Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, September 21, 2022

Alleged "Kurdish Jewish leader" converts to Islam - but it sounds like a scam

Aram Ezzat, Chairman of the Council of the Jewish Religion in the Kurdistan Region, announced his joining the Islamic religion and pronounced the two testimonies in front of the journalists' lens, stressing that his step is embodied in "striving to obtain God's pleasure and the love of the Noble Messenger."

Ezzat said in a press statement that he informed his Jewish colleagues and friends of his decision and that he handed over the sect's representation to his colleagues to decide to choose his successor after 6 years of holding the position.

He added, "I have other personal reasons, but I have not been subjected to any threat or pressure, and I am not the type who succumbs to threats and everyone knows me."

This story seems bogus.

I cannot find any mention either of Aram Ezzat or of the "Council of the Jewish Religion" in Kurdistan.

The main self-described leader of the Jewish community in Kurdistan is supposedly Sherko Abdallah, according to an AFP article on Jews of Kurdistan from 2020. He was appointed Kurdistan's official Jewish representative.

That article said that many Kurdish Jews converted to Islam under pressure and while some of them practice Judaism in secret there are very few left.

However, according to the National Association of Jews from Kurdistan in Israel, there are absolutely no native Jews left in Kurdistan (and even Abdallah, the official Jewish representative, is not Jewish:)

Currently, there are no Jews remaining in the Kurdistan Region, except for very few expatriates... When Jews were expelled from Kurdistan in the 1950s, the Jews living in Kurdistan left in their entirety. No Jewish family remained. Because of the very close nature of the Jewish communities, this was never under any doubt, as all members knew each other and were closely attached to their community leaders.

Since the 2010s, a new but rare phenomenon has occurred of a small handful of impostors who claim to represent long-lost Jews, usually in order to obtain some personal advantage, solicit money, or get a position. This is dishonest, degrading, and connected to antisemitism. Impostors serve nothing except usurping goodwill toward Jews, by attempting to gain personal benefits through inserting themselves into the public consciousness about the Jews from Kurdistan. Three examples of such impostors are,
- Mr. Sherzad Omar Mamsani and Mr. Sherko Othman Abdullah. Both men defrauded an earlier Kurdistan Region administration into roles as local Jewish representatives, before the National Association renewed efforts to advise on Jewish concerns.
- Mr. Ranjdar Abdulrahman, under the alias “Ranj Cohen”, whose attempts to displace the authentic Kurdish Jewish community’s role in Kurdistan are reprehensible.

It sounds like this Aram Ezzat is not Jewish, but is trying to somehow scam people by saying he was. Apparently, some Kurds believe that either Jews hid money, or that they can claim reparations from Iraq as Jews, and they are claiming to be part of a community that completely disappeared from Kurdistan and Iraq.

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

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09/20 Links Pt2: Shurat Hadin head: ‘80 years after Holocaust, there is a price for Jewish blood’; The Cold, Hard Truth About Ben & Jerry’s; Are all progressive college students anti-Israel?

From Ian:

‘80 years after Holocaust, there is a price for Jewish blood’ - Shurat Hadin head

“80 years after the Holocaust, there is a price for Jewish blood,” Shurat Hadin director Nitsana Darshan-Leitner said Monday at the Jerusalem Post Conference in New York.

To exact a price from terrorists, “the private sector [needs] to take part in this war,” she said, rejecting the idea that fighting terrorism is solely the job of the government and the defense establishment. “The only way to fight terrorism is everyone together – me, you, everyone.”

Speaking on “The Price of Terror” panel along with Stuart Force, father of American terrorism victim Taylor Force, Darshan-Leitner said if you see “a lawless regime, terrorism is on the rise.”

“Shurat Hadin was established to choke off the pipeline of the money of terrorism to make sure no one is killing Jews” and doesn’t pay a price, she said.

“Private people built the State of Israel; private people keep it safe,” she added.

Force talked about how he became involved in the campaign against the Palestinians' “pay for slay” policy, in which the Palestinian Authority pays money to terrorists who have killed Israelis.

“There was a program in place – ‘pay for slay,’” he said. “I knew something had to be done.”

Force said when Darshan-Leitner approached him to file lawsuits, he immediately came onboard.

The Cold, Hard Truth About Ben & Jerry’s

Yet Cohen and Greenfield seem to be suffering from convenient memory loss — and, conspicuously, not one journalist cited the actual text of the agreement negotiated in April 2000.

Unilever’s $326 million acquisition of Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Inc. was the subject of complex negotiations, resulting in a lengthy document regulating both company’s rights and obligations down to the last detail. In point of fact, Richard Goldstein — who, as then-president of Unilever USA, served as the global organization’s chief negotiator — once called it “by far the most unique deal” he was ever involved in.

