The latest Palestinian Central Bureau for Statistics report says that there are now 135.000 Palestinian workers who are employed by Israelis (a drop of 6000 in the last quarter 2019) and 24,000 of them work in Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, an increase of 2000 from Q3.
65% of them work in construction, which is the highest paying category of work. This chart shows the comparative daily wages in shekels for Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and Israel/settlements for different types of jobs.
While some 13% of Palestinians work for Israelis, based on the averages in the chart above, it appears that about half of all Palestinian construction workers are actually working in Israeli communities and a much smaller percentage of the other categories.
Last year several thousand Gazans were quietly allowed to work in southern Israel. I do not believe that the PCBS has those people included; Hamas probably has those statistics.
Also, there are many Palestinian workers who depend on business from Israel but who are not employees. I know that some Israeli high-tech firms outsource programming to Palestinian consultants, for example. If Palestinians would succumb to BDS-style pressure, their economy would be devastated.
(h/t Ibn Boutros)
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I enjoyed reading Yoram Hazony's The Virtue of Nationalism. I want to center this review on Hazony's theory of modern anti-Zionism.
To oversimplify, the book is a defense of nationalism as opposed to imperialism. Nationalism is defined as being loyal to one's nation and letting other nations do their own thing; each nation is free do decide on the best way to govern yet each maintains its own national character. Imperialism is a philosophy where the ideas of one nation are imposed on others that might have different ways of thinking because the ideas are superior to all others, so imposing them is for the greater good.
Modern Europe is in many ways a response to Nazism; the horrors of Hitler were so great that we must do everything possible to avoid anything that resembles it in the slightest. But Europe, specifically the EU, makes two very horrible mistakes.
One is that they look at Nazi Germany as being the outcome of extreme nationalism. Because of that, they regard all nationalisms with suspicion at best and hostility at worst.
Yet Nazi Germany was not nationalist - despite calling itself National Socialism. Nazi Germany was imperialist. The Third Reich was meant to rule over Europe and to impose its racist and antisemitic philosophy worldwide.
The EU's connection between nationalism and Nazism is completely wrong.
The second mistake is that the EU, by trying to impose a single standard of law and regulations across Europe, is imperialist itself! The irony of an imperialist Europe, being largely led by Germany, as an answer to the imperialist Third Reich, is painful.
(The major difference between the two is that Europe has effectively outsourced its defense to the United States, so in that way it is a protectorate. Yet its philosophical underpinnings are imperialist.)
Europe looks at Israel as a nationalist endeavor - which it most certainly is. (Hazony brings much evidence that early philosophers of nationalism got their ideas from the Biblical description of the Jewish kingdoms, where individual tribes banded together for defense, one of the major functions of a nation.) Since Europe is traumatized by World War II and mistakes Nazism as nationalism, it views Israel as a potential nationalist danger.
Hazony makes a stark distinction between what lessons Israel and Europe learn from the Holocaust. Israel looks at the slaughter of Jews and says that a national entity could have defended them; Europe looks at the same slaughter and says that Nazi "nationalism" is the cause and that is what must be stopped to ensure it doesn't happen again.
As Hazony writes (p. 206):
In both paradigms, the fact of Israel takes on an extraordinary significance because of the identity of the Jews as the victims of the Shoah. For Israel's founders, the fact that the survivors of the death camps and their children could be given weapons and permitted to train as soldiers under a Jewish flag seemed a decisive movement of the world toward what was just and right. It could in no sense make up for what had happened. But it was just nonetheless, granting the survivors precisely the empowerment that, had it come a few years earlier, would have saved their loved ones from death and worse. In this sense, Israel is the opposite of Auschwitz.
At the same time, Israel takes on extraordinary significance in the new European paradigm as well. For in Israel, the survivors and their children took up arms and set themselves on a course of determining their own fate. That is, this people, so close to the Kantian ideal of perfect self-renunciation only a few decades ago, have instead chosen what is now seen as the path of Hitler—the path of national self-determination. It is this that lies beneath the nearly boundless disgust so many feel toward Israel, and especially toward anything having to do with Israel's attempts to defend itself, regardless of whether these operations are successful or unsuccessful, irreproachable or morally flawed. In taking up arms in the name of their own national state and their own self-determination, the Jews, as many Europeans and others now see it, have simply taken up the same evil that led Germany to build the camps. The details may differ, but the principle, in their eyes, is the same: Israel is Auschwitz.
