The Rafat and Zoreen Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion, at the University of Notre Dame, says it is "dedicated to studying, learning from, and collaborating with religious communities worldwide for the common good. "
This week, it sponsored - along with the University of Notre Dame’s Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, Program in Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies, and Department of Classics as co-sponsors - a discussion purported to be about "Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Voices on Arab-Israeli Normalization."
Every single panelist, as well as the moderator, is extremely anti-Israel.
The moderator, Charles W. Powell, started off with a non-sequitur of quoting a few anti-Israel articles from what he called an "independent news" website IMEMC. That site will write, in its "news" stories, about "fanatic illegal Israeli colonists," which gives you an idea as to its objectivity.
The speakers were:
Laila El Haddad, a BDS supporter who says that Israel is a terrorist state.
Rev. Mitri Raheb, who says that Ashkenazic Jews are Khazars and Jews have no historic connection to Israel.
These people all got together to discuss if Israel having agreements with Arab states is a good thing or not.
What do you think they would say?
How on Earth can you have a panel session on a topic like normalization between Israel and the Arab world without having a single Jew, Christian or Muslim who supports it? How can a university even promote something like this, pretending that it will shed light on a topic when every single panelist wants to see the Jewish state destroyed and replaced with yet another illiberal Arab dictatorship?
This makes Notre Dame look like a propaganda outlet, not a university that actually examines ideas and facts. Choosing such a one-sided panel on an issue that actually obviously promotes peace in the Middle East is especially egregious.
The entire webcast is here:
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If you want to know how much the Palestinian media values truth and objectivity, all you need to do is look at the Palestinian Journalists' Syndicate (PJS).
Instead, it stresses "professionalism" in - propaganda: "Palestinian media professionals contribute significantly to popularizing Palestinian national values, principles, meanings, and priorities, especially the struggle against the occupation."
And it does not want to have anything to do with Israeli journalists:"The Syndicate will not ...take any positions that promote normalization with the occupation state, and it will develop measures to counter any participation by members aimed at normalization..."
This week it showed that it takes its anti-Israel and propaganda stances very seriously.
At Kan News, two reporters visited Ramallah and included in the report are interviews with restaurant owners who are doing very well during the COVID-19 crisis - their establishments are full and Palestinians are enjoying themselves without any social distancing.
The PJS is livid.
First of all, this report made Palestinians look like they are not all poor refugees begging for aid, and that Ramallah's nightlife is not too different from Tel Aviv's.
Secondly, it made the residents of Ramallah look like they don't care about COVID.
Thirdly, it counters the Palestinian narrative of Israel's economic strangulation of the West Bank because some of these businesses are thriving, and that it not something the media should be showing.
The PJS released a statement against the restaurant owners for allowing themselves to be interviewed by Israeli reporters, saying that this is a form of "normalization" that is unacceptable.
They also called on the PA government to do what it can to ban Israeli reporters from visiting the territories and reporting on what they see.
Because the truth is not a Palestinian media principle.
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Perhaps the most important step UNRWA can take is to adopt the same standards as the UNHCR. Specifically, UNRWA must take real measures toward the ultimate resettlement of refugees in the host states as envisaged by its original mandate, so as to transform them from passive welfare recipients into productive and enterprising citizens of their respective societies. This is not something that can occur overnight, or even in a few years, but unless a realistic 10-year resettlement plan is crafted, the ever-increasing numbers of perpetual "refugees" kept in squalid camps will never decrease.
UNRWA must take real measures toward the ultimate resettlement of refugees in host states.
While there have been numerous studies, audits, and assessments of UNRWA's operational deficiencies—from resistance to reform, to cover-up of gender issues and sexual abuse by UNRWA workers, to overall human resource and commercial transaction mismanagement—no independent, external financial audit has ever been demanded by the donor states to account for the use, or possible abuse, of their decades-long massive donations to UNRWA: How much of this money is spent on anti-Israel and anti-Semitic incitement through funding of PLO-dictated textbooks and teachers' guides? How much money is spent on wages for Hamas-affiliated employees who are not legally permitted to be on UNRWA's payroll, and how much on providing facilities for summer training of schoolchildren in terrorism? And above all, how much donor money is spent on perpetuating the Palestinians' "refugeedom" rather than to "start [the refugees] on the road to rehabilitation and bring an end to their enforced idleness and the demoralizing effect of a dole," to use the words of the 1949 Economic Survey Mission, whose recommendations informed UNRWA's original mandate.[29]
Donor states are not only entitled to know how their taxpayers' monies are being spent but have an obligation and responsibility to assure that they are spent on the purposes for which they were donated, and not on those that violate U.N. directives or international law. To date, this has not been done. Only an audit by the donor states will empower reform.
Conclusion
The time has come for the geopolitical realities of the 2020s to be confronted head-on. The PLO, while clinging to its eternal rejectionism as evidenced among other things by its "destroy the Zionist entity" school curriculum, is nevertheless not the PLO of Yasser Arafat. Hamas, though still committed to its ultimate goal of destroying Israel, is amenable to suspension of hostilities in return for humanitarian aid, either directly (e.g., regular flow of Qatari money to Gaza) or indirectly (e.g., training Gaza medical students in Israeli hospitals, hospitalizing serious COVID-19 patients in Israeli hospitals).[30] And the Arab states seem less inclined than ever to make their national interests captive to the whims of the Palestinian leadership as evidenced by the recent normalization accords between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Sudan and the strengthening relations between the Jewish state and the other Arab states.