Under the terms of the sales contract, as published by the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Unilever was given control over the “financial and operational aspects” of Ben & Jerry’s. Meanwhile, the independent board only retained responsibility “with respect to the enhancement of the Social Mission Priorities…of the Company, as they may evolve, and the preservation of the essential integrity of the Ben & Jerry’s brand-name.”

The agreement does not grant the independent board the explicit authority to withdraw Ben & Jerry’s from countries it disagrees with. Schedule 6.14, an addendum to the merger deal that clarifies some of the firm’s social objectives, lists everything from promoting “sustainable agriculture efforts” to continuing “the purchase of non-rBGH milk and cream primarily from Vermont farms,” but — crucially — does not mention geopolitics.

Moreover, the contract limits the board’s discretion within the bounds of “commercial reasonableness.” And one can hardly deny that effectively boycotting a market of 9.2 million consumers impacts the financial and operational aspects of Ben & Jerry’s, especially in light of the massive monetary repercussions Unilever has faced due to counter-boycotts.

At the same time, it is imperative to note that Cohen and Greenfield explicitly agreed to “use commercially reasonable efforts to obtain (at [Ben & Jerry’s] expense) for [Unilever] the right to conduct all facets of the Business in Israel.” Legal experts have pointed out that, “as a matter of contract law, a highly generalized contractual provision giving Ben and Jerry’s board the final say on amorphous ‘social mission priorities’ cannot override a specific and tangible legal commitment to conduct business in Israel.”

This prompts the question: did MSNBC and Mehdi Hasan fail to do their due diligence or are they letting Cohen and Greenfield actively mislead the show’s 443,00 viewers about the Ben & Jerry’s “cone-undrum”?

As HonestReporting detailed in a July 31 piece, Ben & Jerry’s refusal to back down on this issue is indicative of how its board views Israel as uniquely bad, even as the famously “woke” company continues to sell ice cream in the disputed territories of Cyprus and Gibraltar.

Activism vs. Journalism Contrasting the Ben & Jerry Interviews of Mehdi Hasan and Alexi McCammond

NBC News’ biography of Mehdi Hasan claims he is “an award-winning journalist known for riveting one-on-one conversations.” However, Hasan fell far short of “award-winning journalism” during his recent segment interviewing the cofounders of Ben & Jerry’s. This is particularly evident when one contrasts his interview with that of Axios’ Alexi McCammond, who delivered a masterclass while interviewing the same subjects just last year. While the latter handled her interview with a professional focus on getting her subjects to address and dig into the issues, the former seemed focused on preserving his preferred narrative.

Both interviews dealt with Ben & Jerry’s decision to stop selling ice cream in the West Bank, a decision which effectively meant it would stop selling ice cream to the entirety of the Jewish state, not just settlements.

Consider just this portion which Hasan proudly tweeted, when he asks Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield:
“Then a lot of bad faith actors try to claim that not wanting to sell Ben and Jerry’s ice cream in the occupied territories illegally occupied is somehow anti-Jewish antisemitic. As someone yourself who is Jewish but who’s been critical of Israel’s occupation for many years now, what is your response to those critics?”

Putting aside Hasan’s obsession with tokenism and mocking concerns of antisemitism, his question is, professionally speaking, unserious. It begins with Hasan describing Ben & Jerry’s critics as “bad faith actors.” That is, he begins by portraying the story as good faith truth versus bad faith slander. There is then no subsequent genuine effort to unpack the criticisms, explore the arguments, and allow for his audience to get an honest assessment of the competing narratives.

Note that this isn’t for lack of time. Indeed, the Mehdi Hasan interview ran about five minutes, the same length as that of the relevant portion of the Axios interview.

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

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On October 6, 1943, a group of hundreds of Orthodox rabbis came to Washington DC to plead for the lives of their brethren in Europe.

They presented a letter to Vice President Wallace asking for a government agency to help save the remaining Jews from the Holocaust. The letter demanded that the US open its doors to Jewish refugees, that the UN create a passport that could be used for Jews to travel, and for Britain to "open the doors of Palestine."

Some of the details about this trip are outrageous.

Historian Alex Grobman writes:

Dressed in long, dark rabbinic attire, the rabbis walked from Union Station to the Capitol Building. There, Rabbis Eliezer Silver, Israel Rosenberg and Bernhard Louis Levinthal led a recitation of Psalms. Peter Bergson (Hillel Kook), who was head of the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, introduced them to Vice President Henry Wallace and a number of Congressmen.

Bergson enlisted the rabbis and the American Jewish Legion of Veterans for the march. He expected American clergy would join, but none did. Only the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the U.S. and Canada, the Union of Hassidic Rabbis and a commander of the Jewish Legion participated. The modern Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America sent Rabbi David Silver, Rabbi Eliezer Silver’s son.

White House adviser Judge Samuel Rosenman told the president that those “behind this petition” were “not representative of the most thoughtful elements in Jewry.” The “leading Jews” Rosenman knew opposed the march, but he admitted failing to “keep the horde from storming Washington.”

