Wednesday, June 08, 2022

Terror groups very upset at UNGA for appointing Israeli as a VP. It's really funny to watch.



Israel's ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan was elected on Tuesday as a Vice-President of the 77th session of the United Nations General Assembly.

There are 21 vice presidents. It is not a big deal. And his predecessor, Danny Danon, also held the role one year.

But watching the terror groups and their fans freak out is a wonderful thing to behold.

Hamas issued a statement saying the appointment is an affront to the feelings of our people and to those who love peace and justice in the world. It also considered the appointment an affront to the international system

Walid Al-Awad, a member of the Political Bureau of the Palestinian People's Party, said Erdan's appointment "contradicts the moral and political values ​​stipulated in the Charter of the United Nations."

Best of all was the PFLP terror group, which "considered that the appointment of the criminal representative of the Zionist entity to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, as Vice-President of the United Nations General Assembly, represented a black day in the history of the United Nations, and constituted a blow to the values ​​on which its charter was founded. "

It added that "this is clear evidence of the influence of the Zionist lobby on centers of power and influence in this world. "

According to the PFLP, antisemitism is one of the UN's core values. Which isn't really that far from the truth!

I just find it hilarious that anyone can claim that Jews have taken over the UN! 

Keep in mind that this same antisemitic PFLP is linked to numerous Palestinian "human rights" groups. And no human rights professional ever finds anything negative to say about the terrorist, antisemitic PFLP. 


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Tuesday, June 07, 2022

06/07 Links Pt2: High and Low Israel Criticism; BDS map ties police, media to Boston Jewish, 'Zionist' institutions; Oldest Concentration Camp Survivor Dies at Age 108

From Ian:

High and Low Israel Criticism
When it comes to Israel, it’s always the best of times and the worst of times. For the Jewish state, the sky’s the limit—or else it’s falling. According to its critics, Israel is on the verge of moral immolation, an apartheid regime living on borrowed time. Its boosters counter that Israel has never been stronger: The more the haters hate, the more peace agreements it signs with its Arab neighbors, and the more sophisticated the technology it develops and exports. It’s as if the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea can only be viewed through a fun-house mirror.

This schizophrenia finds expression in two recent books that read like they were written on different planets. Omri Boehm’s Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel approaches Israel as a failed state and Jewish sovereignty as a moral obscenity. As Boehm, an Israeli associate professor of philosophy at The New School in New York, puts it, “True Israeli patriots must now challenge Zionist taboos as we have come to know them, must dare to imagine the country’s transformation, from a Jewish state into a federal, binational republic.” If Thomas Jefferson believed that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” then Boehm believes that sometimes you need to cut the tree down altogether.

Yossi Shain’s The Israeli Century: How the Zionist Revolution Changed History and Reinvented Judaism argues that Israel’s success is so total that it has remade the Jewish people, reversed the misfortunes of their past, and secured their future. For Boehm, Israel is so compromised as to be ripe for demolition; for Shain, a Knesset member for Yisrael Beiteinu and professor of political science at Tel Aviv University, it is one of the greatest miracles in human history and the lodestar of the Jewish present. “Israel has consolidated its hold as the most dominant entity in the Jewish experience,” he writes. “The Jewish center of gravity—cultural, religious, political, demographic, and even economic—has decamped from New York, and is now to be found in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv for the foreseeable future.” In the Israeli century, “the majority of Jews will come to live in the historic Land of Israel and enjoy the protection of the State of Israel.” Zion is where it will be at.

Like his one-state fellow traveler Peter Beinart, Boehm knows his audience: He couches his advocacy for the dissolution of the Jewish state in language intended to convince Jewish readers and non-Jewish critics of Israel that it is perfectly acceptable and desirable to overturn the country’s national identity. Even as he seeks to detonate the Israeli national project, he insists that he is more Zionist than the Zionists, selectively citing clippings by Menachem Begin, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and David Ben-Gurion to argue that sovereignty as such was never really necessary. A Jewish state—as opposed to a binational state with a Jewish minority—was a mistake, a wrong turn that has led to a dead end.

According to Boehm, Israelis have become more hardline and closed-minded than their founding fathers, who were open to a broader range of political possibilities. The book’s title refers to Boehm’s personal promised land: not contested Jerusalem or vibrant Tel Aviv, but Haifa, a city unshackled from Jewish history or yearning that in Boehm’s telling can be the model for the successor state to the Zionist entity.
Yisrael Medad: When Siegfried Sassoon was in Palestine at the Same Time as Jabotinsky
Siegfried Sassoon (1886 – 1967) was a scion to the wealthy India Jewish merchant family on his father's side with his mother being Anglican, of the Thornycroft farmers whose progeny had turned to becoming sculptors, painters and engineers. He grew up in rural Kent yet his father abandoned the family before Siegfried was five. His education was at Cambridge although he did not formally finish. He played sports, wrote poetry and developed into a homosexual.

He enthusiastically enlisted in the army when war was delcared but his war peorty became predominately critical with biting satire. While convalescing from a wound received at the Arras batle, he came in close contact with a pacifist circle and a protest of his was read out in Parliament in late July 1917 and published in The Times the following day.

