[Y]ou and I are going to have to learn to distinguish between the righteous Jew and the Satanic Jews who have infected the whole world with poison and deceit.
Sarsour has previously assured us that feminism is "incompatible with Zionism."
Now Sarsour has decided that criticizing antisemitism is incompatible with being a progressive.
Among the "shailos" (halachic questions) so far, under the hastage #AskRabbiSarsour:
o Do you still say Kaddish for Hamas terrorists that blow themselves up? o What bracha do you make upon seeing Louis Farrakhan in all his might and glory? o How long should you wait between hanging out with PFLP terrorists and Hamas terrorists, 3 hours or 6? o If I have limited funds and can only donate to help either a terrorist or a leading voice for bigotry, who should I support first? Farrakhan? Or Rasmea? o Does donating to Ethiopian-Israelis count as supporting Jews of color, or does that make me over issur Zionism? o I accidentally bought Israeli produce. May I donate it to the intersectional poor, or is that assur according to hilkhot BDS? o if I purchased a book written by a progressive who went off the path and became a, lo aleinu, conservative, should I burn the book with my chometz?
The last 3 are under the hashtag #DearRabbiSarsour.
Less than 24 hours and already we have a breakaway.
Maybe we should ask Rabbi Sarsour...?
(EoZ: As far as I can tell, my contribution to the #AskRabbiSarsour hashtag has been the most successful:)
A Jew and a Palestinian are holding a garment. The Jew says "We can split it" and the Palestinian says "I'll kill you and take the whole thing." What is the preferred way to kill the Jew, sword or bus bomb? #AskRabbiSarsour
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On Thursday Arab terrorists hurled rocks at vehicles on the road between the communities of Yiftah and Nahal Amos in Gush Etzion. A bus and a car were damaged.
Also on Thursday, a car windshield was smashed on the road between Adam and Hizma, and police were attacked with four Molotov cocktails at Qalandiya crossing.
Gaza hasn't been quiet either. A number of incendiary balloons were launched on Tuesday near Ofakim.
The mainstream media, and even the English language Israeli media, barely mention these attacks. But stone throwing at vehicles have killed many people. The intention is the same - to kill Jews.
Yesterday, Hamas held an "AskHamas" session on Twitter. When someone asked how they can justify attacking and murdering Israeli civilians, they said it was a natural "reaction" to Israeli actions. And this is how Palestinians feel as a whole - all Jews are considered to be fair game, and they claim that international law justifies it. (It doesn't.)
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UNRWA-USA had a fundraiser over the past week with the slogan "Palestine is my Valentine." This is the graphic they use:
It is a very pretty graphic, but it seems not to quite capture the authenticity of the Palestinian experience.
I decided to take a graphic or picture of my choice from the front page of Fatehorg.ps, the official Fatah website, and make a logo out of that. Luckily, there was a wonderful example of Palestinian graphics design - the logo for the 54th anniversary of the first Fatah terror attack. (Although I did add a heart, to make it more lovable.)
I think it is more authentically Palestinian, no?
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Soon after London Fashion Week concluded, Israel Apartheid Week began. Another week, another obsessive focus on Israel.
The Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement is mostly spearheaded in the West by people who have little to nothing attaching them to the Middle-East conflict.
Nothing, that is, beyond the fact that belonging to the hard-left and not supporting BDS has become the equivalent of claiming a love for fashion, while hating haute couture. Though unlike haute couture, BDS is an inelegant and simplistic solution to a protracted and incredibly complicated problem. But who cares for detail when you have a fabulous placard to wave?
The lazy analogy that BDS rests on is with South African apartheid. But unlike apartheid-era South Africa, Arabs make up 20 percent of Israel’s full citizenry. Most of these Arab-Israeli citizens are Muslim. There are mosques on Israeli beaches. Alongside Hebrew, Arabic is an official language of Israel. An Arab-Israeli judge has even impeached and convicted former Israeli prime minster, Ehud Olmert.
And though many problems with integration persist – as they do with minority communities across the West – when surveyed 77 percent of these Arabs expressed an overwhelming preference to remain Israeli, rather than become citizens of a future Palestinian state.
The reason is obvious, Israeli-Muslims have more freedom of religion than other minorities – and even other Muslims have in all other Middle-Eastern countries.
When Ilhan Omar got in trouble earlier this week for claiming that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee pays politicians to support Israel, plenty of Jewish lawmakers took to Twitter to denounce the comment as anti-Semitic. But one of the highest profile people who took offense at the statement was neither Jewish nor a politician.
“We should expect all elected officials, regardless of party, and all public figures to not traffic in anti-Semitism,” Chelsea Clinton tweeted.