Therefore, Hazony stresses, it doesn't matter what Israel does or doesn't do - its very existence as a nation willing to defend its people is proof of its inherent immorality.
Antisemitism is not the driving factor of anti-Zionism, according to Hazony. He says that Europe is also antipathetic towards all (European-origin) nations that embrace nationalism. This is why they are so upset at Britain after Brexit, at Trump's America, at some eastern European countries - because those countries insist on making their own national decisions and not to be bound by the rules and international institutions and protocols and standards pushed by Europe (e.g., the ICC, the Kyoto Protocol.). I am reminded of the Carter-era US arguments when abstaining from the 1980 UNSC Jerusalem resolution that emphasized how the portion that demanded that no country establish embassies there was an unacceptable violation of national sovereignty. To the Left, every nation must give up some independence to be part of the world community, and the US has always resisted that to varying degrees.
I'm not so sure that antisemitism is not a major factor in European anti-Zionism - it seems to me the vitriol against Israel by the European Left is much greater than that against the US or Britain. But Hazony's theory is intriguing.
As far as non-European countries such as Arab nations are concerned, Hazony claims that Europe and the Left subconsciously do not consider them to be full nations but savages. In this, they are recalling Kant, who theorized three stages of mankind's development, from savages to nations to a higher moral order where all nations federate under one rule of law. European anti-nationalists look at themselves as being at the highest level, at the US, Israel and Britain at the second level, and the rest of the world still at the level of savages, from whom nothing can be expected. I'm not so convinced of this argument; it seems to me that the anti-colonialism of the Left is driving them to regard all non-whites as noble people whose immorality is the fault of the West.
It is always a treat to read Hazony. And this is a very important book.
(Naturally, any mistakes in summarizing Hazony's arguments are mine alone.)
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Egyptian authorities have uncovered a human trafficking ring in Giza where young girls were forced to "marry" rich Arabs for as little as 48 hours where they would be sexually abused.
The price of the girls were between 10,000 and 200,000 Egyptian pounds ($640-$13,000) and the timeframe of each "marriage" was from two days to a week. The leaders of the ring, which included a lawyer, would keep the money for themselves.
The girls were between 12 and 15.
The girls were often runaways. The pimps would send photos of the girls via WhatsApp to the rich Arab johns. One of the pimps performed the "marriage" ceremony with a Quran. in a cafe in Agouza.
The girls say that the pimps also sexually assaulted and raped them.
During the police raid, a "large number" of girls were found.
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In a new BBC2 documentary that aired on Monday, British Jewish comedian and presenter David Baddiel sat down with a Holocaust denier and challenged his conspiratorial views.
A clip from “Confronting Holocaust Denial” showed a frustrated Baddiel trying to argue logically with Irish antisemite Dermot Mulqueen, who expressed a range of vicious tropes, among them the medieval accusation that Jews murdered Christian children and that Jews “hate” Europeans.
Baddiel at one point countered, “If the gas chambers never existed, us Jews would have no reason to hate Europeans. Why would we hate Europeans for something that actually never happened?”
Mulqueen paused awkwardly in response, before stammering, “…because it’s profitable.”
After being arrested in 2015 for vandalizing private property in protest of Holocaust Memorial Day, Mulqueen unsuccessfully ran in Ireland’s 2016 general election as an independent MP.
In an interview with BBC HistoryExtra, Baddiel said he struggled with the question of whether exposing Holocaust deniers to the public provided them a platform to gain legitimacy.
“My feeling — and indeed the empirical fact — is that Holocaust denial won’t go away if we ignore it and therefore it’s better to confront it, and at some level try to understand it. That was my mission in this film,” explained Baddiel.