In addition, UNRWA faces its greatest challenge in decades as Washington, its largest donor, slashed its financial support while the U.N.'s own oversight watchdogs investigated the agency's financial irregularities as it pleads impoverishment over a deficit figure variously ranging between $332 million and over $1 billion.[31] But UNRWA's plea seems to strike a weaker chord even in the European Union where the narrative of the perpetually impoverished Palestinian refugees seems to have worn thin and where the unquestioned propping up of UNRWA's failed mission is coming under growing scrutiny by those who used to be its most vocal champions.
As the Arab and Western states face their long-overdue obligations to help proactively to resolve the Palestinian "refugee problem," the agency's 70-year-long "works" must either profoundly reform or become irrelevant.
Given that well over 90 percent of the Palestinian population lives within Area A, which is fully under Palestinian civilian and security control, the assertion that every time a Palestinian steps outside s/he is “confront with occupation” is absurd. Indeed, a map published by the United Nations’ own Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs plainly shows that, checkpoints — where Israeli soldiers are found in the West Bank — are scattered, and Palestinians can travel freely within their communities and also to other locations without encountering soldiers or settlers.
Abramiam’s article was full of praise for UNRWA schools and their teachers, ignoring that the same institutions have come under heavy criticism for their indoctrination of youth with anti-Israel and antisemitic incitement. UNRWA staff have called for the murder of Jews, revered Hitler and celebrated the deaths of Israelis.
In an article about UNRWA’s funding shortfall, ForbesWomens’ Abramiam neglected to mention that Switzerland and the Netherlands suspended their donations to UNRWA for several months in 2019 due to an internal ethics report alleging mismanagement, including sexual misconduct. Deutsche Welle reported in July 2019:
The Swiss foreign ministry announced on Tuesday that it would suspend funding of the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees), after the agency’s own ethics department reported allegations of sexual misconduct, nepotism and discrimination.
Such revelations, however, would belie Lewis’ parting message that “UNRWA is extraordinary–with an amazing cadre of educators and staff that need support. The potential and the possibilities have been stolen and need to be restored.”
The Guardian newspaper is on a mission. Over the last few days, it has published several ‘Jew-hostile’ news and opinion pieces. For example, two that attempted to discredit the EHRC (the statutory body that conducted the investigation into Labour’s antisemitism), and two more that set out to undermine the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
The David Feldman piece
The criticism of the IHRA definition of antisemitism came first in the form of a letter signed by over 100 Arab ‘intellectual’ voices. Most are names that are instantly recognisable as political anti-Israel activists. The other attack on the IHRA was an article written by David Feldman. Feldman is director of the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism at Birkbeck, University of London.
David Feldman was rolled out because he is Jewish. Just as the Guardian loves to print anti-Israel letters from the Jewish modern Yevsektsiya groups. The haters learned long ago, that if you want to effectively attack Jews, make sure you pick up a Jew to do it with.
Feldman’s main positions are that the IHRA definition curtails free speech and that he believes in an ‘all lives matter’ approach to racism. As David Hirsh expertly points out, ‘the All Lives Matter‘ approach is far from helpful. Hirsh’s article is well worth a read and therefore I have no intention of covering all that ground here.
Another major problem with the ‘all racism matters’ approach is that whole strands of anti-Jewish racism today are coming from parts of the Muslim community and Black Lives matter activists. Jews are explicitly ‘othered’ by members of these groups and often cannot enter their spaces to discuss racism with them.
The right to free speech
Much of the Jewish community, along with the Government have been campaigning to pressure universities to adopt the IHRA definition.
The argument over the right to free speech is an important one. Frivolous accusations of antisemitism should be shouted down loudly. Calling someone an antisemite because they do not like the Likud or Israeli building in parts of Jerusalem is not antisemitism. But then the IHRA doesn’t say that it is. People who raise these sorts of arguments are deflecting.
Jewish people need defending – especially on campus. The main thrust of the opponents of the IHRA definition is coming from antisemites who want to continue to be antisemitic. They must be pushed back.
The 122 Palestinian and Arab intellectuals (Letters, 29 November) have taken it upon themselves to define antisemitism and the struggle for Jewish rights. This is a mistaken approach which also fails to understand the IHRA definition of antisemitism. Antisemitism manifests itself, in part, by denying to Jews their collective right to self-determination under international law. That is why the view of Israel as a “racist endeavour” is an example within the IHRA definition. A Jewish majority state is no more racist than a Muslim or Christian one.
The current plight of Palestinians, far from being an intrinsic feature of Zionism, is the outcome of a tragic conflict between two peoples. In recent decades, Israel has made at least four offers to partition the land and create a Palestinian state, with every offer rebuffed, often violently. Palestinian rejectionism is thus the main cause of their statelessness.
The IHRA definition does insist that legitimate criticism of Israel, similar to that levelled against other countries, cannot be antisemitic. Denying Israel its right to exist as a sovereign state is a different matter.