A number of Jewish congressmen had attempted to dissuade the rabbis from marching. This backfired when Congressman Sol Bloom, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, argued that “It would be undignified for these un-American looking rabbis to appear in the nation’s capital.”

At the Lincoln Memorial, the rabbis—who had declared a fast day—prayed for the welfare of the armed forces and the Jews of Europe and a quick Allied victory. Then they walked to the White House and prayed outside the gates. Though they expected to meet with the President, they were told he was unavailable. Later they learned he went to Bolling Field Air Force Base for a minor ceremony to avoid meeting them.

Rafael Medoff adds:

The era’s most prominent American Jewish leader, Rabbi Stephen Wise, criticized the march in somewhat similar terms. Wise, who headed the American Jewish Congress, the World Jewish Congress, and the American Zionist movement, wrote that “the orthodox rabbinical parade [ sic]” was a “painful and even lamentable exhibition.” He derided the organizers as “stuntists” and accused them of offending “the dignity of [the Jewish] people.”

The oh-so-dignified Jews were aghast that Orthodox rabbis would make a scene while pleading for the lives of Jews in Europe.

And these self-appointed leaders were dead wrong. They thought that since they had their own access to corridors of power, they had influence in those corridors. In fact, Roosevelt didn't want to meet the rabbis specifically because he didn't want to be pressured to help save the Jewish refugees from Europe. FDR knew the power of public pressure. (His schedule that afternoon was remarkably open.)

The vice president issued a vague, meaningless statement of support meant to get rid of these strange Jews.

And there was a more than a little self-hating from the American secular Jews in this event, as these supposed defenders of Jews in America did not want to be associated with people who looked like their grandfathers did. The Orthodox embarrassed them. Public tears to help save millions of lives is not the image they want Americans to see.

They thought of themselves as superior, at having left their visible Judaism behind. And their conceit that they are better, and know better, than other Jews, indirectly resulted in more European Jews being murdered.

It is the same conceit that kept the daily attacks on Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn out of the news cycle for so long.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

09/20 Links Pt1: Ebrahim Raisi's predictable 'CBS News' performance; Germany wake up! Do you know what Holocaust denial you are funding?; Is Ireland going to recognize a Palestinian state?

From Ian:

Ruthie Blum: Ebrahim Raisi's predictable 'CBS News' performance

The brouhaha surrounding Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi's comments about the Nazi genocide of the Jews, during an interview that aired on Sunday with CBS News's "60 Minutes," is puzzling.

Anyone who expected the radical political figurehead of the mullah-ruled Islamic Republic to acknowledge, let alone denounce, the acts of the Third Reich – when his regime makes no bones about wanting to finish the job that Adolf Hitler started – is living in an alternate universe.

Nevertheless, the short exchange he had on the topic with correspondent Lesley Stahl made international headlines and was circulated widely on social media. When asked by Stahl whether he "believe[d] the Holocaust happened – that 6 million Jews were slaughtered," Raisi replied, "Look, historical events should be investigated by researchers and historians. There are some signs that it happened. If so, they should allow it to be investigated and researched."

The only thing noteworthy about this was his willingness to point to "some signs that it happened." It was almost amusing of him to suggest that it be "investigated and researched."

As though he had no idea that it's been studied for decades and verified by historians and survivors. And as if his role-model ayatollahs aren't keen to emulate the Holocaust, albeit Islamist-style: first, through terrorist proxies in Syria, Lebanon, Judea and Samaria and Gaza, and ultimately with nukes.

"So, you're not sure; I'm getting that you're not sure," Stahl said quietly, being careful to avoid causing her interviewee to rue over having agreed to be challenged by a woman.

"What about Israel's right to exist?" she then queried.

Here, Raisi didn't hesitate or moderate his answer. But he did, however, refrain from repeating the name of the Jewish state that's in the crosshairs of his massive arsenal of weapons, both in Iran and along Israel's borders.

"You see, the people of Palestine are the reality," he said. "This is the right of the people of Palestine who were forced to leave their houses and motherland. The Americans are supporting this false regime there to take root and to be established there."

Stahl failed to remind Raisi that the ancient homeland of the Jewish people became a state in 1948, 13 years before he was born. Instead, she invoked the Abraham Accords.

Starving the terrorists of cash -opinion

Israel’s security forces closed down seven Palestinian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) operating in the West Bank on August 19.

The reason given was that those particular NGOs had been diverting to the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) charitable funding provided to them for their own use. The PFLP is designated a terrorist organization by Israel, as well as by the US, the EU, Japan, Canada and Australia. The UN immediately condemned the closures as “totally arbitrary.”

In October 2021, Israel accused six Palestinian civil society groups of funneling donor aid to militants, in particular the PFLP, and consequently designated them terrorist organizations. Justification for this can be traced back to a document published by the Israeli government in February 2019 titled: “Terrorists in Suits.”

