremists.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban meets with Netanyahu.
Screenshot from YouTube video
Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini. Screenshot from YouTube Video
The Muslim vote is more important than the Jewish one. What the Jews do offer, through their participation in right-wing parties, is their own hechsher of these groups.
Krauskopf says he doesn't mind “being used as a fig leaf" by the AfD in order to fight the growing antisemitism, and no doubt many Jewish members of these groups and parties across Europe feel the same way.
But suspicions of AfD persist:
In January, a court ruled against an AfD member and lawmaker in a libel case after he was accused of being a Holocaust denier for challenging the number of the Nazis’ victims
The party’s co-chairman minimized the importance of the Third Reich in 1,000 years of German history.
In response to such events, Josef Schuster, head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, the country’s biggest Jewish body, said “a party that tolerates people playing down the Holocaust cannot possibly stand for the rights of Jews.”
Sigmount Königsberg, appointed by the Jewish community in Berlin to monitor antisemitic acts takes a different tack in addressing antisemitism, noting that "if we want to fight it, we can only do it together with the Islamic community.”
This reaction in Germany is likely indicative of the kinds of reactions to be found by mainstream Jewish groups throughout Europe. Clearly, not everyone agrees that the right-wing parties are part of the solution and no longer part of the problem.
Pancevski does note an example of Muslim leaders making an effort to address the rise of antisemitism. He quotes Mohamad Hajjaj, chairman of the Berlin chapter of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, who says imams in Germany work together in their communities and in their schools to fight against antisemitism. Since only the example of Germany is mentioned, it appears to be a very limited initiative. After all, the potential backlash Muslim leaders would face for the perception of helping Jews or for supporting some kind of normalization with Israel is obvious. Don't expect any imam-led trips to Israel in the near future.
Of course, none of this is going to affect the ongoing Jewish love affair with liberals and the Democratic party in the US.
For now.
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Every birthright trip includes a heavy dose of right wing propaganda.
My trip leader was a settler who told us all Arabs were terrorists and threatened to throw me off the trip for my "Arab beliefs." American Jews were hazed by Israeli soldiers who pushed pins into their chests.
On my trip, one of our evening activities was a simulation of a checkpoint, in which we had to pretend to be IDF soldiers denying entry to pleading Palestinian women.
Even if they told us their children were sick, we were to deny everyone entry. It was horrifying.
He was immediately challenged:
David Sebs @dsebs
I went on a trip in 2012 and this couldn't be further from the truth.
If anything our guide was extremely sympathetic to the Palestinians... Even organizing Ultimate Frisbee tournaments with those on the other side of the 'wall'.
Gritty 2020🔥 @maxberger
It totally depends on your trip leader. They are discouraged from talking about the conflict, but some bend the rules.
David Sebs @dsebs
I mean you mentioned 'every Birthright trip' and then conceded that it 'depends on your trip leader.'
You understand the hypocrisy in that right?
I'm not even trolling, but it c'mon....
And:
Melissa Weiss
@melissaeweiss
I don’t often call people liars, but I went on Birthright as a student. Dozens of my friends have staffed and guided trips. Hundreds of my friends and colleagues have been participants over the years. Not a single one has had the experience Max describes. Not a single one.
Berger backtracks big time:
Gritty 2020🔥 @maxberger
Replying to @melissaeweiss
I don't think this was the least bit typical! Lots of stuff happened on my trip that wasn't according to protocol. But the larger point still holds.
The "larger point," apparently, that Birthright is still right wing propaganda even if his own supposed case was an outlier. And if that really happened, there would be lots of people talking about it.I
Berger was asked repeatedly the name of the leader of his trip. Obviously, if his claims were true, everyone from the left to the far right would condemn it. But he won't say.
His "bravery" at "exposing" Birthright apparently doesn't extend to allowing himself to be fact-checked.
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The official Palestinian Authority Wafa news agency has a weekly feature describing all of the cases of supposed Israeli media "incitement" that would cause Israelis to want to murder or attack Arabs.