Two men are offered $100,000.00 -- All they have to do to earn it is to come to
an agreement on how they will split the money among themselves.
No problem.
Except that one of the men refuses to split the money evenly. Instead, he
demands 90% of the cash or he will leave and neither of them will get anything
-- and he insists on receiving that 90% regardless of the other man's
arguments. Sure enough, realizing that the 'blackmailer' is not going to
budge, the other man realizes he has no choices other than to agree to accept
10% of the money, or leave empty-handed.
So he takes the $10,000.
And the blackmailer pockets the other $90,000.
Welcome to the pre-Trump Middle East.
Nobel Prize winner Robert Aumann described this in 2010 as
"The Blackmailer's Paradox," and explains how Israel's desire for peace with the Arabs suffers from the
same problems.
Namely:
1. There is an underlying assumption that agreements must be reached with the
Arabs at any price -- and the failure to reach an agreement is unacceptable.
2. Just like the man who accepts the $10,000 -- who sees the situation as a
one-time game -- Israel focuses on the short, immediate term instead of seeing
the immediate situation as part of the long term, and as an opportunity to
establish precedents and initiatives for another, different opportunity at
some point down the road. In the paradox above, instead of accepting the
$10,000 -- the man could have stood his ground and refused to give in, thereby
setting the groundwork for a potential opportunity that might come up later.
Aumann believes that the problem isn’t that the Israelis and Arabs don’t
want peace, but rather that the Israelis and their U.S. patron believe
they are playing a one-time game whereas the Arabs see themselves as
playing a repeated game. Jerusalem and Washington are in a hurry to
conclude negotiations immediately, whereas the Arabs are willing to wait
it out and keep playing the same game. The result is that
Israel’s concessions, or the desire to have peace now, have brought
no peace.
...“For repetition to engender co-operation, the
players must not be too eager for immediate results,” Aumann said in his
lecture. “The present, the now, must not be important. If you want peace
now, you may well never get peace. But if you have time—if you can
wait—that changes the whole picture; then you may get peace now.”
3. Like the blackmailer, the Arabs have complete and total faith in their
position, which empowers them to demand preconditions and even concessions
up front. This confidence also convinces the other side, and the West in
general, of the rightness of the Arab cause.
Meanwhile, Israel collapsed under Obama on all three points. It was
compelled to publicly state its support for a two state solution which
may-or-may-not be the best outcome for an enduring peace. It was repeatedly
pushed for “good will gestures” that showed that Israel would take immediate
action and would not walk away from the table. And far-left wing
organizations such as J Street and the New Israel Fund actively undermined
the faith and conviction that Jews have a basic human right to live in homes
that they legally purchase. [emphasis added]
The idea isn’t convincing the other guys to like you, or to even be civil to
you. The idea is to convince them that you’re prepared to walk; that you’re
thinking long-term, not just Obama’s term; that you convince yourself that
you’re playing for keeps, that you have the winning hand, that you’re the
meanest dog in the junk yard — showing your teeth, even as you smile — and
in the process you convince your opponent, too.
And that is what the Trump administration did, by taking the step which the
Obama administration never contemplated: recognizing and supporting some of
Israel's claims, while at the same time holding back on support of the
Palestinian Arabs.
In response, the Arabs did what they consistently do. They played the long
game as opposed to the one-time game -- and waited out the Trump
administration.
What Trump did was change the way the game was played.
Kind of like the Kobayashi Maru.
In the second Star Trek movie, the Kobayashi Maru is a training exercise
designed to test the character of Starfleet cadets in a no-win scenario.
The cadet is assigned in a simulation to rescue the disabled civilian vessel
Kobayashi Maru, located in the Klingon Neutral Zone, knowing that any
Starfleet ship entering the zone will cause an interstellar border incident.
The cadet crew must choose whether to attempt a rescue of the Kobayashi Maru
crew – endangering their own ship and lives – or abandon the Kobayashi Maru to
certain destruction. If the cadet chooses to attempt a rescue, the simulation
is deliberately designed to guarantee that the cadet's ship is destroyed with
the loss of all crew members.
In the movie, Captain Kirk is the only one to ever successfully complete the
mission, rescue the Kobayashi Maru, and escape the Klingons unscathed.
How?
Kirk secretly reprogrammed the computer to allow for the possibility of rescue
-- because he does not believe in "no-win" scenarios.
In going contrary to accepted wisdom, both in pursuing Middle East peace with
other Arab countries while bypassing the Palestinian Arabs and in applying
pressure on the Palestinian Arabs instead of on Israel, Trump rewrote the
accepted, calcified way of pursuing peace -- Trump basically pursued a
strategy worthy of Captain Kirk.
Source: YouTube screencap
Well, maybe not exactly.
But the degree to which Trump exploded the accepted myths by reprogramming how
Middle East peace can be accomplished can be seen in the reactions that
followed.
According to Wikipedia, while the movie itself does not discuss the consequences of rejecting the
rescue mission, it is discussed in Star Trek novels and video games that
followed -- with consequences that include the mutiny of the crew.
So while Trump has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize (similar to Kirk
receiving a commendation for "original thinking"), there has also been a
backlash.
