07/27 Links Pt1: Should There Be a Price for Rejectionism and Terror?; Hamas head: We refused $15 billion in aid conditioned on disarming; IDF thwarts Hezbollah terror cell infiltration

From Ian:

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Should There Be a Price for Rejectionism and Terror?

Decades of peace-processing have been premised on the assumption that Palestinian leaders are ready in principle to end the conflict and live with Israel. But Palestinian leaders have never actually been willing to renounce, once and for all, their claims over any of the territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. President George W. Bush learned this lesson. He wooed Arafat by giving official U.S. endorsement, for the first time, to a Palestinian state, but Arafat rebuffed his overture and, in violation of formal promises, bought a huge arsenal of Iranian weapons and then lied about it.

For decades, Palestinian leaders have refused peace offers that were seen as reasonable by top U.S. officials. What is innovative about the new U.S. peace plan is that it favors imposing consequences if the Palestinians unreasonably perpetuate the conflict. If they continue to support terrorism and reject peace, their cause will suffer. Palestinians are now being told that, if they remain violent and uncompromising, the U.S. will not block Israel from advancing its own claims to areas that, in the administration's view, realistic peace talks would leave to Israel.

The sensible question for the Palestinians is not whether the deal provides everything they think they are entitled to, but whether it is the best deal available - now and in the foreseeable future. The plan's goal is to change the diplomatic circumstances that have perversely incentivized the Palestinian side to keep the conflict going.

Hamas head: We refused $15 billion in aid conditioned on disarming

Hamas political bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh said that his terror group had turned down as much as $15 billion in development aid to Gaza two months ago which he claimed had been conditioned on demilitarizing the Gaza-based terror group.

Haniyeh told Qatari newspaper al-Lusail that the offer had been made in the context of US President Donald Trump’s controversial peace plan, which would allocate $13.38 billion to the Gaza Strip for development if implemented.

“There were parties that came to us two months ago, who we know had been paid off by major powers. They offered us new projects in the Gaza Strip worth about $15 billion. Of course, we said this is excellent, we want to establish an airport, port, and economic development projects in the Gaza Strip,” Haniyeh said.

Both Hamas and its rival Fatah have opposed Trump’s peace plan — often referred to in the region as “the deal of the century” — since it was first published.

Haniyeh, who lives in the Qatari capital of Doha, told al-Lusail that the offer included an end of the blockade of Gaza by Israel and Egypt, which began after Hamas took over in the strip in 2007. Israel says the blockade prevents Hamas from importing weapons which it would use to threaten the Jewish state. The blockade has devastating effects on the Gazan economy, however, where unemployment is now over 60 percent.

Haniyeh said that the most recent offer was conditioned on Hamas relinquishing its military capabilities. The Trump peace plan stipulates Hamas’ disarmament as a precondition for negotiations on Palestinian statehood, although it seems unlikely that the Gaza-based terror group would agree to do so unilaterally.

“We learned that, in exchange, we would have to dissolve our military factions and integrate them into the police and retire our weaponry, especially heavy weapons, the rockets that hit Tel Aviv and beyond, and dissolve the capability of Gaza for self-rule,” Haniyeh said.

David Singer: David Singer: Jordan Moves to Resolve West Bank Sovereignty Problem it Created

Jordan’s Prime Minister Omar Razzaz has made a welcome intervention to resolve the issue of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria (aka West Bank).

Razzaz’s offer comes as Israel readies to restore Jewish sovereignty in 30% of Judea and Samaria after an absence of 3000 years – as promulgated by the 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine and article 80 of the UN Charter – and detailed in President Trump’s deal of the century.

Razzaz has raised the possibility of a “one-state solution” to replace the “two-state solution”:
“We are against unilateral actions. We are against annexation. We are against any steps that are not within an overall scheme that leads to a two-state solution. Short of that, if we’re not going towards a two-state solution, let us know what we’re going towards, what kind of one-state solution we’re going towards.”

The “two-state solution” favoured by the international community for the last 40 years – creating an independent State of Palestine between Israel and Jordan – has long passed its anticipated birth date. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) refusal to sit down with Israel to negotiate creating such a State in Gaza and 70% of Judea and Samaria – as detailed in Trump’s Plan – is the final nail in the coffin for an unattainable solution first aired by the 1980 Venice Declaration.

Razzaz should consider going towards the “Jordan one-state solution” that existed between 1948
and 1967 – after Transjordan:
• invaded and conquered Judea and Samaria in 1948 – ethnically cleansing all Jews then living there
• changed its name in 1949
• unified “the two banks of the Jordan, the Eastern and Western, and their amalgamation in one single state: The Hashemite Kingdom of the Jordan” in 1950
• granted Jordanian citizenship to the West Bank Arab residents between 1950 and 1988

Razzaz lays down three conditions for any “one-state solution”:
“Jordan will not absorb transfers of Palestinians. Jordan will not become ‘the’ Palestine, as the Israeli extreme right wishes. And Jordan will not give up its custodianship over [holy Muslim and Christian sites in] Jerusalem. These three are clear for us.”

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“Jews carrying out raids on Al Aqsa”

 

Of course during the week of Tisha B’Av, Muslim antisemites are doubling down on Temple denial.

