Students for Justice in Palestine sponsored an almost unwatchable discussion with Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi, a professor at San Francisco State University.
Abdulhabi listed a litany of lies about Israel and coronavirus:
The fact that Israeli interrogators actually infected Palestinian prisoners while they were torturing them with the COVID-19 is quite alarming. The fact that Israeli prison authorities tell the Palestinian prisoners use your socks to protect yourself from COVID-19...
As best as I can tell, the rumor that Israelis infected Palestinians while torturing them came from a story last month that Israel quarantined four Palestinian prisoners because they came into contact with a guard who was found to have the disease. So while Israel is trying to save prisoners from COVID-19, antisemites like this professor are claiming that the Jewish state is deliberately infecting them.
Arab papers claimed they were infected. Abdulhabi made up the torture claims all by herself.
The socks rumor came from that reliable source Hamas, and again has no basis in reality. While masks have been hard to come by across the board in Israel, last week Israel did manage to get a steady supply of masks for prisoners, specially colored so they cannot use them as disguises.
This shows yet again how little regard for the truth the anti-Israel activists have. In this case, we have a professor who literally makes things up. Why San Francisco State University allows a proven liar to be teaching their students is a mystery.
The Canary Mission has a large dossier on Abdulhabi's outrageous statements over the years.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
Beth Oppenheim is Director of International Relations at the Israeli Gisha NGO, which is dedicated to improving the movement of people and goods in and out of the Palestinian territories. She just started her job there in February.
"Director of International Relations" apparently means "bashing Israel in international forums."
Gisha calls itself a human rights group, yet when it comes to criticizing Egypt or Hamas for their own restrictions on the movement of Palestinians in Gaza, they are restrained and muted. The vast majority of their pretense of defense of Palestinians is aimed at only one target: Israel.
In her first article for her new employer, Oppenheim curiously chose the Arab News as the forum for yet another article about how Israel is not living up to its responsibility for Gaza. Why the Arab News? Do Arabs not hate Israel enough for Gisha? Or perhaps she was just getting her feet wet and trying to establish credibility to get into the Guardian.
Oppenheim pretty much parrots the many similar articles that we have debunked in recent weeks. She doesn't say a word about Hamas' responsibility for keeping Gazans safe and their choice to fund weapons tunnels instead of hospitals, or how Hamas indeed uses medical facilities for terrorism. She doesn't mention that the PA has been withholding needed medical aid from Gaza for years, including now (according to Hamas, but probably true.) Instead, she falsely claims that Israel is legally obligated under the Geneva Conventions to directly provide aid to Gaza, not just facilitate aid.
I commented on only a couple of points:
Repeating a falsehood over and over does not make it true. Gaza is not occupied under international law. The legal definition of occupation by every jurist in history (before Israel left Gaza) requires "boots on the ground." Making up new international law for only one nation is not valid.
That being said, Israel is indeed keeping Gaza in mind in its coronavirus planning, for example when it is acquiring ventilators. Every ounce of aid donated to Gaza is being allowed by Israel. It is not in Israel's interests for an epidemic in Gaza. Your organization Gisha knows all this.
Gisha also knows very well that any shortage of medical supplies in Gaza is from the Palestinian Authority not sending Gaza its fair share of aid out of the tens of millions already donated. For some reason, while unwarranted criticism of Israel is amplified, the actual attempts by the PA to block all aid to Gaza is virtually ignored by your NGO.
Is your priority to help Gazans - or to bash Israel?
Arab News, that bastion of free speech, did not allow my comment to be published.
Isn't it interesting that a supposed human rights organizations chooses to publish anti-Israel articles in forums where free speech is a joke and censorship is the norm?
Gisha doesn't care about human rights. If it did, it would pay as much attention to Palestinian suppression of their own people's right to movement as it does for Israel. If it did, it would publish articles abut Egypt's restrictions on Gaza. If it did, it wouldn't choose to publish articles in newspapers that don't allow any contrary opinions to be published.
No, it is not a human rights organization. It is an anti-Israel organization. And this is par for the course for anti-Israel NGOs.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
One out of every three Jews on Planet Earth were slaughtered by Nazis and their various collaborators in the Holocaust. While there were unfortunately many other victims, Jews and Roma (“Gypsies”) were the ones targeted for total extinction. Of the six million Jews who perished, a million and a half were babies and children. The Nazis were proud of their work and took many pictures…
There were many worthy commemorative articles by esteemed authors regarding this somber annual event, but two especially come to mind that should be read. The first one by Meir Jolovitz gave me yet another reason to like the actor Morgan Freeman,. Ruthie Blum honored the martyrs beautifully as well
This year, due to the current pandemic, we all recalled these tragic events at home. Since the Hebrew calendar is both solar and lunar, the corresponding dates on the Western calendar change yearly.
I obviously agree that it’s good to have a day set aside to recall the Holocaust and its lessons. Indeed, I’ve worked most of my life trying to assure that “Never Again ! ” will be a truism forever by defending Israel, its right to thrive–not just survive–in relatively secure, far more defensible, real borders than those imposed upon the reborn Jewish State by the United Nations armistice lines in 1949.
The 1949 lines made Israel smaller in width (9-15 miles) at its strategic waist than the size of some Texas driveways, at least according to President George W. Bush.
Additionally, I’ve fought for relative justice for all peoples– Jew and non-Jew alike–with my pen, via other media, and additional means of communication and education for well over half century now. That’s also what http://q4j-middle-east.com is all about.
But, last year, before corona, I stayed away from this public display of sympathy for dead Jews.Putting it bluntly, too many people attending annual Yom Hashoah commemorations leave and then, either consciously or unconsciously, aid and abet those who claim that Arabs are now allegedly the new stateless, oppressed Jews; Gaza is the new Warsaw Ghetto; Jews are the new Nazis; and so forth.
If that above paragraph had even an iota of truth to it, Israel would have solved its Gaza terror problem long ago.
On January 24, 2020, one day after the Fifth World Holocaust Forum in Jerusalem, which marked the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and was attended by dozens of leaders from across the world, Moroccan writer Kamal Ait bin Juba posted an article on the liberal website ahewar.org,[1] in which he noted that the Holocaust was an undisputable fact and an indescribable horror. He added that commemorating the Holocaust was legitimate and justified, especially in light of Iran’s threats to eliminate Israel, and called to continue commemorating it so that tragedies of its sort never recur. He also expressed sorrow that many Islamic countries today still teach children to hate Jews.