The Holocaust is one of the most documented, witnessed and written about events in history, yet one in six people worldwide either think the Holocaust has been exaggerated or deny that it took place. What has happened in the 75 years since the liberation of the camps to have so skewed the picture? And, if it matters, why does it matter?
In this timely and important film, David Baddiel explores the multi-faceted nature of Holocaust denial - in both historical and contemporary terms, in an attempt to understand what motivates this dangerous phenomenon and why it is on the rise, both in Britain and across the globe.
David begin his journey at Chelmno, the site of a huge extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland where 200,000 Jews were murdered. He learns of the extraordinary lengths German forces employed to conceal what they were doing – building huge crematoria to burn bodies, using ‘bone mills’ to grind down skeletons and scattering the resulting human ashes in surrounding woodland. For David, this is the starting point of Holocaust denial – where the Nazis themselves were attempting to deny their actions.
But the Germans were not alone in concealing the truth of the Holocaust. In the national archives in Kew, David uncovers an extraordinary memo issued by the Ministry of Information’s propaganda department, discussing how the atrocities of death camps should be reported to the public. The memo recommends reports focus on the camps' ‘innocent victims’, not criminals, and ‘not Jews’. This idea that the suffering of the Jewish people should somehow be played down was still dominant when the camps were liberated - many newsreels barely mention that the majority of victims had been Jewish. For David, anti-Semitism is fundamentally at the root of all Holocaust denial.
David discovers how, as the true scale of the Holocaust emerges in the postwar years, the numbers of people attempting to deny or to downplay its scale increases. There is a direct correlation between a higher profile of the Holocaust and rates of denial, something reflected in David’s own experience. As soon as this programme is announced by the BBC, David's Twitter feed fills with posts trying to deny the truth of the Holocaust. It begs the question whether David, by making the film, is himself fanning the flames of denial? And if so, should he be doing it?
Watching deeply disturbing and depressing documentary on Holocaust denial by @Baddiel which features a copy of “‘Holocaust’ News” with the headline “Holocaust story an evil hoax”. I’ve seen a copy of that. This one. It was in the private papers of the Labour MP, Andrew Faulds. pic.twitter.com/zbTl4TTEEW
Now more than ever, Germany has its own domestic challenges again rising to the surface: the far-right ideology that has resurfaced throughout Europe in apparent response to the refugee crisis has provoked a resurgence of both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia—particularly in Germany. On the one hand, many fear that if Germany fails to address its current situation, the world could relive one of its darkest moments in history. German-Jews have already been told by Jewish leadership to refrain from wearing Kippahs in public and remove mezuzot from their doors—many have begun to conceal their identity. The attempted attack on the Halle Synagogue—though prevented from becoming a full-blown massacre by a locked door—still led to a loss of life and demonstrates the repercussions of not actively addressing this issue. On the other hand, if this issue prioritized, as was publicly called for by Germany’s foreign minister, Germany will have the chance to confirm its position as a ‘land of opportunity,’ where people from around the world can reinvent themselves.
Yet while the German government has vowed to combat anti-Semitism, its threats so far have mainly consisted of unspecified consequences for individuals who attack German Jews. As a Syrian, I know that warnings alone are not enough to counter decades of anti-Semitic messaging. In febrile minds of extreme anti-Semites, attacking Jews can be seen as an honorable and courageous act. In many cases, these individuals have been conditioned since birth to perceive the Jewish people as their enemy, themselves victims of a narrative designed to prevent them from holding their country’s dictators accountable for the widespread misery felt throughout the Arab world.
Syrians must educate themselves on persistent history of Anti-Semitism, which did not start with the Holocaust—nor end with the creation of the state of Israel. Every Syrian who aspires to become a European citizen must refuse to be an anti-Semitic extension of their government. Germany, with its years of retraining its own population, has a lot to offer on this front, but the German government must make this a priority and a commitment with its deeds as well as its words.
A Europe unsafe for Jews will never be safe for other minorities. When Syrian communities throughout Europe come to recognize this reality, there is the remarkable potential for fostering a conducive environment for Jews and Syrians to respect one another, encouraging understanding and cooperation between neighbours and mutual support of minority communities throughout Europe. However, getting to this point will require a lot of effort and determination, both on the side of the German government and among Syrian communities themselves.