Øyvind Tønnesson, a former adviser and editor for the Nobel Institute's Peace
Prize section,
told Newsweek:
In principle, then, I would not rule out either Netanyahu nor Trump as
theoretically possible NPP [Nobel Peace Prize] candidates. My personal
opinion, however, is that their policies and personal records stand, for the
most part, in stark contrast to the main trajectories in international peace
politics that the NPP has followed since 1901.
To which Aumann offered the counterargument:
The Peace Prize is for peace, not for being a nice guy. It's true that it
was given to Mother Teresa and later to Obama, but neither one brought
peace. Netanyahu brought peace, and is bringing more of the same.
And it is interesting to imagine if Trump might have brought more of the
same as well.
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Stop Misinterpreting The 'From The River To The Sea' Call For Genocide As A Call For Genocide
by House Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI)
Washington, December 3 - A few days ago I felt compelled to remove a message I reposted from elsewhere on Twitter, a message that contained the oft-repeated slogan of Palestinian national liberation, "From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free." I decided to undo the retweet because, I belatedly understood, too many people would choose to distort the meaning of that aspiration for rendering the Jews and their welfare once again at the mercy of outside powers as an aspiration to render the Jews and their welfare once again at the mercy of outside powers.
Of course, once tweeted, even if untweeted, content on the internet can never truly be removed, all the more so when that content comes from or through a public figure; screen captures and other techniques ensured that my deletion of the post did an incomplete job of undoing it, and my political opponents proved all too ready to exploit my error for their own propaganda purposes. They now argue that a call to place Jewish survival in the hands of a culture that allied itself, under Mufti Husseini, with Hitler's genocidal regime, betrays a desire to pursue a genocidal agenda. How many attacks against Jews and Jewish interests will it take to convince the public otherwise? I shudder to consider the answer.
This hardly represents the first time the noble goals of Palestinian liberation, of freeing historic Palestine from the villainous Zionist usurper rapist descendants of apes and swine, has been miscast as driven by animus for Jews or their sovereignty. Palestinians have no objections to Jewish sovereignty; only to Jewish sovereignty that in any way attenuates the contingent, vulnerable status Jews have always held in Muslim society. Stop trying to twist that principle into something antisemitic.
My opponents will never truly be satisfied with these explanations, a fact that merely demonstrates the lack of good faith behind their position. When a pro-Palestine activist finds himself or herself restricted from intimidating Jewish students into silence over the actions of a group of Jews on a different continent, that carries disturbing implications for freedom of speech. When Islamic charities face criminal charges for raising funds for Hamas and other Palestinian liberation groups, that carries disturbing implications for freedom of religion - all because propagandists insist on misinterpreting the Palestinian call to facilitate genocide as a Palestinian call to facilitate genocide. And that must stop.
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In the final days of the Obama administration, it was fashionable for the deal’s defenders to dismiss its critics by contending that Iran was in full compliance with the terms of the accords. But those critics did not disagree. Their problem was always that “full compliance” was not difficult to achieve.
Iran provided inspectors access to declared nuclear sites but not military sites where illicit activities were likeliest to occur. A subsequent agreement allowed inspectors the opportunity to access suspect sites but only with at least 24-days-notice—enough to dispose of the evidence of small-scale work on components related to a bomb. But functionally, that 24-day timeline could be reset by Iran, which could stretch the delays out for weeks—ample time to deceive inspectors.
The IAEA routinely insisted that they had ample access to sites like Natanz and Fordow, though the uranium-enriching centrifuges at those sites were only mothballed and could be quickly restored (as they were last year). But inspectors were blocked from accessing sites like the Parchin military complex, where Iran allegedly conducted nuclear explosives and hydrodynamic testing before bulldozing the area and layering it with asphalt. To satisfy observers unnerved by Iran’s intrigues, Tehran was allowed to use its own inspectors to take environmental samples from around Parchin. Shocking though it may be, neither the Iranians nor the IAEA inspectors who checked their work found anything untoward.
The IAEA also insisted that it regularly conducted snap inspections of various civilian and military sites, but Western diplomats noted that nearly all of those inspections were of places like university laboratories or manufacturing plants with little sensitive intelligence value. When pressed by the former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley in 2017 to reinspect some suspicious military sites to satisfy the Trump administration’s concerns, the IAEA declined—insisting, correctly, that the terms of the deal required a specific and credible basis to request such intrusive inspections.
The deference afforded to Iran didn’t end there. In 2018, a spectacularly successful Israeli intelligence operation recovered a cache of documents related to the Iranian weapons program that clearly illustrates the extensive work the Islamic Republic had done in pursuit of a fissionable device. Those documents were hidden away, presumably to be pulled out of storage after the deal had expired and Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon had been fully legitimized. But Iran was under no obligation to disclose those documents, even though it had repeatedly claimed (and former secretary of State John Kerry affirmed) that all of Iran’s past nuclear-weapons work was on the table.
