Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, January 25, 2019

01/25 Links Pt1: Is Israel’s Inevitable War With Iran Already Underway?; Israel’s Foes Finally Admit That Rocks Can Kill; BDS blacklist under review by UN body will harm Palestinians

From Ian:

Ruthie Blum: Is Israel’s Inevitable War With Iran Already Underway?

Meanwhile, the Iranian regime — weakened by restored US sanctions and the massive unrest of its subjugated populace — is boasting about its military prowess. This is par for the course in Tehran, particularly as the ruling mullahs are marking the 40th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, which ousted Shah Reza Pahlavi and ushered in Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s reign of terror.

In an interview with Iranian state TV on Tuesday, Ali Akbar Salehi, head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, went as far as to flaunt the regime’s nuclear achievements, thanks in large measure to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the nuclear deal signed with world powers in 2015 — which, he said, “marinated” Iran’s right to enrich uranium.

The only drawback he mentioned was the fact that “for Europeans, a centrifuge takes eight years from designing to become operational, while the process takes us 10 years.”

Salehi then announced that he would be traveling at the end of the month to Ardakan “to oversee the transport of 30 tons of yellowcake produced … there to [the Uranium Conversion Facility at] Isfahan, [which] means that the Ardakan site has become operational.”

It would be a grave mistake to dismiss Salehi’s words as mere saber-rattling, given the Iranian regime’s stated intention and increasingly overt attempts to annihilate Israel, even at its own potential peril. Rather than looking the other way, at best — or, worse, condemning Israel at international forums — the world should be thanking the Jewish state for doing its dirty work. The inevitable war against Iran should have been fought by America decades ago. Today, it is up to the IDF.

When the snow melts on Mount Hermon, we Israelis will be back in shorts and sandals, heading for the polls this spring to elect the next Knesset. The only question at this point is whether we will be doing so in bomb shelters.

House Majority Leader Calls for US Recognition of Israeli Sovereignty Over Golan

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) has called for the United States to recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, the congressman’s office told Jewish Insider.

The Golan spans about 700 square miles and directly abuts what is now a civil-war-torn Syria.

This development comes as members of Congress have called for the Trump administration to formally acknowledge Israeli control of the Golan Heights, a geographical security barrier for Israel in the fight against terrorism from Hezbollah, with its growing arsenal of missiles and rockets, and other Iranian-backed groups.

Earlier this week, Iranian fighter jets fired a surface-to-surface missile at the Golan Heights, prompting Israel to launch a massive attack on numerous Iranian targets in Syria.

Last week, Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) sent a letter to US President Donald Trump calling for the official recognition.

Gottheimer followed Senators Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who introduced a resolution last month that stated, “Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights is critical to Israel’s national security,” and that “Israel’s security from attack from Syria and Lebanon cannot be assured without Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.”

Jonathan S. Tobin: Israel’s Foes Finally Admit That Rocks Can Kill

As far as the mainstream media is usually concerned, when rocks are thrown in the Middle East, it’s nothing to get too worked up about. When Palestinian mobs throw rocks at Israeli soldiers at the Gaza border fence as part of their effort to cross into the Jewish state and commit mayhem, such actions are generally depicted as a non-lethal form of protest.

Ever since the Palestinians launched an intifada — a “national uprising” — in December of 1987, rock-throwing has been treated as a popular form of protest against Israel. Indeed, the act of throwing rocks at Jews has long since become an iconic symbol of the “resistance” to Israel, glorified in Palestinian culture, poems, and songs. Throwing rocks at soldiers and settlers — or their cars and buses — has become something like a national sport, as well as a rite of passage for Arab youth.

Incidents of stone-throwing at Jewish targets are a daily occurrence, and so numerous that Israel barely bothers to keep statistics on them. But we do know that at least 14 Israelis have been killed as a result of car crashes caused by rock-throwing or direct blows. When Palestinians are arrested in connection with such crimes, they are either depicted sympathetically as legitimate combatants using the only weapons available to them, or as children who are unjustly harassed or even tortured by the Israeli army and police for what is, at worst, nothing more than so-called teenage mischief-making.

But after more than 30 years of such stories in the media, the international press has finally decided to treat this “harmless” activity in the West Bank as a crime.

A Palestinian women was killed in October when she was struck in the head by a stone thrown by what police believe was a group of Israeli teenagers. Aisha Rabi, a mother of nine, was with her husband and two of their children driving in a car when the crime occurred. The suspects are students at a West Bank yeshiva high school — one of whom remains in custody since being arrested in December due to the fact that, according to Israeli authorities, traces of his DNA was found on the stone that killed Rabi.