The following are translated excerpts from his article: "I have no intention of discussing in this [article] who has the right to live in the Jewish lands in Israel today, for this is not the place to do so… But as human beings, we do not condone the extermination of any nation in the world, be it the Armenians, the Palestinians, the Rohingya Muslims, or anyone else. When the Jews accuse the dictator Hitler of exterminating millions of Jews in gas chambers in Germany [sic] as part of what he called the ‘final solution,’ the world knows they are not directing accusations against a person who brought joy to people’s hearts… but against a person who commanded vast, destructive military and intelligence forces… and who attacked others. And how can they [not accuse him], when he wrote in his book that capitalism and communism were both invented by the Jews, and expressed covert hostility towards them[?]…
"The truth is that, when I myself studied the issue of the Jewish Holocaust… I found it to be an undisputable fact… It was a terrible tragedy that befell the Jews of Europe in [the era of] Nazi Germany, [a tragedy] whose heinous nature cannot be imagined, except by those who are directly connected to it, being Jews or descendants of [Holocaust] survivors, who transmit from generation to generation the stories about this sad and tragic affair.
"On January 23, 2020, a ceremony was held in Jerusalem to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Germany [sic], where many Jews were exterminated. The anniversary of this event becomes [especially] justified and meaningful in light of the existence of a state like Iran, which never stops threatening to wipe Israel off the map… by means of its supporters, who take every opportunity to chant slogans like ‘death to Israel, curse the Jews.’
"Moreover, hatred of Jews is still being taught in many schools across the world, [including] in so-called Islamic states, some of which may even have diplomatic ties and peace agreements with the state of Israel. These people [the Jews] are described [in their curricula] as devils, violators of agreements, etc.
In April 2020, the Jewish people will be commemorating the 100th anniversary of the San Remo Conference, convened in Italy from April 19 until April 26, 1920, in the aftermath of the First World War. British Prime Minister Lloyd George and his minister of foreign affairs, Lord Curzon, attended along with the prime ministers of France and Italy. Representatives of Belgium, Greece, and Japan also took part. They constituted what was called the Supreme Council of the Principal Allied and Associated Powers. Most people have heard of the other great postwar conferences, like the Paris Peace Conference or the Geneva Conferences at the end of World War II. But San Remo has not been on many people’s radar screens, despite the fact that it created the geographic basis of the modern Middle East for most of the 20th century.
San Remo dealt with the disposition of territories that until 1920 were a part of the Ottoman Empire, which had been defeated in the war. Formally, the Ottomans renounced their claim to sovereignty over these lands, sometimes called Arab Asia, in the Treaty of Sevres, which was signed the same year as San Remo, on August 10, 1920. It was at Sevres that a draft peace agreement between the allies and the Ottoman Empire was worked out. What these postwar treaties enabled was the emergence of the system of Arab states, on the one hand, and the emergence of a ”national home for the Jewish people,” on the other hand. The Balfour Declaration from 1917 was in essence a declaration of British policy. But San Remo converted the Balfour Declaration into a binding international treaty, setting the stage for the League of Nations Mandate, which was approved in 1922. It has been noted that at San Remo, Jewish historic rights became Jewish legal rights.
Were these legal rights of the Jewish people superseded in subsequent years? At the time that the UN Charter was drafted in 1945, officials were cognizant that this argument might be raised. Therefore, they incorporated Article 80 into the UN Charter which stated specifically that “nothing in this chapter shall be construed in or of itself to alter in any manner the rights whatsoever of any states or any peoples or the terms of existing international instruments to which Members of the United Nations may respectively be parties.” Thus, the foundations of Jewish legal rights established through San Remo were preserved for the future.
Jerusalem, April 23 - Neighbors, relatives, and friends of a local resident expressed shock this morning upon discovering that he had purchased a coffee-colored pooch but given it a moniker other than "Shoko," thus defying a powerful societal custom.
Concerned citizens in the immediate social circles of Amit Dolev, 34, voiced surprise and dismay Thursday when he informed them his new brown retriever is named Kinamon (Hebrew for cinnamon), and not Shoko, the name that every other brown dog in the history of Israeli society has carried.
"I'm stunned," admitted his sister-in-law Adi, the only close relative willing to go on the record. "This isn't something anyone in the family ever expected, especially from Amit. He's generally not a troublemaker or anything, and I never would have pegged him as having imagination or an abundance of daring. I mean, he's an accountant who likes reading and maybe some occasional fishing. This is going to take some time process."
"Oh, so it's true?" wondered a neighbor who declined to be identified by name, citing concerns of associated shame in the deeply conservative society of secular Israelis. "Wow. Just wow. I grew up in the 1980's amid rumors of someone in our school, always a sibling or cousin of an unnamed student in a different grade, or who'd already graduated, whose car wasn't a white Subaru, so I'm used to this sort of thing, but it's still kind of shocking when it happens, and happens so close by."
Mr. Dolev himself appeared oblivious to the controversy and scandal his actions have generated. "I was considering the name 'Fistuk' (Hebrew vernacular from the Arabic for pistachio)," he recalled, "but figured that might better work for a smaller breed. Then I thought of Hummus, Juju, Looloosh, Loco, Lafa, Mocha, and a bunch of others, but none of them had quite the right flavor. Then I thought, 'Hey, what's something brown that everyone likes and makes a cute name for a dog? Cinnamon, obviously.' So here we are. I can't wait to introduce her to everyone."
Experts observed that while rare, such a flagrant departure from tradition has occurred in secular Israeli society on several notable occasions. "It would be analogous, to give non-Israelis an idea of what's causing the confusion," explained Tel Aviv University sociology professor Enka Zedavar, "to a Hollywood director having somebody get shot on a rooftop or other high surface and not have the character scream as he falls several stories to the ground. The last time anything like this happened here was probably a flight landing at Ben Gurion in 2014 on which no one clapped at touchdown."
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
Its exclusion of Palestinians from becoming citizens is explicit, and in line with Arab League recommendations from the 1950s:
Article 6 II- Iraqi nationality shall not be granted to Palestinians as a guarantee to their right to return to their homeland.
Any Arab has a path to become a citizen, except Palestinians. The justification, as always, is that this is what is best for Palestinians. Of course, no one is giving Palestinians who want to become citizens a voice in that matter.
Non-Arabs seem to theoretically have a path as well, but the Minister of Interior must approve any requests so he can reject anyone for any reason. Which makes is virtually impossible to even imagine a Jew being allowed to become a citizen.
What about Jews who were expelled from Iraq in the early 1950s? Can they become citizens again? Article 18 gives a glimmer of hope, until you read the second paragraph.
Article 18
I- Any Iraqi, who was denaturalized on political, religious, racist or sectarian grounds, shall have the right to restore his Iraqi nationality, subject to submission of an application to this effect. In the case of his death, his children, who have lost their Iraqi nationality consequent to his father's loss of nationality, shall have the right to submit an application to restore Iraqi nationality.
