Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, March 27, 2022

Palestinians chose their path, and now they are left behind by their Arab brethren

Israel is hosting a summit in the Negev today, at David Ben Gurion's house, with top diplomats from Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco and Bahrain along with the United States Secretary of State.

The main topic is expected to be the Iran nuclear deal and its danger to the region.

Palestinian terror groups are very angry. A group of them issued a statement that "the real threat to the Arab nation is only the Israeli threat, and any other threats are fabricated illusions from the United States and its ally Israel, and aim only to justify the establishment of an Arab-Israeli alliance as an extension of NATO."

While the summit shows how the Middle East has changed dramatically in the past couple of years, and proves how wrong the critics who shrugged the Abraham Accords aside have been.

Notably, the Palestinians were not invited. After decades of them setting the agenda for the region by acting as a veto for what all Arab nations can do, they have sunk into irrelevance.

A Palestinian news site quoted an Israeli official on their absence, saying, "relations with the Palestinians are not as they should be, and therefore the summit was limited to Israel and its Arab neighbors, whether new or old friends. It is not important for the Palestinians to be on the table in any summit meeting with Arab countries."

And this is true. Palestinians overplayed their hand time and time again, and the Arab nations have had enough. Palestinians have become what they fear most: they are irrelevant, after being the center of attention in the Arab world and the West.

The only concern is that they act like toddlers - and when toddlers don't get the attention they demand, they do whatever they need to do to gain that attention.

In the Palestinian case, that often means bombs.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Read all about it here!

03/27 Links: Edinburgh Council want to hug Hamas; Arab opposition to Zionism has always been antisemitic; Why is the US still paying for antisemitic UN farce?

From Ian:

David Collier: Edinburgh Council want to hug a proscribed terrorist group

On Tuesday – unbelievably -the Policy and Sustainability Committee of Edinburgh Council will debate and vote on a motion to twin Edinburgh with the HQ of a radical Islamic terrorist group. The 17 Councillors on this Committee (5 SNP, 5 Conservative, 3 Labour, 2 LibDem, 2 Green) will debate a petition concocted by an antisemite whose twisted thinking proved even too toxic for the proscribed group Labour Against the Witchhunt. Yes, that’s right, Tony Greenstein, a notorious antisemite himself, kicked this guy out over his antisemitism. That is how bad he is.

Yet his vile motion, that seeks to give the proscribed terror group Hamas a hug, is going be discussed. And even though it was born from the mind of a clear antisemite, two SNP Westminster MPs, Tommy Sheppard and Philippa Whitford, have disgracefully supported the proposal.

According to the original proposal in 2019, there seems to be a council process which means they have to consider a petition that garners more than 200 signatures ‘unless there is a good reason to oppose it’.

I am sure that if this were a far-right racist, asking for a debate that baited Edinburgh’s black community, the Council would have triggered the ‘opposition’ clause by now. The fact this is still going ahead because it only baits Jews – is just more proof that racism against Jews is still acceptable in Scotland.

The toxic proposer.
Anyone who is familiar with the fight against antisemitism in the Labour Party needs no introduction to Pete Gregson, the key actor behind this debate.

Gregson was expelled by the GMB union for antisemitism. Gregson has expressed a view that the Holocaust had been exaggerated. He added that this was ‘by Israel’, for ‘political purposes’. Gregson has previously made complaints about the way he has been portrayed as an antisemite in the media. IPSO did not agree with him.

He was a member of Labour Against the Witchhunt (LAW), but his association and support for 9/11 truther Ian Fantom and his bunch of extremists, along with his description of Holocaust denier Nick Kollerstrom as not a ‘denier’, but a ”Holocaust sceptic’ – led to him being ousted. It is worth noting that LAW is chock full of antisemites and conspiracy theorists itself, and it has even been proscribed by the Labour Party. Gregson was too toxic even for them.

LAW didn’t even support his twinning ideas. Too toxic for LAW, but suitable for Edinburgh Council. That surely is not something to be proud of.

New book: Arab opposition to Zionism has always been antisemitic

Arab antisemitism is indistinguishable from anti-Zionism, suggests a new book by Elder of Ziyon, veteran analyst and blogger. Point of No Return reviews The Protocols: Exposing Modern Antisemitism.

For anyone following Middle Eastern news as it relates to Israel, Elder of Ziyon has long been the go-to blog for up-to-the minute news and analysis. No one knows Elder’s true identity, but his avatar is the supposed likeness of the medieval rabbi and thinker Rashi. Elder uses him to symbolise the cabal purveying one of the most notorious of published conspiracy theories – The Protocols of the Elders of Ziyon. It is a Tsarist forgery hatched in 19th century Russia and still a best-seller in Arab bookshops.

For 14 years now Elder of Ziyon has been stroking his beard and ruminating over modern manifestations of antisemitism, the overarching topic of his blog. Now a book in three sections distils the themes he has been exploring in over 30,000 posts. The result is The Protocols: Exposing Modern Antisemitism.

The book is a welcome addition to any reader’s bookshelf.

In contrast to the Jerusalem Declaration which provides an impossibly narrow definition, Elder offers an even broader definition of antisemitism than the widely-accepted IHRA. Any example aimed at Jews as individuals, people, as a religion or an ethnic group can be antisemitic, he suggests. Elder’s principal preoccupation is with leftwing antisemitism, a phenomenon routinely ignored by progressives and underrated in the USA. The apathy of the Jewish community to this form of antisemitism, he claims, is exacerbated by poor leadership, ignorance, and lack of pride in Judaism and Israel.

Golda Meir, reconsidered through a feminist lens

If state-subsidized daycare is still a distant dream in most countries, it was a truly radical idea in the 1930s, when few mothers worked outside the home.

Yet that was when this social service was pioneered in Palestine. Jewish women needed safe and affordable childcare as they worked alongside their husbands to build what would become the state of Israel.