It presented dozens of examples of ties between NGO activists who delegitimize Israel, and the PFLP and Hamas. The ideological connection between them is that all reject the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish and democratic state, and oppose any normalization between Israel and its neighbors.

The report, which lists in detail the ties between the various bodies, also found that many of these NGOs were led or staffed by members and operatives of known terrorist organizations.

In designating the six NGOs as terrorist-linked, the Defense Ministry said that the groups had “received large sums of money from European countries and international organizations, using a variety of forgery and deceit,” and that the money had been passed to the PFLP to support its activities.

“Those organizations present themselves as acting for humanitarian purposes,” it said. ”However, they serve as a cover for the ‘Popular Front’ promotion and financing.”

“Terrorists in Suits” is not the only exposé of this connection between non-governmental and terrorist organizations. In November 2021, the Institute for National Security Studies, a research body associated with Tel Aviv University, published an 11,000-word academic research paper.

It analyzed the extent to which the EU, as well as individual European nations, consistently pour millions into the coffers of certain Palestinian NGOs nominally concerned with economic development, peace and human rights.

The recipients, however, are “substantial political and economic actors, and are among the leaders of intense soft power conflict, voicing repeated allegations of fundamental Israeli wrong-doing and encouraging anti-Israel campaigns through boycotts and lawfare.”

PMW: Germany wake up! Do you know what Holocaust denial you are funding?

The hate speech above was disseminated on PA TV by Saed Erziqat, head of PA’s General Union of Palestinian Teachers and is far more odious than PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ libel that “Israel committed 50 holocausts.” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he was “disgusted” by Abbas’ “outrageous… intolerable and unacceptable,” statement. Now Abbas’ hate-speech has been repeated and compounded by a top PA educator on official PA TV, and was included in a letter written on behalf of 60,000 Palestinian teachers, whose salaries are paid by Germany and the EU. This is what Palestinian teachers are taught to believe and is what Palestinian children are learning from their teachers, that Germany is funding.

Ironically, German and the EU are funding PA teachers specifically because the donors don’t want their money to go to PA hate and terror promotion. After Palestinian Media Watch presented US and European donors to the PA with documentation that the PA was using their donor money to pay salaries to terrorist prisoners, many donor countries stopped funding the PA’s general budget in order not to fund the terror salaries. Among the projects the EU and Germany chose to fund instead were the salaries of the PA teachers, thinking this was a secure, non-terror and non-hate related contribution.

But now Saed Erziqat, the head of the PA’s General Union of Palestinian Teachers that represents 60,000 educators, has revealed that the teachers’ union has adopted a hate ideology of Holocaust “relativization” and Antisemitism. Erziqat came to the defense of Abbas’ “50 holocausts” libel. The teachers’ union leader repeatedly compared Israel to Nazis, saying that what Israel has done to the Palestinians is “worse than the Holocaust itself”:
Secretary-General of the General Union of Palestinian Teachers Saed Erziqat: “A blessing to His Honor [PA] President Mahmoud Abbas, He is the one who wrote about Nazism and Zionism, that they are two sides of the same coin… When His Honor the President spoke [in Germany] about [50 Palestinian] holocaust[s] he did not deny what happened to the entity- and the Jews in Germany, rather he attempted to show that the Palestinian people has also been subjected to massacres, more than the Jews in Germany experienced… We in the Palestinian Teachers’ Union sent a letter to the German teachers’ union that there are massacres that have happened to the Palestinian people that were worse than the Holocaust itself.”

Host: “And it is happening now, not in 1945.”

Erziqat: “Yes. Also, the Palestinian holocaust has not ended. The occupation’s (i.e., Israel’s) daily measures are a holocaust that renews every day... It attempts to do to our Palestinian people what they did to [the Jews] in Germany… He [Abbas] is the most knowledgeable person on the thinking of the occupation and the thinking of Zionism, because he wrote [a thesis] about the comparison between Zionism and Nazism. Therefore, he is the person who most understands the importance of [this] narrative to the world.”

[Official PA TV program Topic of the Day, Aug. 20, 2022]

There was a single Muslim poem about Jerusalem written before 1967. It is about revenge against Crusaders.

I have always been interested in finding any evidence that Muslims venerated Jerusalem before Zionism.

Jews, of course, have written hundreds of poems in the forms of psalms, piyyutim, zemirot and classic poetry continuously since the time of David.

Up until now, I have never seen a single Muslim poem about the holy city that predates Zionism (or 1967, for that matter.) Every article I had seen on poems about Jerusalem and Palestine have been about recent poetry.

At Raya.com, Dr. Ayman Al-Atoum wrote a series of three articles on "Jerusalem in Arabic poetry" where he says, "Jerusalem was the hearth of poets' hearts, the compass of their love, the beacon of their words, and the melting of their hearts."