And the former first daughter didn’t stop engaging with the conversation there. After Omar released an apology, Clinton thanked her and said she was looking forward to speaking to the Minnesota Democrat. (Clinton had said in an earlier tweet that she was contacting Omar to set up a meeting.)
Later Clinton was exceedingly polite in responding to a rude troll who had written that she “isn’t even Jewish she’s just ugly” by educating him about anti-Semitic stereotypes.
“The ugly Jew is a vile centuries old anti-Semitic trope so next time, please just go straight to ugly and leave out the rest,” she wrote.
Clinton, who is expecting her third child with her Jewish husband, investor Marc Mezvinsky, also used the incident as a way to call out Republican Reps. Kevin McCarthy and Steve King for what she called “anti-Semitic rhetoric.”
Clinton stands out because she is among the highest-profile non-Jews — J.K. Rowling also comes to mind — to consistently call out anti-Semitism on Twitter. And as seen with her arranging a meeting with Omar, she gets results.
The House on Wednesday unanimously passed a broad condemnation of anti-Semitism days after Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., received widespread criticism over her comments on Israel.
The language, which does not mention Omar by name, was approved 424-0 using a legislature procedure that lets the minority party make a last-minute motion to change legislation just before it's passed. The procedure almost never works for the minority party, in part because the minority usually tries to make radical changes to the bill that the majority quickly rejects.
On Wednesday, however, Republicans used the so-called "motion to recommit" vote to call for the addition of language to a resolution that states it is in the "national interests of the United States to combat anti-Semitism at home and abroad."
"With an unfortunate rise in anti-Semitism and attempts to delegitimize Israel, the United States House of Representatives must emphasize the importance of combating anti-Semitism and reject all movements that deny Israel’s right to exist," the amendment states.
The sponsor of the language, Rep. David Kustoff, R-Tenn., indicated the language was aimed at Omar, who has been criticized by both parties for comments they say amount to anti-Semitism.
“This horrific anti-Semitic tone being taken by some Members of Congress must come to an end," Kustoff said. "The language I offered affirms the United States’ interest in combating anti-Semitism at home and abroad, something my colleagues on both sides of the aisle should and must support. I am proud to stand today in solidarity with my Jewish community as this hate has no place in our country."
"Benjamins" are, of course, slang for $100 bills since Benjamin Franklin is pictured on them.
But there is another link between Benjamin Franklin and antisemites - the so-called "Franklin prophecy."
Award-winning Lebanese author/writer, Ayad Mowsley, invoked the antisemitic "Franklin Prophecy" in an article in Al-Binaa newspaper today, and wrote an entire article about it last month.
Like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, it is a forgery, pretending to be the text of a speech Benjamin Franklin gave at the Constitutional Convention of 1787.
It reads:
There is a great danger for the United State of America. This great danger is the Jew. Gentlemen, in every land the Jews have settled, they have depressed the moral level and lowered the degree of commercial honesty. They have remained apart and unassimilated; oppressed, they attempt to strangle the nation financially, as in the case of Portugal and Spain.
For more than seventeen hundred years they have lamented their sorrowful fate — namely, that they have been driven out of their mother land; but, gentlemen, if the civilized world today should give them back Palestine and their property, they would immediately find pressing reason for not returning there. Why? Because they are vampires and vampires cannot live on other vampires --they cannot live among themselves. They must live among Christians and others who do not belong to their race.
If they are not expelled from the United States by the Constitution within less than one hundred years, they will stream into this country in such numbers that they will rule and destroy us and change our form of Government for which we Americans shed our blood and sacrificed our life, property and personal freedom. If the Jews are not excluded within two hundred years, our children will be working in the field to feed Jews while they remain in the counting houses, gleefully rubbing their hands.
I warn you, gentlemen, if you do not exclude the Jews forever, your children and your children’s children will curse you in their graves. Their ideas are not those of Americans, even when they lived among us for ten generations. The leopard cannot change his spots. The Jews are a danger to this land, and if they are allowed to enter, they will imperil our institutions. They should be excluded by the Constitution.
Arab antisemites love this; it has been quoted by Fatah and Osama Bin Laden. I've quoted it in Arab media before.
It's been around for a while, at least since 1934, debunked as early as 1938.
Franklin was a friend of the Jews and contributed money to the Mikveh Israel synagogue in Philadelphia.
The Franklin Forgery shows that it is impossible to actually stop antisemitic myths. Haters will reprint them forever, no matter what the facts are, and gullible haters in waiting love to eat it up.