The case raises a lot of uncomfortable questions for both Arabs and Jews.

Fatah issued a statement yesterday, calling on Palestinian Arabs to defend the Al Aqsa Mosque and surrounding area against "attacks and the successive incursions, the latest of which was this morning with the Israeli police chief, accompanied by a number of settlers who wreak havoc in the holy sites."

Member of the Revolutionary Council of Fatah Osama al-Qawasmi asked, "Where the Arab and Islamic nations concerning these crimes against the first Qibla and the third holiest mosques, and against the Prophet of Islam, peace be upon him? ...These crimes and violations are a prelude to Netanyahu's visit to al-Aqsa which will explode the situation completely."

The specific incident that upset them so was an apparent visit to the Dome of the Rock by IDF veterans who had captured the Temple Mount in 1967. Here's video of them walking through the site very quickly, upsetting a single shouting woman for twenty seconds asking why they have to be there.

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Ireland closer to a bizarre law that could penalize Google or Facebook for having Jerusalem employees

From JTA:

The lower house of Ireland’s Parliament approved a bill on Thursday that would ban the import or sale of goods originating in all “occupied territories,” with lawmakers’ discussions centered on eastern Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and the West Bank.

The Dail passed the measure by a vote of 78-45 with three abstentions. It is the second of a five-phase process, according to reports.

The measure introduced by the conservative Fianna Fáil – The Republican Party would make illegal “the import and sales of goods, services and natural resources originating in illegal settlements in occupied territories.” Sinn Fein, a left-wing party, supported the bill.

Fianna Fáil foreign affairs spokesman Niall Collins told the Irish Independent ahead of the vote that his party has become “increasingly concerned about the actions of Israel and its continued and blatant disregard for international law.” He said the bill would not harm trade in Israeli goods, just goods produced in the settlements.

Actually, the bill can and would affect lots more than "goods produced in the settlements."

The text of the proposed law says, in part,

Provision of a settlement service
8. (1) It shall be an offence for a person to provide or attempt to provide a settlement service.
(2) It shall be an offence for a person to assist another person to provide or attempt to provide a settlement service.

“settlement service” means a service provided in whole or in part within a relevant occupied territory by an illegal settler.

10. (1) A person who is guilty of an offence under section 6, 7, 8 or 9 is liable—
(a) on summary conviction to a class A fine or to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 12 months or to both, and
(b) on conviction on indictment to a fine not exceeding €250,000 or imprisonment for a term not exceeding 5 years or to both.

If Apple or Google or Microsoft have employees who are allowed to telecommute from one of the many Jewish areas of Jerusalem that Ireland considers "occupied," then the high tech companies are assisting that person in providing a settlement service and could be fined and jailed.

As Eli Lake writes in Bloomberg, this would not only force the companies to choose between doing business in Ireland or Israel, but also could run foul of US laws:

This would place U.S. companies in a bind. If they follow Irish law, they would have to either fire the telecommuting employee or not allow the employee to work from home. If they did that, however, the companies would be participating in a boycott not sanctioned by the U.S. government. And that, as Kittrie observed last year, would in turn risk violating the anti-boycott sections of U.S. export regulations.

Beyond that, if an Irish citizen visits Israel and decides to visit this kosher coffee shop in the Old City, she could be fined up to €250,000 and go to prison for five years.

And don't be fooled by the language of the law that says it is against any occupation. As Trocaire - an NGO that supports this legislation - writes:

2. DOES THIS BILL ONLY AFFECT ISRAEL?
If enacted, the legislation would apply to territories where there is a clear international legal consensus on the status of the occupation. As it stands, only the occupied Palestinian territories have been confirmed as occupied by the International Court of Justice. However, this Bill allows for other territories to be included so long as there is consensus between the Minister for Foreign Affairs & Trade and both houses of the Oireachtas.

It just so happens that Irish oil firms Island Oil & Gas, Longreach and San Leon are stealing oil from Western Sahara territory occupied by Morocco, and the native Sahwaris aren't happy about it. But this bill doesn't cover that.

When an "anti-occupation" bill is written in such a way that it only targets the Jewish state while allowing corporations to profit from other occupied territories, you can safely say that it is antisemitic.

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The biggest BDSFail that you never heard about

In 2015, the BDS Movement was ecstatic over some economic news:

"BDS was a major factor behind the 46% drop in foreign direct investment in Israel in 2014, according to a UN report," the BDS webpage still says.

YNet reported, "The report contains one very glum statistic; in 2014 $6.4 billion were invested in Israel, whereas in 2013 $11.8 billion were invested - a decline of about 46%."