And then, he returned to service and
In November 1917, Sassoon was passed fit for service. He was sent to Ireland where he served until February 1918 and was then transferred to Palestine as part of General Allenby’s army. He hated it there and described Jerusalem as ‘not a very holy-looking place’ and referred to the natives as ‘Hebrews’. His vague Jewish connections through his father meant nothing to him. After three months in Palestine, Sassoon returned to the Western Front.

Sassoon arrived in Palestine on 12 March 1918, some 3 months after Jerusalem had surrendered to Allenby. Sassoon’s unit, the 25th Battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, was stationed north of Ramalleh, near the Jerusalem–Nablus road; by the time Sassoon reached Palestine the unit was engaged in holding the recently-secured line.

Palestine Jews were encouraged to visit Lebanon, Syria, Transjordan and Egypt in the 1920s-40s

The blog at Israel's National Library put out an interesting post:

Just as Jewish merchants moved between Jerusalem, Damascus, Halab, and Beirut during the days of the Ottoman Empire, citizens of Mandatory Palestine – both Jews and Arabs – continued to visit their northern neighbors while living under British rule. The local tourist industry in particular, flourished during this period. Lebanon was considered a fascinating and attractive destination: its southern shores, the vibrant metropolis of Beirut and the beautiful snow-capped mountains – a rare sight in the Middle East. The Hebrew press and bulletin boards were filled with advertisements appealing to the Jewish readers to come and relax in Lebanon.  
They show advertisements to visit Lebanon, Syria and Transjordan:





Jewish tourists were so desirable that Lebanese hotels competed by offering kosher food:



I found this 1932 article in the Palestine Bulletin about a successful trip to Lebanon and Syria:


The YWHA sponsored many of these trips, and also went to Egypt (1933):



It is possible for Israeli Jews to visit two of those countries, at least.





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Left wing and Right-wing antisemites agree: Jews are the center of all evil (and America is not far behind)

You know how far-Right antisemites like to churn out graphics that show that Jews are at the center of the media, or the pharmaceutical industry, or the banks?


Well, here's the "Mapping Project:"

[A] project created by activists and organizers in eastern Massachusetts, investigating local links between entities responsible for the colonization of Palestine, for colonialism and dispossession here where we live, and for the economy of imperialism and war.
To them, the Anti-Defamation League is at the center of...policing and lots of other supposedly evil things:


Same energy.

Some of the organizations that they consider to be Zionist/racist are obviously aimed at Jews. For example, here are some of who they are targeting as being recipients of funding from the Klarman Family Foundation:
The American Jewish Committee (AJC)
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL)
Facing History and Ourselves
The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA)
The Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston
Gann Academy The New Jewish High School of Greater Boston Inc.
Jewish National Fund (JNF)
Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA)
Hadassah, The Women's Zionist Organization of America
The Shalom Hartman Institute of North America: $1,500,000 from FY17-19
Washington Institute on Near East Policy
A Wider Bridge
Brandeis University
Commentary Magazine
Harvard
Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life
JCRC of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin, Sonoma, Alameda and Contra Costa Counties
In other words, any Jewish organization that doesn't explicitly consider Israel to be satanic is on their blacklist.

This makes Joe McCarthy look like a piker.

To get an idea of how extremist these "progressives" are, here is why they hate Facing History and Ourselves:

Facing History and Ourselves develops educational materials and curricula for K-12 educators. Although educators and school districts often point to Facing History and Ourselves as a progressive option for teaching about US history, in reality the organization's materials and curricula only provide a more progressive cover for the same harmful narratives that reinforce American racism and US empire, while also celebrating Israel and propagandizing for Zionism.

Materials and curricula Facing History and Ourselves offers on slavery, colonialism, and police brutality approach these institutions of mass violence as painful episodes within an otherwise positive project of American democracy (episodes which must be "faced"), without challenging or advocating for the dismantling of the fundamentally white supremacist and colonial character of the US state, US Empire, or the US-dominated global capitalist system, which these institutions exist and have existed to uphold.
Meaning that any educational initiative that does not call for the total dismantling of the United States is hopelessly colonialist and Zionist. 

If the Mapping Project goes national, it will need to maintain a database of hundreds of thousands of institutions that accept Israel and the United States as anything other than their enemy.

There is really no difference between the far Left and the far Right. They are both obsessed with Jews. 

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06/07 Links Pt1: Israel says UN report on Gaza conflict 'tainted with hatred'; Who is fanning the flames for religious war? Abbas’ advisor!

From Ian:

UN blames Israel for conflict with Palestinians, to probe discrimination
Israel is largely to blame for its conflict with the Palestinians, the United Nations charged in the initial report by its highly contentious Commission of Inquiry, which plans to focus in part on issues of discrimination by the Jewish state both within and without the country's sovereign borders.

“The findings and recommendations relevant to the underlying root causes were overwhelmingly directed towards Israel, which we have taken as an indicator of the asymmetrical nature of the conflict and the reality of one state occupying the other,” Navanethem Pillay, who heads the three-member panel that conducted the probe, said. Pillay is the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

The UN's report
The brief 18-page report by the UN's "Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory, including east Jerusalem and Israel" posted on the UN website on Tuesday marks the first of what will be an annual report to the UN's Human Rights Council in Geneva.