In part one, he quotes from poems about Baghdad and Damascus, to show that Arabs have shown great affection for their capitals, so of course - he says - Jerusalem would be one of them. He provides a quick Arab history of Jerusalem. But he doesn't quote any of the poems he refers to.

In part two, al-Atoum asserts that there were lots of Arabic poems about Jerusalem:

If you go and research these huge events that Jerusalem has gone through, you will find their impact in every aspect, whether social, political, economic or cultural. These events inflamed the sentiments of poets, ancient and modern, and perhaps the history books that recorded the poetry of conquests at the beginning of the Islamic rule of Jerusalem, are the ones that re-recorded the poetry of occupation at the beginning of the Crusades, and not more famous than what Al-Abiwardi wrote.

Presumably, al-Atoum is a scholar and he looked for these Arabic poems of Jerusalem - and couldn't find any from before the Crusaders took over the city. So he pretends that there must have been many such poems, and they were copied by Al Abiwardi, who wrote what seems to be the only semi-famous Arabic poem about Jerusalem.

Al Abiwardi's poem is named Jerusalem, but it doesn't mention the city. It doesn't mention anything about Jerusalem. It doesn't extol the beauty of the city. It is all about the indignity of losing to the Christians ("Romans") and is a call to arms to take it back.

We mingled blood with blazing tears
So there was no mercy left in us.
And the wickedness of a person's weapon is a tear that sheds
This war caught its fire with the swarms

Al-Atoum then moves on to his next poem about Jerusalem, written in....1967.

So it appears that the only Arabic poem that may have been peripherally about Jerusalem was written at the time of the Crusades by an Iraqi poet.

Not exactly a tradition of showing veneration for Jerusalem.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

WJC president Ronald Lauder acts chummy with antisemite Mahmoud Abbas. He has lost the plot.

Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas is in New York to give his annual anti-Israel speech filled with lies to the UN.

This comes on the heels of his Fatah party bragging about its terror wing attacking Israel in recent weeks. It has been only a month since Abbas said that Israel has inflicted 50 "holocausts" on Palestinians, only the latest of his many explicitly antisemitic statements he has made publicly.

Abbas' Wafa news agency has hundreds of articles trying to make Abbas look like a statesman, reporting breathlessly on his sending letters of congratulations to various world leaders on their national days and every meeting he has in Ramallah with even minor officials from countries or NGOs. For the New York visit, Wafa has a bonanza of photo ops trying to make Abbas look important showing him meeting with major officials.

One of the featured photos is with Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, smiling while putting his arm around Holocaust denier Abbas.

Compare with with Abbas' publicity photos with other dignitaries in New York.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez:

President of the International Committee of the Red Cross Peter Maurer:

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres:

No other official gives Abbas more than a handshake.

But the head of the WJC, which is committed to fighting antisemitism worldwide, puts his arm around a dyed in the wool antisemite like Mahmoud Abbas. While smiling. As if it is an honor to be in the same room as a supporter of terror.

The WJC issues several statements a week, but it did not condemn Mahmoud Abbas' "holocausts" statement, even though it was widely reported.

I have no problem with the head of a Jewish organization meeting Abbas, as a means to convey messages from the Jewish community or to encourage moves towards peace and away from terror. But it needs to be accompanied with a public message of what the meeting is meant to accomplish and a strong statement of condemnation of Abbas' antisemitic statements.

In this case, as in other meetings between Lauder and Abbas, the subject matter is opaque - and all we see are the photo-ops which the Palestinians use as propaganda to pretend that they have no problem with Jews, but only with Israel.

When the leader of a Jewish organization seemingly goes out of its way to treat an antisemite with more respect than anyone else does, we have a problem with our Jewish leadership.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Suddenly, after weeks of his Fatah party taking responsibility and bragging about terror attacks, Mahmoud Abbas' Palestinian Authority arrested Hamas terrorist Mosab Shtayyeh in Nablus.

This caused Palestinian fans of terror to protest in Nablus and Jenin, and Hamas condemned the arrest.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority also confiscated a cache of weapons in Hebron, plus "the arrest of a number of outlaws and instigators of sedition and security chaos in the Hebron Governorate."

So what's going on? Why is the PA suddenly acting how it is supposed to when it has been openly supportive of terror recently?

The reason is that Mahmoud Abbas is in New York this week to give a speech at the UN. He has been under pressure from the US and Israel to flex his muscles against terror, and he doesn't want to look bad when he gives his annual anti-Israel speech to the world.