One of those women was Golda Meir.

Decades before serving as Israel’s fourth, and only female, prime minister (from 1969 to 1974), Meir was a member of the Women Workers Council and in the 1950s became Minister of Labor.

Believing that work was essential to dignity, Meir engineered Israel’s Social Security Act and guaranteed maternity leave with pay, says Boston University law professor Pnina Lahav.

Based on years of research, Lahav’s book, The Only Woman in the Room: Golda Meir and Her Path to Power, will be released on September 6 by Princeton University Press.

The book is described as a feminist biography, reexamining Meir’s life through the lens of gender.

From Times of Israel:

The Israeli government is on Sunday expected to raise the number of permits for Gazans to work in Israel by an additional 8,000, to a total of 20,000, the Ministry for Regional Cooperation said.

Cabinet ministers are set to sign off on a government resolution authorizing the additional permits at their weekly meeting. The decision comes as Israel seeks to reduce tensions with the Palestinians before the Ramadan holiday, with some officials fearing heightened tensions.

The quota was raised to 12,000 permits just two weeks ago. An Israeli security official briefed reporters at the time that the ceiling would soon be raised to 20,000 at the initiative of Defense Minister Benny Gantz.

Qatari envoy to the Gaza Strip Mohammad al-Emadi, who regularly meets with both Israeli and Palestinian officials, told Gaza media on Thursday that Israel had pledged to eventually raise the quota to 30,000 permits.

But...I thought that Israel was racist and only wanted to bomb civilians in Gaza, not help them out!

Must be that Israel wants to enslave them by paying them triple the normal wage in Gaza. Yeah, that must be it.

And that's exactly how the haters spin this sort of news. Because they start from the assumption that Jews are greedy, malicious, and murderous.

The idea that Israel has every interest in helping Gaza's economy, and that since there have been few incidents from Gaza in recent months and therefore there is little additional risk from allowing more workers with appropriate security vetting - the haters don't want anyone to think that way. The only "fact" to them is Jewish mendacity, and they twist every story to fit that predetermined conclusion.

And this includes "human rights experts" and academics and politicians. People who swear that they are against antisemitism engage in it every day by assuming that the Israeli government and Israelis are simply awful people, and they pretend that "oh, I don't hate Jews, just Israelis or Zionists." They really believe it. Yet their actions and feelings about Israel and Israelis and Zionists are exactly the same as those of right-wing antisemites against Jews.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Read all about it here!

The thoroughly discredited Khazar theory, that claims that all Ashkenazic Jews are descended from people in the Khazar kingdom that converted to Judaism in the ninth century, has been a favorite of Arab Jew-haters for at least seven decades.

A writer in Syria's Al Watan, Hassan M. Yousef, has extended this fairy tale to connect the Khazars to the Elders of Zion conspiracy theory of rich Jewish world domination.

In the year 802 AD, a number of Jewish merchants, led by Rabbi Ebadi, came to Khazaria from Iran after a revolt broke out against them. The shrewd rabbi succeeded in persuading Khagan Khazaria to convert to Judaism in order to remain independent, because his conversion to Islam would make him a follower of Baghdad, and his conversion to Christianity would make him a follower of Constantinople. After Judaism was declared the official religion of the country, the rabbi refused the entry of the entire population into his religion, and made Judaism a monopoly on the nobility of the major merchants, army leaders and notables of the people.

The Russian historian and archaeologist Lev Gumilyov states in his book “The Discovery of Khazaria,” that the immigrant Jews “bloodily and brutally suppressed any popular revolt demanding a limitation of the domination of foreign Jews.”

The important thing is that Khazaria, thanks to its strategic location, controlled the trade of Chinese silk and Siberian fur, and collected taxes from the caravans that passed through it. In the year 965 AD, the Russians were fed up with its policy and attacked it from the land and across the Volga River under the leadership of Prince Svetislav, and its Jews were scattered in Eastern and Central Europe. The most amazing thing that historians have reported is that the Jews of the ruling class in Khazaria disappeared with their money and gold just before it fell into the hands of the Russians. The old Russian references say: "When the Russians entered the city of Itil, the capital of Khazaria, they did not find any of its rulers or anything from the treasury." It is said that the rich Jews of Khazaria left with their money and went to Venice and Sardinia via Byzantium, where they established maritime trading companies that dominated trade in the Mediterranean, through which they doubled their wealth and then moved to Andalusia. After the weakening of Spain's role, they moved to Britain, and established the Bank of England, which collected most of the world's gold reserves. In the mid-nineteenth century, their grandchildren transferred their money to America, which is called “the second Khazaria,” and there they established Hollywood and the American Federal Treasury, and those who remained in Europe established the Zionist movement. As for the rest of the story, we not only know it, but we live it as a daily tragedy.

See? Khazars, Jews, money, brutality, theft, controlling Spain, somehow taking over England 200 years before Jews were allowed to return there, then to take over Hollywood and create the Federal Reserve and also Zionism. It all fits together so perfectly!

Hassan Yousef has a long resume of books, articles, films, stories, and awards.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Read all about it here!

Jerusalem church leader lies about why Christians leave Jerusalem

Anadolu Agency reports:

A church leader in Jerusalem has expressed concern over the steep decline of the holy city’s Christian population over the years.

Wadih Abu Nassar, the spokesman for the Council of Heads of Catholic Churches in Jerusalem, said Christians constituted about 25% of the population of Jerusalem in 1922. But the number has since fallen drastically to less than 1%, he noted.

According to Israeli sources, the population of Jerusalem was 936,000 as of 2019. Jews made up 62% of the city’s population, with Palestinians making up the remaining 38%.

Abu Nassar said the Christian population accounts for less than 10,000 of the total number of Jerusalemites.