The report spoke of Israel's actions in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem as a situation "in perpetuity," noting that It was unlikely the situation would end without International intervention.

"The commission notes the strength of prima facie credible evidence available that convincingly indicates that Israel has no intention of ending the occupation, has a clear policy of reassuring the complete control over the occupied Palestinian Territory and is acting to alter the demography through the maintenance of a repressive environment for Palestinians and a favorable environment for Israeli settlers," the report stated.

Israel has done this with impunity that "is feeding increased resentment among the Palestinian people" and "is fueling … an endless cycle of violence," the report stated.

The report gave a nod in the direction of Palestinian violence against Israelis. It spoke of the need for all parties, including armed Palestinian groups, to respect international law. It noted, in particular, the "indiscriminate" firing of rockets at Israel. But it did not speak of Hamas's violations of international law.

Unlike past UN probs, this one focuses not just on Israeli actions in the territory which the UN holds will eventually be part of the final borders of a Palestinian state, but it also plans to look at Israeli actions within its sovereign borders including with respect to issues of discrimination.

Israel has feared that the three-member Commission of Inquiry (COI) would charge Israel with crimes of apartheid, similar to reports that have already been issued by a number of non-governmental human rights groups.


Israel says UN report on Gaza conflict 'tainted with hatred'
Israel slammed the latest UN report on the May 2021 Gaza conflict on Tuesday and said it was heavily biased in favor of Palestinians after its authors blamed Israel's "perpetual occupation" of Palestinian areas for the flare-up.

The findings were in the first report by a commission of inquiry headed by a three-person team of human rights experts. It was set up last year by the UN-backed Human Rights Council following an 11-day flare-up between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

The commission, headed by former UN human rights chief Navi Pillay, is the first to have an "ongoing" mandate from the UN rights body. Critics allege that permanent scrutiny testifies to an anti-Israel bias in the 47-member-state council and other UN bodies.

But the report, which comprises 18 pages, contains only a few paragraphs about the indiscriminate rocket fire from Gaza on Israeli population centers, with only passing references to the role played by terrorist groups such as Hamas in perpetrating these attacks. The rest of the report is almost entirely dedicated to bashing Israel with unsubstantiated allegations of discrimination and racism while going into lengthy detail on Israel's military action in the operation without the proper context of self-defense.

The Foreign Ministry rejected the report as "part and parcel of the witch hunt carried out by the Human Rights Council against Israel." The ministry further said that the report "a waste of money and effort," adding that "it is a biased and one-sided report tainted with hatred for the State of Israel and based on a long series of previous one-sided and biased reports."

The ministry accused commission members of ignoring Palestinian violence, incitement and antisemitism. "The commission members, who claim to be objective, were only appointed to their roles because of their public and well-known anti-Israel stances, in direct opposition to the rules set out by the United Nations," it said.

The report largely recaps efforts by UN investigators over the years to grapple with the causes of Mideast violence and the authors acknowledged it was in part a "review" of previous UN findings.

Video/audio of another Palestinian sniper much closer to Shireen Abu Akleh than the IDF was (UPDATES - I was wrong)

Here is a video from Jenin journalist Ali Samoudi which he uploaded to Facebook only minutes before Shireen Abu Akleh's death.


Abu Akleh was killed at about 6:30 AM. This video was uploaded to Facebook at 6:22 AM.  (Update: See below, the video was uploaded to Telegram around 6:15.)

You can hear at least 9 loud gunshots (and 4 that might be echoes or might be more distant gunshots) in the 17 seconds of the video. Those 9 gunshots are clear enough, and loud enough, to indicate that they were shot from the same rooftop as the camera. (UPDATE: this is wrong. See below.)

The video shows the spot that Abu Akleh was going to be killed.

Here is the scene from the video, showing where the landmarks are on the map.




The video was taken from roof of the building on the right; the tree that she was in front of is on the left in this Mapillary photo:



This sniper did not kill Shireen Abu Akleh. He is only 75 meters away from her, and we know that the gunfire that killed her was about 180 meters away from the intersection near her.

But we can learn a great deal from this video nonetheless.

It proves beyond the witness testimony we have seen so far that there were indeed Palestinian snipers on the roofs of buildings in Jenin.

It proves that at least one of these snipers were much closer to Abu Akleh than the IDF was. Together with the witnesses we have seen pointing out or saying they saw other snipers, this is further proof that there were Palestinian snipers all over the area.  CNN and Bellingcat's investigators do not mention this fact, leading them to say that the IDF was the most likely shooter and not even mention the many other gunmen we have evidence for.

It proves that the Palestinian snipers are trigger happy. The IDF is not visible in this video, but it is in the general direction beyond where Shireen Abu Akleh was (215 meters down Street 1.) The gunmen who were nowhere near the IDF shot in that direction anyway. They are "shebab," youth, who want to prove how macho they are with their M-16s so they are firing towards anything that they feel like. Is it really so difficult to imagine that another similarly hotheaded terrorist saw Shireen's helmet poking above the brush from the southeast and fired volleys of bullets towards her immediately, imagining her to be IDF?