It turns out the UN report didn't blame BDS for the drop, but one of the Israeli economists who wrote the UN report said it might be because of a combination of BDS and the 2014 Gaza war -and admitted that her theory was only conjecture. But that guess was enough to excite the Israel-haters.

Mondoweiss was over the moon, quoting Bisan Mitri, Palestinian BDS National Committee secretariat member, who said, "Ten years after its launch, the BDS movement is being recognised by one of the authors of a UN report as starting to have major impacts on the Israeli economy. Israel’s shift to the far-right, its intentional crimes against Palestinians and the BDS movement and rapid changes in public opinion following Israel’s massacre of Palestinians in Gaza last summer mean that Israel is increasingly becoming a less attractive investment destination."

BDS was claiming this victory across the board, with no caveats. They knew that they were having a major effect on Israel's economy. They raised money based on this victory.

So how has direct foreign investment in Israel done since then?

It has more than tripled!

The 2018 report shows that Israel's FDI inflows has soared from $6 billion to nearly $19 billion in only three years!

Yes, the statistic that was giving Israel-haters virtual orgasms in 2015 as proof that Israel's fortunes are finally on a downturn is now seen, three years later, to have been an anomaly - and Israel has not only tripled its FDI inflows, but it was ranked #18 in the world in 2017 (up from #27 in 2016), far higher than even the UK!

Israel's 2017 increase of 59% is even more astonishing considering that the total FDI inflows to developed countries decreased by one third in 2017, from $1.1 trillion to $720 million.

In the end, the very nature of foreign investment is based on some very large deals, and it is going to vary a lot from year to year.

If BDS is going to take credit for Israel's dip in FDI in 2014, then it must take responsibility for Israel's huge FDI increase in 2017. Which means that if BDS was a corporation, its CEO should resign in disgrace for how poor it meets its stated goals.

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01/24 Links Pt2: Don’t Believe Ilhan Omar; Rachel Riley: Why I spoke out about Labour’s anti-Semitism shame; How Al Jazeera Dresses Up Its Anti-Semitism for an English-Speaking Audience

From Ian:

Don’t Believe Ilhan Omar

She “unknowingly” offended Jews by saying that Israel hypnotized the world not to see its evil? Nonsense. In the Greater Middle East, from which Omar’s family hails, conspiracy theory is the coin of the realm, and much self-inflicted grief is blamed on dark Jewish magic. It’s ludicrous to think that she didn’t know what she was saying. Omar composed her offending tweet during Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza and was, in all probability, speaking foremost to an audience that truly believes in the evils of Jewish sorcery.

We’re talking here about people who embrace a strain of superstitious anti-Semitism that sees Jews as non-human agents of the Devil. In January 2015, for example, after Islamist terror attacks rocked Paris, a Daily Beast writer interviewed some French Algerians who blamed the attacks on “magical shape-shifting Jews that were master manipulators that could be everywhere at the same time.” We’re talking about the Iranian cleric and Tehran University professor who went on television and claimed: “The Jew is very practiced in sorcery. Indeed most sorcerers are Jews.”

This is the crowd that Ilhan Omar—an American congresswoman who now serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee—was speaking to. In their language.

The history of mystical anti-Semitism is long indeed. It predates Christendom and thrived, at times, long afterward. Martin Luther wrote that “a Jew is as full of idolatry and sorcery as nine cows have hair on their backs, that is: without number and without end.” Such notions were popular throughout Medieval Europe and survived in various forms into the modern age. The Third Reich was, in part, an occult operation. Official Nazi publications discussed phenomena such as the “Jewish evil eye.”

Omar’s talent for untruth is evident in the way she went about pretending not to be a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, which advocates actions aimed at delegitimizing the existence of the world’s only Jewish state. After she was safely elected, Omar freely confessed her support for the BDS movement—a tacit acknowledgment of its controversial nature.

Rachel Riley: Why I spoke out about Labour’s anti-Semitism shame

You need to know next to nothing to propagate Nazi or Soviet Jew-hating propaganda, reframed to fit today’s narrative, which spreads like wildfire and is dangerous. But you need to know nearly everything in order to combat it. The odds are stacked in the anti-Semite’s favour. Every Labour official who labels this a smear, every disciplinary decision that gives the perpetrator a free pass while its victims are abused or even disciplined themselves, is a disgrace. My level of engagement in this issue is directly proportional to the amount of anti-Semitism and hostility to Jews and their allies I’m witness to, which is why it’s currently consuming my life.