He attributed the drop in the number of Christians to a combination of reasons ranging from economic to political.

...Abu Nassar has also blamed attacks by Jewish extremists on Palestinians and expansion of illegal settlements as another key reason behind the decline in Jerusalem’s Christian population.

"There is an increase in illegal settlement activity in many neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, and this is not a secret, and it targets many places, including some Christian holy sites," he said.

OK, let's look at Jerusalem's Christian population since 1922. This is based on the Wikipedia article on Demographic History of Jerusalem and the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics for the 2020 number.

Today, there aren't less than 10,000 Christians in Jerusalem - there are 16,300, and the number has been slowly rising since 1967. There has been no decline in the Christian population since 1922.

The only time that the number of Christians has ever decreased in Jerusalem since 1900 has been under Muslim rule - both under Ottoman rule, although those numbers from the 19th century are not reliable, and most emphatically during Jordanian rule, when more than half the Christians in Jerusalem fled the city even as the number of Muslims nearly doubled.

Under Israeli rule, the number of Muslims skyrocketed while the number of Christians have steadily increased, although not close to the rate of the rest of the city.

Which shows that "Jewish extremists" have no discernible impact on Christians leaving Jerusalem - but Muslim control definitely does.

You will find that the Christian population of cities in Gaza, Judea and Samaria, like Bethlehem, have been decreasing markedly under Palestinian Muslim rule. Which means that, as with the rest of the region, Christians are fleeing because of Muslims - not because of Jews.

Wadih Abu Nassar is lying both about the absolute numbers and about the reasons. Not once does he mention Muslim intimidation and attacks on Christians that have been the primary reason for Christian flight throughout the entire Middle East.

This is not surprising - Christian Arabs are historically more antisemitic than Muslim Arabs and they are more frightened of a backlash from Arab Muslims, so they play the dhimmi role to the hilt.

Also not surprisingly, anti-Israel media like Palestine Chronicle and Middle East Monitor have picked up on this story, because the lie that Jews are discriminating against Christians (while somehow Muslims keep increasing their numbers under Jewish rule) is one of the big lies they love to promulgate.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Read all about it here!

03/26 Links: Russia bombs Drobitsky Yar Holocaust memorial in Ukraine; Egypt’s FM to Join Summit of Arab, US Diplomats in Israel; Brandeis University Severs Ties With MESA Over BDS Vote

From Ian:

Russia bombs Drobitsky Yar Holocaust memorial in Ukraine

Russian artillery hit the menorah-shaped monument at the entrance to the Drobytsky Yar Holocaust memorial complex on Saturday, the United Jewish Community of Ukraine reported via Telegram.

According to the State Archives of the Kharkiv Region, between 16,000 and 20,000 victims of the Holocaust were shot and killed at the site, near Kharkivin northeastern Ukraine.

Earlier in Russia’s invasion, Russian missiles and shells struck close to the Babyn Yar site, where more than 33,000 Jews were massacred on September 29-30,1941.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky took to Twitter to condemn the Babyn Yar attack.

“To the world: what is the point of saying ‘never again’ for 80 years, if the world stays silent when a bomb drops on the same site of Babyn Yar?” Zelensky wrote. “At least 5 killed. History repeating…”

This is the second time Russia's "denazification" campaign in Ukraine seems to target memorials dedicated to those the Nazis hurt the most.

Top Zelensky adviser opens up about his Jewish roots, urges greater Israeli support

A senior adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke at length about his own Jewish heritage during a conversation Thursday with Israeli journalists.

Andriy Yermak, Zelensky’s chief of staff, conducted the hour-long briefing in Ukrainian, using an interpreter. Until, that is, he was asked about his Jewish heritage.

Yermak switched to English only for this response, speaking directly to the Israelis.

“My father is Jewish, he was born in Kyiv,” said the 50-year-old, dressed in the military fleece that Ukraine’s leadership has donned throughout the war with Russia.

“Some of my relatives were killed in Babyn Yar,” he stressed, referring to the ravine in Kyiv in which over 33,000 Jews were slaughtered by Nazi Germany and its local allies in September 1941.

“It was a shock when one of the first shells hit the city of Uman, and the next week, another shell killed the family with children who were visiting the Babyn Yar memorial,” Yermak continued. “The millions of people who died do not deserve for their memory to be burned.” A Jewish man looks at the buildings near the synagogue of Uman, central Ukraine, on March 9, 2022. (Daphne Rousseau / AFP)

“The slogan ‘Never Again’ is very relevant,” he stressed.

Earlier this month, Yermak wrote about the history of Ukraine’s Jews in a Times of Israel op-ed, and compared Ukrainians under attack from Russia to Jews murdered by Nazis.

“The Jewish people know all too well the threat of being eradicated,” he wrote. “Today, Ukraine is Israel.”

Biden says Putin ‘cannot remain in power’; White House: He didn’t mean regime change

US President Joe Biden said Saturday that Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power,” dramatically escalating the rhetoric against the Russian leader after his brutal invasion of Ukraine.

Even as Biden’s words rocketed around the world, the White House attempted to clarify soon after Biden finished speaking in Poland that he was not calling for a new government in Russia.

“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” Biden said at the very end of a speech in Poland’s capital that served as the capstone on a four-day trip to Europe.

A White House official asserted that Biden was “not discussing Putin’s power in Russia or regime change.” The official, who was not authorized to comment by name and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Biden’s point was that “Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region.”

The White House declined to comment on whether Biden’s statement about Putin was part of his prepared remarks.

The Kremlin dismissed the remarks, saying it was up to Russians to choose their own president.

Asked about Biden’s comment, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Reuters: “That’s not for Biden to decide. The president of Russia is elected by Russians.”

Biden has frequently talked about ensuring that the Kremlin’s invasion, now in its second month, becomes a “strategic failure” for Putin and has described the Russian leader as a “war criminal.”