The Israeli occupation authorities are trying to subjugate the Palestinian citizen, imposing him, arbitrarily, on the military barriers and iron gates that make it difficult for him to carry out the simplest tasks, and confuse his planning for his life. Will he be able to arrive at the appointed time or not?
The West Bank barriers and gates were divided into 100 cantons, and its goal is to generalize the apartheid regime and prevent the establishment of a connected Palestinian state...
The occupation forces install about 165 iron gates on the entrances of villages and cities, and on the roads connecting them, half of which are closed in normal conditions, while about 600 military barriers, dirt berms or cement blocks control the lives of citizens, which restrict the movement of vehicles and pedestrians alike, and they erect gates at the entrances to the villages which aim to isolate any village within a few minutes when the occupation decides.
Besides the fact that the numbers seem hugely exaggerated, the timing of this and similar articles is curious.
After all, if anything, the checkpoint situation is better today than at any time in the past 20 years.
This seems to me to be a way for Palestinian leaders to misdirect both their own people and the world by starting a campaign against Israeli security measures.
They want to proactively stir up anger because there is a simple solution to the checkpoint problem, as well as the "canton" problem and most of their other complaints: Accept the "Peace to Prosperity" plan!
Every single checkpoint, except those into Israel, would be dismantled under the plan.
Palestinian propagandists realize that they need to change the focus away from the plan and towards their usual posture of playing the innocent victim of Israeli evil. They know they can't have it both ways - complain about how terrible life is and also complain about how terrible a plan that solves all their every day problems is as well. So they will complain about specific aspects of the peace plan they don't like and try as hard as they can to distract people away from the parts that would solve their major everyday issues.
The proper response to all of these types of articles and tweets is - if things are so bad, then a peace plan that solves those issues is a good idea.
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In September 2017, right after Rosh Hashanah, Peter Beinart wrote in The Forward:
Last week, Bernie Sanders gave a much-touted foreign policy speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, the same location where Winston Churchill delivered his famous “Iron Curtain” address in 1946. The contents of the speech were intriguing. So was its timing.
Sanders delivered it on the first day of Rosh Hashanah.
This has become a pattern for the Vermont Senator. In 2015, Sanders used the Jewish New Year to deliver a major address on, ironically enough, religion and public life, at Liberty University, an institution founded by Jerry Falwell. In 2016, he spent Yom Kippur at the White House meeting Pope Francis and talking about it on CNN.
It’s a pattern he’d do well to reconsider. Although he considers himself Jewish, Sanders is not, in his words, “actively involved with organized religion.” That is, of course, fine. He can observe or not observe Jewish holidays however he’d like. But he’s also a former — and likely future — contender for the presidency in a deeply religious country. And flaunting his disrespect for his own religious tradition isn’t smart.
Beinart's concern was not for Sanders to embrace his spirituality, but to ensure he is electable:
Sanders has not called himself an atheist. His secularism, however, may hurt him with voters who espouse a specific faith. According to a January 2016 Pew Research Center survey, Democrats who identified as Protestant or Catholic were roughly 20 points less likely than religious unaffiliated Democrats to say Sanders would make a good or great president. Among the religious unaffiliated within their party, Sanders led Clinton by eight points. But among Protestants and Catholics, she led him by 23 points.
Sanders' recent videos where he claims to be proud to be Jewish may be a direct, and somewhat cynical, attempt to gain the votes he lost to Hillary.
Bernie's latest outreach video to Jews is more of the same - he talks a lot about Hitler's Nazis and contemporary Nazis and that is pretty much his entire Jewish playlist.
I'm very proud to be Jewish and I look forward to becoming the first Jewish president in the history of this country. pic.twitter.com/UOPvEomHNE
There is a short clip there of Bernie lighting a menorah - but even then, in Des Moines, he couldn't come up with a single word to relate to Chanukah itself, only speaking in platitudes about freedom and diversity. It's a holiday that celebrates religious freedom and he couldn't even bring himself to make the connection, something that non-Jewish presidents have done ever since they started creating greetings for Chanukah.