Since speaking out, I’ve attracted the attention of a Who’s Who of anti-Semites and apologists, who’ve publicly criticised me. Neo-Nazis, naturally, have also shown their interest. A local Labour Party secretary repeatedly libelled me to Channel 4, ignoring my requests for her to check her facts and stop. Labour supporters have taken it upon themselves to contact my employers, calling for me to be sacked, suggesting we should rename our show ‘8 out of 10 Cats does Paedophilia’ in my honour. I’ve seen thousands of untrue slights against my character, with those making them knowing they can do so to praise from their echo-chambers, in all likelihood with impunity – yet one misplaced word from me could be ruinous.

We need to re-stack those odds. No-one should have to risk their safety and jeopardise their career speaking out against anti-Semitism in Britain in 2019. This has been happening to others for the last three years. Campaigners – the large majority ex-Labour people, deeply hurt by what they are seeing – have been called every name under the sun. They’ve postponed careers, degrees, lost businesses through harassment and, in recent weeks, I’ve even seen three people baselessly libelled as paedophiles in a desperate attempt to discredit and silence them, and it’s all been allowed to happen in quiet.

It’s lonely speaking out about this. And we can’t win this fight alone, nor should we have to try. We’ve seen where anti-Semitism can lead from centuries of persecution. It never ends well. We need to remember our history and I am so grateful to groups like the Holocaust Educational Trust and speakers like Eva Clarke, who, by sharing their stories, help in the only way we know how to safeguard future generations from this ever being allowed to happen again.

This needs a bigger spotlight. This should be a national scandal. We need action rather than words. I call on all people, the media and politicians from every side to stand with us and Be Louder against anti-Semitism. Enough is enough.

Joe Rogan: NY Times Writer Details Anti-Semitism by Progressives

Know How to Answer, part 19: "Palestine is not viable without contiguity or Jerusalem"

Latest in the series...

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.

Here is part 19.

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Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

Matti Friedman explains what should be obvious when he says that there is no Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

There isn’t an Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the way that many outsiders seem to think, and this perception gap is worth spelling out. It has nothing to do with being right-wing or left-wing in the American sense. To borrow a term from the world of photography, the problem is one of zoom. Simply put, outsiders are zoomed in, and people here in Israel are zoomed out. Understanding this will make events here easier to grasp.

Zoom out and you will see, Friedman explains, that only a minority of Israel’s enemies, historically and currently, are Palestinian Arabs. Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and even Yemen joined with the Palestinians in an attempt to snuff out the newly-declared State of Israel in 1948. Today Iran and her Shiite proxies – Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Iraqi militias entrenching themselves in Syria are Israel’s most formidable enemies, with Hamas, the Qatari-financed offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, playing a secondary role.

Compared to the Palestinians, Israel looks strong, Goliath to their David. But in the context of the overall Muslim Middle East, Israel, with its relatively small population and lack of strategic depth, is threatened.

And this, says Friedman, is why the peace processors don’t get it. Clinton, Bush, and Obama were all “Zoomed in” on Israel and the Palestinians, while not understanding the broader context. Although we haven’t heard Trump’s proposal yet, it will likely have the same defect.

Friedman is right, as far as he goes. He doesn’t mention the reason that five Arab armies invaded the new state of Israel in 1948, or the reason the “peace” agreements with Egypt and Jordan are cold, pragmatic deals that greatly benefit the autocratic regimes of those countries, while not moving a centimeter in the direction of the normalization of everyday relations between the nations that was supposed to follow. It certainly isn’t because these countries care about the welfare of Palestinians. The invaders of 1948 did not turn over the areas that they controlled to Palestinian Arabs, and indeed treated them quite cruelly. It was Israel, not Jordan, that created the autonomous Palestinian Authority, and it was Israel, not Egypt, that turned over control of Gaza to the Palestinians.

Of course there are the usual geopolitical explanations for the broader conflict, but they are not sufficient to explain its persistence or its virulence. While it’s clear that Iran is hostile toward Israel for geopolitical reasons – Israel is seen as an outpost of American power in the region that Iran wishes to dominate – there is also a special degree of hatred that is reserved for Israel above other Iranian opponents. Iran does not threaten to destroy Saudi Arabia, a closer and more immediate rival. Iranian demonstrators rarely if ever chant “death to Saudia.”

I believe that the ultimate source of this enmity is the principle – literally an “article of faith” in the Muslim Middle East – that a sovereign Jewish state in the region is an abomination to Allah, and it is their religious duty to destroy it. This religious/racial principle is sometimes expressed verbally by saying “Israel is a cancer” that must be excised from the Middle East, a sentiment expressed both by the Iranian regime and in Palestinian Authority media. This is Muslim rejectionism.