Moreover, the contrast between these youths with their beloved and iconic M-16s and a professional army like the IDF could not be starker. It is infinitely more likely that untrained, hotheaded and trigger happy youth would fire at anything that moves than that the IDF would target journalists in the middle of an operation. That simple fact does not even enter into the calculus of the "investigators" because they have a bias against the IDF, assuming that IDF soldiers act worse than the Jenin shebab.

I don't know if Ali Samoudi took this video himself or if he obtained it and uploaded it. He was close enough to have descended the three flights of stairs and go to the intersection in the 8 minutes or so before he himself was shot. Either way, this video indicates that Samoudi - a trusted eyewitness to the media - had either hung around the snipers himself or he is friendly with the videographer who apparently shared a rooftop with a trigger happy militant. 

What is clear is that the sniper we hear in this video was not IDF and was shooting in the general direction of where the reporters were to be.

Finally, it proves that the open source investigations of Bellingcat, AP and CNN only covered a tiny percentage of the action in Jenin during the timeframe between 6:15 and 6:40 AM. They represent themselves as if they have all the relevant information to determine that the IDF is the likely shooter, but their information is are not even close to what the actual events were, especially their assertions that there were no Palestinian gunmen closer to where the reporters were than the IDF was. The constant gunfire that can be heard in this and other videos prove that there are far more gunmen shooting wildly than have been caught on video. 

Viewed objectively, the overwhelming evidence indicates that Shireen Abu Akleh was killed by Palestinians.

UPDATE: Tal Hagin points out a similar video from the same vantage point that was uploaded around 6:05 AM to the Jenin camp Telegraph group:


The Ali Samoudi video was on that same channel at 6:15 AM.

 The Ali Samoudi video gunshots are much more pronounced and clear than in this one, where they could conceivably be from other (relatively nearby) sources.  This seems to indicate that he wasn't there himself. I still think the Ali Samoudi uploaded video makes it sound like the snipers are on that roof, or very close by, and shooting from a great distance towards very unclear targets.

UPDATE 2: Some have pointed out that there is no direct evidence of gunmen on this roof, and this is true. I assumed that the clarity and loudness of the gunshots in the video indicates that gunfire was very close by, but it is possible that distant gunfire from other elevated positions might be amplified by the microphone.

UPDATE 3: I asked the Montana State University professor what he thought of the audio. He said that when a gunshot is nearby, the audio has a loud sound that fades away consistently. These were much more muddled and seemed to include echoes. He does not believe that these gunshots were very close to the mic, so in this case my assumption is wrong. 

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NYT hatchet job on the IDF and Abu Akleh

The New York Times published an editorial on June 3 that broadly implied that Israel purposefully murdered Shireen Abu Akleh by cherry picking facts (and highlighting a truly stupid statement by Israeli military spokesperson Ran Kochav.)

After noting that the Palestinians blame Israel and Israel admits that there is a chance that it was Israeli fire that killed her, and quoting CNN's bogus "investigation" that ignored crucial facts and trusted "eyewitnesses" who are anything but reliable, the "Paper of Record" implies that Israel wanted to silence Abu Akleh:

The Palestinian Authority, Israel and the United States would do well to agree on an independent investigator to determine who shot Ms. Abu Akleh and establish whether she was a target because of her work as a journalist.   
It is nothing short of slanderous to say that Israel intentionally murdered Abu Akleh. I've already described in detail how, when all the evidence is viewed, it is highly likely that she was killed by Palestinian fire. The only people with guns who were close enough to Abu Akleh to have fired the shots consistent with the audio forensics evidence were Palestinian terrorists - both a group caught on video to the southeast of Abu Akleh and those who the very witnesses to her death falsely identified as Israeli snipers in buildings, who were in fact Palestinian snipers. (Israel had no snipers in buildings; Israeli snipers use different bullets, and other witnesses identified the snipers as Palestinian "Shebab.")

I will add one more piece of evidence to show how utterly incompetent the media and other investigators have been in the reporting of the events around Abu Akleh's death.

The NYT says:

CNN and other news organizations have begun their own investigations. After reviewing video footage, witnesses’ accounts and audio forensic analysis of the gunshots, CNN reported that the evidence suggested that “Abu Akleh was shot dead in a targeted attack by Israeli forces.” The witnesses and videos, it said, provided new evidence “that there was no active combat nor any Palestinian militants near Abu Akleh in the moments leading up to her death.”
Note the implication - that there is no doubt that Israel killed her, but Israel is lying by saying that there was active combat or militants near Abu Akleh before her death.

If she was killed by Palestinian militants, there doesn't have to have been any active combat, does there?  But even this is wrong. One can count many gunshots in the minutes before Abu Akleh's death.

In the very video that includes the gunshots that killed her, there are other gunshots heard in the minutes beforehand. And, as mentioned, we have both eyewitness and video evidence of militants in the area, closer than the IDF was.

In my next post, I will show even more such evidence of snipers on a rooftop that were much closer to Abu Akleh - not her shooters, because they are too close, but further proof that the CNN/Bellingcat investigations either inadvertently or purposefully ignored evidence available on the morning of May 11.