Felesteen “reports” that “Temple groups begin carrying out raids on the Al-Aqsa Mosque.”

Dozens of settlers continued their incursions into the courtyards of the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque, with close protection from the occupation forces that deployed in the area to facilitate the storming operation.

Local sources reported that a number of settlers, accompanied by rabbis, stormed Al-Aqsa courtyards and performed Talmudic rituals in its courtyards.

The preacher of Al-Aqsa Mosque, Sheikh Ikrima Al-Maqdisi warned against the great danger that settlers ’storms carry on the Al-Aqsa Mosque, through which the occupation seeks to impose a new reality on it.

The Al-Aqsa preacher said that the occupation takes many religious occasions among the Jews as an excuse to intensify the storming of the mosque and impose Israeli sovereignty on it.

Sheikh Sabri affirmed that the Zionists are celebrating what is called the “ruin of the Temple,” and they do not know where it is, but they use the holiday as  an excuse to Judaize Al-Aqsa Mosque with false pretenses.

Sheikh Ikrima has been going on a tear lately  to incite Muslims to jihad against any Jews who want to visit Judaism’s holiest place that Muslims took over, much like we just saw happen to Hagia Sophia in Turkey.

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A brief debunking of the “Blacks are the real Jews” theory

Many Black antisemites insist that they are the real Jews and Jews are imposters, and they claim that they have science and history on their side.

So let’s look at their evidence.

This article in Medium by “Black Simba” is fairly typical in its list of proofs.

1.

Tacitus a Roman historian, even states his thoughts on the origins of the Jews to be descended from Africans:

“Others assert that in the reign of Isis the overflowing population of Egypt, led by Hierosolymus and Judas, discharged itself into the neighbouring countries. Many, again, say that they were a race of Ethiopian origin..”

-Tacitus (Roman historian, History V: Theories of Jewish Origins, written circa 105 AD)

If you look up Tacitus Histories, he also says three other theories of the origin of Jews, each with as little proof as the others.

It is said that the Jews were originally exiles from the island of Crete who settled in the farthest parts of Libya at the time when Saturn had been deposed and expelled by Jove….Still others report that they were Assyrian refugees, a landless people, who first got control of a part of Egypt, then later they had their own cities and lived in the Hebrew territory and the nearer parts of Syria. Still others say that the Jews are of illustrious origin, being the Solymi, a people celebrated in Homer's poems,5 who founded a city and gave it the name Hierosolyma, formed from their own.

This cherry picking of the words of an unreliable historian reporting rumors is proof of nothing.

2.  From a similar article in Medium by Addison:

In 2001, Dr. Ariella Oppenheim and her team at Tel Aviv University released their study which found that the European Jew-ish people were mainly from Khazaria, a Caucasus country which is now called Kazakhstan, Georgia, and other names. The Khazarians converted from pagan religions to talmudic Judaism after the 8th century.

Here’s what the paper actually says:

It is believed that the majority of contemporary Jews descended from the ancient Israelites that had lived in the historic land of Israel until ∼2000 years ago. Many of the Jewish diaspora communities were separated from each other for hundreds of years. Therefore, some divergence due to genetic drift and/or admixture could be expected. However, although Ashkenazi Jews were found to differ slightly from Sephardic and Kurdish Jews, it is noteworthy that there is, overall, a high degree of genetic affinity among the three Jewish communities. Moreover, neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardic Jews cluster adjacent to their former host populations, a finding that argues against substantial admixture of males.

This is the exact opposite of the claim.

3. From Addison:

In 70 AD the Romans invaded Israel causing millions of Israelites to escape to Africa. “In his book ,The Great Roman-Jewish War: 66–70, the Roman historian, Flavius Josephus, stated over thousands of years ago,that the Israelites migrated into Africa. He writes:

“General Vaspasian and his son Caesar Titus fought against the Jews. Millions of Jews fled into Africa, among other places, fleeing from Roman persecution and starvation during the siege.”

Millions of Jews streaming into Africa would be a very compelling proof from an eyewitness. However, I could not find this passage in Josephus, assuming that  the book being referred to is “The Wars of the Jews.” I likewise cannot find any scholar who quotes this. It appears to have been fabricated.

4. From Simba:

These maps, drawn/written by different cartographers all show Judah on the African West coast in the 1700s. Some of which show the Kingdom of Judah right on the Slave Coast itself!

 

The Kingdom of Whydah  in today’s Benin was also spelled Hueda, Whidah, Ajuda, Ouidah, Whidaw, Juida, and Juda  by various European mapmakers.  The natives pronounced it Owidah, not close to Yehudah. The name is coincidental. Absolutely no one before recently tried to claim that Jews lived there. The people of the kingdom did not have any rituals that could be considered Jewish in the slightest.

5. From Simba:

If you look at the original names of those African slaves that were captured (before Europeans changed their names after getting to the Americas..), many of them had Hebrew names. Searching slavevoyages.org (a database of those that boarded slave ships during the trans-atlantic slave trade) just for names with “yah” (a short for the name of God, example: hallelujah, kumbaya..etc) in them returned over 800 matches, the term “jah” had over 400.