But I think even this analysis doesn’t go far enough. Resentment and hatred of Jews, deeply ensconced in Christian tradition, is found throughout post-Christian Europe. While in most of Europe the moral principles of Christianity have been transmuted into a kind of universalist humanism (much like Reform Judaism), the visceral hatred of the Jew that “killed their God” hasn’t disappeared; it’s just been turned toward the Jewish state, today the bearer of the guilt of Judas, with the suffering Palestinians taking on the role of the crucified Savior. Of course the irony in this is that the Muslims that are besieging Europe today are as almost as hostile to non-Muslim sovereignty there as they are against the Jewish variety in the Middle East (ordinary Europeans are beginning to understand this, although many of their leaders don’t seem to get it yet).

I suggest that to really understand the conflicts surrounding Israel since its coming into being, one needs to zoom out even further than Friedman does. One needs to take into account that not only Arabs and Muslims are viscerally opposed to the concept of Jewish sovereignty, many Europeans and even some circles in America are too. Although they might not go as far as to compare Israel to a malignant tumor, they are quite comfortable saying that the creation of Israel was a mistake. Friedman’s lens must be widened to include not just the greater Middle East, but much of the Western world.

And this enables us to understand why the “peace” proposals based on Israeli concessions to the Palestinians keep coming, despite the fact that they have repeatedly been shown incapable of ameliorating the real problem, Muslim rejectionism of Jewish sovereignty. Even those in the West who do not completely reject the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in a sovereign state, adhere to a milder form of rejectionism: they may accept the idea of a Jewish state, but they firmly believe that the conflict surrounding it is a result of its being an alien element that doesn’t belong in its neighborhood. Therefore the solutions they choose always involve Israel adapting herself to the region and not the opposite. And this always means Israel meeting the demands of her neighbors. Of course, those demands will never end until there is no more Israel.

I can’t leave Friedman’s article without noting one jarring paragraph, possibly written as it was at the request of his NY Times editor:

When I look at the West Bank as an Israeli, I see 2.5 million Palestinian civilians living under military rule, with all the misery that entails. I’m seeing the many grave errors our governments have made in handling the territory and its residents, the construction of civilian settlements chief among them.

Suddenly we are back to “settlements” and “military rule” (actually, this is incorrect, since around 95% of the Palestinians in Judea/Samaria live in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority). Friedman, who has shown himself capable of understanding the strategic imperatives of Israel’s military control of the land, is nevertheless still stuck in the Sisyphean mud of the “2-state solution” (just like my fictitious Uncle Max two Passovers ago). Is Friedman himself guilty of the mild rejectionism that demands that Israel should pay the price for her neighbors’ violent racism?

Despite this – the obligatory mea culpa of every Jewish liberal or centrist writer on the subject – we should take Friedman’s advice and zoom out to see the conflict in its true, worldwide and historicalcontext. And stay out of the mud.

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01/24 Links Pt1: PA spent at least 502 million shekels in payments to terrorists in 2018; Dershowitz: Time to tell the truth about the Palestinian issue; Can Zionists Advocate for Palestinian Rights?

From Ian:

PMW exclusive: PA spent at least 502 million shekels in payments to terrorist prisoners in 2018

As Israel is preparing to implement a new law that imposes financial sanctions on the PA for its "Pay for Slay" policy, PMW has looked at the PA's financial reports for 2018 which includes its payments to terrorist prisoners and released terrorist prisoners

While the PA does not provide details of how this money was allocated between the terrorist prisoners and the released terrorist prisoners, PMW calculations, based solely on open sources, show that:

At least 230 million shekels were paid in salaries to terrorist prisoners

At least 176 million shekels were paid in salaries to released terrorist prisoners

The remaining 96 million shekels covers additional salary payments and other benefits to the terrorist prisoners and released terrorist prisoners that PMW is unable to precisely quantify

According to its own budgetary update, in 2018 the Palestinian Authority spent no less than 502 million shekels on salaries and other payments to terrorist prisoners and released terrorist prisoners.

While the PA does not provide information how the 502 million shekels was allocated between the terrorist prisoners and the released terrorist prisoners, using open sources only, Palestinian Media Watch has calculated, subject to a number of limitations, these figures.

Using information obtained from the Israeli Prison Service (IPS), PMW has calculated that the Palestinian Authority paid at least 230 million shekels in salary payments to terrorist prisoners in 2018.

For example, based on the information provided by the IPS that appears in the 2 left hand columns in the chart below ("time served" and "number of prisoners") and the PA's own terrorist prisoner pay scale ("salary" column), PMW has calculated that in the month of January 2018 alone the PA paid almost 20 million shekels in salaries to the terrorist prisoners.