The JCPOA was never designed to prevent Iran from achieving nuclear-nation status. It was only aimed at dragging that process out while reshuffling the region’s geopolitical deck in Iran’s favor and ultimately providing a patina of legitimacy to Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. Any talk about exhuming and reanimating this agreement that glosses over its weak verification regime suggests that the Biden administration, like the Obama administration, will settle for any deal—even a bad one. When Iran is on the ropes, it’s Joe Biden who is committed to negotiating from a position of weakness.
Iran's mullahs love the nuclear deal because of its fundamental flaws, especially the sunset clauses that remove restrictions on Iran's nuclear program after the deal expires soon. The nuclear deal, rather than preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, as it was falsely touted to do, in fact paves the way for Tehran to become a legitimized nuclear state.
With the nuclear deal, the regime would gain global legitimacy, making it even more difficult to hold Iran's leaders accountable for any malign behavior or terror activity across the world.
Finally, Iran's ruling clerics want immediately to rejoin the nuclear deal because it would again alienate other governments in the Middle East and inevitably lead to a worsening of relations between the US and its traditional allies, especially Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.
This flawed deal, in favor of Iran, failed to recognize the rightful concerns of other countries in the region about Iran's potential nuclear capability, missile proliferation or funding of violent proxies -- both within and next door to their territories.
Iran‘s Guardian Council watchdog body approved a law on Wednesday that obliges the government to halt UN inspections of its nuclear sites and step up uranium enrichment beyond the limit set under Tehran’s 2015 nuclear deal if sanctions are not eased in two months.
In retaliation for the killing last week of Iran‘s top nuclear scientist, which Tehran has blamed on Israel, Iran‘s hardline-dominated parliament on Tuesday approved the bill with a strong majority that will harden Iran‘s nuclear stance.
The Guardian Council is charged with ensuring draft laws do not contradict Shi’ite Islamic laws or Iran’s constitution. However, the stance of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the last word on all matters of state, is not known.
“Today in a letter, the parliament speaker officially asked the president to implement the new law,” Iran‘s semi-official Fars news agency reported.
Under the new law, Tehran would give two months to the deal’s European parties to ease sanctions on Iran‘s oil and financial sectors, imposed after Washington quit the pact between Tehran and six powers in 2018.
In reaction to US President Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” policy on Tehran, Iran has gradually reduced its compliance with the deal.
The law pushed by hardline lawmakers would make it harder for US President-elect Joe Biden, who will take office on Jan. 20, to rejoin the agreement.
This makes no sense. Once you give Iran JCPOA 1.0, you have given it everything, including a bomb. It has no incentive to agree to JCPOA 2.0. Anybody who has read the text will understand this. https://t.co/gW0Z9HDvzZ
Iraq's Mustaqila, the Independent News Agency, describes itself as committed to "accuracy, objectivity, transparency and an independent approach with a commitment to professional performance."
Keep that in mind when reading this column published yesterday written by Asaad al-Azzouni. It shows yet again that Arab "anti-Zionism" is simply old school Jew-hatred.
It is true that Egypt and Jordan signed “peace” treaties with the Israeli Khazarian Zionist Talmudic terrorist group in 1978 and 1993. However, the agreements between the two signatories created a cold peace and remained within the formal framework, just as forced marriage is devoid of any marital practice. The Egyptian and Jordanian governments and decision-makers in Egypt and Jordan did not impose normalization on their peoples, and this shows that what they did was a coercive scheme only.
As for the political teenager in the Gulf [UAE], which has not passed forty days after normalization with the Zionists at the official level, they committed a folly that followed a folly...
The normalization of political adolescence in the Gulf moved very quickly, and they began to allow Jewish visitors to desecrate mosques, accompanied by figures from the authority, and broadcast pictures and comments from inside the mosques that they entered with their shoes and without purification of course, insulting the mosques...
In another dehumanizing move, they began to open kosher restaurants for Jews in the Gulf, and to hold Jewish wedding parties in some capitals of the Gulf, a clear indication that Israel has achieved a decisive victory in this field. In every sense of the word, it was no longer a cultural, political or economic normalization. Rather, it shows that this is shameful.
This normalization, which was exposed in pictures by the enemy's media, is part of the exchange of visits between the Zionist youth and the Gulf youth, to have sex, as young Gulf men travel to have sex in Tel Aviv, while young Zionists travel to the Gulf to have sex as well, and thus the role of the bridge will not stop and Jewish schools will be opened. In the Gulf, the practice of prostitution will flourish more in the Gulf, and we will witness an expansion in human trafficking and trade in women.
Social normalization is now including Gulf families hosting Zionist families and vice versa, to mix and exchange family experiences and social values, and dear reader imagine what this program will include in terms of demolishing values and morals or what remains of them in the Gulf after the shameful normalization.
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Jewish Voice for Labour posted an absolutely hilarious tweet that perfectly exposes the hypocrisy and antisemitism) of the anti-Israel Left:
Yes, they did the legwork to find Chanukah candles that were not manufactured in Israel that British anti-Zionist Jews could buy.
And if they are manufactured in a country that oppresses and tortures a million Muslims, well, that's the price you have to pay to be moral.
There's a deeper issue here, though.
Chanukah is the most Zionist Jewish holiday there is (at least before 1948.) It celebrates a revolt for an independent Jewish state, and the holiday specifically celebrates the recapture of Jerusalem by a Jewish army and the rededication of the Jewish Temple there.