But until his remarks in Warsaw, the American leader had not veered toward suggesting Putin should not run Russia. Earlier on Saturday, shortly after meeting with Ukrainian refugees, Biden called Putin a “butcher.”

and the White House will walk it back and say that’s not what he meant, and much of the media will act like the president randomly declaring that American troops will be entering the Russian war against Ukraine is no big deal. https://t.co/P4UvLpWz4Y
— Jerry Dunleavy (@JerryDunleavy) March 25, 2022

03/25 Links Pt2: Behind the Scenes of Amnesty International’s Report on Israel; Glick: Becoming the strong tribe of the Middle East; What Biden Gets Wrong About UNRWA

From Ian:

Behind the Scenes of Amnesty International’s Report on Israel

A recently published Amnesty International report declared that Israel practices a policy of apartheid against the Palestinians, both in Israel and the Palestinian Authority. In my view, this is a ridiculous claim, but since this is a case of a detailed report by a prestigious organization, cries of antisemitism will clearly not be helpful here. Readers around the world would rather believe an organization that is considered reliable and neutral and not the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

I wish to address the report itself, particularly at the methodological level.

Amnesty International’s reports are written anonymously. There is no way to know who authored the report, how many researchers were involved in its preparation, what their professional experience is and so on. In addition, when examining the sources on which the current report is based, a disturbing picture emerges. The report contains about 1,600 footnotes, the majority of which refer to past reports and policy papers by Amnesty International, B’Tselem, Adalah, HaMoked, Ir Amim, Bimkom, Al-Haq, and additional far-Left Israeli organizations, as well as reports by the UN Human Rights Council and similar international bodies. When these are the sources for “research” that purports to examine the State of Israel’s attitude toward its Arab population from 1948 to the present, it is clear that the result will be biased and one-sided. While I am not familiar with all the legal experts quoted in the report, if one relies on people like John Dugard, who is known for his critical attitude toward Israel, it is clear that the views of people like him will lead any reasonable person to similar conclusions. Furthermore, despite the fact that the report claims to confirm the theory that Israel, since its inception, has aspired to discriminate against Arabs on racial grounds, the number of sources concerning Israel’s first fifty years is negligible compared to those concerning recent decades.

Amnesty International prides itself on the organization’s high level of research and its neutrality. This report is an extreme example of how baseless that claim is. If one writes a report based almost entirely on all one-sided sources, does not bother to engage with civil society organizations that hold a different perspective, and does not turn to mainstream academics and legal experts, then he is conducting biased and negligent research with the main purpose of smearing Israel and harming its international status. His aim is not to promote human rights. Anyone who seeks to have a dialogue with Israel and improve its human rights situation should not label it an apartheid state, which by definition makes it illegitimate.

Rep. Torres urges American Jews to worry more about anti-Israel sentiment in Congress

A New York congressman who has been taken to task by the left and faced social media harassment for his strong defense of Israel is cautioning the Jewish community to avoid complacency over bipartisan support for Israel in Congress.

“We cannot afford to lull ourselves into a false sense of security,” Torres, a first-term Democrat representing the South Bronx, said in a talk at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue on Wednesday. “We live in a time where nothing can be taken for granted.”

Torres, 34, pointed to the House vote on the replenishment of Israel’s anti-missile Iron Dome defense system in September which was opposed by nine members, including eight progressive Democrats. Pro-Israel groups celebrated the fact that Israel still enjoys overwhelming bipartisan support and dismissed the opposition as a fringe group.

“But nine today could be 90 in five years,” Torres warned. “It could be 190 in 10 years.”

Interviewed by author Abigail Pogrebin, a Forward contributor, Torres was asked whether he sought to engage with his progressive colleagues about the vote. He said that while a majority of Americans “are persuadable on the issue,” he is sticking with his principle “not to reason with people who refuse to be reasoned with.”

Torres has been an outspoken supporter of Israel ever since he was elected in 2013, when he was 24, to represent the South Bronx on the City Council. His first trip to Israel in 2015 was met by protests from far-left activists, but he credits that experience with helping him form his views of the Jewish state.

Caroline Glick: Becoming the strong tribe of the Middle East

The only fight Bennett, Lapid and Gantz are (half-heartedly) waging is against the administration's reported plan to withdraw Trump's terrorist designation of Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps. While this is important, it misses the point and sets a trap for Israel. The biggest problem with Biden's deal with Iran is that it legitimizes Iran's efforts to build a nuclear arsenal and become the region's hegemon. Withdrawing the IRGC's terrorist designation would be a terrible thing, but it is a much lower level of disaster than the deal itself. Moreover, if Bennett, Lapid and Gantz succeed, and Biden retains the IRGC's terrorist designation, he and his team will use the concession as "proof" that they is pro-Israel, even as their main policy imperils Israel's very existence.

The Saudis and the Emiratis have responded to the administration's hostility by refusing to speak with Biden or his advisors. US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, who is scheduled to come to Israel and the Palestinian Authority, was forced to cancel his planned follow-on trip to Saudi Arabia and the UAE because their governments refused to host him. Rather than learn from Israel's Arab partners, and begin to extract a price from the administration for its hostility towards Israel, Bennett is reportedly trying to lobby the Saudis and Emiratis on the administration's behalf. On Thursday reports said Bennett was even trying to organize a summit in Jerusalem during Blinken's visit with MBZ.

These actions don't raise Israel's star in Arab capitals. Bennett's slavish devotion to the abusive administration makes him look weak and foolish to the Arabs who are deliberating now whether to bet their future on Israel or Iran. If MBZ does come to Jerusalem, he is liable to walk away from the summit with a US and Israeli agreement to rehabilitate Syria and so empower Iran.

It isn't that Israel doesn't have another play. It does.