II-Excluded from the benefit item I of this Article shall be those Iraqis who had lost their nationality pursuant to Law No. (1) Of 1950 and Law No. (12) Of 1952.
Law No. 1 of 1950, entitled “Supplement to Ordinance Cancelling Iraqi Nationality,” deprived Jews of their Iraqi nationality. Section 1 says “the Council of Ministers may cancel the Iraqi nationality of the Iraqi Jew who willingly desires to leave Iraq...”
Of course, that law was an excuse to expel the Jews of Iraq giving as an excuse that they are all Zionist.
Meaning that Jews who were expelled from Iraq are excluded from returning. By law.
How many leftists have ever protested either the antisemitism or the explicit anti-Palestinianism of the citizenship law on the books today in Iraq?
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
Israel is a democracy. Let it decide on its own future.
There is a lot of debate within Israel itself on what the future of Judea and Samaria should be, in a way that respects the rights of both Arabs and Jews. There are no simple answers.
But leftist American organizations are trying to subvert Israeli democracy by pressuring Israel to do what they want, rather than what Israelis want by choosing their elected officials.
It is chutzpah to assume that Israelis don't understand the issues as well as American Jews do. Israelis are the ones who live in Israel and have to live with whatever decisions are made. Not all of them agree, by any means, on the best way to move forward. If they want to choose a different direction they can elect different leaders. Outsiders do not have the same risks that Israelis have, and their attempting to pressure Israel is an attempt to subvert Israeli democracy.
Let Israel decide what it best for Israel.
I'm not going to send this out to my mailing list like J-Street is because I don't like to spam people. This petition will likely not get as many signatures. But it doesn't matter, because the entire point is optics - if people who support Israel take the time to create petitions then there is no longer a clear playing field for the people who oppose Israel and its policies.
Furthermore, my petition can be signed by people who oppose annexation too. The point isn't the decide Israel's policy one way or the other, and I support Israel's right to make its own decisions even when I disagree with them.
So sign on and help neutralize the people who think they can tell Israel what to do.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
Scientists racing toward a vaccine against COVID-19 at Israel's MigVax will commence a safety and efficacy assessment in rodents in May prior to initiating human trials during the summer months, a senior company official said on Wednesday.
Kiryat Shemona-based MigVax, an affiliate of the Migal Galilee Research Institute, is working to adapt a vaccine developed over the past four years against infectious bronchitis virus (IBV) - a coronavirus strain causing bronchial disease in poultry - for human use.
Phase 1/2 clinical trials in humans will start during the summer of 2020 and last six to nine months, senior Migvax researcher and director Prof. Itamar Shalit told a webinar hosted by Jerusalem-based crowdfunding investment platform OurCrowd.
"People think the winner takes it all. We are going to need much more than one vaccine. Manufacturing the needed quantity for all the world will require different types of vaccines," said Shalit, who specializes in infectious diseases.
MigVax researchers aim to adapt the vaccine for the avian coronavirus into a new oral subunit human vaccine against COVID-19, based on their great genetic similarity and identical infection mechanism. Except for some required genetic adjustments, researchers say the same vaccination concepts should apply in humans.
"It is very important to understand that to suppress coronavirus and go back to our normal life, we have to invest in a vaccine that will be effective," Shalit said. "Once we have an effective vaccine, that will be the time to exit this pandemic situation and return to normal life."
Twenty-two-year-old Amir Kashfi arrives early in the morning around 6:30 a.m. outside a Los Angeles school to set up boxes of canned goods, pasta, rice and other non-perishables to dispense. A number of recipients line up by car or by foot by 8 a.m.
The need for this food pantry has spiked during the ongoing coronavirus crisis.
“There’s a huge increase in demand because of the pandemic,” said Kashfi, a volunteer with IsraAID, an Israel-based NGO that partners with Los Angeles Regional Food Bank and Team Rubicon, which is a US veterans organization, among others in these efforts. “It hurts my heart to see so many in need.”
“Our goal is to be there for the community,” said Seth Davis, chief executive officer of IsraAID US.
He noted that the short-term goal was to fill a gap and get food to people in need, but the long-term goal was to create a cadre in the community who can respond to such crises. In addition to Los Angeles, IsraAID has helped operate food banks in other California locations, including San Diego, Orange County, San Jose and Santa Barbara.
Davis said, “This deployment will go on for months, because even if the curve flattens, there’s going to be a long tail of people still in need of food and financial help.”
“These are unprecedented times,” Dr. Lucy Uber, another volunteer, said. “Food is a basic necessity that most of us take for granted.”
Latest: Orthodox Jews are emerging as a major force in plasma donation efforts in the New York region.
More than half of Mount Sinai's donors so far are Orthodox.
Defense Minister MK Naftali Bennett presented Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with plan for the immediate opening of educational institutions and stores, as an exit strategy following the coronavirus pandemic.
Bennett explained that at this stage the closure would crush the livelihood of Israelis, which is infinitely worse than the medical benefits of the closures.
This Ongoing War writes, "The opinions of Palestinian Arabs are, to a great extent, a puzzle."
Are the opinions of Israeli Arabs any less a puzzle?
For example, in July 2012, The Israeli website The Marker, (a Hebrew-language daily business newspaper published by Haaretz) featured the headline:
60% of Israeli Arabs define themselves as Palestinians
But then, right below it:
However, 80% also consider themselves Israeli
How does that work?
(Note: translations by Google Translate)
The article quotes the results of a study by Prof. Sammy Smooha and Zohar Lichtman on the effects of a year of civil service on Arab participants. They looked into the results of a survey by Adalyah Economic Advisory that showed that Arab civil service volunteers are satisfied with their year of service and say it has been very helpful to them.
Smooha and Lichtman found that when it comes to how Israeli Arabs define themselves:
o 40% self-define as Israeli Arab o 40% self-define as Israeli-Palestinian o 20% self-define as Arab-Palestinian
Looks clear enough.
But if you mix and match the numbers, you can get the contradictory results of the headline:
This data, as Samucha points out, can be read in two ways. It can be read that "60% of Israeli Arabs define themselves as Palestinians"; And they can also be read as "80% of Israeli Arabs incorporate Israelis into their identity". The choice between half full glass and half empty glass can be made by anyone.
Just 2 years later, in January 2014, Haaretz itself ran an article on what it claims is the failure of the attempt to integrate Israeli Arabs into society. It again features Prof. Sammy Smooha, of the Sociology Department at Haifa University. This time Smooha is using different data and describes the self-identification of Israeli Arabs this way:
o 32% self-define as Israeli-Arab o 45% self-define as Israeli-Palestinians o 22% self-define as Arab-Palestinians
Using the same mix and match approach, the article concludes:
These figures can be read two ways: We can call the cup half empty, with 67% of Israel’s Arabs defining themselves as Palestinian in one way or other; or call the cup half full in that 77% refer to themselves as Israeli.