How can the people who consider the Six Day War to be a disaster celebrate Jews defeating their enemies to liberate the exact same land that Judah Maccabee redeemed 2100 years earlier?
Since they don't want to claim to be against Chanukah, they try to co-opt it into symbolizing whatever they want it to symbolize, as this page from Jewish Voice for Peace last year shows:
Anti-Zionists cannot celebrate Chanukah as it is, so they hijack it to become what they want it to be.
Because they are against everything that Chanukah represents.
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Qatar and Saudi Arabia are close to striking a preliminary agreement to end a dispute that has pitted the Gulf neighbours against each other for more than three years, sources told Al Jazeera.
The expected deal comes after United States President Donald Trump’s adviser Jared Kushner arrived in the Gulf region as part of a last-ditch effort to resolve the Gulf crisis, before the Trump administration leaves office in January.
The person who has been derided as an inexperienced, spoiled, rich real estate heir from a corrupt family who has no business being anywhere near the White House has proven to be the single most effective Middle East negotiator in history.
Here is a three year dispute that is on the way to being resolved after three days of Kushner arriving - representing a lame duck administration that can't offer any real incentives.
Still, Kushner gets little respect from the media and practically no respect from the "experts" who have spent decades spinning their wheels in the Middle East. Even the accomplishments themselves are downplayed and minimized. His Wikipedia page is filled with vitriol - it is perhaps the most biased Wiki I've ever seen - and its brief summary of his diplomatic achievements ignores Bahrain and Sudan and frames the UAE deal as Kushner opportunistically jumping in when such a deal would have happened anyway:
After Yousef Al Otaiba, the UAE ambassador to the United States, wrote a June 2020 opinion piece warning that annexation of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank would threaten better relations between Israel and the Arab world, Kushner saw an opportunity and stepped in to facilitate talks. The talks led to the August establishment of diplomatic ties between the United Arab Emirates and Israel.The agreement normalized what had long been informal relations between the two countries.
To state the obvious, if any one of Kushner's diplomatic victories had occurred under a Democratic administration, he would be on the cover of magazines every week like Kissinger was during his heyday.
But it is not even conceivable that any other White House - Democrat or Republican - would have given the role to anyone who had not already been indoctrinated the failed philosophy of traditional American diplomacy. Kushner took intractable problems and found solutions that every professional diplomat was blind to.
Before interviewing him, I had read dozens and dozens of articles about the 39-year-old Harvard-graduate in the US media. There was a quite negative and cynical labels about almost everything pertains to him, be it his competence, skills or even personal traits. There is a prejudgment that evidently turned into a bias against him.
My impressions of Kushner that I had met were kind, humble, soft-spoken and certainly a pragmatic. Having met several heads of state, top-level officials and many celebrities from different industries throughout my humble career, I can say his composure and emotional intelligence are distinctive. His ability to understand, give and take, turn old foes into brand-new friends, and embark on missions to resolve, what many previous American leaders and top officials could not, are evident through many outcomes, lately in his role in Israel’s peace accords with the UAE and Bahrain.
It is a breath of fresh air in the Washington, Abu Dhabi, and Tel Aviv today as a chapter of the old Middle East has ended and a new one has started.
It speaks volumes that it is difficult to find this sort of analysis of Kushner's skills in US media.
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Feeling guilty about America’s past dishonors, Obama believed he could engage Iran’s mullahs honorably. And uncomfortable with the West’s disproportionate power globally, he decided that “given the asymmetry in power between Israel and the Palestinians... it was reasonable to ask” Israel, “the stronger party, to take a bigger first step in the direction of peace.”
Ideologically, in pressuring Israel while engaging Iran, Obama overcompensated for America’s previous “sins.” That’s why he sanitizes the Palestinian turn from negotiation toward terrorism in 2000 by describing a mutual “lure of violence,” while underplaying how the terrorism Palestinians initiated betrayed and traumatized Israelis. Instead, he decides ”Israeli attitudes toward peace talks had hardened, in part because peace no longer seemed so crucial to ensuring the country’s safety and prosperity.” This obsession with Israel’s economic and military power blinds him to Israelis’ feelings of vulnerability and Palestinian culpability.
Personalities played a part, too. Obama writes that Bibi Netanyahu’s “vision of himself as the chief defender of the Jewish people against calamity allowed him to justify almost anything that would keep him in power.” In our new book, Never Alone, Natan Sharansky agrees that Netanyahu “believes his staying in office keeps Israel alive, an equation that only grows more significant the longer he stays in power.”
Sharansky, however, writes with admiration, tinged with occasional frustrations; Obama exudes contempt.
Obama believes his position is equitable, idealistic – and resents the criticism he received, especially from AIPAC. But his European-style obsession with power dynamics and America’s lack of exceptionalism made him too indulgent of the sins of dictators and terrorists like the Iranians and the Palestinians, and too harsh regarding the missteps of liberal democrats like the Israelis.