Can Zionists Advocate for Palestinian Rights?

A lieutenant colonel in the Israeli Navy Seals, Hendel grew up in the settlement of Elakana. “My father would give rides to Arabs who lived nearby and he made sure to tell me that while we may be in a conflict, individual Arabs are not our enemies.”

Hendel says he started Blue and White to work for human rights from a Zionist perspective. Today, there are nearly 40 volunteers in their programs.

Some of these are ex-combat soldiers who speak to 12th graders in the year before their enlistment. These soldiers speak of their experiences in the army with Palestinians and human rights groups. They talk about the importance of the IDF ethical code, of the need to be moral at all costs.

“We need to take back these values,” Hendel says. “This is why we take groups to the checkpoints. To see reality. It’s not Auschwitz—it’s a border where soldiers need to be patient with people crossing while making sure that they don’t let in terrorists.”

Lipaz Ella was one of those who visited the crossings with Blue and White. While working at UCLA as a Jewish Agency Israel fellow, students initiated a program called Fact Finders to learn about the conflict from both sides on the ground. “Checkpoints were one of the places they wanted to see. In UCLA during Apartheid Week, groups build checkpoints on campus. The students see these things on campus and want to see them for themselves in reality.” In planning the trip, the group arranged to visit the Rachel checkpoint between Bethlehem and Jerusalem.

“We were surprised to see Israeli volunteers helping Palestinians arrange permits for medical treatment and work. The students were told [in UCLA] that Israel erected checkpoints to prevent Palestinians from the right of movement. Even Jewish students who are better informed than others were surprised to see reality, the lines moving, the technology used for efficiency (biometric permits), etc. We spoke to Israeli officers and heard from Palestinians as they came through. The students saw with their own eyes the reality of the situation. They saw that it isn’t black and white.”

Caroline Glick: The Iranian Revolution and Establishment Prejudice

In 2007, the Bush administration accepted the National Intelligence Estimate that falsely claimed Iran had abandoned its nuclear program in 2003. And in 2014, the Obama administration based its nuclear diplomacy with Iran – diplomacy that paved Iran’s path to a nuclear arsenal – on the false assertion that President Hassan Rouhani is a moderate.

Just as the Carter administration ignored Khomeini’s own writings and his ties to the PLO, and viewed concerns about both as Israeli propaganda, so in these subsequent encounters with the Iranian regime, U.S. officials dismissed or held suspect evidence that Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons or otherwise undermining regional and global security as Israeli propaganda.

Facing this wall of cynical disbelief, last year Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu felt compelled to risk the lives of dozens of top Mossad operatives and send them to Tehran to take physical possession of Iran’s nuclear archive, and spirit it out of the country.

And even after Israel produced the Iranian documents which proved that Iran was developing a nuclear weapon, European officials and former Obama administration officials accused Israel of lying.

There are plenty of lessons to learn from the Iranian revolution that brought Iran and the world the now 40-year-old nightmare of the Islamic regime.

But as far as the West is concerned, the first lesson must be that you cannot understand the Middle East – or anything for that matter – if you judge events and people through the filter of irrational prejudice.

Bibi's elastic library

This week Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu released another of his excellent videos, this one describing how Israel is very supportive of the people of Iran, but not their regime.

I noticed that in this and similar videos Bibi has volumes of the Talmud and other Jewish texts behind him. (Usually there is an Israeli flag as well, but not when the primary audience is Iranian!)

I discovered that when Bibi is speaking in Hebrew to his Israeli audience, in videos that are not meant for the rest of the world, his library is quite a bit different - secular Hebrew texts and an encyclopedia (I believe Encyclopedia Hebraica) but not Jewish texts.

Does he think that religious Jewish texts would turn off his Israeli audience? Very possibly.

And he seems to believe that the subtle message to give to the world is that Israel is where the Jewish people have been centered for millennia. (Also, he probably realizes that his Jewish support in the Diaspora is disproportionately religious and he wants to maintain that support.)

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From AP:

A federal judge on Wednesday let stand an Arkansas law requiring state contractors to pledge not to boycott Israel, ruling that such a boycott is not protected by the First Amendment.

U.S. District Judge Brian Miller dismissed the lawsuit the Arkansas Times had filed challenging the 2017 law. The newspaper had asked the judge to block the law, which requires contractors with the state to reduce their fees by 20 percent if they don't sign the pledge.

The Times' lawsuit said the University of Arkansas Pulaski Technical College refused to contract for advertising with the newspaper unless the Arkansas Times signed the pledge. The paper isn't engaged in a boycott against Israel.