Earlier this week, Bennett claimed that there was no point in campaigning against the nuclear deal because it was already completed and irreversible. This is false. The Biden administration is much weaker politically than the Obama administration was. Several Democrats are publicly opposing Biden's deal with Iran. It isn't too late to kill it.

And even if the campaign fails to stop the deal from going forward, it's still imperative that Israel fight it. Doing so will mobilize US public opinion against it, and energize politicians from both parties. It will also drive home that Israel will not be bound by the deal, which endangers its very existence.

Even more critically, in the face of MBZ's Syria initiative at Sharm Tuesday, Israel must fight it to broadcast its power and seriousness of purpose to the Arabs at this critical moment when they are trying to choose between working with Israel or groveling to Iran.

Maybe a Republican administration will be inaugurated in 2025 that will work to restore America's standing as the strongest tribe in the Middle East by reinstating its commitment to Israel and the Sunnis and fighting Iran. But Israel can't place its trust in such a prospect. Today, in the face of Biden's abandonment, Israel has but one option – to become the strong tribe of the Middle East.

The Caroline Glick Show Ep44 – Biden and Obama’s Putin Two-Step in Ukraine and Iran

How can Biden call Putin a war criminal for his aggression in Ukraine while subcontracting his signature foreign policy – cutting a deal that makes Iran a nuclear state and regional hegemon – to Putin?

For answers to this key question, in this week’s Middle East News Hour I spoke to Mideast scholar Tony Badran from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Last week Tony published an important article on this topic in Tablet online magazine.

Towards the end of our discussion we moved from the administration’s policy of empowering Iran to its policy of pretending that Hezbollah is not in charge in Lebanon.

New @UNRWAUSA Communications Manager once belonged to "F**k Israel" FB group

UNRWA USA announced some new hires that they are excited about.

Here is one of them: Diala Ghneim, Communications Manager.

Canary Mission has a page on her and says that she has supported terrorists on Facebook (she took down that link) and is/was a member of the “F**k Israel" Facebook group.

Ghneim was also a student activist with Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at Rutgers University.

Her current Facebook page show that she "likes" the BDS movement and many anti-Israel groups.

A typical Facebook post claims that Jesus was a Palestinian with the type of propaganda we would expect at UNRWA schools.

UNRWA-USA doesn't have the same neutrality requirements that UNRWA has, as it is not a UN agency. So the hate and lies can be freely shared, as we've seen many times in the past.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Read all about it here!

03/25 Links Pt1: Melanie Phillips: Why liberals fail to equate Israel and Ukraine; Ukraine is not Palestine, no matter what celebrities say; 5,000th Ukrainian immigrant lands in Israel since Russia-Ukraine war began

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Why liberals fail to equate Israel and Ukraine

This is the same kind of mind-bending reversal that we hear from Putin, the former KGB officer, when he dismisses Ukraine as a fake country involved in aggressive action against Russia.

The similarity is hardly surprising since the entire Palestinian fiction was concocted in the 1960s between the terrorist leader Yasser Arafat and the Soviet Union.

This has been nourished in the West by the liberal belief that the nation-state is the fount of all evil, and that nationalism (in this case, Zionism) leads inevitably to prejudice, aggression and war.

Yet although Putin is an advertisement for monstrous nationalist excess, the astonishing defense against him being mounted by the Ukrainians demonstrates how an aggressor can only be repelled if people have the strongest possible attachment to their nation and understand that their freedom depends upon its survival.

The idea that Western liberals will therefore now rethink their hostility to the nation is, however, surely misplaced. This is because they aren’t in favor of national self-determination so much as they are opposed to economic and military power, which they believe makes inevitable victims out of those who can’t match it.

By this standard, the West can never be victimized by the developing world, whose violence is to be excused as “resistance.”

This is why to such people the Israelis, who have economic and military power, can never be victims. More noxiously still, the endemically anti-Semitic West believes that the Jews are cosmically all-powerful, and run the world in their own interests and to the disadvantage of everyone else. So Israel is multiply damned.

The recent upsurge of attacks against Israelis has reinforced concerns that the imminent arrival of Ramadan will produce a lethal spike in incitement and terrorism.

There are particular worries that the upcoming surrender to Iran by the Biden administration over the nuclear deal will galvanize Gaza and the disputed territories into murderous attacks, in the giddy belief that the Islamic world is now on the verge of finally annihilating Israel.

Will anyone care if Israelis find themselves once again under sustained onslaught? Only if Israel retaliates with military force. Then what the West will care about—deeply—is that the Jews have the gall to fight back.

The Ukrainians are allowed to do so. The Jews are not.

The Lesson of Ukraine

But in contrast to those who believed in standing firm against totalitarian regimes, there was always a strong pacifist and left-wing voice that came to dominate the US State Department and academia, as happened in the UK. This was reinforced by a perception that the US over-reacted to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and their jihadist supporters. When Barack Obama became president with no experience in foreign affairs, he surrounded himself with people who were committed to such an ideology, one that saw America as racist and imperialist. They believed that being apologetic and nice to one’s enemies would win them over. This doctrine produced the pathetically weak deal with Iran, which they assessed as a regime one could reason with (echoing Chamberlain’s comments about Hitler). In fact, Tehran was simply playing on American naiveté to pursue its violent repressive and atomic agenda. As we know, weakness only encourages more violence.

Obama’s passiveness over Crimea in 2014 and his refusal to stand up to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad when he used chemical weapons all contributed to a perception that the US had lost its mojo. The chaos of the Afghanistan withdrawal suggested it had lost its competence. The Biden administration’s policies have only shown America’s hitherto allies that they cannot rely on the US for protection. Is the US now just too weak to take serious, rather than token, action? To impose a no-fly zone? To provide jets and missiles? Is it just fed up with wars and weakened by internal divisions? Perhaps it is too narcissistic, cowardly, or simply in the wrong hands.