(h/t WC)
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Arafat Irfaiya is the monster that raped, murdered and mutilated a beautiful 19-year old girl last week because she was a Jew living in Eretz Yisrael. He is guilty of crimes against the Jewish people, and he should be executed for them.
There is a law in Israel that prescribes the death penalty for crimes against the Jewish people committed during WWII or “the period of the Nazi regime.” The limitation to the Nazi period is illogical and should be removed. Murdering Jews, qua Jews, in 2019 is not different than doing it in 1943. Murdering them in order to try to destroy the Jewish state is a crime against the Jewish people no less than deporting them to Auschwitz.
Military courts can impose a death penalty for crimes committed in the territories, but unfortunately the site of the murder was just inside the Green Line, so the trial will be in a civilian court.
The leniency shown by the Jewish state to murderers motivated by “nationalism” – Palestinian Arab Jew-hatred – is remarkable, including almost Scandinavian-style prison conditions, regular salaries paid by the Palestinian authority, and often early release as part of political deals or as blackmail for hostages.
This is stupid. The smiles often displayed by Palestinian Arab terrorists like Irfaiya as they are sentenced testify to the fact that they see themselves as victorious despite their conviction.
Keeping these creatures in prison is expensive, provides an incentive for hostage-taking – you may recall that in 2011 one Jewish soldier, Gilad Shalit, was exchanged for 1027 terrorists, many of whom were guilty of murder – and, thanks to the Palestinian Authority’s payment system and the adulation they receive in Palestinian society, probably encourages further terrorism rather than deterring it. When they are released, they often return to terrorism. In 2015 it was reported that six additional Israelis had been murdered by prisoners released in the Shalit deal.
Every time – and there have been many times – that a Palestinian Arab terrorist commits a particularly horrible murder, there are calls for the imposition of the death penalty. And every time, it doesn’t happen.
There are numerous objections to the death penalty in general. But in this case, and in most cases of Palestinian terrorism, they don’t apply. There is no doubt of Arafat Irfaiya’s guilt; there is physical evidence, including DNA, plus a confession and reenactment of the crime.
It is often said that the death penalty is not a deterrent, and this may be true in the West, especially in places like California, where the probability of a death sentence being carried out in a reasonable time is almost zero. In the Middle East, however, there are cultural factors that have the opposite effect. In our region, not executing a murderer is a sign of weakness, a signal that the victim’s family or tribe is too weak to preserve its honor. And a tribe without honor is a tribe whose members can be murdered with impunity. Failing to impose the death penalty actually has the opposite of a deterrent effect – it encourages murdering Jews.
Since 1967, Israel and the Jewish people have undergone a continuous loss of honor relative to their enemies, as they have made a series of unrequited concessions (starting with the surrender of sovereignty over the Temple Mount). With Oslo the pace of the concessions – and the concomitant terrorism against Israel – accelerated greatly, and there are beginning to be murmurs that still more is about to be expected of us.
If we wish to survive as a Jewish state, the pendulum must be forced to swing back the other way. I believe that a comprehensive policy to regain the initiative – and our honor – is needed. A small part of it would be to actually punish terrorists in proportion to their crimes. Executing Arafat Irfaiya would be a start.
But only a start. How did it come about that there are so many like Irfaiya? Why did two young Palestinian Arabs viciously slaughter five members of the Fogel family including a 3-month old baby girl? Why did another Palestinian Arab teenager climb through a window and stab Hallel Yaffe Ariel to death in her bed? Why have there been hundreds of terror attacks against Jews by Palestinians in the past four years, many by perpetrators who are not known to be directly associated with traditional terrorist groups?
The answer is not complicated. When Israel invited Yasser Arafat back from exile and allowed the establishment of the Palestinian Authority as part of the Oslo accords, one of Arafat’s first actions was to decree that every institution in the territories under his control – schools, mosques, summer camps, newspapers, radio and TV – would teach violent hatred of Jews and Israel. Every anti-Jewish trope was included, from traditional Muslim “apes and pigs” slanders to memes borrowed from European antisemitism. Terrorists who murder Jewish women and children are treated as military heroes who have carried out successful “operations.” The project was continued by Mahmoud Abbas after Arafat’s death, and in Gaza after the Hamas takeover. Its effect has been to paint Jews as vermin that it is not only permissible, but laudable, to kill.
At some point, Abbas introduced the policy of paying salaries to terrorists in Israeli prisons (if they should be killed during their attacks, the stipend is given to the family). Despite threats from the US and Israel to cut payments to the PA (the US has already reduced aid to the PA in accordance with the Taylor Force Act and PM Netanyahu has promised to start deducting equivalent funds from import duties collected on behalf of the PA), the PA continues to pay terrorists, which Abbas has called his top priority. Salaries are proportional to the length of prison sentences, which means that they are proportional to the severity of the crime.