Miller wrote that refusing to purchase items isn't protected speech. He noted that the Times wouldn't be barred from other protected forms of speech, including writing or picketing against Israel policies.

"It may even call upon others to boycott Israel, write in support of such boycotts, and engage in picketing and pamphleteering to that effect. This does not mean, however, that its decision to refuse to deal, or to refrain from purchasing certain goods, is protected by the First Amendment," Miller wrote.

Arkansas' law is similar to restrictions enacted in other states that have been challenged. The measures are aimed at a movement protesting Israel's policies toward Palestinians. A federal judge in September blocked Arizona from enforcing a similar measure. A federal judge also blocked Kansas from enforcing its anti-boycott measure, but lawmakers rewrote the measure so that it no longer applied to individuals and nonprofits and only applied to state contracts worth $100,000 or more. Arkansas' law applies to contracts worth $1,000 or more.

The judge is correct. Boycotts aren't speech - they are actions, which are not protected by the First Amendment.

And they are discriminatory actions. If boycotting Israel is considered free speech, then so should boycotting African American businesses, or women-owned businesses.

The ACLU disagrees:

"We disagree with the district court's decision, which contradicts two recent federal court decisions and which would radically limit the First Amendment right to boycott," said Holly Dickson, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas, which represented the Times.

Yet the argument that refusing to do business with a specific group is not considered a First Amendment issue was given by none other than the ACLU themselves, which wrote in another case:

We filed our brief to explain why the First Amendment does not give a commercial business license to offer services to the general public and then – in violation of a state’s public accommodation law – refuse to provide photography services to particular customers based on their race, sex, religion, sexual orientation, age, disability, or any other characteristic. Under Elane Photography’s proposal, customers could walk into the photography studio at Sears or JCPenny for a family portrait and be told they cannot have their picture taken because they are a Latino family, or a Jewish family, or a family with a child who has Down Syndrome. A photography studio could tell an interracial family that taking their portrait would create expression celebrating their interracial relationship and that it would violate the studio’s First Amendment rights to participate in that expression.

I see no First Amendment difference between a "boycott" by a business of gay customers, as the Elane Photography case was, and a refusal to do business with Israeli-linked people or companies. In neither case is the issue free speech, as the ACLU says explicitly.

Refusing to accommodate a gay couple on religious grounds may be a different story, because then there is a case of two differing sets of rights that contradict each other and those cases need to be decided by a judge to determine whose rights are more important under the law. But in this case, it is clear that boycotting itself is not considered free speech, even when the boycott is done through a medium of expression such as, as the ACLU letter notes, "countless other businesses that use words, pictures, or other forms of creative expression, including court reporting services, translation services, graphic-design agencies, architecture firms, sound technicians, print shops, and dance studios, almost any good or service involving computer code, makeup artists, hair stylists, florists, and countless other services."

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Sephardic/Mizrahi Jews prove how antisemitic and bigoted the "progressive" Jewish Voice for Peace, @WomensMarch are

Two different articles published in the past couple of days are very instructive in pointing out the racism of the supposedly "progressive" Left.

One was from a group of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish organizations, excoriating the Jewish Voice for Peace in its defense of being anti-Zionist.

JVP wrote:

Zionism is and was an Ashkenazi-led movement that othered, marginalized and discriminated against Jews from across the Middle East and North Africa that it termed Mizrahim (the ‘Eastern Ones’).

In a scathing response, the Sephardic groups showed how JVP was racist in its misrepresenting the Sephardic experience:

We are writing to express our denunciation with Jewish Voice for Peace’s (JVP) latest document, “Our Approach to Zionism”, which tokenizes, appropriates, revises and explicitly lies about Mizrahi and Sephardic history and experiences in order to promote a hostile, anti-Israel agenda. As Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews, we reject JVP’s framing of the Mizrahi and Sephardic experience as a driving force of their anti-Zionism and we request that JVP remove all references to Mizrahi and Sephardic history in this document and in all other organizational literature. We ask them to stop in their failed attempts to represent Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews, in any capacity.

.... Because it cannot accept the simple historical truth that most Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews are and continue to identify as Zionist, JVP instead propagates a portrayal of Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews as pawns without any agency. We reject this revisionism, and call it out for the orientalism and racism that it is.

...Today, the majority of the Mizrahi and Sephardic community resides in Israel, and the vast majority of Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews, in Israel and in diaspora, are self-identified Zionists. In seeking to obscure that reality in service of its own narrow ideological ends, the JVP statement perpetuates a history of racist exclusion where Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews are spoken for and spoken over.