As for the United Nations, it has once again proven what a useless and morally compromised waste of time it is. Any organization that still gives Russia and China a veto has lost any moral authority whatsoever (not that it had any before). The US, despite its words of protest and token sanctions, has shown itself to be a paper tiger. Meanwhile, far poorer and weaker states are helping the Ukrainians.

Diplomacy has failed. Murder continues each day. We still do not know how this will play out. All around the world, from the Americas, to Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East, there are failed and corrupt regimes with millions of ordinary people at daily risk of murder, rape, and theft. And I do not hold out much hope of this changing soon. Yet constant acts of humanity, charity, and support show that the human spirit has not been completely crushed. And if most Russians and Chinese are happy with their totalitarian regimes, good luck to them. But as for the rest, every state must now realize how foolhardy it is to rely on the US, and do what it takes to defend themselves against violence and tyranny.

Fine words and good intentions have their place in our world. But the reality is that bullies are cowards, and the only to deal with them is to stand up to them. “ Do not trust princes,” says the Psalmist — as true today as it was then. We are as far from a peaceful Messianic world now as we have ever been.

Ukraine is not Palestine, no matter what celebrities say - opinion

In 2011, [Noa] Tishby founded Act for Israel. She’s brought professionals to the region to see what’s really going on “beyond the conflict,” has spoken in front of the United Nations several times, and continues to act in TV and movies, although she admits that advocacy is now her true calling.

In her most recent Facebook video, Tishby doesn’t pull any punches. Here’s a lightly edited version of her rebuttal to Hadid’s screed.

“I can’t believe I actually have to say this, but let’s be clear. Ukraine is not Palestine and Israel is not Russia. Russia launched an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, a sovereign democracy, in order to place it under Russian influence.

“And yet supermodels like Gigi Hadid blatantly make this false and dangerous equivalency, reporting it as fact. By trying to co-opt the war in Ukraine, one which has nothing to do with Israel, people like Gigi Hadid not only harm the real victims, the people of Ukraine, they help flame anti-Israel and antisemitic sentiments all over the world.

“If you want to help the people of Ukraine, stop hijacking their horrific war. Stop bringing the only Jewish state into your false activism. This war is caused by one man and one man only. Stop lying about it. Stop bringing Israel into it.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Thank you, Noa Tishby. Now go out and buy her book. Or better yet, order an extra copy and have it express-mailed directly to Gigi Hadid.

Nasrallah's curtains don't cover windows

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah is assumed to spend nearly all of his time during the past 15 years in an underground bunker out of fear of being targeted by an Israeli airstrike.

But he often hosts guests, usually Iranian dignitaries and fellow terrorists.

Their meetings almost invariably take place in front of....curtains.

This week he hosted Iran's foreign minister:

With Hamas leader Haniyeh:

With Iran's foreign minister Zarif:

And other meetings with Hamas, Lebanese and Iranian officials:

These curtains do not cover windows. There is not a hint of light coming from behind them, which one would see if the meeting is during the day even with blackout curtains.

The only exception I could find was this photo from 2006, before Nasrallah's panicked descent into the bunker beneath Beirut, where you can see the flash of the camera reflect off the window behind a thin curtain:

His hideout is clearly very large, with multiple rooms.

When you live your life like a rat underground, any bit of self-deception helps.

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From Associates for Biblical Research:

Associates for Biblical Research (ABR) announce the discovery of a formulaic curse inscription recovered on a small, folded lead tablet.

The defixio came to light in December 2019 when Scott Stripling, ABR’s Director of Excavations and the Director of the Archaeological Studies Institute at The Bible Seminary in Katy, Texas, led an ABR team to wet sift the discarded material from Adam Zertal’s excavations (1982–1989) on Mt. Ebal.

A press conference was held on Thursday, March 24th at the Lanier Theological Library in Houston, Texas to announce the extraordinary discovery.

The ancient Hebrew inscription consists of 40 letters and is centuries older than any known Hebrew inscription from ancient Israel. The scientists employed advanced tomographic scans to recover the hidden text [and]...deciphered the proto-alphabetic inscription, which reads as follows:

Cursed, cursed, cursed – cursed by the God YHW.
You will die cursed.
Cursed you will surely die.
Cursed by YHW – cursed, cursed, cursed.

According to Stripling, “These types of amulets are well known in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, but Zertal’s excavated pottery dated to the Iron Age I and Late Bronze Age, so logically the tablet derived from one of these earlier periods. Even so, our discovery of a Late Bronze Age inscription stunned me.”

Almost immediately Galil recognized the formulaic literary structure of the inscription: “From the symmetry, I could tell that it was written as a chiastic parallelism.”

According to Deuteronomy 27 and Joshua 8, Mt. Ebal was the mountain of the curse. Joshua 8:30 indicates that Joshua built an altar on Mt. Ebal. The defixio derived from previously excavated and discarded material from a structure Zertal believed was Joshua’s altar.

It may be a coincidence that a curse be found on a mountain most famous for its curse, but the dating of the tablet to the Late Bronze Age - the 14th to 13th century BCE - is about the accepted time of the Exodus.

As far as I can tell, this is the earliest mention of the Hebrew God using the tetragrammaton by centuries - the previously earliest find was the Mesha Stele from 840 BCE.

The chiastic structure of the curse (ABCCBA) is clear, and the Hebrew Bible is filled with similar chiastic structures throughout, such as Genesis 9:6: שֹׁפֵךְ֙ דַּ֣ם הָֽאָדָ֔ם בָּֽאָדָ֖ם דָּמ֣וֹ יִשָּׁפֵ֑ךְ, "the spiller of blood of a human, by a human would his blood be spilled." Some chiasms span chapters or entire books.