The database he refers to has over 91,000 names. His assertion that any names with “yah” or “jah” are meaningful falls short when you realize that it is only 1.3% of all the names. Moreover, if you choose other consonants besides “j” and “y you get more impressive results: 2400 for “bah,” 1100 for “dah,” 700 for “kah,” 2400 for “lah,” 2450 for “mah,” 900 for “rah,” 700 for “sah,” 800 for “tah.” Meaning that “yah” and “jah” have no relationship whatsoever with anything Jewish.

6. Addison:

Black people of the Diaspora, unlike other Africans, trace their DNA ancestry back to the Land of Israel.

Unfortunately he fails to say anything further about this study. The closest he gets is discussing the Lemba:

In the 1990’s, a black Hebrew tribe called the Lemba, that resides in Zimbabwe, had their DNA tested in a study done by The Center for Genetic Anthropology at University College London. The DNA test confirmed, that the Lemba, had the same DNA sequences as the Israelite priests, that many believe to be the descendants of Aaron, the older brother of Moses. The results from the study means that the Lemba tribe share the same DNA as the ancient Israelites.

That study, and more recent studies, do not support the conclusion that the Lemba descended from the ancient Israelites, rather all that could be proven was that they patrilineally  originated in the Middle East, because other tribes had the Cohen haplotype. 

Addison makes a similar claim about the Igbo tibe of Nigeria which has a similarly tenuous claim on having Jewish origins.

It is possible that a  few African tribes have some Jewish origin. Jews have spread far and wide. Plus, of course there are Jews who settled in Ethiopia and Tunisia and elsewhere in Africa. But the claim that the majority of Africans who were sold as slaves are descended from Jews has no basis in reality.

Add to this the fact that both these articles knowingly distorted facts and selectively chose others while ignoring the overwhelming evidence that contradicted their proofs, and we see that the idea that most Black descendants of slaves are the original Jews is fiction.

And in at least some cases, it is a thin thread to hold a large basket of Jew-hatred.

 

7. Slightly off topic but to a similar accusation that Jews were instrumental in the slave trade in North America, here are the facts: There were far more Black slave-owners in the Americas than Jewish slave-owners.

To keep matters in perspective, we should note that in the American South, in 1830, there were only 120 Jews among the 45,000 slaveholders owning twenty or more slaves and only twenty Jews among the 12,000 slaveholders owning fifty or more slaves. Even if each member of this Jewish slaveholding elite had owned 714 slaves—a ridiculously high figure in the American South—the total number would only equal the 100,000 slaves owned by black and colored planters in St. Domingue in 1789, on the eve of the Haitian Revolution.

In actuality, so far as ownership of slaves is concerned, the free people of color in the Caribbean greatly surpassed the much smaller number of Jews. Even in Charleston, South Carolina, the percentage of free African Americans who owned slaves increased from one half to three quarters as one moved up the socio-economic scale as indicated by the ownership of real estate. The thousands of Southern black slave owners included freedpeople who had simply purchased family members or relatives. But there were also colored planters, especially in Louisiana, who owned more than fifty or even one hundred slaves. The allure of profits and power transcended all distinctions of race, ethnicity, and religion.

And the most important point:

No one should defend the small number of Jews who bought and sold slaves, or who forced slaves to cut cane on the estates of Joden Savanne. No one should defend the infinitely larger number of Catholics and Protestants who built the Atlantic slave system, or defend the Muslims who initiated the process of shipping black African slaves to distant markets, or defend the Africans who captured and enslaved perhaps twenty million other Africans in order to sell them to European traders for valuable and empowering goods. But while posterity has the right and even duty to judge the past, we must emphatically renounce the dangerous though often seductive belief in a collective guilt that descends through time to every present and future generation.

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Hamas claims it rejected $15 billion aid to Gaza in exchange for dismantling its terror wing

 

Ismail Haniyeh, head of the “political wing” of Hamas, claims that he rejected a a proposal that was submitted to Hamas two months ago which would have included $15 billion in infrastructure projects in Gaza, including an airport, seaport, and other major projects.

The proposal, which presumably came from a moderate Arab country in cooperation with the Trump administration, was for Hamas to integrate its terror wing into the Palestinian police force and to end the division between Hamas and Fatah in exchange for the cash.

Haniyeh said that he especially rejected the idea that Hamas would give up its “heavy weapon” of missiles that can reach Tel Aviv and beyond, whose entire purpose is the war crime of targeting civilians.

It would be interesting to see a poll of Gazans themselves to see whether they would prefer Qassam rockets or cash and an airport.

Palestinian leaders have a habit of making decisions that use their people as pawns, and if this offer was in fact made, this is no exception.

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#NoSafeSpaceForJewHate–boycotting Twitter for 48 hours

 

JPost reports:

Prominent Twitter users are calling for a 48 hour boycott of the social media platform starting Monday, July 27 at 9 a.m. GMT following the site's refusal to take satisfactory action against antisemitism.

Using the hashtag #NoSafeSpaceForJewHate and backed by a number of prominent users including writers, politicians and other celebrities, the new campaign is fueled by frustration felt by many Twitter users over the lack of action taken against antisemitism on the site, despite the platform's claims of being against racism.

The campaign was sparked over the lack of action taken against British rapper Wiley, who made several antisemitic comments on the platform.