Maybe he can fool some people of faith in America into thinking that his talking about people who hate Jews gives him some Jewish bona fides. But the entire "proud to be Jewish" shtick, when four years ago he avoided the topic at all costs, is not seeming very authentic.
He has yet to say a single specific thing about Judaism he is proud of.
(h/t EBoZ)
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Question: How long does it take a Palestinian Authority TV reporter to rewrite history and deceive Palestinians into hating Israelis?
Answer: 10 seconds.
This is a classic example of how the Palestinian Authority lies to its own people to demonize Israelis and create hatred of them among Palestinians.
At a Palestinian protest against US President Trump’s Middle East peace plan, an Israeli officer instructed Palestinian journalists to move to the other side of the road to be safe from oncoming cars.
But in the PA TV reporter’s instantaneous rewriting of history – during his live broadcast – this was distorted into a lie, turning the Israeli officer’s attempt at protecting the Palestinians into a racist statement. The PA TV reporter told viewers that the Israeli soldiers ordered them to move because “this is an Israeli road and Palestinians are not allowed on it.” In truth, the Israeli officer stressed that the soldiers were trying to “look out for” the lives of the Palestinians, because they were in danger of being “run over.” It is worth noting that the Israeli officer and the PA TV reporter spoke Hebrew together.
Israeli officer (in Hebrew): “Stand over there.”
PA TV reporter (in Hebrew): “We are journalists.”
Israeli officer (in Hebrew): “Journalists over there.”
PA TV reporter (in Hebrew): “Where?
Israeli officer (in Hebrew): “Across the street. They’ll run you over. It’s your life. Go over here.”
PA TV reporter (in Arabic): “As you can hear –”
Israeli officer (in Hebrew): “You’ll get killed. We’re looking out for you.”
PA TV reporter (in Arabic): “One of the occupation soldiers is making us move away on a false claim that this is an Israeli road and Palestinians are not allowed on it.” [Official PA TV, Jan. 29, 2020]
Iranian authorities are threatening to destroy the historic tomb of Esther and Mordechai in the city of Hamedan, 200 miles west of Tehran, in favor of constructing "a consular office for Palestine," ARAM, the Alliance for Rights of All Minorities in Iran, said in a Twitter post on Sunday.
The organization claims that members of Iran's formidable Basij paramilitary force attempted to raid the historic site in what it called "an act of revenge against the Israeli-Palestinian peace plan by President Trump."
"Ester and Mordechai were biblical Jewish heroes who saved their people from a massacre in a story known as #Purim. Their burial site has been a significant Jewish landmark for Jews and history buffs around the world," ARAM said.
In December 2010, Iranian protesters tried to breach the compound citing fears that Israel might damage the Al Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
Sir Henry McMahon, acting on behalf of the British government, met with Sherif Hussein of Mecca in 1915 and made what were taken to be a series of promises to the Arab people. These ‘promises’ were later disputed by the British government and, as with many issues concerning recent Middle East history, were open to interpretation.
Hussein interpreted the correspondence given to him by McMahon as a clear indication that Palestine would be given to the Palestinians [sic] once the war had ended. The British government was later to dispute this interpretation. They claimed that any land definitions were only approximate and that a map drawn at the time (but not by McMahon or a member of the British delegation) excluded Palestine from land to be given back to the Arab people.
...
By the time war ended in November 1918, two distinct schools of thought had developed regarding Palestine:
1) That the British had promised Palestine to the Arabs after the war had ended in return for their support to the Allies in the war.
2) That the British had agreed to give their support to the Jews for a homeland in Palestine as laid out in the Balfour Declaration of 1917.
It turns out that this same argument came up in 1937, when the Peel Commission issued its partition plan. In that plan, there would be a tiny Jewish state but the Arab state would become united with Trans-Jordan, seemingly under the rule of King Abdullah. ("two sovereign independent States would be established--the one an Arab State consisting of Trans-Jordan united with that part of Palestine which lies to the cast and south of a frontier such as we suggest in Section 3 below; the other a Jewish State consisting of that part of Palestine which lies to the north and west of that frontier.")