CNN and the other "investigations" knowingly ignored the presence of multiple Palestinian militants all over the area. They blame the IDF based on this airbrushing of the facts. The New York Times happily goes along with this facade of the IDF being the only group with guns remotely close enough to have the audio signature to have shot her, and this is 100% false and falsified.



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

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Abbas spokesman: Jews visiting the Temple Mount are "invasions, not visits"


From the official Palestinian Wafa news agency:

The daily storming by Jewish extremists into the holy Al-Aqsa Mosque and its courtyards, which are rejected and condemned, has become an invasion and not simply a visit, today said the spokesman for the Palestinian presidency, Nabil Abu Rudeineh.

He stressed the importance of preserving the legal and historical status quo at Al-Aqsa Mosque, warning that the continuation of this invasion would turn the conflict into a religious war with serious repercussions.

He called on the US administration to assume its responsibilities and compel Israel to stop its escalation and storming of Al-Aqsa Mosque before it is too late.

He pointed out that the continuation of double international standards and ignoring United Nations resolutions have become a cover and protection for incursions and blatant Israeli violations of international law, which encourages the occupying power to persist in its crimes.

So Jews peacefully visiting the Temple Mount, walking around its perimeter, not bothering any of the Muslims there, not interfering with any Muslim religious rites, are characterized as "invading."

And the only people who keep warning about a religious war are the Palestinians who insist on using war terminology like "invasion" to characterize quiet and peaceful visits.

The people who want a religious war are the ones who say Jews walking and quietly praying is an unacceptable event - while hurling rocks and firecrackers, playing soccer and volleyball, and waving the Hamas flag are the proper ways to honor the holiness of the site. 



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

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Monday, June 06, 2022

06/06 Links: UN and PLO are the cause of journalist Akleh's death; Saudi Arabia Engaging in ‘Serious Talks’ with Israel; The 1967 Six Day War: Why it matters

From Ian:

David Singer: UN and PLO are the cause of journalist Akleh's death
CNN at least used the word “suggests” rather than “establishes”.

Not so Al Jazeera which headlined its report:
“Shireen Abu Akleh: Al Jazeera reporter killed by Israeli forces”

A later statement from Al Jazeera indicated it had not resiled from its unproven claim:
“In addition to the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh by the Israeli Occupation Forces outside Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank on May 11, 2022, the case file will also include the Israeli bombing and total destruction of Al Jazeera’s office in Gaza in May 2021, as well as the continuous incitements and attacks on its journalists operating in the occupied Palestinian territories”.

No mention was made of Israel’s claim that the Gazan building housing Al Jazeera: "contained military assets belonging to Hamas military intelligence,"

The Jenin refugee camp should have been closed after it came under the PLO’s administration in 1995 with its 14000 occupants being resettled in Jenin or other 'West Bank' Arab towns and villages.

The UN has never called for Jenin Camp’s closure –despite UNRWA labelling it as experiencing:“one of the highest rates of unemployment and poverty among the 19 West Bank refugee camps.”

Nor does the UN question why those 19 refugee camps are open today – being located in the territory of Areas A and B – called Palestine by that body and a non-member observer state of the UN.

The UN keeps repeating its mantra for a two-state solution- which Trump’s plan provides for – but refuses to call on the PLO to negotiate with Israel on the final contours of Trump’s proposed new State.

Instead the UN continues to take note of the quarterly reports prepared by Tor Wennesland - United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process – detailing the cycle of violence that peace negotiations could have helped prevent.

The UN and the PLO have a lot to answer for the bullet that killed Shireen Abu Akleh.


House letter calls for ‘independent investigation’ of Abu Akleh death
A group of House lawmakers is set to send a letter on Friday calling for an “independent investigation” of the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and urging the Palestinian Authority to turn over evidence to assist the inquiry.

Twenty-four House members — 14 Democrats and 10 Republicans — have signed onto the letter, organized by Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) and obtained by Jewish Insider, to Secretary of State Tony Blinken encouraging him to take steps to facilitate an independent inquiry into the Al Jazeera reporter’s death.

“The Palestinian Authority was quick to ‘reject and refuse the participation of any Israelis in this kind of investigation,’” the letter reads, citing an Al Jazeera report. “Without access to the bullet that the Israelis have requested as part of an independent investigation, it is impossible to determine all the facts. This obstinate position serves no one, and will preclude any final determination of responsibility. One-sided releases of information will not get us closer to the truth.”

The letter adds that “Recent sensationalist media accounts of the incident have not served the cause of truth. Only an independent investigation can resolve this situation, and provide solace to the families and all parties.”

Abu Akleh was killed in the West Bank town of Jenin during a raid by Israeli Defense Forces. The PA has accused Israel of intentionally killing Abu Akleh. Her employer, Al Jazeera, blamed Israel and has urged the International Criminal Court to investigate.

Israel has said Abu Akleh’s death occurred during an exchange of fire between Israeli forces and Palestinian militants and that it cannot conclusively determine who the shooter was without the provision of the bullet that killed the reporter, which the PA has withheld.

“We urge you to ask the Palestinian Authority to provide access to the forensic evidence in Abu Akleh’s death for an independent investigation, so that all parties can reach a definitive conclusion about the events leading to her death, and hold all parties accountable,” the letter reads.

Friday, June 03, 2022

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach!