Next week, we'll find out if this is a real change or just optics. My bet is the latter.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

09/19 Links Pt2: The Bones of the Blood Libel; PBS Holocaust doco perpetuates well-worn myths to glorify FDR; Ben & Jerry’s founders say Unilever ‘usurped’ authority with Israel spin off

From Ian:

Meir Y. Soloveichik: The Bones of the Blood Libel

This reminds us of a dialectic in the story of England and the Jews. One aspect was documented by the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb in her book The People of the Book: Philosemitism in England, from Cromwell to Churchill. As she illustrated, a remarkable admiration for Jews made itself manifest at various moments in the country’s history- from Oliver Cromwell’s charitable treatment of Rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel, to the Christian proto-Zionism of the Earl of Shaftesbury, to the success of novels such as Tancred, Ivanhoe, and Daniel Deronda. But from England also emerged the blood libel as well as one of the most perniciously influential images in literature, the character of Shylock, which then lived on in Fagin and other figures in English literature.

The libels born with the death of William of Norwich, and propagated by The Merchant of Venice, survive to this day around the world, and the confirmation of the Jewishness of the bones of Norwich should inspire us to ponder the haunting lessons they offer. One of the scientists involved in the genetic analysis of the skeletons reflected that “Ralph de Diceto’s account of the 1190 a.d. attacks is evocative, but a deep well containing the bodies of Jewish men, women, and especially children forces us to confront the real horror of what happened.” This is admirable, and true, but it does not capture the true horror of what originated in Norwich. The readiness of all today to denounce the massacres of medieval Jewish communities often highlights how, as the writer Dara Horn put it, “people love dead Jews.” The blood libel is not a thing of the past. It is ongoing. The world is all too prepared to bemoan the injustice against Jews in the past and yet all too ready to overlook those who purvey blood libels today.

Such a phenomenon can be seen in the successful career of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. As Seth Mandel has noted in these pages, the congresswoman has taken rhetorical dishonesty about Israel to entirely new level, linking—like the libelists of old—purported Jewish activity to grievances around the world. Commenting on the situation at the Mexican-American border, she accused, without offering any evidence, Israel of placing Palestinian children in cages. During one debate, standing on the floor of the House next to an image of a dead Palestinian child, she linked Israel’s airstrikes to the Naval base in Vieques, Puerto Rico. “When I saw those [Israeli] airstrikes that are supported with U.S. funds,” she said, “I could not help but wonder if our communities were practice for this.” As Mandel put it, Ocasio-Cortez’s career reminds us that “There are blood libels and then there are blood libels on steroids. Her presence in Congress is an embarrassment and her incitement goes almost totally unremarked on.” The sad fact is that from Thomas of Monmouth to today, purveyors of libels against the Jews have all too often enhanced their own celebrity.

The bones of murdered Jews may have been exhumed from the soil of the site where the blood libel was born, but what has yet to be exhumed from the present is the blood libel itself. And it is only if we do all we can to identify, and call out, the liars and the libelists that we can honestly hope that the murdered Jews of Norwich will rest in peace.

Can Countries with Grave Human-Rights Records Help Fight Anti-Semitism?

For several decades, Deborah Lipstadt has been known as one of the most prominent and prolific writers on the dark history of anti-Semitism. In 2000, she won a judgment after being sued in a British court by the Holocaust denier David Irving, a case which was later made into a film starring Rachel Weisz. Since then, Lipstadt has published a book on the Eichmann trial and an investigation into anti-Semitism, among others. She is a professor of Jewish history at Emory, but is currently on leave because she was tapped by President Biden as the State Department’s special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism. In her new role, she has been travelling around the Middle East—she recently returned from a trip to Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates.

Lipstadt and I spoke several years ago; we talked again by phone last week. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the compromises involved in transitioning from scholar to diplomat, how Israel’s relationship with its neighbors impacts her job, and whether the Saudi government is interested in improving its human-rights record.

What made you want to take this job?

Initially, I wasn’t really interested, even though there were a lot of people who were pressing me to put my name in the hopper, including people from the Administration. Then someone said to me, “You can make a difference.” At this stage of my career, I feel I’ve accomplished a lot. I feel very lucky and blessed in what I’ve been able to do, but the chance to make a difference was something that really intrigued me.

At first, I thought of the job as mainly putting out fires: there’s a tragedy in Paris, there’s a tragedy wherever, and you have to make it clear to the government that America takes this very seriously. Then I thought about the Abraham Accords—here was a chance possibly to do something positive to change the nature of Muslim-Jewish relations, certainly as they’ve emanated from the Gulf. That intrigued me a lot.

You mentioned the Abraham Accords, signed during the Trump Administration, which sought to normalize relations between neighboring Arab states and Israel. I’m curious to what degree you view the fight against anti-Semitism and the fight for the recognition of Israel as part of the same battle.