Obviously they do this just to counter the very real incitement that they have daily in their media; if they can point to Israeli incitement they feel that they are blunting the message from Palestinian Media Watch and MEMRI and others. Even the most ridiculous pretense of incitement irs enough for them to be able to point to statistics that no one will challenge of "Israeli media had X number of articles this weekinciting violence."
The report presents a number of news articles that incite incitement and racism against the Palestinians.
According to journalists Asaf Jibur and Yishai Friedman, Israeli Arab terrorists, who were recently released from prison, were received like kings in Ramallah in the presence of senior officials of the Palestinian Authority. Among those who received a certificate of appreciation, during a ceremony held a few weeks ago, were Samir Sarsawi and Mahmoud Jabarin, who were accompanied by a convoy of long cars, horses, applause and encouragement from the public, and a ceremony at the grave of Yasser Arafat.
Sarsawi was charged with throwing hand grenades at civilians on the Noordo Street in Haifa in 1998, and was imprisoned on charges of placing explosives in order to kill, manufacture weapons or explosive materials, and membership in illegal organizations. Jabarin was accused of killing an Arab collaborator. The wife of the terrorist, Walid Daqqa, also participated in the ceremony.
The concert was broadcast live and live on Palestine TV channel, within the program "Giants of Patience", which follows the families of "terrorists".
From what I can tell, the story is largely accurate - I couldn't confirm that Jabarin, an Israeli citizen was honored in Ramallah at the celebration for Sarsawi but both of them were released in recent months after serving full 30 year sentences and both were highly honored - Jabarin in Umm al Fahm and Sarsawi in Ramallah.
Accurately reporting on how Palestinians honor murderers is considered "incitement" by the Palestinian Authority.
In a sense I suppose it is, because it causes Israelis to get angry at their "peace partners."
It is interesting how little coverage both these events received in English at the time. Everyone should see how Arabs - including Israeli Arabs - honor murderers.
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I haven't thought about what to do with the Hasbys going forward. I enjoy the live presentations, and haven't done any in the New York area yet, so that is a possibility.
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When Labour’s shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry spoke last week at the annual Limmud Jewish cultural festival in Birmingham, she declared in relation to the accusation that the Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn was an antisemite:
“I don’t believe there is a racist or antisemitic bone in his body”. And she claimed that Corbyn had been unable to deal properly with the issue of Labour antisemitism because he had been so emotionally affected by being accused of it himself.
Cue derision and jeers. Which was only to be expected.
After all, Corbyn has not only personally endorsed numerous enemies of the existence of the State of Israel, Judaism and the Jewish people. He has not only failed adequately to tackle the blizzard of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish utterances by party members under his leadership.
He has himself endorsed unambiguously antisemitic tropes, such as the wall mural depicting grotesquely caricatured Jewish financiers making money literally on the backs of the enslaved poor (which he claims to have supported only on freedom of expression grounds and not to have noticed what the mural actually contained); and he also implied that British Zionist Jews were somehow alien to their own country by being unable to appreciate “English irony”.
So Thornberry’s protestations were ludicrous and clearly untrue and amounted merely to cynical dissembling, no?
Well actually, no. I think she was speaking honestly. And that’s even worse.
For I believe that Corbyn really is upset at the accusations against him – because he really does believe he is simply incapable of antisemitism (which he equates, shallowly, with racism, thus demonstrating he doesn’t even understand that antisemitism is not just a prejudice nor even just a form of bigotry but is a unique and ultimately murderous deformation of rationality and psychology).
And he’s not alone in that belief. Virtually all on the left believe they too are incapable of antisemitism because that is exclusively to be found on the right. Why so?
Please join me here as I discuss with Avi Abelow of Israel Unwired some major events of the past few days in our crazy world.
We consider the implications of President Trump’s decision to withdraw US troops from Syria, the ramifications of which are more complex than might be imagined from the shallow mainstream media accounts. You can also read my take on what really matters about America’s approach to Syria and Iran here.