At the time, Palestinian Arabs argued that the McMahon correspondence gave them the right to an independent state in Palestine and therefore the Peel Commission plan was invalid.
As a result, Sir Henry McMahon himself wrote a letter to the Times of London and set the record straight. The Palestine Post reported:
Sir,
Many references have been made in the Palestine Royal Commission Report and in the course of the recent debates in both Houses of Parliament to the ‘McMahon Pledge’, especially to that portion of the pledge which concerns Palestine and of which one interpretation has been claimed by the Jews and another by the Arabs.
It has been suggested to me that continued silence on the part of the giver of that pledge may itself be misunderstood.
I feel, therefore, called upon to make some statement on the subject, but I will confine myself in doing so to the point now at issue—i.e., whether that portion of Syria now known as Palestine was or was not intended to be included in the territories in which the independence of the Arabs was guaranteed in my pledge.
I feel it my duty to state, and I do so definitely and emphatically, that it was not intended by me in giving this pledge to King Hussein to include Palestine in the area in which Arab independence was promised. I also had every reason to believe at the time that the fact that Palestine was not included in my pledge was well understood by King Hussein.
Yours faithfully,
A. Henry McMahon.
July 22.
That should have settled the matter, yet even today Arabs and Arabists are arguing that the McMahon correspondence pledged an independent Palestinian state.
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The hidden government of the world, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Masonic plans to dominate the world, Part 10, by MANSOUR ABDUL HAKIM, Egypt, 2011 Stones on the chessboard .. The practical application of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, by Majdi Kamil, Egypt, 2011 Protocols of the Elders of Zion, MOHAMMED IBRAHIM, Jordan, 2011 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, ABDEL BADIE KAFAFI, Oman, 2007 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, VICTOR MARSDEN, Egypt, 2004 (Also a 2018 edition) The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, MOHAMED IBRAHIM, Egypt, 2012 (Also a 2014 edition published in Jordan) Protocols of the Elders of Zion, OSCAR LEVY, Jordan, 2017 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Part 1 and 2), AJAJ NOUEIHED, Jordan 2014 Protocols of the Elders of Zion, AHMED MUTAWE, Jordan, 2015 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, ABBAS EL AKKAD, Egypt The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, BAHA AL-AMIR, Egypt, 2016 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, SALAH ABOUDIA, Kuwait, 2015 Zion Protocols, RASLAN ALADDIN, Syria, 2016
That's about 15 different publications of the Protocols or about them.
I also found a book from Algeria, "Blood from the Pastry of Zion," by Muslim Brotherhood member Najeeb al-Kilani, describing the 1840 Damascus blood libel as if it was true.
The Great Conspiracy to Control the World 3 - Isra and the Children of Israel is one of the many anti-Israel books that are pure antisemitism. Also a number of books predicting Israel's demise.
Anti-Israel books by Shlomo Sand and Israel Shahak are also featured, although Bibi Netanyahu's 1996 book "A Place Among Nations" is also there.
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Hassan Nasrallah gave a speech Sunday where, among other ramblings, he discussed how Hezbollah will deal with the United States. (The translation comes from Hezbollah's Al Manar website.)
Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah stressed Sunday that the United States of America has recently committed two major crimes, the assassination of the head of IRGC’s Al-Quds Force general Qasem Suleimani as well as the deputy chief of Iraq’s Hashd Shaabi Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis and the announcement of Trump’s Mideast plan.
Sayyed Nasrallah stressed that those two crimes had ushered a direct confrontation with the axis of resistance in Lebanon, calling for forming a comprehensive (political, economical, cultural and legal) resistance front, against the United States all over the world.
The military choice will never be abandoned, according to the Resistance Leader who pointed out that the US tyrant has not left [anything] for the regional peoples except holding guns to fight it.
That last paragraph sounds like a terrorism threat, but he left it vague.
Sayyed Nasrallah considered that the confrontation between the United States and the forces which reject to surrender to its will is inevitable, adding that Washington is who has led the region to this conflict, not the resistance.
All the regional peoples must be prepared for the key confrontation, according to Sayyed Nasrallah who added that Trump’s administration is the most arrogant, unjust, Satanic and corrupt in the US history.