President-elect Joe Biden and his new team should correct Obama’s mistakes, not repeat them. Look peripherally, not just bilaterally. It’s not just about borders or nukes: Palestinian leaders must stop terrorizing Palestinians and Israelis; Iranians must stop terrorizing the world. Rather than bashing friends like Israel and coddling enemies like the Iranians and the Palestinians, restore the true moral order to the universe: Support your friends, your fellow liberal-democrats, and confront our enemies.
Israel exists. It is the largest Jewish community in the world and the center of Jewish life worldwide. @PeterBeinart and his buddy @RashidaTlaib seek its annihilation. That makes both of them anti-Jewish bigots, Beinart's Jewish heritage notwithstanding. https://t.co/EZJ8ADvDIc
When last summer the Trump administration brokered the Abraham Accords—a peace agreement between Israel and the two Gulf states of Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates—much commentary focused on their immediate causes, particularly the signatories’ shared fear of Iran. Reports of a recent face-to-face meeting in Saudi Arabia between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman will only reaffirm that explanation.
Yet the historic character of the accords lies elsewhere. The accords recognize the Jewish and Arab people’s common ancestry in the region, accepting that Jews as a people and their faith are indigenous to the Middle East and have a legitimate right to be there. This affirmation discards two central tenets of Arab nationalism: the inherent rejection of a Jewish state as an alien, colonialist presence in the region and the idea that Arab-Israeli peace must defer to Palestinian grievances. The affirmation thus marks the end of Arab nationalism. Henceforth, the Arab countries that join the accords signal that they intend to pursue their national interest and seek alliances with the Jewish state, each on their own terms and without the need of a pan-Arab strategy.
Proximate causes, to be sure, matter. After all, it was President Jimmy Carter’s misguided foreign policy in the Middle East—alongside Israeli intelligence’s tipping off of Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, of a Libyan assassination plot against him—that propitiated Sadat’s historic visit to Jerusalem in November 1977. His trip set off direct bilateral peace talks that would culminate in the 1978 Camp David Accords and the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty. But those events simply flicked a switch. Peace ensued not only because strategic interests suddenly aligned, but because worldviews turned upside down.
The same can be said of the Abraham Accords. Common cause against an ascendant Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, and radical Islam have driven Gulf countries closer to Israel. So has the desire to leverage full peace against Israel’s avowed intention to annex portions of the West Bank earlier this year. And no doubt, the election of Joe Biden as the next U.S. president raises the possibility that the United States will rejoin the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, a move both Arab countries and Israel firmly oppose. Both enthusiasts and detractors of the accords have mostly focused on these catalysts of historical change rather than recognize that a paradigm shift has emerged as a result of long-term trends.
You hear about it, but you don’t really believe it.
What is happening in American universities to Jewish students, and particularly those who support Israel even to a small degree, is appalling, and it hasn’t diminished as courses have moved online during the pandemic. Misoziony, “new antisemitism,” and plain old Jew-hatred that doesn’t even try to disguise itself have become part of the everyday experience of Jewish students in a way that would have been unimaginable for me or for my children when we were students. Read Blake Flayton’s article at the link above. You can say that it’s just a collection of anecdotes, but they are characteristic of the atmosphere at most universities.
One of the more distressing aspects of it is that it is not just coming from other students, but often from faculty and administrators. The adult authority that is expected to protect students goes missing when the victims are Jewish. Administrators that are exquisitely sensitive to reports of microaggressions against “people of color” or sex/gender minorities, often act as though Jewish students do not deserve protection, because after all they are the most privileged of the privileged. In the event that they are not properly anti-Israel – they don’t even have to identify as Zionists – they are vilified and discriminated against in multiple ways for supporting a “racist apartheid state” that can only be repaired by allowing its enemies to overrun it. Those staff members that do sympathize with Jewish concerns or Israel are often afraid that they will be targeted if they don’t stay quiet (see here, here, here, here, etc.)
Campuses are pervaded by a postmodern ideology, which permits free speech only for those that support it, and a postcolonial one that institutionalizes racist attitudes against “whites,” by which they mean (somewhat incoherently) anyone that does not belong to one of a variable collection of “oppressed” groups. Jews, despite a history of millennia of pogroms, expulsions, and genocides, are never included.
Unfortunately, the postmodern/postcolonial ideology (“wokeism”) is not limited to the universities anymore. The so-called “cancel culture” that pervades progressive media is derived from postmodern ideas like truth being a social construct while feelings are a priori valid. The willingness of both the Left and the Right to simply invent “facts” – because the irrefutable “truth” of their narrative overrides any possible falsification by reality – comes from the same place. The ideology has spread to k-12 education, too. And, surprisingly, even the corporate world is becoming suffused with it, as shown by the obsession with various forms of sensitivity training and “anti-racism education.”
This is not surprising, because the woke penetration in the universities has been going on for at least two decades, and graduates now work for the biggest corporations, media, law firms, ad agencies, local and national government, and public and private education. One misses the 19th century robber barons who were interested primarily in money, and didn’t have social objectives like the management of Google or Twitter.