They’re related. You can’t completely bifurcate them. That would be wrong. I think to make one dependent on the other is also wrong. When I was in Saudi Arabia, someone said to me, “Oh, if Israel would just solve the Israel-Palestine issue, there’d be no anti-Semitism.” I said that there was a millennia of anti-Semitic behavior and attitudes before there ever was a state of Israel or a Palestine issue. What I found in Saudi Arabia—particularly among younger people that I met, and I met quite a few under forty—is a willingness to separate the very crucial, important, significant geopolitical issue of Israel and Palestine from attitudes toward Jews. If you go back and you think about it, in the seventies, eighties, nineties, even a little bit into the aughts, Saudi Arabia, among other Gulf countries, was one of the leading countries in dispersing anti-Semitic material. I’m not suggesting that the Saudis sent imams out and said, “Go preach anti-Semitism in Europe or the United States or wherever,” but that’s what imams did. The Saudis were funding the dissemination of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

That’s changing, and I wanted to encourage that kind of change. I will talk to anyone who is serious about addressing the issue of anti-Semitism, which is one of the reasons why I chose to make Saudi Arabia the first stop on my travels. If it can lessen anti-Semitism, that’s a good thing all around. It’s certainly good for Jews who might be impacted by it, but it’s also good in terms of easing tensions. If you can get a government or an entity to stop othering one group of people, it’s possible that that will spill over to other groups or segments of the society.

A powerful new account of how Washington abandoned Hitler’s victims

On Jan. 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was sworn in as the chancellor of Germany. Over the next 100 days, American newspapers published more than 3,000 stories about the eruption of antisemitic attacks whipped up by the new regime.

“Bands of Nazis throughout Germany carried out wholesale raids calculated to intimidate the opposition, particularly the Jews,” reported Edmond Taylor of the Chicago Tribune. “Men and women were insulted, slapped, punched in the face, hit over the head with blackjacks, dragged from their homes in night clothes. Never have I seen law-abiding citizens living in such terror.”

Taylor’s story is quoted early in “The US and the Holocaust,” a six-hour documentary by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein that premieres tonight on PBS and will air in three parts this week. The story is cited to make the point that for Americans who cared to know what was happening to the Jews under the new German government, the information was readily available. News accounts like Taylor’s fueled widespread protests. On March 27, more than 20,000 New Yorkers packed Madison Square Garden, with 35,000 more outside, to condemn the Nazis’ wave of terror. Similar rallies were held in scores of cities across the country.

Pressure to suppress both the news coverage and the protests was not long in coming. Some of that pressure came from Germany, where Nazi officials denied that they were targeting Jews and claimed that the negative stories were “Jewish lies.” But efforts to downplay the truth, the new documentary makes clear, also came from the US government.

“The American embassy in Berlin cabled Secretary of State Cordell Hull that it was the Nazis who were lying and that the Jewish situation was rapidly taking a turn for the worse,” the film’s narrator says. “But Hull insisted that the mistreatment was coming to an end and that things would revert to normal — if the protests in America would stop.”

There are a number of interlocking themes in “The US and the Holocaust.” Among them: the entrenched antisemitism of prewar America, the stiff anti-immigration laws that excluded most refugees from the United States, and the way Jim Crow segregation in the American South provided a model for the Nazis’ infamous Nuremberg laws stripping German Jews of their rights. In his trademark fashion, Burns interweaves gripping human stories, some recounted by survivors who managed to avoid the fate that befell 6 million of Europe’s Jews, and others told about those who struggled in vain for permission to enter America but ended up as corpses in the Nazi ghettos, execution pits, and death camps.

Through it all, the US government, with some rare and heroic exceptions, not only refused to help Europe’s Jews escape the Nazi genocide but went to extremes to suppress or downplay reports of the horror that was underway. Hull’s grotesque contention in the spring of 1933 that putting a lid on anti-Nazi criticism in America was the best way to ease anti-Jewish attacks in Germany was no aberration. Again and again, the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and especially the State Department, where FDR’s close friend and financial backer Breckinridge Long was a powerful assistant secretary of state, worked assiduously to thwart refugees from reaching safe haven in the United States.

A Palestinian's home will be demolished - but no human rights groups will care this time

Tamer Abu Bakra received a demolition notice for half of his already tiny 60-square-meter home.

But you won't hear a word about this from B'Tselem or ICAHD or HRW or Amnesty, who love to publicize when Palestinian homes are to be demolished.

Because this demolition notice came from Hamas.

Bakra put out an appeal on social media, saying the Khan Younis house "has been lived in by my father and my family since the Nakba, and it has been inherited from them to this day."

It had been burned down in 2020 and he has been rebuilding it himself.

Bakra said it is already too small to be called a "home."

Too bad he had the misfortune of building his house where no one would care if his home gets taken down.

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Egypt and Hamas' open air prison

Israel haters love to claim that Gaza is an Israeli open-air prison.

Gazans know better.

Sama News writes:

The crisis of stranded travelers in the Gaza Strip continues, with thousands of people wishing to leave the Strip still waiting.

Informed sources told Al-Ayyam newspaper that the crisis that started since last May is still continuing, especially in the departure route, as thousands are waiting for their turn to travel from the Gaza Strip.