The combination of the coordinated program of indoctrination, plus financial incentives for terrorist acts, has bred several generations of monsters like Arafat Irfaiya.
What this means is that the leaders of the PLO and Hamas, who have programmed the murderers and who pay them, are also guilty of murder. Indeed Irfaiya and the other monsters are no more than hitmen. The root of the problem is planted higher up.
We have a long road to travel to recover from the errors we’ve made since 1967 and since Oslo. But we have to start small.
As a first step, let’s hang Arafat Irfaiya and go on from there.
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It sounds absurd, right? The current "ethical" dilemma facing the Palestinian Authority is this:
A Palestinian man, Arafat Arfiah, murdered 19-year-old Ori Ansbacher last week. Israeli reports stated that Arfiah had not only murdered Ansbacher but raped her as well.
This possible rape presents the Palestinian Authority with an absurd "ethical" dilemma. The PA supports and pays a salary to anyone who is imprisoned for "fighting the occupation." This means that the PA pays a salary to anyone who murders an Israeli in a terror attack, and that the PA-funded Prisoners' Club provides legal representation to the terrorist in the Israeli court system.
However, rape is considered by the PA a "criminal act" and not a "nationalistic act" opposing "the occupation," and therefore a rapist is not entitled to any support - legally or financially.
Thus, according to PA "ethics," it is fine and even heroic to stab and kill a 19-year-old Israeli woman for "Palestine," but it is unacceptable to rape her. So when a Palestinian rapes and murders, like Arfiah did to an Israeli 19-year-old last week, what is the PA to do?
The chairman of the PA-funded Prisoners' Club Qadura Fares explained the twisted PA values and the resulting dilemma: "The director of the prisoners club, Qadura Fares, told Haaretz that Irfaiya's family has not asked his group for any legal aid. 'If there will be such a request, we will consider it and send a defense lawyer to review his claims,' Fares, said. 'If it turns out there really was a sexual assault, we will pass on representation. That would make the case a criminal one, as far as we're concerned, and we object to anyone committing a criminal offense trying to pass it off as a nationalist act.'"
[Haaretz, Feb. 13, 2019]
Still, nobody took to the streets to demand that Nahmani or any of the others be put to death. Why? What is it about a murder committed by a terrorist that differentiates it in the Israeli mindset from one perpetrated by a “regular” criminal?
There are two answers. One has to do with the collective memory of the Jewish people. Eichmann’s much-publicized execution, which was carried out a mere 17 years after the Holocaust, constituted a statement — to the victims of Nazi atrocities and the rest of the world — that the Jews would never again be dragged to the slaughter for being Jews. Well, Arab terrorists slaughter Israelis for being Jews.
Nevertheless, until now, no Palestinian terrorist has met Eichmann’s fate.
It is a sorry situation that might even have continued to be accepted by most Israelis if terrorists were actually punished for killing Jews, rather than rewarded by their leaders and hailed as heroes by their peers for doing so.
Which brings us to the second, more pragmatic reason that Israelis place terrorists in a different category from other criminals.
While serving time in Israeli prisons, where they band together to study the Koran and plot additional attacks, terrorists and their families receive a hefty stipend from the Palestinian Authority’s Martyrs’ Fund. The PA recently acknowledged that its annual “pay-for-slay” budget was NIS 1.2 billion (approximately $33 million) in 2017 and 2018.
Terrorists also know that their incarceration is possibly temporary, due to what has come to be called “prisoner swaps,” which is a disgusting euphemism for the exchange of an innocent Israeli, dead or alive, for hundreds of Palestinian would-be “martyrs.”
Thus, Ansbacher’s killer will be in clover for his brutality and has the hope of being let out of jail at some point.
Joel Singer, a veteran Israeli peace negotiator, critically reviews Seth Anziska’s book, Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo, forcefully rejecting Anziska’s central claim that the peace process has ‘prevented Palestine’. Anziska replies to Singer in this issue of Fathom here.
Seth Anziska’s revisionist book, Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo, tells an alternative story to the conventional wisdom regarding the political road that led from the Camp David Accords to the Oslo Agreement (with a detour to the intervening 1982 Lebanon War, which appears to not completely fit organically within his story). As someone who was deeply involved in both ends of this political history, as well as in some other, similar developments in between, reading the book sometimes gave me the feeling that the events it describes belong to some alternate reality.