We also talk about the recent EU survey of perceptions by Jewish communities in Britain and Europe of the incidence of antisemitism in their countries. The survey found rising alarm, especially in Britain, but once again this needs to be unpicked to discover findings which the mainstream media have not seen fit to explore, including a refusal to face realities by the Jewish communities themselves.
Nearly six years ago I gave a lecture at Yeshiva University on how to answer anti-Israel arguments. Since the lecture was over an hour and twenty minutes, I decided to break it up into 20 sections, one each to answer one popular anti-Israel argument.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
In my last post, I wrote about the Democracy Index for 2017, compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit. Looking at its evaluation of Israel gave an opportunity to contrast two very different views of what the index revealed about Israel.
But the Democracy Index also evaluates "Palestine" and Iran, for example
Which raises the question: How do those two jive with this description of "democracy," from the report?
most observers today would agree that, at a minimum, the fundamental features of a democracy include government based on majority rule and the consent of the governed; the existence of free and fair elections; the protection of minority rights; and respect for basic human rights. Democracy presupposes equality before the law, due process and political pluralism.
Looking at how the report evaluates those countries reminds us of the bias of the West when it comes to the Middle East in general, and these states in particular.
Here is a composite of the scores for Israel as compared with "Palestine" and Iran.
The Middle East and North African (MENA) section consists of 20 countries. Not surprisingly, Israel ranks first.
And guess who ranks 5th out of 20 countries.
In the area of Electoral Process and Pluralism, they rank low -- as you would expect.
But when you read the report, you find that of the 12 questions used to determine the ranking in that category, 9 relate to having elections.
Now we all know that tracking how long Abbas has been president after his 4-year term ended in 2009 is practically a spectator sport. There have been no elections, neither for president nor Parliament. Of the remaining questions about the freedom to form political parties, by no stretch of the imagination would they get full credit.
Also, "Palestine" is classified as a "hybrid" as opposed to a Democracy or Authoritarian. Hybrids are countries where:
Elections have substantial irregularities that often prevent them from being both free and fair. Government pressure on opposition parties and candidates may be common. Serious weaknesses are more prevalent than in flawed democracies—in political culture, functioning of government and political participation. Corruption tends to be widespread and the rule of law is weak. Civil society is weak. Typically, there is harassment of and pressure on journalists, and the judiciary is not independent.
But in the West Bank, they don't have "election irregularities" -- they don't have elections at all!
Contrast the definition of 'hybrid' with the definition of 'authoritarian' government:
In these states, state political pluralism is absent or heavily circumscribed. Many countries in this category are outright dictatorships. Some formal institutions of democracy may exist, but these have little substance. Elections, if they do occur, are not free and fair. There is disregard for abuses and infringements of civil liberties. Media are typically state-owned or controlled by groups connected to the ruling regime. There is repression of criticism of the government and pervasive censorship. There is no independent judiciary.
And in the category of "Political Participation," "Palestine" comes in with a score of 7.78, tied for second place with Tunisia behind Israel. Add to that how the Palestinian score of 7.78 in Political Participation ties with Canada and exceeds the US score of 7.22 and it appears clear that different standards apply to different areas of the world -- the soft bigotry of low expectations.
As it turns out, the Index uses criteria that The Economist has decided are not really all that important:
The Economist Intelligence Unit’s index is based on the view that measures of democracy which reflect the state of political freedoms and civil liberties are not thick enough. They do not encompass sufficiently, or, in some cases, at all, the features that determine how substantive democracy is. Freedom is an essential component of democracy, but not, in itself, sufficient. In existing measures, the elements of political participation and functioning of government are taken into account only in a marginal and formal way.
Yet the report claims that "the condition of holding free and fair competitive
elections, and satisfying related aspects of political freedom, is clearly the sine qua non of all definitions [of Democracy]."
The report also claims "freedom of expression is a sine qua non of democracy"
We have 2 areas that constitute a "sine qua non" of democracy, areas where "Palestine" is clearly deficient, yet it ranks 5th in the Middle East.
This mirrors how Europe bends over backward trying to find excuses not to label Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations and why a corrupt terrorism-sponsoring dictator like Abbas is always welcome in Europe and gets standing ovations.