The document fails to recognize and address the rampant state-sanctioned anti-Semitism – frequently taken under the banner of anti-Zionism in the 20th century. Under the color of law, one million indigenous Jews from the Middle East and North Africa were persecuted, dispossessed and ultimately fled or were ethnically cleansed from countries their ancestors lived in millenia. Of those, 650,000 found refuge in Israel, the place where they regained freedom, rights and a sense of personal security. It fails to grapple with the terrible truth that the most tangible political accomplishment of anti-Zionism in the 20th century was not to establish a Palestinian state, but to engender the decimation of Mizrahi and Sephardic Jewish communities across the Middle East. As a (now-publicly) anti-Zionist organization whose spokespeople and leadership continue to be predominantly Western and Ashkenazi, JVP must reckon with the deeply-embedded anti-Mizrahi and Sephardic orientation inside the anti-Zionist movement.

...Simply put, in the fight for Mizrahi equality, JVP has not been and is not now an ally, and more often than not it is has explicitly aligned itself with those who have done us harm. We condemn its self-congratulatory and ahistorical attempt to position itself as a friend of the Mizrahi community even as it continues to talk over and erase actual, extant, and living Mizrahi and Sephardic Jewish community organizations.

There is an equally scathing article from Sarah Levin, a Sephardic Jew, describing exactly what is wrong with the Women's March from the perspective of Jewish women whose families lived in Muslim countries.

Jewish women from Arab countries have a visceral understanding and concern of the inequities and oppression faced by women in the Middle East. Our mothers and grandmothers lived to tell stories of being oppressed, third-class citizens who fled or were chased out of the region as refugees because of anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist governments. They moved on only to have their experiences and resulting outlooks ignored.

... Controversies around “white Jews” versus women of color ignore important nuances of Jewish diversity by totally leaving out Mizrahi and Sephardic Jewish women. This erasure further alienates Sephardic and Mizrahi women. It feels as though our inclusion in the national Women’s March will only be welcomed if we align with a narrative where Middle Eastern women stand in opposition to the views of “privileged, white Jews” and Zionism. I totally reject this. Sephardic and Mizrahi women’s intersectionality provides incredible opportunities for relationship-building in progressive spaces, but the vast majority of us continue to be on the margins, unable to feel we belong or are truly, unconditionally welcomed in movements like the Women’s March.

My refusal to participate in the Women’s March was fueled by progressive feminists in the United States, including Jews, who routinely ignore the very real and ongoing plight of Middle Eastern women, including Jewish women. This is personal for me as I reflect on my great-grandmother who fled anti-Semitism in Turkey, and as I sit and listen to my mother-in-law recall traumatic memories of escaping state-sanctioned anti-Semitic persecution in Iraq. I don’t want to join any women’s movement that doesn’t speak out loudly and boldly against the mass human-rights violations and brutal oppression of Muslim, LGBTQ and religious minority women in Arab countries as a result of war, extreme patriarchy and misogynistic religious interpretation.

The Women's March and JVP and the other "progressive" movements have chosen to align themselves with the misogynist Muslims, whom they consider to be people of color, and to ignore the non-European women who have been oppressed throughout centuries by those very same Muslims.

Given a choice of two groups of women who have the same skin tone, the "progressive" movement chooses to support the oppressors and to ignore the oppressed (except to use them cynically and against their will to score political points.) Their actions contradict everything they claim about intersectionality and women's rights and human rights.

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Donate Jewish prayer books to hospitals that need them!

Last month, after my mother in law passed away, Mrs. Elder and I decided to fundraise to purchase Jewish prayer books, Psalms and chumashim for hospitals where patients or their visitors might need them.

We called it Tzivia's TiSCH - her Hebrew name was Tzivia and TiSCH stands for Tehillim (Psalms), Siddurim (prayer books) and Chumashim (Pentateuchs).

All of the books are in English and Hebrew.

Since then we have purchased over $700 worth of Jewish books and we are happily distributing them to hospitals that have shown interest.

Word got out to hospital chaplains slowly, but as of today, we are being asked for more books than we have raised money for. And it looks like the interest is increasing.

We need to raise more money to provide the books that these hospitals need!

You can help this project.

You can dedicate a Tehillim, Siddur or Chumash in memory or honor of a loved one, and we can inscribe their name inside the books. Just donate the amounts listed below for each book you want to dedicate, donate through our GoFundMe page, and leave a comment with who you want to dedicate them to and which kind of books. Of course, we will accept regular donations as well!

The price to donate each book is:

$54 - Tehillim
$72 - Siddur
$90 - Chumash

Thanks so much and tizku l'mitzvot!

Help spread the word!

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