The book’s main thesis can be summarised as follows: A Palestinian state should and could have been created in 1978, when the Camp David Accords were negotiated. In late 1977, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat made his historic visit to Israel and offered to make peace with Israel in return for full Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula, which Israel had conquered and occupied since the 1967 Six-Day War, provided that Israel also agreed to recognise the right of the Palestinians to their own state. Thereafter, in September 1978, US President Jimmy Carter invited Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Sadat to a summit meeting at the presidential retreat, Camp David, in an attempt to achieve a comprehensive agreement that would include both an Israeli-Egyptian bilateral peace treaty and an agreement to allow Palestinian self-determination. Begin, however, decided to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state (or to ‘prevent Palestine’ in Anziska’s shorthand) and, therefore, he shrewdly devised an alternative idea — a plan for Palestinian autonomy. In Camp David, Begin twisted the arms of both Carter and Sadat and, as a result, the Camp David Accords reflected Begin’s autonomy idea, rather than an agreement to establish a Palestinian state. According to Anziska, this unfortunate outcome of Camp David has continued to haunt all subsequent political plans and agreements related to the Palestinians, all the way through the 1993 Oslo Agreement. In other words, all of these later developments, Anziska argues, have been contaminated by the autonomy plan that Begin advocated in Camp David to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state, and this has well served his objective, as well as that of all subsequent Israeli governments, to keep the West Bank.
Nouri Kamil Mohammed Hasan al-Maliki was Prime Minister of Iraq from 2006 to 2014. He is currently secretary-general of the Islamic Dawa Party and one of three Vice Presidents of Iraq.
He went on the Afaq satellite TV channel on Tuesday and warned that Jewish Zionist plans are seeking to topple Iraqi society.
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I've been looking a lot at statistics about the pro-Israel lobby over the past couple of days. The major database that follows the money, OpenSecrets, provides a wealth of information about all lobbies, lobbyists, lobby groups, contributors and more.
In 2018, OpenSecrets ranks the pro-Israel lobby as #50 among all categories in amounts contributed to politicians, with nearly $15 million given.
OpenSecrets categorizes J-Street and J-StreetPAC as "pro-Israel" since it doesn't fit under any other category and claims to be pro-Israel.
Antisemites know that it isn't. More on that below.
J-Street has, to my knowledge, never supported a single bill in Congress that was also supported by the State of Israel.
The entire calumny against the "Israel lobby" is that Jews are more interested in supporting Israel than the US, that Jews have dual loyalties, that Jews dance to the tune of the Israeli government and Zionist leaders. But no one accuses J-Street of doing any of that.
This means that the pro-Israel lobby isn't even close to the top fifty of all interest groups that contribute to politicians. And OpenSecrets only tracks about 80 interest groups!
The pro-Israel lobby is not important at all compared to the hundreds of millions that are thrown around candidates to office.
Don't take my word for it that J-Street isn't pro-Israel.
Alison Weir and her organization "If Americans Knew" ("What every American Needs to Know about Israel/Palestine") are antisemitic. Even Jewish Voice for Peace and the main US BDS group have distanced itself from Weir for her bigotry.
Her site has an article she wrote, updated in 2017, called "Introduction to the Israel Lobby." It is a scattershot article listing not only pro-Israel political organizations but also general pro-Israel and Jewish organizations (like Bnai Brith) that she considers to be part of this insidious "lobby." Israeli-owned companies are listed. Even journalists like Jeffrey Goldberg are listed there as part of this insidious "Israel lobby."
But J-Street is nowhere to be seen on her list.
The single largest "pro-Israel" contributor to influence American policy in Congress is not listed by an organization that is dedicated to exposing Jewish and Israeli influence on American politics.
That tells you all you need to know about J-Street's "pro-Israel" credentials.
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On Tuesday, MEMRI released a video showing Detroit imam Bassem Al-Sheraa spouting the most vile antisemitism imaginable.
Al-Sheraa, a Shiite, said (among other things) that Jewish women have historically established and managed “dens of female iniquity” and headed the brothels of Europe. He added that the Jews allow their faith to be passed down maternally so that their women could increase the Jewish population through prostitution.
I tweeted this to the Detroit News and the Detroit Fox channel, assuming that local media might be interested in a thoroughly antisemitic imam in their city. Yet there are no stories today about Al Sheraa in Detroit media. The only places I see coverage are the Cleveland Jewish News (via JNS) and FrontPage, plus Mexico's Diario Judio.
One would think that an antisemitic imam publicly spouting hate would be a little newsworthy. Perhaps the Detroit media is too cowed by the large Muslim population to want to touch the story.