“If you work for a company owned by 2 Jewish men and you challenge the Jewish community in anyway of course you will get fired,” Wiley wrote and then added, “Infact [sic] there are 2 sets of people who nobody has really wanted to challenge #Jewish & #KKK but being in business for 20 years you start to undestand [sic] why.”

In several other tweets, Wiley claimed that Jews control "the Law," and made several claims about Israel not being a Jewish country, "Listen to me Jewish community Israel is not your country I'm sorry."

He later doubled down on the comments, stating after being confronted: "Anti Semetic? What's it called the way you rip us off in business then? What's that called when you tell us there is 1 rule for us and another rule for you lot? What's that called?" He added "Anti Semetic? Are u stupid? Do you know what these people do to the world?"

Wiley is only the tip of the iceberg as many Black celebrities have been posting Jew-hatred on social media in recent weeks. Some have huge followings.  Twitter is complicit in Jew-hate worldwide.

I will not be posting anything to Twitter for 48 hours (I hope I managed to shut down all my automated posts.)

 

Please check out my posts directly on my blog, or go to Facebook to see my most recent posts. If I have the urge to tweet, I’ll write everything on Facebook instead. (Not that Facebook is that much better than Twitter…)

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My “I have a joke” memes

Over the weekend Twitter was overrun with “I have a joke…” memes. So I made a few of my own.

I have a joke about @ErakatSaeb but you'd never believe it.

— Elder of Ziyon (@elderofziyon) July 26, 2020

I have a joke about @IfNotNowOrg but it will have to wait until their Wednesday afternoon havdalah ceremony

— Elder of Ziyon (@elderofziyon) July 26, 2020

I tried to make a joke about Jewish Voice for Peace but couldn't possibly top their name itself.

— Elder of Ziyon (@elderofziyon) July 26, 2020

I have a joke about Mahmoud Abbas but it is way past its expiration date.

— Elder of Ziyon (@elderofziyon) July 26, 2020

I have a joke about Hassan Nasrallah but I have to run it by the Ayatollah first.

— Elder of Ziyon (@elderofziyon) July 26, 2020

I HAVE A JOKE ABOUT ARIEL GOLD
I HAVE A JOKE ABOUT ARIEL GOLD
I HAVE A JOKE ABOUT ARIEL GOLD
I HAVE A JOKE ABOUT ARIEL GOLD
I HAVE A JOKE ABOUT ARIEL GOLD
I HAVE A JOKE ABOUT ARIEL GOLD
I HAVE A JOKE ABOUT ARIEL GOLD
I HAVE A JOKE ABOUT ARIEL GOLD
I HAVE A JOKE ABOUT ARIEL GOLD

— Elder of Ziyon (@elderofziyon) July 26, 2020

I have a joke about Neturei Karta, but they say they are the only REAL jokes.

— Elder of Ziyon (@elderofziyon) July 26, 2020

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07/26 Links: Time for social media to change its ways; #NoSafeSpaceForJewHate; Islamists co-opted the George Floyd protests

From Ian:

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Time for social media to change its ways

On June 30, 2016, 17-year-old Mohammad Tra'ayra from the West Bank village of Bani Naim infiltrated a home in nearby Kiryat Arba and stabbed 13-year-old Hallel Yaffa Ariel to death as she slept in her bed. It was later discovered that his Facebook feed was rife with messages of hate and incitement and that he boasted on his own page that he wished to die as a "shahid" – a martyr – writing, "Death is a right and I demand that right."

The complaints lodged with Facebook over his posts, as well as the demand later to remove posts praising the killing and the murderer were, as always, ignored.

Social media platforms enjoy absolute immunity from any liability over the user-generated content they feature. They can remove controversial content without being perceived as responsible for its nature. Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms have an internal mechanism for dealing with "content that violates the community's rules," and they remove posts according to their sole discretion.

The broad immunity afforded to them by law often translates into selective enforcement.

There have been dozens of cases when right-wing activists and journalists has their Facebook accounts suspended for allegedly violating the community's rules with their posts, all while someone sitting in Facebook headquarters in Ireland has no problem allowing posts inciting the murder of Jews to stand.

Facebook's own interpretation of the limits of freedom of expression has had a clear impact on the waves of stabbing and ramming attacks in Israel and around the world. This has been clearly shown in examples of inciting social media posts included as evidence of motive and intent in many cases of mayhem and murder.

The evidence proves that the killers were often inspired by and drew ideological justification for their actions from posts by extremist religious leaders. It also proves that they received "training" from videos posted by terrorist groups on their websites as well as on social media.

High profile Twitter users call for boycott of site over antisemitism

A group of high-profile Twitter users, backed by leading community figures, writers, celebrities and politicians have launched a campaign for a 48 hour 'walkout' from the site from Monday, in protest at Twitter's refusal to take proportionate action against rapper Wiley.

The grime star - who has nearly 500,000 followers - published a series of antisemitic posts on Twitter and Instagram on Friday and Saturday

But Twitter merely imposed a 'suspension', leaving almost all the posts still on the site.

Wiley is the latest in a long line of accounts with large numbers of followers who have posted antisemitic tweets.