I've been playing with an artificial intelligence art generator, and here was the best I could get it to do for Shavuot:



Maybe I should stick with cheesecake pictures.



Anyway, chag sameach!

I will not be blogging or tweeting from Friday night to Monday night.

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

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06/03 Links Pt2: Morningstar's ESG unit admits anti-Israel bias; Beinart, in New York Times, Aims at Maker of Iron Dome, Javelin While Misleading on Military Budget

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: From Washington to Jerusalem, the conspiracies are unravelling
Like every politician on the face of the planet, Netanyahu sought positive coverage from news organizations. The prosecution decided that this effort amounted to a solicitation of a bribe. Netanyahu signed regulatory decisions that affected a telecommunications firm owned by his friend. The prosecution decided this was a favor – a payment for positive coverage from his friend's news website. Unfortunately for the prosecution, Netanyahu received terrible coverage from the website. But no matter, the prosecutors simply updated the definition of bribery. They said Netanyahu received "undo responsiveness" from the website's management to his requests for better coverage, and that was now the definition of a bribe.

Over the first several months of the trial, prosecution witness after prosecution witness shred the claim. The website's management was not responsive to requests from Netanyahu or his spokesmen, not in absolute terms and not in comparison to requests from other politicians.

Over the past three months, the focus of the trial moved to the alleged regulatory favors Netanyahu provided his friend, who owned the telecommunications giant Bezeq along with his website. Here too, the prosecution's case has fallen apart. Netanyahu was a mere rubber stamp in the regulatory process. He gave no instructions to his underlings. There was no give, and no take. There was no bribe.

There are many different ways to view the prosecution's behavior. Some commentators argue that they never thought Netanyahu would risk going to trial and would simply cop a plea to avoid prison and slink off into the shadows, handing leadership of the country to someone else. Others claim that the prosecutors are simply stupid, or incompetent.

But judging from their behavior, Israel's legal fraternity was – and remains – rabidly political. They used every power they could conjure up to bring about Netanyahu's downfall. They invented laws just for him. They defined politics and journalism as criminal enterprises, to criminalize Netanyahu's non-criminal actions – which, it works out, he didn't even undertake. They trampled the very notion of the rule of law in their "ends justify the mean" campaign to force Netanyahu from power.

And just as in the case of Russiagate, the prosecutors and the police could never have conducted their legal coup d'etat without the media's full cooperation. Just as was the case with Trump and the US media, so in Netanyahu's case, the Israeli media was a full partner in the plot to overthrow Netanyahu. Throughout the two-year investigation, the media received a constant stream of illegal, and grossly distorted information from police interrogations which carefully selected reporters breathlessly reported daily on the evening news.

Israel's prosecutors tied their actions to the elections calendar to tilt the results against Netanyahu. And they succeeded. For four years, then-attorney general Mendelblit was the most powerful "politician" in Israel. And he won. Netanyahu was first paralyzed and weakened by the investigations, then critically wounded by the indictment, and finally forced from office.

Whether or not Netanyahu is exonerated, whether or not Sussman's acquittal was justified, the fact is that no verdict will bring justice or bridge the divides in American and Israeli societies. So long as the legal systems that created Russiagate and ousted Netanyahu from power remain corrupted by politicized bureaucrats, our societies will only grow more divided and unstable.
Beinart, in New York Times, Aims at Maker of Iron Dome, Javelin While Misleading on Military Budget
Unlike Beinart, I’m not going to cast aspersions on people’s motives. Yet it’s intriguing that the single defense contractor he names, Raytheon, is Israeli defense firm Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd.’s partner in the development of the Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and SkyHunter interceptor systems and Tamir missiles that defend against incoming rockets, artillery, and mortars. Beinart is on record calling for elimination of the Jewish state and its replacement with a different country Beinart calls “Israel-Palestine,” “a Jewish home that is also, equally, a Palestinian home,” “a Jewish home that is not a Jewish state.”

Personally, I’m grateful Israelis are protected by defense systems of the sort built by Raytheon and Rafael. I’d think ties to Raytheon would be a plus in a potential Pentagon official, not a disqualifier.

Even Beinart concedes, “The Biden administration deserves credit for speedily arming Ukraine.” Who does Beinart think manufactured those arms that went to Ukraine? Without the defense contractors Beinart is casting aspersions on, the Ukrainians would be crushed under the tracks of Russian tanks. Raytheon, it turns out, also helps make the Javelin antitank missile that has been so useful to Ukraine in disabling Russian armor.

Modern weaponry requires extended research, development, manufacturing, testing, and training lead time. Without adequate military spending even in peacetime, speedily arming any country — Ukraine, Israel, the United States itself — that needs protection from an advancing tyrant becomes impossible. This was a point made memorably in 1938 by Winston Churchill in While England Slept and in 1940 by John F. Kennedy in Why England Slept. By the years those books were published, the realizations were, alas, too late to save much of European Jewry.

Posters that summarize proof that Palestinians killed Shireen Abu Akleh

I created a series of posters to summarize the main findings I mentioned in my video and followup posts.