Here is the video and transcript from MEMRI:
"[The Jews] Employ Tricks And Fraud In Matters Of Religion And Moral Values"
Bassem Al-Sheraa: "Yahya [John the Baptist], with all his greatness and his glory, was a prophet, as was his father... [The Jews] excommunicated him and then sanctioned his killing. He wasn't just killed – he was declared a heretic and his head was chopped off. Jesus, son of Mary, was also declared a heretic by them. They excommunicated him. They said that he was not a Jew. Then the Romans killed him. They arrested him in order to crucify him. But it was the Jews who issued the religious ruling about it. The Roman ruler... When the Romans wanted to arrest Jesus, they got a religious ruling from the Jews that said that he did not represent them and that he had been excommunicated. The Jews sanctioned his killing.
[...]
"[The Jews] employ tricks and fraud in matters of religion and moral values. They distort [sacred texts], and therefore it is said that the Jews would often kill their own prophets. They would sanction the killing of one another. In addition, they allowed their women to engage in prostitution, God forbid. Following the [Babylonian] captivity, when Nebuchadnezzar exiled them and destroyed the Temple, the Jews said: 'Money and women are our most powerful weapons.'
"So they would amass gold and money, and they would spread usury. Usury constitutes a peculiar Jewish philosophy... Even in the modern world, global banks are based on the culture of usury, which is a Jewish concept. Since a long time ago, the Jews have been lending people money and collecting interest, even though it is forbidden according to their religious law. Allowing usury is one of the things they did to circumvent their [scriptures]. The Jews permitted usury and have been usurers. They are still proud of this. Look at the global banks, the billionaires... All those are from among [the Jews]. Their culture is a culture of usury.
"The financial culture of the world was founded according to their instructions and their vision. Why? Because they consider [usury] to be an instrument of control."
[...] "The Brothels Of Europe Were Established By [Jews], Their Women Would Manage Those Dens Of Female Iniquity – Most Dens Of Gambling, Usury, And So On Were Run By Them"
"In addition, they allowed their women to engage in [prostitution]. Pardon my language, but the brothels of Europe were established by them. Their women would manage those dens of female iniquity. Most dens of gambling, usury, and so on were run by them. They are always like that. They control people's resources through such tricks and deception. They consider it to be a reward and a way to serve their religion. They employ these means to control rather than be controlled."
"They Sent Their Women Around And Said To Them: 'Go [Fornicate], And If You Get Pregnant, Bring Us The Children And We Will Accept Them As Jews' – This Is Their Way To Increase Their Numbers"
"So they said that the son of a Jewish woman is a Jew, even if his father is not Jewish. They even issued a religious ruling to that effect. The Old Testament and the Torah say that a child belongs to his father. If the father is Jewish, then the son is Jewish as well, and if the father is not Jewish, then the child is not Jewish, either. But in the Talmud, the priests changed this. They said that the son of a Jewish woman is a Jew. Therefore, they sent their women around and said to them: 'Go [fornicate], and if you get pregnant, bring us the children and we will accept them as Jews.' This is their way to increase their numbers."
I do not see this video on the regular YouTube channel of the mosque, so they might have taken it down or they might have a separate YouTube channel.
Videos like this are published by MEMRI every day. But it is not nearly as usual to see Ilamic religious leaders in the US or Canada being publicized with the same hate that one sees all the time in the Middle East.
If the US political parties and media are as concerned about antisemitism as they all swear they are, then this should be a front page story. The fact that it isn't indicates that much of the outrage we see when stories like Ilhan Omar come up is not real.
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Is it antisemitism or anti-Zionism? Everyday, semantics are used to deflect what is obvious. When people argue over this it protects antisemitism. It does not matter whether in theory anti-Zionism and antisemitism are the same thing or not. It is a straw man argument. When you perform the duck test on anti-Zionist activity across the board, it soon becomes clear that antisemitism overflows in every corner of the anti-Israel movement. The duck test highlights just how seamlessly, blatant antisemitism has renamed itself.
I am in the middle of writing a large report that will hopefully meet my self-imposed end-of-February deadline. This particular post is not part of that and was never planned. It came about because in preparation for a talk I gave last night to students at KCL I needed to spend some time gathering examples of the similarity between anti-Zionism and classic antisemitism. This is what I found:
The duck test
What are examples of antisemitism? What are the tropes? I needed to work from a check-list, so turned to Wiki to find one. They have a page titled ‘antisemitic canards‘. It provides a list of different types of canards used to foster and legitimise hate against Jewish people throughout the ages. There are 20 classic types listed. They added the 9/11 conspiracy, which I ignored because I believe it captured in the essence of all the others.