A spokesman for the group said: “The action we are announcing today is to show that the Jewish community and its allies have had enough of platforms like Twitter acting as loudspeakers for antisemitism, amplifying the hatred of Jews to millions of other social media users.

"As soon as Wiley began posting his antisemitic tweets on Friday Twitter was flooded with requests to have his account taken down. In response Twitter deleted a couple of his tweets and gave the grime star a brief suspension. It was a completely inadequate response.

"Unless there is an immediate change in how Twitter operates then there will be further action, including legal action, against the organisation.”

The walkout is being promoted using the hashtag #NoSafeSpaceForJewHate

Twitter is guilty of violating Twitter rules against abusive behaviour.

Twitter continually refuses to take #Antisemitism seriously.

From tomorrow at 9am UK time, people from all over the world are suspending @twitter for 48 hours.#NoSafeSpaceForJewHate pic.twitter.com/2JEmFM6LlL

— David Collier - - walking out for 48 hours (@mishtal) July 26, 2020

CST will be supporting the boycott of Twitter and Instagram to protest their weak action on Wiley's disgusting antisemitism. Here's our statement #NoSafeSpaceForJewHate pic.twitter.com/5M8uzFowKi

— CST (@CST_UK) July 25, 2020

Home secretary demands social media giants act faster on antisemitism

The home secretary has called on social media companies to act faster in removing “appalling hatred” from their platforms following outrage over anti-Semitic posts made by grime artist Wiley.

Police are investigating a series of comments made on the musician’s Instagram and Twitter accounts on Friday that led to him being banned from both for seven days.

In a tweet on Sunday, Priti Patel said: “The antisemitic posts from Wiley are abhorrent.

“They should not have been able to remain on Twitter and Instagram for so long, and I have asked them for a full explanation.

“Social media companies must act much faster to remove such appalling hatred from their platforms.”Following Wiley’s posts, Twitter was accused of “ignoring anti-Semitism” as his tweets were still visible 12 hours after they were first posted.

A number of tweets have now been removed and he has been given a seven-day ban by the site.

On Sunday, a spokesperson for Facebook, which owns Instagram, said the platform had also issued the rapper with a seven-day block on his account.

The antisemitic posts from Wiley are abhorrent.

They should not have been able to remain on Twitter and Instagram for so long and I have asked them for a full explanation.

Social media companies must act much faster to remove such appalling hatred from their platforms.

— Priti Patel (@pritipatel) July 26, 2020

You have an appoitment with the Colonel. Streaming live today!@COLRICHARDKEMP https://t.co/SUiHt00r1S

— Michael Dickson (@michaeldickson) July 26, 2020

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Cartoon of the Day: Reading material

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Metropolitan Museum of Art calls tefillin “an Egyptian amulet”

 

This is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art webpage showing its collections:

 

 

This object is obviously tefillin shel rosh, called “phylacteries” in the New Testament, that Jewish men wear for prayer every day (and in the times of the Talmud, all day.)

It is sort of amazing that tefillin could be categorized in the museum as Islamic era amulet since 1962 with no one recognizing it.

This tefillin shel rosh  looks startlingly modern with even the four-branched Shin on the side.

While tefillin shel rosh seem to have been cube shaped since at least the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are conical tefillin shel yad in the Cairo Geniza and cylindrical tefillin shel yad as late as a 1725 engraving by a French/Dutch artist Bernard Picart, as well as tefillin shel yad shaped like an arch in (seemingly) the 19th century.

 

 

 

Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz says that the Talmudic prescription that tefillin shel yad must be square only refers to the base, not the box, as is the case with all of these.

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Today’s Peter Beinart lie: “Palestinians have been excluded from mainstream US media”

 

Peter Beinart continues with his push to destroy Israel with another whopper of a lie.

“For decades, Palestinians have been largely excluded from the mainstream US media conversation about Israel-Palestine. That exclusion continues today, and represents one more form of Palestinian dispossession,” he tweeted.

Really?

Judging from the New York Times op-ed page since Arafat rejected Oslo, I see articles by

Marwan Barghouti
Saeb Erekat
Diana Buttu
Ahmed Abu Artema
Mahmoud Abbas
Hanan Ashrawi
Ali Abunimah
Ayman Odeh
Raja Shehadeh
Zena Agha
Daoud Kuttab
Yasir Arafat
Ali Jarbawi
Yousef Munayyer
Rashid Khalidi
Khalil Shikaki
Linda Sarsour
Zahi Khoury

I’m probably missing some. Most of these were in the past decade. Many of these have written articles more than once. (If you include the years before 2000, there are even more, like Edward Said and Mamdouh Aker. )

Not to mention that Rashida Tlaib has been all over the media since her election. Hanan Ashrawi and Saeb Erekat have been staples on TV news shows for decades.

Now, how many countries can claim to have had more citizens writing in US media? Israel, probably the UK, maybe Canada. Are there more articles by Germans or the French or Mexicans or Japanese than Palestinians? I doubt it highly.