The US hit the quadfecta!
But here's the best part:
Hezbollah Chief suggestedboycotting all the US goods or at least the products of some (e.g. Trump’s) firms, adding that the US point of weakness is its economy.
What, exactly, does Hezbollah purchase from Trump's companies today? Do they stay in Trump hotels? Do they buy apartments in Trump buildings?
This is some strategy.
Nasrallah then gave a backhanded compliment to Israel while trying to insult it and the US:
“The Israeli enemy has a major weakness which is the human losses; similarly, the Americans have their economic and financial situation as a point of fragility. Hezbollah hit the Israeli enemy at its weakness, so, likewise, we can concentrate on the US economic interests.”
Those crazy Jews and their concern for human life! We in Hezbollah have no such weakness.
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Featured on the program were Messianic Jews Steve and Jana Ben-Nun of Israeli News Live, who claimed that the transgender rights movement is a Zionist plot to make all of humanity androgynous.
“They want to rule the world,” Jana Ben-Nun said of the Jews. “They want to get Gentile riches, and they want to rule the Gentiles. They don’t consider Gentiles [to be] fully human beings. In fact, as an end game, they have this strange doctrine: the Adam Kadmon doctrine. Adam Kadmon was, originally, according to the Zohar and the Talmud, he was androgynous; Adam, he wasn’t male or female, he was male and female in one body, and this is why you see this transgender agenda today.”
“Is Zionism behind the transgender movement?” Wiles asked.
“Yes,” Ben-Nun replied. “It gets its origin in Zionism, and it gets its origin in the Talmud, Zohar, and Kabbalah. It’s a Kabbalahistic doctrine of Adam Kadmon. They have this doctrine called Tikkun Olam—repairing the world—so how do they want to repair the world? They want to bring it to the original. Who was original? Adam. He was androgynous. So now they’re putting specific things in food, in drink, and basically their end game is to make humans on Earth that will survive—whatever it is they are bringing—androgynous.”
“What they are really trying to do is undo God’s creation,” Wiles said. “They are at odds with the Creator.”
I'm not quite sure I get the logic, but perhaps when the entire world is androgynous, the Jews will have the only men left and they can take over. You'd have to ask Wiles whether I have that right.
Actually, Jews are often at odds with the Creator. We've been arguing with Him for millennia. And now we ask Him, why is this antisemitic jerk still spreading his filth?
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What is it that makes possible a horror like the machete attack on a Jewish gathering in New York in December? The outrage overshadowed increased sightings of anti-Jewish graffiti and incidents of boorishly aggressive behaviour towards Jews in public places, here as well as in the United States. Violence always depends on the normalising of bigotry, in which even the most farcically ignorant prejudice plays its part.
During the election campaign, a Labour candidate was obliged to stand down for having used the name “Shylock” as a term of abuse against a member of the Jewish community. In his defence, he claimed that he did not know that the name had any Jewish associations.
This may be chiefly an indictment of standards in British secondary schools. But it also points to an issue about cultural awareness of Judaism and Jewish history. Schoolchildren, of course, study the Holocaust. But what is disturbing —from our own experience and that of many other teachers—is that they often emerge with only the haziest idea of the specifics. We have heard of students who have studied the diaries of Anne Frank with barely any mention of the fact that she was Jewish. Holocaust education, and even events around Holocaust Memorial Day, can come to be focused on generalities about victimised minorities. We have encountered schoolchildren who have visited Auschwitz and returned with only the vague notion that it is bad to persecute people for their religion. This is a worthy enough principle (as Christians in the Middle East or Pakistan would agree); but it signally fails to bring out what is distinctive about the atrocities of the Third Reich and their accomplices, and what is distinctive about Jewish identity and history.
The Holocaust is not a story about deplorably bigoted attitudes. It was a systematic, indeed “scientific”, effort to exterminate an entire population. It is also about a campaign rooted in two millennia of consistent demonisation of that population by Christian theologians, artists and liturgists—and latterly by political extremists searching for a universal scapegoat. The nightmare of the Third Reich is intelligible only against the background of this long record.