Below are the results from the twenty I worked with. In those cases where the accusation predates Zionism (such as the killing of Christ), I have only used posts by people who ‘coincidentally’ are also anti-Israel activists:
Researchers have determined that the uncanny correlation between hatred for Jews and opposition to Israel constitutes a statistical fluke, a recent study reports, cautioning that observers ought not to draw unwarranted conclusions from the close association that means nothing.
A comparative study of the rhetoric and behavior of people who claim only to oppose the Jewish State and of the rhetoric and behavior of outspoken antisemites revealed a 98% overlap in the composition and content of the two groups, which study authors warned does not indicate any inherent relationship between them, since, as every student of elementary statistics knows, correlation does not imply causation. Instead, the researchers advise the public to note the overlap as a curiosity and then return to the everyday work of explaining how opposing the existence of the world’s only Jewish country, established as a refuge from thousands of years of persecution, does not qualify as antisemitism.
“We can understand why a facile interpretation of these numbers would lead a person to the conclusion that the two phenomena are in some way related,” the authors wrote. “But that fails to take into account all the protestations by self-proclaimed anti-Zionists that they do not in fact harbor ill will toward Jews; they just want them to remain at the mercy of the world’s often-hostile majority, with a soupçon of human rights verbiage thrown in. We therefore urge people not to misinterpret the near-perfect correlation as anything but an interesting quirk.”
But the difference here is that while genuine racism exists in Israel—as it does in any other society of imperfect human beings—to claim that the government promotes hate is a bold-faced lie. To the contrary, classic anti-Semitic tropes and blood libels are a staple of the Palestinian Authority’s official press, broadcast media and education system. The same is true of the Hamas government of Gaza. Moreover, the P.A. continues, despite threats of aid cutoffs from the United States, to pay salaries and pensions to imprisoned terrorists and their families.
This reflects a consensus within Palestinian society that those who commit acts of violence against Jews and Israelis are role models and heroes to be celebrated, rather than to be shunned.
Will it be any different for the murderer of Ori Ansbacher, a teenager from the settlement of Tekoa who was doing national service for her country? The Israeli media has reported that the murderer is affiliated with Hamas and said he wanted to be a “martyr.” Unfortunately, nothing that has happened up until now gives us much hope that most Palestinians will treat the death of a Jewish teenager as anything other than a victory for their cause, no matter how egregious the crime.
Neither Israel nor its citizens are perfect. But friends of Israel can be proud of the efforts of the Israel Defense Forces to spare innocent lives even when it means that sometimes terrorists might escape. Moreover, its political system, however flawed it might be, rests on democratic principles that ensure that Israeli Arabs are equal before the law and have rights to representation unknown elsewhere in the region.
Those who wish to talk about racism should point their barbs at Palestinian leaders who bear personal responsibility for creating an environment in which “nationalist” murders like that of Ansbacher are made possible, not at Israel.
Unlike other U.S. allies, Israel has never asked for a single American soldier to deploy to Israel and give their life for the Jewish state. Israel has always been committed to defending itself. That is an invaluable strategic asset.
More specifically, the United States benefits from its alliance with Israel in very practical ways. In 2012, Michael Eisenstadt and David Pollock, both fellows at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, produced a great report that details these benefits—from intelligence sharing and counterterrorism cooperation to cyber and water security. Israel's remarkable technological innovation is critical for American businesses, and its expertise in homeland security and military tactics are critical for keeping Americans—both in and out of uniform—safe.
The number of benefits is too long to list here, but it is extensive. Even Richard Nixon, who peddled his share of anti-Semitic canards, recognized Israel's strategic importance and ordered an essential arms airlift during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The former president also recognized the remarkable character of the Israeli people, and became the first commander in chief to visit the Jewish state on the job. Critics may say the alliance is just a relic of the Cold War, but this is a dangerously myopic view. In such an interconnected world, where security is ever more difficult to guarantee and technology is the economy of the future, Israel is a necessary ally.
In sum, Americans support Israel for both moral and strategic reasons. The two cannot be separated. And together, they create a foundation for an alliance that can resist Omar's corrosive, anti-Semitic charges, which are part of an effort to break apart an essential, mutually beneficial relationship. In defending Israel against the likes of Omar, Americans should remember that they not only have the moral high ground, but also the strategic high ground.
I could have taken a photo of
Ori Ansbacher’s grieving mother. My finger hovered over the button on my phone
as I contemplated the idea. A photo of that face full of pain would have shown
the world what a thousand words could not. It would have said, “Look! This is
what it means to have your daughter brutally raped and murdered just for being Jewish
in Jerusalem, and alone.”
And there would have been value
in that. After all, Noa Ansbacher’s face was probably the most wrenching sight
I’ve ever seen. Shouldn’t the world see that? See what it is for a mother to
lose a child to hatred? Might it not change something in the world, seeing that
photo? Could it not make a positive difference?