Apparently, some elements of Democracy are judged to be less important than others when it comes to the Middle East, provided that the country is Muslim or Arab.
The report also expresses its concern numerous times that "anti-terror laws have also been widely criticised for curbing the exercise of freedom of expression in the name of protecting public order and national security." Oddly, there is no indication in the report that those states which commit acts of terrorism lose points at all, which mirrors the EU's general lack of an outcry in response to Abbas's habit of paying stipends to terrorists.
Also, while "Palestine" is included in the list, nowhere is there any indication how "Palestine" is being defined -- does it include Gaza with its Hamas terrorist leadership -- an issue that those calling for a two-state solution never get around to addressing.
Another example of the superficial nature of the evaluations in the report is its rating for Iran, which claims:
an improvement in Iran’s score in 2017, which saw it climb four places to 150th globally as a result of consistently high voter turnout in recent elections.
One correspondent explained that the government also stamps birth certificates at polling stations when the presidential ballot is collected. Those stamps are necessary for university admission, bank loans, or state employment. What reportedly happens is that many voters outside the capital and major cities pick up the presidential ballot in order to qualify for such benefits. The state counts the ballot, and the “voter” spoils the presidential ballot since their interest is local only and they do not wish to legitimize the broader regime.
At a time when the media, traditional as well as social, is understood to have its own biases and agenda, their reports and articles require a critical eye, now more than ever.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
Issam Aqel, a Palestinian-American with Israeli residency, has been detained, arrested and tortured.
You may be surprised that you’ve never heard of Aqel. It’s usual for the plight of the Palestinians to make big news. But the ugly truth is, they only make big news when they’ve been hurt by Israel.
And Aqel was tortured by the Palestinian Authority.
This Palestinian Was Tortured. But No One Cares Because It Wasn’t By Israel. by the Forward
Aqel responded to a PA summons to appear in Ramallah where he was called in to “sign paperwork.” But once he appeared, Aqel wasn’t allowed to leave. According to people who have been in touch with him, he was tortured.
Hi crime? Selling land to Jews.
A few weeks ago, the Palestinian Authority’s security forces announced that it had “foiled” the sale of roughly 741 acres to Jews throughout the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In a statement posted on Facebook, the PA said that in a large-scale operation, 44 Palestinians were arrested for attempting to sell property to Jews.
The use of torture is not unusual in the PA. Another man who I will call Ali to protect his identity testified about it before the Knesset. He said he was taken from his family. He was kept in a cage for weeks at a time. His captors threw hot and cold water, threw garbage and rotten food on top of him. They forced him to sit on broken bottles and hung him upside down for days on end.
Ali is one of 52 so-called “collaborators” who were arrested and tortured in the 1990s and early 2000s. In the PA, collaborating with Israeli security forces is illegal, despite the fact that the Oslo accords call for security collaboration between the Authority and Israel. Over the years, many men and women have been accused of being “collaborators” and tortured and killed for their crimes.
“They punished me for saving lives,” Ali told the Knesset, “for preventing terror attacks.”
The 52 “collaborators” were freed by the IDF during Operation Defensive Shield, an Israeli military operation which tackled the suicide-bomber infrastructure in 2002.
An American-Palestinian, Isaam Akel, was convicted of selling land in East Jerusalem to Jews and sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labor by a Palestinian court: "In accordance with the instructions of clause 2/274 of the [PA] criminal procedures law, the [PA] Grand Criminal Court, which convened in Ramallah, convicted the accused I.A. on the charges attributed to him - an attempt to cut off part of the Palestinian territories and annex them to a foreign state [as described in] Penal Code Number 16 of 1960. Relying on the conviction and in accordance with the instructions of clause 2 of Decision with Legislative Force Number 20 of 2014, the court sentenced him to life with hard labor.
The lawsuit was submitted to the court on Dec. 23, 2018, and the verdict was given approximately a week later."