Even this doesn’t tell the whole story. For while the US newspapers are eager to publish Israelis who oppose Israel’s policies, one would be hard pressed to find Palestinians who are against the Palestinian leadership or who are pro-Israel in the media. Voices like Khaled Abu Tomaeh or Bassem Eid are rarely found in the New York Times nowadays (Bassem Eid was published in 2001 and 1996, not since.)  Throughout the 2010s, the ratio of anti-Israel to pro-Israel op-eds in the NYT was about 4-1, meaning that the Palestinian perspectives were well represented even if not from Palestinians  - which is not unusual, as there were more Americans who wrote op-eds and columns about the conflict than Israelis and Palestinians combined.

In short, Peter couldn’t name more than  a handful of actual countries that have had more representation in US media than Palestinians. The truth is the exact opposite of his claim.

But when someone is seeking attention for his immoral ideas, making things up is not unexpected.

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07/25 Links: Twitter faces 48-hour boycott over ‘failure to tackle antisemitism’; Jewish group asks head of Philadelphia NAACP to resign after anti-Semitic Facebook post

From Ian:

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Twitter faces 48-hour boycott over ‘failure to tackle antisemitism’

Anti-racism campaigners and public figures have joined calls for a mass walkout from Twitter in protest at the site’s failure to sufficiently tackle antisemitism.

Users of the platform are being urged not to post on the platform for 48 hours from Monday at 9am. The action comes after Twitter failed to remove the account of British grime artist Wiley following a string of hate-filled posts to his half-a-million followers between Friday and Saturday morning.
Grime artist Wiley has been dropped by his management company over accusations of anti-Semitism.( Photo credit : Matt Crossick/PA Wire)

“Wiley’s is just one of a recent number of high profile and influential Twitter accounts that has incited racial hatred against Jews, receiving an insufficient response from the platform provider,” said organisers of the campaign that includes actress Tracy-Ann Oberman. “This incident reflects the need for clear legislation, such as the Online Harm Reduction Bill.”

Activist Saul Freeman, who tweets under @nuddering, approached Oberman with the idea of a mass walkout after she tweeted on Friday night that she might stop using the platform.

Twitter faced sustained criticism from the Jewish community and high-profile figures beyond including Piers Morgan after only removing a few of Wiley’s tweets and slapping him with a week-long ban, rather than taking down his account.

Among dozens who have already pledged to join the walkout before it was even publicly announced are anti-racism campaigner Sir Trevor Phillips, singer Beverley Knight, comedian Shappi Khorsandi, former MP Luciana Berger, broadcaster Maajid Nawaz and writers Nick Cohen and Sathnam Sanghera. The call for action also has the backing of the CST, Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council.

CAA calls for prosecution, revocation of MBE and closure of social media accounts of musician Wiley over unhinged incitement against Jews

Campaign Against Antisemitism is calling for the prosecution of the musician known as Wiley over his unhinged incitement against Jews. We have also called for the revocation of his MBE and asked Twitter and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, to close his social media accounts.

The rapper, whose name is Richard Kylea Cowie but who is known as Wiley, has spent today engaged in an escalating rant which has culminated in calls for Jews to be shot and for black people to go to “war” against them.

After a day spent likening Jews to the Ku Klax Klan and claiming that Jews had cheated him and were “snakes”, Wiley tweeted that Jews should “hold some corn”, which is a slang expression meaning that they should be shot. He added “Jewish community you deserve it”.

He also called on “black people” to go to “war” with Jews.

Wiley repeatedly evoked conspiracy theories that Jews were responsible for the slave trade and that modern-day Jews are in fact imposters who usurped black people — a conspiracy theory that has incited acts of terrorism against Jews, such as a stabbing attack in Monsey in New York in December.

As Wiley spewed his antisemitic venom, Campaign Against Antisemitism responded with the facts, for example that the conspiracy theory that Jews were responsible for the slave trade has been described by the Legacies of British Slave Ownership project at University College, London, as based on “no evidence whatsoever”.

Wiley’s racist ramblings, which he apparently referred to as “Black History Lesson For Today”, come after the musician known as Ice Cube tweeted a picture of an antisemitic mural and several other celebrities have promoted the antisemitic hate preacher Louis Farrakhan. During his rant, Wiley praised Ice Cube.

Police probes British rapper Wiley after an antisemitic tirade on Twitter

British rap artist Richard Kylea Cowie Jr., most commonly known as Wiley, is facing a police investigation after a string of antisemitic comments appeared on his social media accounts, prompting his management to drop him.

“If you work for a company owned by 2 Jewish men and you challenge the Jewish community in anyway of course you will get fired,” Wiley wrote and then added, “Infact [sic] there are 2 sets of people who nobody has really wanted to challenge #Jewish & #KKK but being in business for 20 years you start to undestand [sic] why.”

In several other tweets, Wiley claimed that Jews control "the Law," and made several claims about Israel not being a Jewish country, "Listen to me Jewish community Israel is not your country I'm sorry."

When confronted about his tweets, Wiley wrote "Anti Semetic? What's it called the way you rip us off in business then? What's that called when you tell us there is 1 rule for us and another rule for you lot? What's that called?" He added "Anti Semetic? Are u stupid? Do you know what these people do to the world?"

Police confirmed they had received complaints about Wiley.

We released some records by Wiley between 2007 and 2014. We fully condemn Wiley's comments and royalties from those records will be donated to campaigns that fight anti-Semitism.