The numbers here are a little different, but the ability to combine them to reach contradictory conclusions remains.
But even without combining results, some of Smooha's findings seem self- contradictory.
On the one hand:
Anyone following Smooha’s surveys knows that the position held by Israeli Arabs towards the state has become more extreme over the years. It is doubtful the Jewish majority knows that 67% of the country’s Arabs believe Israel is a racist state, only 36% accept it as a Zionist state, only 47% believe it has the right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state, or that 53% support having a strong Muslim force in the Middle East to restrain Israel, and that 63% support the development of nuclear weapons by Iran.
But on the other...
63% of the country’s Arabs believing it would be good if Arab and Jewish citizens continue to coexist here, and 60% to 70% supporting Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state where Arabs and Jews live together. These findings indicate clear support for a constitution establishing Israel’s status as Jewish and democratic, with the Arabs’ status being defined as that of citizens with equal rights. Fully 60% accept Israel’s existence as a Jewish state with Hebrew serving as the dominant language and culture.
Surprisingly, the Arabs even think Israel should aspire to turn more towards Western culture than that of the Arab Middle East. And perhaps most surprising of all, they express affection towards their country: 58% believe Israel is a good place to live and 55% would prefer living in Israel than any other country in the world. [emphasis added]
Still, Haaretz is not the only left-wing source that marshalls data indicating an increase in Israeli-Arabs identifying with Israel.
+972 Magazine makes clear that: "the findings in the current poll show that the number of respondents self-identifying as “Arab-Israeli” has risen, and the number of those identifying only as “Palestinian” dropped."
But with qualifications:
Perhaps following the ratification of the Jewish Nation-State Law, some of the respondents in the 2019 poll were more fearful, and sought to appease the poll with their answers. Disclaimers aside, one thing is clear: there is no evidence of a trend in the opposite direction.
One advantage of this poll is that it distinguishes between identifying as "Palestinian" vs "Arab." On the other hand, their breakdown makes it difficult compare the results with the other 2 polls. What the first 2 polls refers to as "Arab-Palestinian" -- does that really correlate to "Palestinian" in this survey? To a combination of "Palestinian" + "Arab"?
According to the survey, conducted by Prof. Camille Fuchs of Tel Aviv University, about a quarter of Israeli minorities (23%) define themselves primarily as "Israeli" and half (51%) self-identify as "Israeli-Arab."
The proportion of non-Jewish people who define themselves primarily as "Palestinian" now stands at around 7%, down from 18% this time last year.
Moreover, there was a sizable increase in the number of Arabs who define themselves as Israeli - that number rose from 5% last year to 23% this year. [emphasis added]
Without the actual results of the survey, the results still remain unclear.
The numbers add up to 81% -- leaving the question of what other options were available to choose from.
Also, is it accurate -- as the tweet says -- that 74% of Israeli Arabs see themselves as Israeli, when the 23% component seeing themselves only as "Israeli" are defined as coming from "Israeli minorities," which would apparently include those who are neither Jews nor Arabs?
All this all makes it impossible to do an apples-to-apples comparison.
But if we were to make a table comparing the 4 surveys, using the 74% number, it might look something like this:
Israeli Arab
Israeli Palestinian
Arab Palestinian
Arab
Palestinian
Smooha I (2012)
40%
40%
20%
---
---
Smooha II (2014)
32%
45%
22%
---
---
+972 Magazine (2019)
46%
19%
---
22%
14%
JPPI (2020)
74% (23% Israeli and 51% Israeli Arab)
---
---
---
7%
We will have to wait for JPPI to publish the results so that we can see what choices were offered to the respondents, and what kind of mixing and matching might have been done to reach its results.
In any case, there does seem to be a sizeable number of Arabs in Israel who really do see themselves as Israeli-Arabs -- and a significant drop in the number of Palestinian Arabs who see themselves as just Palestinians.
The fact that Arabs in Israel can identify as Israelis, Arab-Israelis, is a sign of some success in the integration of Arabs into Israeli society -- success that can only be accomplished by providing equal rights and opportunities.
But more remains to be done.
And then there are the Palestinian Arabs.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
There is always intense interest in the Arab world about the miniseries that are broadcast during Ramadan.
This year, there is additional controversy.
The Arab MBC network is presenting "Um Haroun," a series about the history of the Jews in the Gulf and specifically in Kuwait, told through the story of a Jewish nurse of Turkish origin who moved between Iran and Iraq before settling in Bahrain, and the antisemitism she and her people experienced.
Here is the trailer:
Arabs are upset that a Ramadan film is actually sympathetic to Jews. The comments on the trailer include:
Jews teach their children from childhood to hate Muslims and love to kill them
A prelude to accepting and marrying the Jews, and this is essentially forbidden
This is a prelude to normalization with the Jews
It is our duty to fight every normalization act that promotes normalization with the enemy and / or dilute forms of conflict with it and / or falsify the reality of terrorism that it engages against Palestinians and Arabs
A malicious trick to establish the idea of the presence of civilian Jews before the usurping Jewish Zionist entity in the Arab land of Palestine in 1948 and that they are part of the fabric of Gulf society !!! It becomes clear to the inattentive viewer about the goals of the writer and director, the true Zionists or Zionists, which are the safety of the Jews' intentions, their humble life and their desire to live benignly, despite the people’s rejection of them and the oppression that occurred to them !!!
There are some sarcastic responses as well, saying that the Arabs aren't exactly the most peaceful people and that there are plenty of good Jews.
On Twitter, Arabs are saying things like, "A hashtag must be made to boycott MBC channels because of a Gulf series for sympathy for the Jews."
Um Haroun star Hayat Al-Fahad, who also co-produced the series, has been hitting back at critics.
Al Jazeera interviewed a professor on why Arabs should be upset at the series.
Professor Tariq Al-Tawari, professor of interpretation at the College of Islamic Law at Kuwait University, says that there are two concerns.
The first is that it opens the way for claiming the existence of a historical right for Jews in Kuwait or in other Gulf countries, which is not baseless because these families came to Kuwait at the beginning of the ninth century from Iraq and Iran....
The second fear of the series is that it could be an introduction to normalization by paving the way for penetrating the Kuwaiti consciousness that ultimately leads to Jews being accepted in the social structure.
While Arab antisemitism is evaporating ever so slowly - as is evidenced by the series itself, and a very pro-Jewish documentary in Egypt several years ago - it is still open.
Arab antisemitism will disappear when it is considered more shameful to be an antisemite than to embrace Jew-hatred.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
Reporters and anti-Israel activists, trying to prove that Israel is not allowing needed medical aid into Gaza, have been referencing the list of "dual use" items that Israel's COGAT publishes.