[WAFA, official PA news agency, Dec. 31, 2018]
The basis for the PA's prosecution of Palestinians for selling land to Jews is article 114 of the Jordanian Criminal Code (1960), which the PA later adopted. The original Jordanian provision stated that a person who attempts to sever any part of the Jordanian territory in order to annex it to a foreign state will be subject to at least five years of hard labor.
In 2014, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas passed an amendment to the law - Government Decision with Legislative Effect (No. 20), 2014 - in which he raised the maximum sentence to life imprisonment with hard labor.
The prosecution of Palestinians for selling land to Jews is not new and enjoys overwhelming Palestinian support.
In October, Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah faction stated: "The Fatah Movement emphasized that the sale of properties and lands to the occupation or their illegal transfer to dubious sources constitutes high treason against the religion, the homeland, and the people, and that 'whoever does this decrees upon himself shame and disgrace in this world and in the world to come.'"
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Oct. 14, 2018]
This position is also reflective of the general opinion of the Palestinians. In a recent study, 87.8% of those surveyed said they would call Palestinians who sell land to Jews "traitors" while 9.1% would call them "corrupt/despicable/non-patriotic." [Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, Dec. 18, 2018]
The fact is that malice toward Israel and Jews is also something that appears regularly in Jordanian media and civil discourse. As the US State Department’s 2017 annual report on international religious freedom noted concerning Jordan, “Editorial cartoons, articles, and postings on social media continued to present negative images of Jews and to conflate anti-Israel sentiment with antisemitic sentiment. The government continued not to take action with regard to antisemitic material appearing in the media, despite laws that prohibit such material.”
HENCE, EVEN though Jordan has formally been at peace with the Jewish state for more than two decades, it appears that our neighbor to the east is shamelessly fomenting antisemitic and anti-Zionist sentiment with little regard for the potentially dire consequences.
This cannot be allowed to continue. With all due respect for Jordan’s so-called “moderating” role in the region, the regime’s actions appear to be anything from moderate and threaten to add fuel to an already combustible situation.
Fortunately, both Israel and the US have leverage with Amman. Washington provided Jordan with $1.3 billion in aid in 2017, and the Jewish state provides the parched kingdom with 50 million cubic meters of desperately needed water annually.
So both in terms of the pocketbook and the pipes, Jordan is reliant on American and Israeli largesse to keep its autocratic rulers afloat. Now more than ever would be a good time to employ these tools to pressure the Jordanian regime to start acting more like a friend, and less like a foe.
Otherwise, there is little reason to continue pouring liquids and liquidity into a country that tramples on its commitments, both literally and figuratively.
Some say that after the Oslo Accords, armed struggle abandoned. However, particularly after the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian resistance, led by Fatah, was set free. In the years of the Intifada, between the years 2000 and 2005, it was set free in a way that was unprecedented in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The fiercest battles between Fatah and Israel took place after the Oslo Accords, not before them. I am referring to the years 2000-2005. This means that that negotiations that ended in failure in Camp David brought about armed resistance by Fatah with a ferocity that had not been seen before the Oslo Accords.
(h/t Yoel)
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On Alice Walker's blog, the author and poet publishes a letter from anti-Zionist Israeli Nurit Peled-Elhanan that pretends to defend the Talmud from Walker's antisemitic essay:
Dear Alice
I read your poem and the criticism of it and I must react.
The people who torture and kill Palestinian have never studied the Talmud. It is not studied in Israeli state schools. And no one can read it on their own. The ones who study it are the ultra-orthodox Jews such as the pro-Palestinian Neturei Karta in NY.
Really? Professor Peled-Elhanan, who has previously published lies about Israeli textbooks supposedly being "racist," is another academic fraud if she thinks that Talmud is only taught among the haredim.
In order to buttress her arguments she says that the disgusting Neturei Karta, rejected by every Orthodox Jewish group, study Talmud!
The quotes (whether true or false) are surely partial and do not characterize this 12 volume work (thousand pages in every volume) whose writing ended thousands of years ago.
Peled-Elhanan, as an academic, should have researched the Talmud a bit herself before giving Walker an out by saying her quotes might be true. She could have done a great service by informing Walker that she was repeating lies in her poem.