The researchers are holding back on some of the findings, such as the text on the outside of the tablet that they found.

(h/t Yoel)

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The Palestinian legislature is planning to pass a law based on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW.)

The PA has been a signatory of that convention since 2014, but it hasn't actually put it into law. When pressed, it does what it always does - it blamed the "occupation."

When no Westerners are listening, Palestinians freely admit that the only reason they joined the Convention and other international conventions (without reservations, showing that they barely read them to begin with) was to make it easier to join the International Criminal Court and therefore attack Israel via lawfare.

Palestinians never had any intention to enforce the convention that they signed.

Apparently, the international community has noticed this and it can turn into a source of embarrassment. The Palestinian dictatorship decided to have its cabinet pass a law that is congruent to CEDAW and to do it in a quiet way so that the right wing, Islamist opponents don't stop it.

Now, 41 Palestinian legislators have signed a crazy letter opposing CEDAW, complaining how the legislation was being sneaked by them.

Their letter says the purpose of CEDAW is "to spread abnormal practices in our reality, and turn them into familiar natural phenomena and practices, such as sexual relations outside marriage, absolute freedoms, moral chaos, and homosexuality of all kinds. destroying the foundations on which the family is built."

They also expressed their “astonishment and disapproval” that such an important law was drafted “in secret, discussing and circulating it in closed rooms with a limited group that does not represent society, and avoiding consulting specialists from Sharia scholars, clerics, judges, jurists and opinion-holders." The noted that under Palestinian law, the Legislative Council is the only body authorized to pass laws and legislation.

It seems that the cabinet doesn't even have the power to enact laws like this, and this is just a sham to push off the international community for another couple of years until they notice that the laws are not being enforced.

This sort of stuff happens all the time in the PA. They pretend to be a functioning, responsible government but the PA side is thoroughly corrupt and Abbas does whatever he wants, while the Hamas side is thoroughly Islamist. The entire CEDAW episode has been playing out for years and anyone can see that there was never any desire to actually fight for women's rights.

This 2018 report details the huge gaps between Palestinian laws and equality for women, showing how few women are employed or in important political positions, and how many are beaten every year.

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03/24 Links Pt2: A New Iran Deal Leaves Us Meeker and Weaker; According to the UN’s Lynk, Facts Change, “Covetous” Jews Do Not; Kansas becomes 20th US state to endorse IHRA

From Ian:

Bret Stephens: A New Iran Deal Leaves Us Meeker and Weaker

Last year, Secretary of State Antony Blinken promised a new nuclear deal with Iran that would be "longer and stronger," hinting that it would seek to extend some of the JCPOA's sunset provisions that were set to expire in the next decade, as well as place limits on Iran's testing of ballistic missiles. It isn't clear the new deal will meet either goal.

Reaching a kick-the-can-down-the-road agreement may seem like a diplomatic victory to the State Department. But it's a strategic defeat when it does little more than delay a crisis for the future in exchange for strengthening our adversaries in the present. Tehran attacked Iraq with ballistic missiles earlier this month and (through its Houthi proxies) launched missile and drone strikes on Abu Dhabi in January. What can Iran's neighbors expect from it when its coffers are refreshed with tens of billions in oil revenues, free from sanctions?

The principal geopolitical challenge the U.S. faces today is the perception, shared by friends and foes alike, that we are weak, distracted and divided. The Biden administration urgently needs to telegraph strength. An Iran deal that leaves us even weaker and meeker than the previous deal accomplishes the opposite.

(2) Iran's new fiscal year just started. In the regime's new budget, there's a 386% budget increase for the Shahid Ebrahimi Program, an initiative for the IRGC to "strengthen the security infrastructure of the country.

Translation: funding to take hostages and kill dissidents.
— Gabriel Noronha (@GLNoronha) March 23, 2022

(9) But historically, we know the regime spent:
??$700M annually on Hezbollah
??$100M annually on Hamas
??More than $16 billion in funding for terror proxies since 2012.

And we know they always prioritize funding terror over the Iranian people. I don't expect that to change. END
— Gabriel Noronha (@GLNoronha) March 23, 2022

A Crisis in U.S.-Middle East Relations

Most of America's Middle Eastern allies - Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Israel, Jordan, Turkey and Egypt - also are expanding ties to Russia and China. America's Middle Eastern partners have rationally concluded that they need to diversify their foreign-policy options, given Washington's reluctance to uphold its defense commitments.

Dramatic scenes of the disorderly U.S. exit from Afghanistan confirmed that America is in retreat. For Saudi Arabia and the UAE, in particular, the lack of a meaningful American response to Iran-sponsored drone attacks on airports and oil facilities in 2019 and 2022 was the straw that broke the camel's back.

The U.S. can't engage effectively in a great-power competition while relinquishing its dominant position in the Middle East. When the void left by the U.S. is being filled by Russian military encroachment, and as China has displaced the U.S. as the lead trading partner for most of the Middle East, allies and partners will need to adjust accordingly.

Moreover, while the U.S. assumes that achieving detente with Iran, beginning with a nuclear deal, would make the region more stable, once most Western sanctions are lifted and American deterrence across the region wanes, Iran's appetite for expansionism will likely increase.

The writer is an adjunct professor at George Washington University's Elliott School for International Affairs and a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute.

Melanie Phillips: The long tentacle of terror

It’s reasonable to assume that, when the Revolutionary Guards “put the fear of God into her,” they told her what she could and could not say when she returned to Britain.

They would have wanted her to shift the focus away from the way they had ill-treated her as their hostage — her solitary confinement, her torture, the mental cruelty of releasing her only to re-incarcerate her and charge her with new crimes after the sentence had been completed. They would have wanted her to present her experience instead as something that could have been solved years ago if only Britain had paid the £400 million debt that it owed for an unfulfilled weapons deal in the 1970s (and which has now apparently been paid).