They misrepresent the list as a list of items banned from Gaza. But that was never true: it is a list of items that require special permission to enter Gaza (and, for many of them, the West Bank as well.) When the intended use of the items is clearly not for terrorists, they get approved fairly easily, if not automatically.
When I visited the Kerem Shalom crossing a few year ago, I was given an example of radiology equipment that uses radioactive materials. It certainly makes sense for Israel to restrict radioactive materials into Gaza, because no one doubts that Hamas would build a "dirty bomb" if they could, but when the intended use is obviously for medical needs the equipment gets approved.
Very few reporters bother to visit Kerem Shalom or Erez to find out the truth about what Israel allows into Gaza. Instead, they rely on the reporting of organizations that are hostile to Israel.
In March, when the coronavirus crisis was accelerating, The Forward published an article by Muhammad Shehada in March 24 that included these lies:
[D]ue to the blockade, health workers, cleaners and policemen working in quarantine zones lack protective clothing and N95 masks. They also have a shortage of the chemicals necessary to make disinfectants, including hydrogen peroxide and chlorine. Israel bans both from entering Gaza under the pretext of “dual-use” items — items they say can also be used for building weapons.
The closure of Gaza (not a blockade, which has a specific definition only for goods coming from the sea) never banned protective clothing or N95 masks. Israel does not ban chlorine at all, and neither does it ban hydrogen peroxide at the concentrations used by hospitals for disinfecting. Interestingly, Shehada linked to a March 14 Haaretz article for his assertions, but he changed what that report said:
Israel has not yet been asked to ease or temper its policy on importing goods, the official said. Israel may have to consider the entry of “dual-use” goods – civilian materials that can be used for military purposes. For example, Israel imposes limits on hydrogen peroxide, which in addition to its use as a medical disinfectant can at certain concentrations be used to manufacture explosives.
Israel says the restrictions it places on an exhaustive list of “dual-use” items—whose contents range from chemical fertilizers, to aluminum poles, to steel cables, to water skis—are necessary for maintaining security against a hostile military group that frequently launches missile barrages across its borders. But critics of the policy—which has at times restricted goods as quotidian as cilantro—insist it has transformed Gaza into “the world’s largest open-air prison.”
Ah, yes, the cilantro ban. I haven't heard that one for years. For a short time period around the time of intense Hamas rocket barrages in 2009, Israel changed its policy from restricting dangerous items into only allowing specific items into Gaza as needed for Gazans to live. Those items didn't include cilantro, which must have been a terrible burden. The policy was to encourage Gazans to rise up against Hamas, and it didn't work, so Israel ended it in 2010. It was not an application of the "dual use" restrictions.
Of course, anti-Israel activists calling Gaza an "open air prison" does not make it a charge that should be taken seriously.
But the worst part is that at the time this was written, Israel had already eliminated restrictions on dual-use items needed for fighting coronavirus.
As far as I can tell, no one has reported this, even though the policy is now four weeks old.
Movement of goods from Israel and Egypt has continued as previously, including the entry of restricted (“dual use”) items via the Israeli-controlled Kerem Shalom Crossing. The Government of Israel has offered to expedite approvals for items needed in relation to the COVID response.
And that policy has continued since then - before the Time article and possibly before the Forward article as well.
For a place as closely observed as Gaza, why has no one reported that Israel has essentially changed its policy and significantly eased its restrictions on dual use items? Not even Gisha, the NGO that obsessively tracks restrictions on movement and goods to and from Gaza, has said a word about it.
The hundreds of reporters and NGO employees in Israel and the territories, as always, only look for stories that fit their preconceived narrative - and that narrative simply does not include the idea that Israel is not a monster hell-bent on making the lives of Palestinians miserable for no reason.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
It really bugged me so I made my own video fisking both sides.
Remember, you can subscribe to EoZTV as a podcast on iPhones as well as some other podcast software. The URL is here.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
On Thursday, March 13, my synagogue, Congregation Shearith Israel in New York City, announced it would not be holding services on Shabbat. To refrain from praying in a community is a traumatic moment for any house of worship. But for my community, the suspension of our communal Sabbath prayer due to the pandemic echoed down through history. Shearith Israel is the oldest Jewish congregation in America; tracing its origins to 23 souls that had landed in New Amsterdam, with a public synagogue first built in 1730, its members had joined one another in sanctifying the Sabbath for centuries. The last time Shearith Israel’s sanctuary had been abandoned by its congregants was 1776, when the patriot members of the congregation had fled in advance of the British taking Manhattan. But the very same Jews formed a minyan in Philadelphia, and the public rituals continued apace.
Now, however, it was the minyan itself that had been rendered impossible.
I delivered a sermon on Friday afternoon—by conference call. What, I asked, does it mean to be joined, as a Jew, to others, precisely when we are forbidden from engaging with others? In my words to my community, I noted that on the Internet, many had been mentioning breakthroughs achieved by men of genius in solitude to suggest that forced aloneness might have unexpected advantages. After all, the argument went, Isaac Newton discovered the rules of calculus while in quarantine. But what interested me more, I said, was what I had learned about another insight achieved by Newton while in a period of solitude created by a plague: his conceptualization of gravity. A student described Newton’s eureka moment: In the year he retired again from Cambridge on account of the plague to his mother in Lincolnshire & whilst he was musing in a garden it came into his thought that the same power of gravity (which made an apple fall from the tree to the ground) was not limited to a certain distance from the earth but must extend much farther than was usually thought – Why not as high as the Moon said he to himself & if so that must influence her motion & perhaps retain her in her orbit…
In his solitude, Newton conceived of a gravitational bond that could exert its power over long distances—that could even span heaven and earth. It is, I suggested, a spiritual form of just such a bond that we now must discover, one that binds us to others and indeed binds those in Heaven and those on Earth. The Hebrew term for synagogue is Beit Knesset, a house of gathering, and it is called so because, in the rabbinic tradition, the phrase Knesset Yisrael refers to the mysterious bonds that connect Jews to one another. A synagogue is not merely a physical gathering of individuals, but rather, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik explained, it reflects “an invisible Knesset Yisrael, which embraces not only contemporaries, but every Jew who has ever lived.”
The synagogue is meant to embody this bond, this connection to all Jews past and present. But there are other ways to experience it, and those other ways can have a singular power of their own. Anatoly Sharansky concludes his prison memoir by reflecting that at times, in the solitude of his cell, he felt more connected to his people than in the prosaic bustle of his newfound freedoms: How to enjoy the vivid colors of freedom without losing the existential depth I felt in prison? How to absorb the many sounds of freedom without allowing them to jam the stirring call of the shofar that I heard so clearly in the punishment cell? And, most important, how, in all these thousands of meetings, handshakes, interviews, and speeches, to retain that unique feeling of the interconnection of human souls which I discovered in the Gulag?