I considered all this as I
looked at Noa Ansbacher’s face, as she sat in her house of mourning. Looking at
her, I saw Ori’s face some 30 years away, albeit lined with a heavy sorrow. I
saw the same features. Mother. Daughter.
But Ori would not be here in 30
years. Her light has been extinguished. She is buried underground.
Which is the reason for the
pain etched on Noa Ansbacher’s face. Unlike Noa, Ori would never have a daughter.
She would never have a husband. She would never have any children or
grandchildren at all.
She would never have a future.
This being the case, all I
could do was look at Noa Ansbacher’s face, and see what Ori might have looked
like, had she lived her life. Looking at the mother, I could see the promise,
now stolen away. A young girl with her life ahead of her, ended with sudden and
brutal finality, stamped out in a flash, like a cloud of evil darkening the
world, obscuring all that is good.
The irony of a name, “Ori.” It
means: “my light.”
Studying Noa Ansbacher, I knew
that for her, the light had gone out. I could see it in her face, though smiles would break
through the pain from time to time, as she acknowledged Ori’s friends, who
surround her during this terrible time.
Ori’s friends are all she has
left of Ori. That and the stack of photos of her girl, left on the low plastic
mourner’s chair by her side, for visitors to peruse.
When she is not distracted by
the need to be gracious, to love the sweet girls who come to comfort her, who
cherished her daughter, Noa Ansbacher’s smile is washed away, overtaken by
lines of pain once more. There’s a heaviness to her grief, a thick fog of unbearable
pain.
I could have shown you all
this. It would have taken less than a second to capture Noa Ansbacher’s face
and the scene around her for perpetuity. Perhaps a “real journalist” would
have snapped that picture and published it here to show it to you. It would
have gotten lots of page views, gone viral.
I could have done it, taken
that photo, published it here, and in some ways, it would have been a serious
good. A mother’s face, a study in mourning for a daughter stolen away by evil. Blameless,
unassailable as Ori was, just a young girl with her life ahead of her. She was
meant to do so much.
Anyone who would have seen such
a photo of Noa Ansbacher in the depths of her unfathomable sorrow would have remembered
her face forever, as I will, an indelible vision of pain. And indeed, seeing
her face is the only way anyone could truly understand that pain. The kind of
pain a mother exchanges for a life full of light.
Imagine a daughter blotted out
by cruel thunderclap after a gentle lifetime of promise. This was a crime
dripping with the worst sort of hate and aggression. A crime directed at a sweet
young girl, a holy people, and a way of life—a way of life that is wholly good,
driven as it is by the life force—and the bringing of an ancient land alive.
But there was something private
in Noa Ansbacher’s face, something I dared not attempt to capture or share. In
truth, I could hardly bear look at it myself. Who was I to imagine that I could
depict the pain of a mother whose child is murdered in such an obscene and
brutal way, for the crime of being Jewish and alone in Jerusalem?
And so I took photos of
everything else around me, with the help of my friend and neighbor, who was the impetus behind this visit. Between the two of us, we took photos of everything in and around the Ansbacher home. I took photos of the photos of Ori Ansbacher from the stack of photos resting on
the low plastic mourning chair beside her grieving mother. With no need for words, Jocelyn stepped in to hold the photos up for me, one at a time.
I took photos of the rolling sand dunes of the Judean Desert, a view that Ori would have seen from the balcony of her childhood home; a home that sits on ancient land: land that belonged to her people for thousands of years. She saw that view for the 19
years she lived her life, a handful of years. An age and a number she would
never surmount.
On our way out, Jocelyn stopped so I could take yet more photos. I took photos of Herodian,
where Herod built a summer residence. The flattened mountaintop looms in the
distance from everywhere within the town of Tekoa, where Ori grew to womanhood and where
her mother yet grieves. It is impossible to forget one’s history when one lives
with such a view.
And the anemones. I could not
leave without getting some photos of the bright red flowers that grow in such profusion close to the Ansbacher home at this time of year. These would have
been old friends to Ori. In Hebrew they’re called “kalaniyot.”
(photo credit: Jocelyn Odenheimer)
No doubt the same flowers can be found in the Ein Yael forest in Jerusalem, where Ori sought solace and met instead, a brutal end. The kalaniyot are everywhere now, the bright scarlet notes breaking through the hillsides, so red against the green of the grass and the blue of the sky.
The anemones were, perhaps, the last beautiful
thing Ori Ansbacher would ever behold.
They were a harbinger of spring.
A spring she
would never see.
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Friday, February 15, 2019
Elder of Ziyon