The IDF was only in Jenin for perhaps 45 minutes that morning, it was not a large operation. They simply didn't have the time to take over buildings and set up sniper positions in a hostile environment. As we showed in other contexts, some Palestinian observers even identified the snipers all over Jenin as being militants. 

Shireen was shot by Palestinian snipers in the buildings opposite her. I don't know if it was accidental or purposeful - they were about 185 meters away so they may have misidentified the helmeted Abu Akleh as a soldier - but the soldiers were in a different direction, and too far away to have fired the gunshots we heard in the videos.







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06/03 Links Pt1: Why the US won't stop appeasing the Palestinians; Blinken promotes an immoral Israeli-Palestinian moral equivalence; Demonization of Jews, not flag march, at fault for Jerusalem unrest

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Why the US won't stop appeasing the Palestinians
Although such incitement has recently reached a crescendo, the P.A. routinely promulgates Nazi-style blood libels and "evil Jew" conspiracy lunacies; instructs its children that their highest calling is to kill Israelis and steal their land; and continues to pay terrorists' families a reward for murdering Israeli Jews.

In any sane and morally functioning universe, such people would therefore be treated as social and political pariahs, and be held to account for their murderous agenda.

So why is the Biden administration so determined instead to elevate them? Of course, there are elements within the administration of gross anti-Zionist or anti-Jewish hatred. Such bigotry marks many Palestinian supporters in progressive circles throughout the West.

But there is also a lethal refusal to face reality in the Middle East that has characterized American administrations, as well as governments in Britain and Europe, for many decades.

This has been fed by a fundamental misconception that the war of extermination waged against Israel is instead a conflict between two rival claims to the same area of land. To those wearing such blinders, the solution must therefore be a compromise between the two sides in which the land has to be shared.

But since this is in fact a war of extermination by the Palestinian side against Israel, all such attempts at compromise serve instead to legitimize, incentivize and reward its aggression – while punishing and weakening Israel for refusing to surrender to its existential foe.

The great fallacy of American and Western liberals is that this insistence on compromise is proof of their even-handedness.

The idea of equality, and thus moral equivalence, is a supposedly cardinal precept of liberal thought. In reality, it results in grotesque and amoral inequality. By insisting on equivalence between victim and aggressor, it always ends up favoring the aggressor and placing the victim in even greater jeopardy.

It's not possible to support the Palestinian cause without harming Israel. Palestinian supporters tell themselves they are helping those who have been deprived of a state of their own. In fact, they are aiding the potential invasion and theft of someone else's country.

Western liberals don't seem to realize it, but their support constitutes the Palestinians' last chance of destroying Israel. For the Arab world has largely deserted them, and instead of trying to destroy Israel, the Arab states are increasingly "normalizing" relations with it.

In short, the murderous Palestinian train has left the station. The Biden administration and other Western liberals – clinging to their ideologically twisted fantasies about creating a new world – are apparently the last people to know.
Biden Is No Friend of Israel
The real crime, one that represents a serious breach of the long-standing intelligence-sharing arrangements between the US and Israel, is that one of President Joe Biden's senior officials has been willing to betray the trust of such a close ally.

At a time when tensions are already running high between Iran and the West over the stalled nuclear talks, there are quite justifiable concerns in Israel that the leak will prompt Iran to exact revenge by attacking Israeli targets, even if it later transpires that Israel was not responsible for the assassination.

The timing of the leak also indicates an underlying willingness on the part of the Biden administration to undermine Israel when, in public, the White House is seeking to portray itself as an ally of Israel, as indicated by its recent seeming decision not to remove the IRGC from the US list of designated terrorist organisations.

As for motivation, it is unclear if the leak was deliberate, to harm Israel, or from not fully appreciating the jeopardy it could potentially cause Israel, an act which would reflect the Biden administration's profound lack of understanding as to what is at stake with the entire Iran issue.
The alternative universe of Palestinian 'sovereignty'
The real concern, then, is that a great many people are unwilling to learn, discern, analyze and evaluate our situation. It is much easier to just believe what the "underdog" has to say.

Realistically, though, what can come of such a delusional mindset?

H.L. Mencken, the cynical 20th-century American journalist and commentator, once famously said, "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people." I would suggest that no one is about to go broke overestimating the willingness of the Palestinians to depict an alternative universe in which their control of Jerusalem is blocked and thwarted by settler thugs.

We have heard rumors, for example, that the EU plans to construct a contiguous belt of structures that will link eastern Jerusalem (which includes the Old City) with Palestinian-controlled areas. Part of the reason for this is likely that the EU has adopted the Palestinians' delusional claims. The Europeans believe they will build on what is already "Palestine" – or, at least, ought to be "Palestine."

It is difficult for rational people to understand true irrationality, so I suspect that the Israeli leadership laughs off the sheer lunacy of the Palestinian vision. But there is a method to the Palestinians' madness, which is to formulate a false reality that the rest of the world buys into, and then insists Israel buy into it as well.

One of the challenges of true sovereignty is to do whatever it takes in order to protect that sovereignty. Israeli leaders will have to learn how to expose the delusions of the Palestinians and disabuse the world of their fantasies.

We have no choice but to enter their alternative universe and bring it back to reality.