Our challenge, I said, was to attempt a Newtonian insight, to find what Sharansky had felt: to ponder the meaning of relationships, and our bond as Jews with one another, until we were able to see each other in synagogue once again.
Unlike every other Holocaust Remembrance Day over these past few decades, on Monday and Tuesday the gate at the entrance to the Auschwitz extermination camp remained empty. The thousands who usually visit the camp every year have stayed at home due to the coronavirus epidemic - but we will be back, strong and with our heads held high.
Auschwitz was here with us, in our generation, before the eyes of the entire world. Most of the world knew about Auschwitz as early as 1942, more so in 1943, and all the more in 1944, while trains filled with 50,000 Hungarian Jews to be exterminated were dispatched daily to the camp.
Some of the people who perpetrated these atrocities had even graduated from universities after studying enlightened German philosophers and
spiritual leaders such as Goethe, Heinrich Heine, and Immanuel Kant.
Auschwitz was a factory of death. It was there that the cursed Dr. Josef Mengele stood, and with a glance decided who was worthy of staying alive to bolster the camp's workforce, and who was to be sent to the gas chambers.
This year we could not walk the same route that those sentenced to death walked so many years ago, and no rendition of the Israeli national anthem HaTikvah will be heard in this valley of Jewish suffering. Even so, every one of us knows that the memory lives on of the Nazis, who threw millions of innocents into gas chambers and planned to eradicate an entire people from the face of the Earth.
But it is this people, our people, who are the people of eternity and will remain so until the end of time.
Holocaust survivors do not need annual ceremonies to remind them of the Nazi atrocities that they endured or of the family members that Adolf Hitler's henchmen slaughtered during World War II. No, those memories are just as inked in their hearts and minds as the numbers tattooed on their forearms.
Indeed, it is not those people who require the admonition "Never Forget," but rather the rest of the world. It is also a mantra for subsequent generations of Jews to repeat and forge a collective memory of events that we did not experience firsthand, but which require our ongoing attention. If, that is, we are to recognize and combat anti-Semitism in all its ideological – and military – manifestations.
The Knesset thus ruled in 1951 that Holocaust Remembrance Day would be marked on the 27th of the Hebrew month of Nissan, which falls between Passover and Israel Independence Day – two celebrations of freedom, victory, and a return to the Jewish homeland.
In Israel, then, Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) is particularly significant. Not only was the Jewish state established in the wake of the Holocaust, but many survivors fought and were killed in the 1948 War of Independence.
Their stories of unparalleled heroism in spite of unfathomable victimhood are recounted each year at the main ceremony at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem on the eve of Yom Hashoah and at other locations during the following 24 hours. On the day itself, everyone in the country stops in his/her tracks at the sound of a siren to stand in silence for two minutes.
But not this year.
Thanks to coronavirus lockdowns – the emphasis of which ostensibly is to protect the elderly – the ceremonies are void of participants. With the exception of speeches by prominent politicians and performances by singers to empty halls, all commemorations and survivor testimonies have been held online and televised.
What makes this especially sad is the fact that the aging survivors – most of whom are not adept at Internet communication – have been living in isolation for weeks as it is. One survivor told Channel 12 on Monday evening that the hardest part about being alone is the lack of distraction from his daily traumatic memories. He explained that without people around, he finds it harder to push away the ghosts of his past.
Yom HaShoah, Israel’s Holocaust
Day, from the night of April 20, through April 21, meant that depressing coronavirus
news shared somewhat equal billing with solemn Holocaust-related news items, at
least for a few days. A news piece in the Jerusalem
Post in that genre, spoke of the resurgence of the Dortmund, Germany
Jewish community, which today numbers 3,000 souls, around the same as in 1938, when
an evil madman with a mustache unleashed the eternal hatred in the German
breast for the Jewish people. Dortmund, it seems, has recovered so nicely that
they’ve gone ahead and built the first Jewish school in that city since 1942.
Presumably, we are supposed to
see this resurrection as an achievement, perhaps even something miraculous: a murdered
people coming back to life, as strong as ever.
It makes me sick. What? You
didn’t get the message the first time around? You’ve come back for another go?
But I’ve written about my
feelings on this before. I wrote about this in 2018, in a piece I called, “The
Guest Who Wouldn’t Leave” which described my anguish at reading about three
orthodox rabbis ordained
in Berlin, after an 80-year “interruption.”
No one should be reviving
Jewish life in Germany. No Jews should live there, ever. It’s a place that does
not want us. It’s a place that hates us, now as then, even when the hate is
maintained at a slow simmer—with bubbles that only occasionally poke above the
water line—instead of a rolling boil.
A resurgence of Jewish life in
Germany is not a good thing and should not be encouraged. Especially when it is
today, so easy to hop on a plane to live in
Israel, in Jewish indigenous
territory, the place we prayed to return to all these thousands of years.
By coincidence, on the same day
I read about the resurgence of Jewish life in Germany, I read a different news
piece about dead Jews clamoring to be buried in Israel, an expensive proposition
made even more costly, due to the global pandemic. The rising costs of burial
in the Holy Land for Diaspora Jews are due not only to costs associated with
coronavirus precautions, but also, it seems to price gouging. The Jewish
Press, nonetheless, reports that over 200 coronavirus victims, wrapped and
packed according to Israel’s Ministry of Health strict guidelines, have been
brought to the Jewish State for burial. With COVID-19 taking so many lives in
the Jewish community, dead Jews are practically an entire industry.
This at a time when unemployment in Israel has risen to unseemly heights and the
Israeli economy has plunged.
גופות של 18 יהודים, שנפטרו בחו"ל לאחר שחלו בקורונה, הובאו לפני כניסת שבת לישראל כדי להיקבר באדמת ארץ הקודש. הגופות הובאו מליאז' בבלגיה במטוס ג'מבו של "אטלס אייר" הפועל בשירות אל על. בתוך שבועיים הגיעו מעל 200 גופות של חולי קורונה שנארזו ע"פ פרוטוקול מיוחד. @Yossi_eli@avischarfpic.twitter.com/jYQyXn8K0t
— איתי בלומנטל Itay Blumental (@ItayBlumental) April 18, 2020
Exactly how much does it cost
to be buried in Israel? There’s the burial plot, which in non-pandemic times can
cost as much as $35,000. There’s the airfare ($1k-$3k on El Al, $30,000 to
$40,000 if using a private jet), with added costs for pandemic precautions (another
$200-$300). But the cost to transport dead American Jews has zoomed ever upward,
as the demand rises, to some $200,000 a flight. ZAKA Chairman Yehuda
Meshi-Zahav claimed that one family paid $270,000 to fly a body to Israel in a
private jet.