What would effective Holocaust education look like? It would certainly have to involve an attempt to trace these historical roots, to look at, for instance: the history of the “Blood Libel” (the myth that Jews routinely kidnapped, tortured and killed Christian children at Passover), with origins that lie in this country in the Middle Ages; at the expulsion of Jews from England in the 13th century, France in the 14th century and Spain and Portugal in the 15th and 16th; at the 19th century pogroms in Tsarist Russia, and at the resulting first large waves of Jewish refugees in Britain and elsewhere. It would need to look at how these communities took root and developed, what they had to battle against and still have to combat in the form of lazy prejudices encoded in British literature and popular culture, even when the latter’s Christian rationale has long been forgotten.
Some important liberal journalists have recently started talking about an ugly fact. Running afoul of Sen. Bernie Sanders's online supporters isn't fun. That was the upshot of a recent conversation on MSNBC when Meet the Press host Chuck Todd read aloud a passage from an article by writer Jonathan Last that was published in The Bulwark, where he wrote about the behavior of Sanders' backers, popularly known as the "Bernie Bros."
Last accurately described fans of Sanders as an online mob that bullies the Vermont senator's critics, "hounding opponents, enforcing discipline, quashing any sort of dissent – and trying to preempt anyone else from taking sides against the Dear Leader." The point of the piece was to compare them to supporters of President Donald Trump, but in doing so, Last went a step further by saying that both Sanders and Trump each had a "digital brownshirt brigade."
Predictably, that sent up howls of protest from supporters of Sanders, who said it was offensive to compare a Jewish candidate's backers to Nazis. And, in the manner of online mobs, Todd's sin in merely quoting the article brought down on his head an avalanche of criticism, including a trending #firechucktodd hashtag. By calling attention to the bullying the press gets from the socialist's posse, Todd (who is also Jewish) was "canceled" by the political correctness police of the left.
The context for this kerfuffle is not one of the usual left-right, pro-Trump/con-Trump variety that seems to characterize all of our political arguments these days.
Todd is a liberal journalist notorious for his disgust of the president. And Last is a #NeverTrump conservative writing in an anti-Trump publication. Yet the tsunami of abuse thrown at Todd proved his point about the way the Sanders mob swarms anyone who speaks up against the current Democratic presidential frontrunner.
But there are two separate points to be made here.
One is that Sanders' supporters are right that Last was wrong to call them Brownshirts. Todd was equally wrong for quoting the passage on air without pointing out the huge difference between even the most obnoxious of the Bernie Bros and Adolf Hitler's Storm Troopers, who were known for their brown uniforms.
Those words can't come from someone caught in the throes of war. In its relentless focus on taking down Trump, the Democratic Party has overlooked the power of a unifying message. Yes, the goal is to replace Trump – but how and with what? Bashing Trump is a tactic, not a strategy. And promising radical changes to the country and the economy is a strategy, but the wrong one.
The lesson of the Trump presidency is that character counts at least as much as policy. America doesn't need a policy revolutionary. It needs decency. It needs a mensch in the White House. A mensch with the wisdom to hear all voices and the spine to make difficult decisions.
Bernie Sanders is no mensch. He's a cranky idealist hell-bent on pushing his utopian socialist agenda – and "healing the country" is not on that agenda. He's exploiting the rage at Trump to trigger the kind of class warfare that spreads even more animosity and division.
Sanders is just the most extreme expression of a phenomenon that has plagued the Democrats: They've allowed their fury at Trump to turn them into a crisis party. In their near panic at the prospect of losing another election, they've thrown the kitchen sink at Trump and the American voters hoping something would stick.
But in the process, they've missed the real crisis: We are a deeply divided nation in desperate need of a courageous leader who will embrace the challenge to Make America One Again.
I know: I'm dreaming. Being a dreamer these days is a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.
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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Wednesday, February 19, 2020
Elder of Ziyon
While some 13% of Palestinians work for Israelis, based on the averages in the chart above, it appears that about half of all Palestinian construction workers are actually working in Israeli communities and a much smaller percentage of the other categories.