— Big Dada (@bigdadarecords) July 25, 2020

.@jeremycorbyn is deleting his interactions with the antisemite @WileyCEO

That’s cos Jeremy is the most honest man in the world

Like that time he said he never laid a wreath for Jew-killing terrorists

And then we saw a photo of him laying a wreath for Jew-killing terrorists pic.twitter.com/YV06EdtC0o

— leekern (@leekern13) July 25, 2020

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07/24 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: Betraying Jewish history by watering down the Holocaust; Arsen Ostrovsky: Xinjiang Shows We Haven't Learnt a Thing from Auschwitz

From Ian:

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Melanie Phillips: Betraying Jewish history by watering down the Holocaust

The British baroness Ruth Deech, whose family were Jewish refugees from Nazism, recently delivered an impassioned address to the Oxford Jewish community about the way the Holocaust is being evacuated of meaning by memorials and museums in its name.

Her concern was prompted by the controversial plan to build a Holocaust memorial and learning center in London's Victoria Tower Gardens, a small park near the Houses of Parliament.

Westminster council, the local planning authority, has turned down this proposal on environmental grounds. The space is a small, green oasis that would not only be marred by a jarring brutalist structure, but risks becoming submerged by tourist traffic and anti-Jewish vandals alike.

The British government is making extraordinary and arguably irregular efforts to overturn this decision and get this center built. Its insistence is all the more strange given that there are already five major Holocaust memorials in Britain.

Deech's concerns, however, go far deeper than inappropriate positioning. Her sharpest point is that these memorials tend to shy away from the real causes of Jew-hatred. Instead, they are increasingly being used to promote a self-congratulatory and sometimes self-exculpatory image of the country that erects them.

Britain's memorials, for example, do not note how in the 1930s and 1940s, the U.K. government blocked the entry into Palestine of desperate European Jews in flagrant repudiation of the British Mandate to settle Jews there, thus facilitating their extermination in the Nazi slaughter.

"The Holocaust didn't involve "injustices" against the Jews. It involved the attempt to exterminate the entire Jewish people."

Hungary, Ukraine and other Eastern European countries have used Holocaust memorializing to erase their own complicity in the slaughter of the Jews, presenting themselves instead as historic victims of the Nazis or even equating the Nazi killing of Jews with the Soviet killing of other minorities.

As Deech observed, the Holocaust tends to be lumped together with other genocides and examples of racism or persecution, thus watering down its significance. The message becomes a generalized one of avoiding hatred and intolerance.

But that doesn't address or explain the roots of the Holocaust: "Namely, centuries of Jewish persecution; first, on the grounds of religion, and then on the grounds of race, and now on the grounds of a distorted left-wing view of the State of Israel."

Arsen Ostrovsky: Xinjiang Shows We Haven't Learnt a Thing from Auschwitz

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has called Chinese government actions in Xianjiang the "stain of the century," and asserted that China is "in a league of its own" on human rights violations.

The Treasury Department has also imposed Magnitsky sanctions on some of the Chinese officials responsible for these crimes, while President Trump has signed into law the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, giving the U.S. an even greater array of tools to target Chinese abuses—which the administration has signaled its preparedness to use.

Meantime, there is currently a bipartisan bill before Congress to ensure that goods made with forced labor by the Uyghurs in Xinjiang do not enter the U.S. market.

The next, and perhaps most powerful step, must be to invoke the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide against China, which is a signatory.

However, one cannot help but ask, where is the rest of the international community?

The Muslim world has completely turned its back to the cries of their own people being slaughtered. As Ilan Berman of the American Foreign Policy Council suggests, they have been entirely outmaneuvered by China, their silence bought with billions of dollars in supposed aid and investment.

Enlightened Europe, which recently managed to secure over 1,000 parliamentarians to sign a letter condemning Israel's proposed application of sovereignty over the West Bank, has not been able to muster more than a whimper when it comes to China.

Meantime, the United Nations, which was created in the wake of the Holocaust to serve a bulwark against genocide and crimes against humanity, has likewise been deafeningly silent, with China's Security Council veto guaranteeing virtual impunity. At the same time, in an abominable act of injustice, China is now set to be elected to the U.N. Human Rights Council, according to U.N. Watch.

In his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel warned us "there may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest."

Here, too, we cannot remain silent, thereby giving China impunity for its crimes. We must speak up for the Uyghur people.

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(Another) Cartoon of the Day: Little David’s trip

This cartoon caption came out better than I expected.

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07/24 Links Pt1: Caroline Glick: Stability for our enemies; Oslo revisited; Head of PA’s Mission to UK Lies and Distorts 1948 History; Europe’s NGO cold war to ‘mitigate pro-Israel voices’

From Ian:

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Caroline Glick: Stability for our enemies

Since the 1990s, the dominant view in Israel's national security community has been that Israel's top priority in relation to the Palestinians is to maintain the stability of their leadership. This is the case in relation to both the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria and the Hamas regime in Gaza.

The rationale behind this view is that despite their hostility, if the regimes lose control, things will be worse, not better for Israel. Israel will have to take over, at great cost in lives and international stature. In other words, it's either Fatah and Hamas or the Israel Defense Forces. And Israel's security establishment prefers the former.