The costs do not end here. There’s
a fee from Ben Gurion Airport to the burial society, which may reach a cost of
$1,300. Then there’s cleansing the body which can cost around $800.
In short, it costs as much for
Diaspora Jews to be buried in Israel as it does to purchase a modest Israeli apartment.
Framed another way, it costs as much to be dead in Israel as it does to live in
Israel. And by the way, Israel’s National
Insurance Institute “pays burial expenses and related services for every
person who dies in Israel and is buried in Israel, and for every Israeli
resident who dies outside of Israel.”
It seems to me that the two
news items, one detailing the resurgence of the Jewish community in Dortmund,
Germany, the other detailing dead Jews clamoring to be buried in the Holy Land,
express a kind of backward Jewish ghetto mentality that must be addressed. Jews
should not live in Germany, but in Israel. Jews should not be clamoring to be
dead in Israel, but to live in Israel.
The Torah teaches “Chai B’hem,” that we should live and not
die by the precepts handed down to Moses at Sinai. We should not be focused on
the resurrection of the murdered or on where we wish to be buried, but where we
will live now, in the present. Our entire focus should be on building the
Jewish community in Israel, and only in Israel, now and forever.
Once someone lives in Israel
and subsequently dies, after living a long life, to 120, the burial costs nothing,
so you don’t even have to think about it. It’s a twofer, Folks. The burial’s
already covered. So you might as well make the best of it and spend your hard-earned
cash dollars on life.
L’Chaim!
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
We found a chair on Tuesday morning. In Israel, unlike the USA, most people don’t have garages, basements, or attics to fill up with junk. When something is no longer useful to them, they often put it out on the street. And so we came upon a dining room chair, sound in frame but spattered with paint and with a damaged seat. We took it home, and I easily removed the paint spatters. Then I took off the seat and began the process of removing the countless staples that held the ruined vinyl cover on it. Whoever had put it together had been generous with staples, and they were driven into a chunk of that repulsive, hard particle board that seems to have replaced wood everywhere in recent years.
As I pried them out one at a time with an old screwdriver and pliers, I listened to the radio. A woman was describing her time in the hands of the Nazis. She was six years old at the time, and she remembered every horrifying detail. She talked very fast, but there were many details. She remembered everything, she said. Wasn’t it hard to carry all that around for so long, the radio host asked? That’s why I am telling you, dear, she said.
My wife came in to say that it was yom hashoah, as if I didn’t already know, and there was going to be a siren in a couple of minutes. I put down my pliers and we went out on our roof – one of my favorite things about this apartment is that it is on the top floor and we have a piece of roof for my wife’s plants and my antennas – as is our custom, and stood waiting for the siren.
The building is moderately tall, and when the sirens come on you can hear not only our own, which is located a few blocks away at the Magen David Adom compound, but others throughout the city, and maybe even as far away as Nes Tziona. First we hear our loud one, and then the sound arrives from sirens successively farther away, each one slightly weaker than its predecessor. The sirens sound continuously, rather than the rising and falling that warns of a rocket attack, which is the scariest sound you will ever hear.
We stood silently for two minutes, nothing moving in the street, and I could see someone standing still on their balcony in a building a few blocks away. As the sirens wound down, first ours, then the successively more distant ones, I imagined that I could hear hundreds of them from all over the Jewish state, and I thought that there were hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions, all standing at attention to honor that woman who spoke on the radio, the rapidly dwindling group of survivors, and the memory of those who fought for their lives in the Warsaw Ghetto and even in the shadow of the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Sobibor. And of course all those who didn’t survive.
From the roof I could see a small part of our Jewish state, roads, the green spot of the Hebrew University agricultural campus, a few tall buildings of the Weizmann institute. I am not sure exactly why, but I choked up, I couldn’t speak and I just hugged my wife, who is the emotionally tough one in our family.
Next week, the day before Independence Day will be another day of remembrance, this time for the soldiers, policemen, and terror victims lost in the struggle to preserve this beautiful Jewish state that makes me so proud to see. There will be two more sirens, and I will silently thank Hashem that my son, who spent nine years of his life in uniform, not including reserve duty, came home whole to his family.
***
So that was my morning. And then I read an article in the Forward (motto: “Jewish. Fearless. Since 1897”) , a debate between two youngish American Jews on the subject “Is anti-Zionism antisemitic?” Is anti-Zionism antisemitic? You are kidding me, right? Ask the woman who spoke on the radio.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
Israel has gone to great lengths and donated generously to protect Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip from the coronavirus pandemic, but our lifesaving assistance has been greeted by Palestinians spreading lies and inciting hatred against Israel and the Jewish people.
The Palestinian Authority that governs much of the West Bank and the terrorist group Hamas that rules the Gaza Strip have been happy to accept massive amounts of Israeli assistance, which includes:
Professional medical training for Palestinians to share best practices and ensure they have tools and knowledge required to protect themselves against the coronavirus.
Thousands of coronavirus testing kits and protective gear for Palestinians.
Over 200 tons of medical supplies, 50 tons of building materials, and a dozen tons of food to help Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, despite the territory being ruled Hamas, which does not even recognize Israel’s right to exist and regularly launches rocket attacks on civilians in the Jewish state.
Under the leadership of President Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority is fabricating a false narrative about Israel that has taken on anti-Semitic undertones. The authority falsely accuses Israel of deliberately obstructing Palestinian efforts to combat the virus – but the exact opposite is true.
In official letters to the United Nations, Palestinian Authority slanders include the wild claim that Israel is smuggling Palestinian workers back into Palestinian-controlled territory via wastewater tunnels to avoid testing checkpoints, with the hope of infecting other Palestinians.
In perhaps the most obscene defamation – akin to the infamously anti-Semitic blood libels – the Palestinian Authority accuses Israeli soldiers of deliberately spreading the virus among the Palestinian population.
The Palestinian Authority is far more interested in escalating its diplomatic warfare against Israel than in saving Palestinian lives in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. Abbas and his colleagues are trying to change the conversation away from cooperation with Israel and into slandering.
As the Palestinian Authority injects these poisonous lies into the global discussion, it is willing to accept not just aid from Israel but from the U.S., despite its repeated denunciations of President Trump and its refusal to even consider the Israeli-Palestinian peace plan that President Trump proposed and that Israel accepted as the basis for negotiations.