Elements in the black community also seem to find wokeism congenial, because the idea that they are a colonized population makes it possible to argue that all the problems that they face in the larger American society are due to the structural racism inherent in it. That implies that they are owed something in addition to equality of opportunity, because of what was taken from their ancestors by slavery and continues to be taken from them by institutional racism. Unfortunately, the anti-Jewish aspects of woke culture fit in with the historical antisemitic bias of the black community, which was introduced by the Nation of Islam as early as the 1930s, and today is represented by Louis Farrakhan. The racial disturbances and controversies of the 1960s (like the New York teachers’ strike) sharpened the differences between blacks and Jews in urban areas.
Other groups in American society, such as the non-Evangelical Protestant Churches have also adopted a great deal of the woke ideology. Evangelicals, with their belief in absolute biblical truth, and traditional Catholics and Orthodox Jews who also reject the idea of the relativity of truth, have rejected it.
The woke generation adopts various causes that they believe oppose injustice. They are somewhat arbitrary in their choices: although they devote a lot of attention to racism against black people in the US, they almost entirely ignore the phenomenon of black slavery in Muslim countries, which seems to primarily interest conservatives. Of course one of the most prominent causes – far more prominent than is justified by the number of “victims” of oppression and the degree to which they are oppressed – is the Palestinian one.
I would argue that the Palestinian cause, which might better be called “the anti-Jewish sovereignty movement,” actually favors injustice, as its pretense of promoting Palestinian self-determination is easily shown to be a smokescreen for ending Jewish autonomy. Such things as the violence of the Palestinian side compared to the defensive actions of the Jewish side; the vicious racism and religious prejudice of the Palestinians; their poor treatment of women and LGBT people; economic inequality; cruelty to animals; neglect of the environment; oppressive, undemocratic government; and other characteristics that are normally anathema to the woke are completely acceptable when the perpetrators are Palestinian.
One reason for the popularity of their cause is the large number of Arab and Palestinian students in American universities. Google “scholarships for Palestinian students in the USA” and you get a surprising number of results. There are numerous organizations (including the US State Department) that offer them, and some like the FMEP and AMIDEAST, which would be expected to seek out political activists. Many of these students are activists, and they tend to be highly focused on their goals. Many lead chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and similar groups.
Since the 1970s, Arab countries pumped millions into American universities to establish departments and endow chairs of Middle East Studies – by which they meant Arab/Muslim studies – which often became centers for political activism.
Devotees of the Palestinian cause are found throughout American society, among the woke population as well as more traditional liberal segments. The degree of misinformation that these people have absorbed can be stunning. Recently, liberal/progressive icon Barack Obama published a book in which he presented a short discussion of the Israeli-Arab conflict and its history. It was remarkable for the number of falsehoods and biased statements it contained, clearly aimed to justify aggression against Israel and to damage the legitimacy of the Jewish state. Did he honestly believe this tissue of lies for the eight years that he was President of the US? Or did he simply write them into his book to justify his anti-Israel policies and to influence his successors? I’m not sure it matters.
American Jews are in a difficult position today. The traditional violent Jew-hatred that was mostly expressed by uneducated people is still there, and social media has given it a new life, resulting in several murderous incidents. At the same time, the misoziony of the overeducated class, which is trickling down to the average American, often spills over into antisemitism. Jews in urban areas (that’s most of them) also have to face hostility from many of their black neighbors as well.
Finally, Israelis need to realize that the pendulum of public opinion in the US, especially among the decision-making class, is swinging against the Jewish state. The Arab and Iranian strategy of introducing money and activists into Western universities has been hugely effective in changing the national perception of Israel for the worse. The change took some years, but with the help of other social and political trends, is now rapidly accelerating.
We had a brief respite with the Trump Administration, which strongly opposed wokeism and also was truly pro-Israel in a way that few previous ones were. But that was an anomaly. In the past, an anti-Israel president had to contend with a generally pro-Israel public, and a Congress that reflected that view.
The future will be different.
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Even though the Ayat restaurant in Brooklyn has only been open a few weeks, the New York Times rushed to give it a raving review:
A new restaurant showed up in October on Third Avenue in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, announcing its arrival right in the sidewalk, where a tracery of Arabic script meaning “end the occupation” and a peace sign are imprinted in concrete. Above the street wall — a grid of windows that slides open in good weather — the restaurant’s mission is written in swooshes of red, green and black spray paint: “Shawarma. Falafel. Palestinian Street Food.”
Ayat is all that and more.
The reviewer thinks that the V hand symbol is a peace sign, as if the Palestinians are hippies from the '60s. No, it means "victory for Palestine."
For example, it is the profile logo of this account run by a BDS group, which is certainly not interested in peace.
Since it means "victory," guess who is the loser?
The photo of the restaurant in the article show a mural painted on the wall. It depicts a crying Palestinian woman, evil looking Israeli soldiers holding Palestinians prisoner at gunpoint, the Dome of the Rock, and the words "Down with the Occupation."
Can you imagine a restaurant with a theme of Jewish suffering? A mural of an auto-da-fé here, a pogrom there, the burning of the Talmud, some smokestacks?
But this restaurant is more proof that Palestinians wouldn't exist if it wasn't for Jews that they could blame for their suffering. It is a sickness to even consider that this is an appropriate mural for people to go out and enjoy their meal.
Unless the customer base is Bay Ridge woke people who think it is trendy to support a Palestinian restaurant whose very walls scream hate.
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Elder of Ziyon