To achieve the goal of preserving the Fatah regime, Israel's generals and their think tank colleagues have long insisted the government ensure its financial viability. In practice, this has required Israel to collect customs and other indirect taxes for the PA and transfer the funds, with no strings attached to the PA every month. The fact that the PA has always used large portions of its budget to finance terrorism was of little consequence to the generals and their colleagues.

In the case of Hamas-controlled Gaza, preserving the terrorist regime has required Israel to permit the PA to transfer funds to its employees in Gaza, even though by paying their salaries the PA effectively enabled Hamas to devote its resources solely to waging its war against Israel. Preserving Hamas has also involved Israel allowing Qatar to send truckloads of cash to Gaza to keep Hamas's terror state afloat.

Safe in power – thanks to Israel – Fatah has been free to devote its energies waging its multidimensional war against Israel. It funds terrorists – with the tax arrears Israel collects for it. It incites terror on its media organs – again paid for by the taxes Israel transfers. It pays its security forces and indoctrinates its members to seek Israel's destruction. It engages in large-scale theft of government lands and illegal construction in Judea and Samaria to choke off Jewish communities. And the Fatah-PA wages diplomatic war against Israel at the UN, in the world capitals, and increasingly at the International Criminal Court.

Safe in power in Gaza, Hamas builds up its forces. It develops collaborative ties with Hezbollah and the Houthis and strengthens its client relationship with both Iran and Turkey. And every so often, it opens another missile offensive against aimed at killing and terrorizing Israeli civilians.

Whether they like it or not, the denizens of Hamastan and Fatahland alike have no choice other than to live under the jackboot of their regimes. Thanks to Israel – and its stability minded security experts – they have no chance of competing for power or rebelling.

Oslo revisited

The days of the Oslo Accords were dark days for Israel. Fortunately, the public put a stop to the Oslo trend before it endangered the very fabric of the State of Israel.

As Tisha B'Av rolls closer, it behooves us to ponder how Israel managed to extricate itself from the trap laid for her in the 1990’s by the infamous Yasser Arafat and by the “liberation” terror organization that he led.

The Oslo Accords cost us over one thousand casualties, but the dangerous veering toward the sea, eventually slowed. Nowadays we are discussing sovereignty – not “victims of peace”. There is plenty of room for improvement in our diplomatic discourse even today. But everything is relative.

In contrast, remember what happened in the darkest days the Jewish people ever experienced, ever – in Nazi Europe. You remember the famous poem, by a German Lutheran leader called Martin Niemöller, about being passive and keeping silent:

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

The Oslo Accords, horrific as they were and still are, never reached anywhere near the point Europe reached during Nazi days. Why? Not because Palestinian Arab leaders are lacking in antisemitism. They are not. The central reason was that during Hitler’s day, there was no State of Israel. But there was also another reason. The second reason was that prominent people in Nazi Germany simply did not do very much about it, when ugly things began to happen in their country.

In Israel however, way before things slid into a complete abyss, people did things. People stood up and said, this is not cool. Not just the downtrodden, not just the persecuted, stood up and banged on the national table. Prominent people stood up and said this – not many of them, but enough of them.

Head of PA’s Mission to UK Lies and Distorts 1948 History

However, the op-ed in The Times (paywall) by Sammy Stein, co-chair of Glasgow Friends of Israel, he’s referring to doesn’t even allude to the Zomlot family’s dislocation during the Arab-Israeli war, and doesn’t accuse Palestinians of lying about their flight during that time.

In other words, Zomlot’s accusation — that Stein accused Zomlot of lying, is itself a lie.

Rather, Stein’s piece largely focuses on what he refers to as the “politicised hijacking of a term Nakba,” and characterizes “The Nakba” as self-inflicted by the Arab leaders who launched a war of annihilation against Israel instead of accepting partition.

Zomlot continues to mislead in a subsequent paragraph:
Palestinian refugees, scholars everywhere, as well as a growing number of Israeli historians, have all attested to the reality of al-Nakba (the “Catastrophe”), when hundreds of towns were depopulated, looted and destroyed. Overall, more than half the population of Palestine was expelled. This is what Mr Stein refers to as “Israel’s success”

First, it’s not true that all of the refugees were expelled. Most fled due to orders from Arab military and political leaders, or of their own accord — to escape the war. More deceiving, however, is Zomlot’s claim that Stein referred to the Palestinian exodus as an Israeli “success.”

Here are the relevant paragraphs from Stein’s op-ed, where he refers to Israeli success:
The politicised hijacking of a term Nakba which bemoaned the absence of pan-Arab unity and castigated Arabs for their failings, into a term of abuse against Israel is a calculated and continuous act of deception, designed to absolve Arab states of blame and condemn Israel for successfully defending itself against attack.
…
Today Palestinians and their apologists worldwide might stop to consider these realities and face up to the fact that Nakba describes their failure, not Israel’s success.

It’s clear that Stein is referring to Israel’s survival in the Arab war as an Israeli “success” — not the flight of Palestinian refugees.

To see more deceit from Zomlont, read this post on his recent appearance on BBC’s “Hardtalk.”

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Cartoon of the Day: The problem with Jews

Continuing with my recaptioning of single panel cartoons….

I think that this is a bit deeper than it looks.

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