The Coronavirus antisemitism reports – failure of the Brits
There have been several reports produced by Jewish organisations focusing on the coronavirus antisemitism. Having read them it is clear that in the US, they understand the issue far better than we do in the UK. You CANNOT discuss antisemitism and focus almost exclusively on the neo-Nazi aspect. This type of reporting is lazy. Even people like Jackie Walker get neo-Nazi antisemitism. Like with Corbyn, anti-fascist Marxist activists have no trouble holding aloft the Jews as victims when it suits them:
No offence but it is almost formulaic. An event occurs and you quickly look for a couple of outrageous memes on neo-Nazi websites. You link to them and you have your blog. It is this single-minded blindness that helped create the environment for the rise of antisemitism in the first place. The neo-Nazi ‘holocough’ is a clear and easy image to spread. Yes, if you attack the neo-Nazis, there is no pushback. Everyone applauds you. But telling the truth without fear remains the only way of fighting antisemitism. You have to anger some of those who ally with you and open the eyes of people who do not see it. If you are not annoying anyone then you are treading water. You are not truly fighting anti-Jewish racism.
The CST report into antisemitism during the virus is disappointing and indicative of the prevailing mindset that we really need to break free from. ‘Israel’ is only mentioned once, ‘Zionist’ twice – with the central focus being the obscure shared content of neo-Nazi’s in places like the imageboard 4Chan. The word ‘Islam’ does not appear at all in the CST report- as if Islamist antisemitism using the virus to attack Jews is not even a thing. This single-minded anti-Nazi focus is self-defeating.
Anti-Zionism as the new antisemitism
Why is Israel only mentioned once in the CST report? The comparable Simon Wiesenthal Centre report on coronavirus antisemitism references Israel 16 times. This isn’t a difference to easily dismiss. We must address the tunnel vision attitude that allowed for the rise of left-wing anti-Jewish hate in our own neighbourhood. Some of the UK Jewish organisations monitoring antisemitism produced detailed statistics – which are then quoted by both press and politicians – that do not include tests for anti-Zionist antisemitism. How can you produce a statistic for antisemites which does not include someone who believes ‘Zionists’ run the banks and are involved in a plot to take over the world? This insanity allows for left wing antisemites to continually argue that antisemitism is chiefly a problem on the far-right:
To its credit, the UK publication Fathom display more clarity of thought – looking at antisemitism coming from across the spectrum. In not one, but two excellent articles, Lev Topor and Cary Nelson discuss widespread antisemitism related to the virus as well as the horrific exploitation of anti-Israel groups piggy-backing on the Coronavirus outbreak to attack Israel.
B’tselem and the Coronavirus blood libel
For the anti-Israel NGOs, the Coronavirus pandemic has provided a perfect opportunity to accuse Israel of all sorts of dastardly deeds. On Thursday, 26 March B’tselem reported that Israel had confiscated equipment intended for a Coronavirus field clinic. This is one of the lazy accusations that NGOs frequently make and that western media outlets swallow wholesale. Every piece of wood that Israel removes was going to be part of a classroom, every brick was to be the foundation stone of a new hospital. Israel never just removes a normal brick. In today’s climate – the path to the lie about Coronavirus was an obvious one.
Once the lie about the clinic is published as a B’tselem press release, the eager anti-Israel industry turns it into viral news. The fake news piece was reproduced in places such as Independent Catholic News, IMEMC, Mondoweiss, The New Arab, Palestine Chronicle, Palestine Return Centre, The Muslim News UK, and Albawaba News. COGAT can slam B’tselem for making up stories and ‘exploiting a global crisis to spread fake news’- but the damage is done.
Commentators and politicians today worry that the current situation might trigger a new cold war with China. They fail to understand that, in a similar but much more far-reaching pattern to the jihadist conflict, China has been fighting a cold war against the West for decades, while we have refused to recognise what is going on.... Like 9/11, Covid-19 must now force the West to wake up and fight back.
For decades, China has been working on its three-pronged strategy: building its economy and fighting capability, including intelligence, technology, cyber and space as well as hard military power; developing global influence to exploit resources and secure control; thrusting back and dividing the US and its capitalist allies.
China's arms exports are not motivated primarily by revenue generation, but as a means to impose influence and control, create proxies and challenge the US.
Chinese investment penetrates every corner of the UK, giving unparalleled influence here as in so many countries. Plans to allow Chinese investment and technology into our nuclear power programme and 5G network will build vulnerability into our critical national infrastructure of an order not seen in any other Western nation. Even the BBC, which receives funding from China, has produced and promoted a propaganda video supporting Huawei, to the alarm of some of its own journalists. All this despite MI5's repeated warnings that Chinese intelligence continues to work against British interests at home and abroad.
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.
Weekend long read
-
1) At Foreign Affairs, Matthew Levitt explains ‘What Hamas Wants in Postwar
Gaza’. “In seeking to force a new governance structure on Gaza and...
The pos...
Weekend long read
-
1) At Foreign Affairs, Matthew Levitt explains ‘What Hamas Wants in Postwar
Gaza’. “In seeking to force a new governance structure on Gaza and...
The pos...
Revisiting “From The River to the Sea”
-
[image: Revisiting “From The River to the Sea”]
The Australian senate has overwhelmingly condemned the phrase “from the
river to the sea, Palestine will be...
The ethnic cleansing no-one tells you about
-
More young Jews seem to be challenging the false narrative that Jews are
white colonial settlers from Europe. This video not only makes the point
that most...
The Jewish Cordoba
-
I have blogged multiple times here on what I see as a parallel between the
conflict between Catholics and Moslems over the Cordoba Cathedral and that
of ...
Hamas in America
-
[image: Dry Bones cartoon, Biden, Pro-Palestinian demonstrations, Hamas,
Bibi, Jewish, Israel, Oct 7, Jews, Israel, Rafah, Gaza,]
We should have seen it c...
Jonathan Sacks – Faith After the Holocaust
-
Jonathan Sacks – Faith After the Holocaust IsraelSeen.com
Jonathan Sacks – Faith After the Holocaust Faith After the Holocaust Rabbi
Sacks responds to the ...
Yom Hashoah 5784 – 2024
-
Israel’s Yom Hashoah began at sundown this evening with the annual ceremony
at Yad Vashem with torches lit in memory of the 6 million Jewish victims of
the...
The Palestinian “Two-State” Plan: Duping the West
-
One of the great unsolved mysteries of the 21st century is why, given what
a catastrophe it proved to be, anyone, much less a whole phalanx of
politicians,...
Closing Jews Down Under Website
-
With a heavyish heart I am closing down the website after ten years.
It is and it isn’t an easy decision after 10 years of constant work. The
past...
‘Test & Trace’ is a mirage
-
Lockdown II thoughts: Day 1 Opposition politicians have been banging on
about the need for a ‘working’ Test & Trace system even more loudly than
the govern...
Friday, April 24, 2020
Elder of Ziyon