She chose not to, and allowed Walker to believe the lies she was hearing.
(And there are far more than 12 volumes of Talmud, none of which have a thousand pages.)
The rest of Nurit's letter is not too inaccurate, although there are errors.
The Talmud is not a prescriptive book. It is an endless interpretation of the Torah, always adapting the Torah to present times so that people can live by it. Ethiopian Jews never studied it and lived by the Torah as is.
In these volumes you read discussion and polemics between different sages about every tiny aspect of human life. And the discussions are brought as they happened, more or less because it was all discussed orally.
But the main thing is that each such discussion ends with: “and so they disagreed” and people would choose the interpretation they wanted. Every argument that is brought is immediately countered by an opposite argument and the discussion that ensued. It is always open ended.
In my time we learned a bit of it and I loved it, because it is Logic, like reading Plato. Today schools don’t teach it anymore.
So in order to know what is in the Talmud – which none of the non-orthodox Israelis or Jews know – you have to read at least a whole chapter, pros and cons etc.
One of the most discussed subjects in the Talmud as in the Torah is the treatment of foreigners, workers, slaves etc. Extremely human and enlightening.
I don’t want you to be trapped in superficial propaganda of ignorant people. And again: the reason for the ruthlessness and violence towards Palestinians is not to be found in ancient writings but in Modern ones. It is Modernity and European Enlightenment that brought slavery, colonialism, Fascism and Totalitarianism, national movements such as Zionism and the way to treat people as superfluous. Auschwitz was not prescribed in any ancient scripture, neither is Israeli colonialism.
Much love
Nurit
–
Prof. Nurit Peled-Elhanan
Walker responds with a newer poem where she repeatedly refers to "Zionist Nazis" as not representing all Jews, but those "Zionist Nazis" are pretty evil. An excerpt:
Zionist Nazis are not the Jews I know; terrorists who would and do kill anyone and anything to get what they want: Control over everyone.
(When you take out the random line breaks that make this drivel "poetry" the hate is much clearer.)
Walker is saying that "Zionists" want to control the world and everyone in it, and are willing to do any immoral act to achieve their aims.
Which is exactly what the Protocols of the Elders of Zion says!
Since over 90% of Jews support the existence of a Jewish state, Walker is saying that nearly all Jewish people are terrorist killers hellbent on world domination. But, no, she's not antisemitic, because she loves the other Jews.
Even after this explicit antisemitism, Walker pretends to be righteous:
I will never be divided from my friends, no matter how bad Zionist Nazis are making Jews look.
She can distinguish between good and evil Nazi Jews, but sadly, many others (on her side!) cannot. Which means that when Jews are shot dead for being Jews, from Pittsburgh to Paris to "Palestine," you can give the murderers the benefit of the doubt because they really hate Zionism and Zionists are to blame for making all Jews look bad.
A rough analogy would be for a white person to say "I will never abandon my black friends, no matter how bad the welfare queens and gangbangers and muggers make all black people look."
Then Walker addresses the Talmud specifically to Nurit:
As someone ignorant (yes, this is true) of what is in the ancient texts in their totality, I am, millions of us are, still wounded by the parts that have been inherited by word of mouth, over generations, and millennia, and are recognized as active in human behavior today. I don’t see how we will ever have peace without examining the deep past, and letting go of those parts that mean endless contention and war and suffering.
Walker's response is that the evil Talmud is in the DNA of all Jews and her extensive exposure of it using neo-Nazi YouTube videos helps excise the poison from the Jewish DNA.
THIS IS ANTISEMITISM.
Her letter talks about love but one doesn't have to scratch very much beneath the surface to see the hate and ignorance that fuels Walker.
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Fatah was founded in 1954, but no one celebrates the anniversary of its founding.
Instead, Fatah celebrates the anniversary of the first terror attack it mounted against Israel, on January 1 (some say the 3rd,) 1965.
The terror group attempted to bomb Israel's National Water Carrier. Meaning, their very first act was to deprive Israelis of water.
And this is what is being celebrated today.
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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 over 19 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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