A Muslim storms the Kotel and joins in Talmudic prayers

Arabic media is upset at this tweet from Mohammed al-Dhirabi, a trainer in the Council of Arab Economic Unity of the League of Arab States,  who is visiting Israel.


Watanserb reported it this way:

Bragging about his Zionization, the Bahraini coach accredited to the Council of Arab Economic Unity of the League of Arab States, Muhammad Al Dhirabi, published a picture of him performing a Talmudic prayer next to a number of Jewish extremists at the Al-Buraq Wall, which the Zionists call “the Western Wall.”

Al-Dhirabi appeared in the photo, wearing a white cloak and a red shemagh, next to the wall, accompanied by a group of extremist Jews, performing their prayers.

The tweet is a greeting of Shabbat Shalom to all Jews. 

Notice that the Jews have no problem with a Muslim praying at the Kotel with them. The contrast with the Muslim insistence that no Jews pray (or even visit) the Temple Mount could not be more striking. 


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NPR and the poor, misunderstood terrorists






NPR has a segment pretending to analyze the very valid reasons why Palestinian terrorists from Jenin try to kill Jews in Tel Aviv cafes by interviewing his gracious host, one uncle of the terrorist who murdered three in a Tel Aviv cafe in April.

NPR justifies terror and humanizes terrorists.

What compelled a young Palestinian man to open fire at a bar in Tel Aviv last month? It was one of several deadly attacks in Israel that has sparked a military crackdown in the occupied West Bank, where a prominent journalist was recently killed covering an Israeli raid. NPR's Daniel Estrin visited the Jenin refugee camp to trace one early spark that ignited the latest flames.

DANIEL ESTRIN: Amin Khazem invites us to his rooftop porch in the Jenin refugee camp. 

From your rooftop, you can see the whole camp.

AMIN KHAZEM: Yes.

ESTRIN: What are you growing here? All these rooftop plants, what are these?

KHAZEM: Small oranges.

ESTRIN: Amin is also raising two parrots ...And looking after his 5-year-old grandson, whose T-shirt, shorts and shoes feature the silhouette of an M-16. 
Here, the culture in the refugee camp is a culture of jihad and martyrdom," Amin says. They carry the memories of their families' old villages, destroyed when Israel was created.

KHAZEM: (Speaking Arabic).

ESTRIN: Wow. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine - can't even count how many bullet holes are - oh, on that wall, too.

KHAZEM: From the Israeli army.
In his Twitter thread on the story, Estrin says that the IDF took over Khazem's rooftop in 2002 in Jenin - meaning that the bullet holes are likely from Palestinians shooting at the Israelis, not from the IDF. But he doesn't bother to clarify that in the NPR story.

ESTRIN: Scars from a major battle with Palestinian militia 20 years ago. It was the Palestinian uprising. Young men from this camp were going to Israel to carry out deadly attacks. Israel stormed the camp and destroyed hundreds of homes. Amin's 29-year-old nephew Raad watched all of this when he was this little boy's age. One night last month, Raad wasn't home in the camp.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) UNIDENTIFIED JOURNALIST: A Palestinian assailant opened fire inside a crowded Tel Aviv bar, killing three Israelis.

ESTRIN: Hundreds of Israeli officers and armed civilians launched a manhunt through the streets of Tel Aviv. Officers say they found Raad at dawn and killed him in a firefight.

KHAZEM: (Speaking Arabic).

ESTRIN: Amin says the family was shocked. Raad was a techie. He invested in Bitcoin and was financially stable. But his uncle says neighbors shot Raad in the legs several months ago in a dispute over a loan. He says Raad wanted to shoot them back, but the family convinced him to reconcile. He did, and a week later, he was in Tel Aviv. Did this personal anguish drive him to kill Israelis, knowing he likely wouldn't come back alive?

KHAZEM: (Speaking Arabic).

ESTRIN: Amin denies any connection. He says Israel links Palestinian attacks to personal hardship to undermine the fight for Palestinian rights. Raad's father was a senior commander in the Palestinian security forces, trained by the U.S. to round up gunmen, bring order and prepare the ground for an independent Palestine. But here, Palestinians are fed up with their own security forces who brought no security and no independence.

KHAZEM: (Speaking Arabic).

ESTRIN: He says, "we fell in love with the United Nations Security Council and the International Criminal Court in the Arab states and ended up with delusions. People have reached a dead end. There's no horizon that we we will be liberated without us liberating ourselves." He says the camp is full of guns.
It doesn't take much to realize that Ra'ad was humiliated at not being able to take revenge on being shot by his neighbors, but once his family convinced him not to, he had to regain his honor somehow - and killing Jews is always a reliable method to do that.

In fact, this was alluded to in a video from another of Ra'ad's uncles, who praised the murderer for shooting Israelis instead of his fellow Palestinians - which is what he wanted to do!




Khazem can be seen is in the background of this video of the other raving uncle.

Estrin simply accepted the words of the terrorist's uncle - which is the Palestinian narrative that justifies all murders of Jews as a natural response to Israeli actions. 

Notice that they aren't featuring any interviews with the victims' families. Only the terrorists must be understood and sympathized with. 

(h/t Daniel)

UPDATE: The first picture above has what looks like notone but two swastikas on Khazem's wall. (h/t Ian)

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