Now look at what Nazanin actually said and didn’t say at that press conference.

Discussion of the debt, she said, had come up early in her detention.
“So I didn’t know the details at the time,” she said. “But I think it was the week two or week three that I was arrested, like six years ago, that they told me, ‘We want something off the Brits. We will not let you go until such time that we get it.’ And they did keep their promise.”

She declined to speak about the months she had spent in solitary confinement or about the psychological and physical torture to which she had been subjected.
“Over the past six years, it has been cruel, what happened to me,” she said. “It’s always going to haunt me. There is no other way round it. It will always be with me.”

That was it. Not a word of condemnation of the Iranians.

In other words, she framed her story as a cruel and dreadful experience to which she had been subjected for six years because Britain hadn’t paid the debt it owed Iran.

We don’t know the full story behind the non-payment of that debt. But the actual reason that she and the other dual nationals were incarcerated for so long (and one of them, Morad Tahbaz, an Iranian, US and British citizen who was briefly let out of prison when Nazanin was freed but was then cruelly re-imprisoned) was because the Iranian regime intended to use them in the lethal game of three-dimensional chess it has been playing for decades in its war against the west.

The people responsible for her ordeal were those running the revolutionary Islamic regime in Tehran. Their absence from the story she has chosen to tell strongly suggests that while Nazanin is at last free, her parents are now Iran’s hostages — and so in a sense she still is, too.

Times of Israel reported two weeks ago:

Turkey has agreed to return to Israel an ancient inscription from Jerusalem, currently housed in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum, an Israeli official told Zman Yisrael, The Times of Israel’s Hebrew sister site. It is considered one of the most important ancient Hebrew inscriptions in existence.

The gesture comes amid warming ties between Israel and Turkey and was discussed during the landmark visit of President Isaac Herzog to Ankara earlier this week, said a senior official in the Israeli entourage.

Israel has long sought the return of the so-called Siloam Inscription, a 2,700-year-old ancient Hebrew text that provides concrete historical support for the biblical account of the construction of a tunnel which brought water from the Pool of Siloam to the City of David, below the southern edge of the Temple Mount, during the reign of King Hezekiah.

This was widely shared, and it would be a big deal.

If it was true.

Immediately afterwards, the Daily Sabah, a site close to the Turkish government, denied this story altogether:

Turkish officials denied reports on an Israeli website that the country would return an ancient inscription brought to Turkey from eastern Jerusalem during Ottoman rule.

The artifact, currently in Istanbul Archaeological Museum, is viewed as one of the oldest and most important Hebrew inscriptions in existence.

Turkish diplomatic sources speaking to local media outlets said the claim was “false.”

Diplomatic sources told Anadolu Agency (AA) on Sunday that east Jerusalem, where the inscription was found in 1880, was part of Ottoman territories back then and it is currently a part of Palestinian territories; thus, it was out of the question to return it to Israel, a third country in Turkey's view.

The Palestinians like to claim that there is no archaeological evidence that Jews lived in the region. The Siloam Inscription refutes that. As Wikipedia says,

It is the only known ancient inscription from ancient Israel and Judah which commemorates a public construction work. It is among the oldest extant records of its kind written in Hebrew using the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet,[

(h/t Josh K)

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Advocate Of Sanctions On Apartheid, Terrorist-Run, Anti-Palestinian Mideast State Realizes He Means Lebanon (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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black man New York, March 24 - An activist campaigning for economic, cultural, diplomatic, and other measures against a Levantine country for its structurally-discriminatory policies against a significant minority within its borders, a minority that has suffered displacement for decades, on top of which the country's government lies under effective control of a violent ideological group at the root of so much regional unrest and suffering, had an epiphany today during which he understood he must target Beirut and those who underwrite its dysfunction if he wishes to address the primary injustice he sees in the world.

Chico Howell, 25, of Midwood, Brooklyn, shared his realization Thursday with fellow activists, to some confusion and much anger. "They don't want to hear it," he discovered. "Like, our function as social justice advocates is to fight for the oppressed, and Palestinians in Lebanon face far more oppression from Hezbollah-run Lebanon than even their fellow 'refugees' under Israeli control - of which there are none under direct Israeli control, would you believe? I mean, I know lots of my colleagues like to define 'occupation' and 'control' flexibly, so that Zionists can be blamed whichever way you slice it, but have you seen the restrictions on employment and education that Lebanon places on Palestinian refugees, and has the temerity to call them 'guests' in the country?"

"Don't get me wrong, I'm as anti-Zionist as the next random Black guy from Brooklyn," he insisted. "I'm of two minds about harassing Jews here over what goes on over there. I get it, not the same people, but really, everyone knows they're the same. Whatever. Violence isn't my thing, at least not directly. But if I want to support my fellow People of Color, my Palestinian brothers and sisters, and fight for their right to live free lives, I can't only fight for the ones in Israeli-controlled territory. I also just discovered that the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza even have their own elected government! Nobody tells us that! Now, I know they haven't actually held any elections in more than fifteen years, and I'm ok blaming Israel for that, I really am - but since when is a group with their own elected government under 'occupation'? Now get this - the 'refugee' camps in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the folks who live there, are not allowed to become Palestinian citizens under Palestinian law that the Palestinian government issued, because otherwise they might decide to just live wherever instead of specifically 'returning' to their ancestors' long-gone homes in Israel itself - the same as when Palestinian President Abbas refused to allow Palestinian refugees in Syria to escape the civil war there by letting them into his territory, lest he lose valuable anti-Israel leverage by reducing Palestinian suffering even a little."

"Now take that and apply it to Lebanon, where they don't even have representation in the government," he continued. "I think we have to rethink our approach, because if we're really about helping Palestinians, we have to- hey, where is everybody going? What is WRONG with you people?"

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