The crisis continues despite the departure of more than 3,200 passengers per week, and the stranded people have appealed to the Egyptian authorities to speed up their exit from the Strip, by increasing the number of departures, and opening the crossing for an additional day per week, so that work will become six days instead of five.

Those stuck in the Gaza Strip are forced to purchase the express travel service through a specialized company, in order to expedite their departure from the Strip, despite its high financial cost....

With regard to the arrival route, the source confirmed that returning to the Strip is easier, but there is suffering in the journey to come, due to the turbulent conditions in the Sinai Peninsula and the long hours of travelers staying at the Egyptian army checkpoints, in order to allow them to reach the crossing.

The Rafah crossing operates five days a week from Sunday to Thursday.

Hamas publishes the list of people allowed to leave every day. They are the ones who decide who can stay and who can go.

Egypt sometimes blocks specific people from coming for presumed security reasons, last week they blocked 86 out of 3200 people.

Israel has nothing to do with this.

But it gets blamed.

(h/t Imshin)

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09/19 Links Pt1: The contrasting tale of two monarchs; US MUST put Fatah on its Terror Groups List; Israelis and Jews at Risk of Attack by Iran and ISIS Overseas

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The defender of faith

The King has shown much friendship and warmth towards British Jews. In 2013, at the inauguration of Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, he became the first royal to attend such a ceremony — sporting a personalised kippah embroidered with the crest of the Prince of Wales. In a speech that year, he expressed concern at the rise of antisemitism in Britain.

In 2019, at a Chanukah party at Buckingham Palace, he said that as he grew up he had been deeply touched that British Jews remembered his family in their weekly prayers. “And as you remember my family”, he said, “so we too remember and celebrate you”.

Five years ago, however, Jews were alarmed to read a letter he wrote in 1986 to his mentor, Laurens van der Post. He referred in this to Israel having been created by an influx of European Jews. He also lamented the influence of the “Jewish lobby” in America.

At the time, Clarence House disavowed these remarks. It said the letter “clearly stated” these weren’t his own views but represented the opinions of some of those he had met during his recent visit to the Gulf “which he was keen to interrogate”.

Whether or not he ever held such views, however, is all but irrelevant.

Now that he is the King, he has lost the freedom to express his opinions. In his private weekly audiences with the prime minister, he is most likely to follow the constitutional convention upheld by his mother.

This is to proffer wise advice to the prime minister, issue warnings and above all provide support — but never to seek to influence government policy.

In any event, his own deep belief in promoting harmony reinforces the fundamental duty of the British monarchy — to unify the nation.

In that duty, the British crown has patterned itself since antiquity on the monarchy of King David, who forged a united kingdom out of disparate tribes and whose own power was limited through alternative power bases of priests, prophets and judges.

Charles III is the latest British monarch in that Davidic tradition. God save the King. And God save British Jews.

Liz Truss’s world view and its implications for UK-Israel relations

While the world’s attention has been focused on Britain’s new king, the country also got a new prime minister just two days before the death of Queen Elizabeth II. Toby Greene investigates Liz Truss’s approach to both domestic politics and diplomacy—which he argues are not unlike those of Margaret Thatcher—and how these will shape policies toward the Jewish state:

In Truss’s mental map of the world, in which decent, honest, sovereign, free-trading nations are pitted against aggressive authoritarians, Israel sits firmly in the former category. Israel’s inclusion in Truss’s list of “friends and allies” in her October 2021 conference speech was not an isolated example, with Israel referred to repeatedly as an example of a (non-EU) democratic partner that excels in innovation.

Truss’s attitude towards Israel cannot be separated from that of her party, in which a view of Israel as a democratic, economically successful, and strategically significant partner has become increasingly dominant.

Whilst Israel is a pariah for significant chunks of the [British] left—and bursts negatively into the public eye during periodic rounds of violence [in the Middle East]—for the right this is more grist for the mill in the culture wars. Conservative pro-Zionism helps expose Labor’s internal rifts over the legacy of [its former leader Jeremy] Corbyn, who got the party bogged down in his anti-Semitic anti-Zionism.

Like much of Truss’s politics, her philo-Semitism carries echoes of Thatcher, whose cabinet famously included more “old Estonians than Old Etonians.” . . . . But that does not guarantee plain sailing for UK-Israel relations under a Truss premiership. First there is the issue of Iran. While Truss talks tough on Iran, like many Western leaders, she is unlikely to stand in the way of the Biden administration’s determination to return to the [2015 nuclear deal], which Israeli leaders and U.S. Republicans will complain is disastrous.

The contrasting tale of two monarchs

The one was to live a tranquil 96 years – a full life. The other was to be cut down aged 23 in a bloody revolution. Faisal, his family, the prime minister Nuri al-Said and his ministers were brutally shot by military officers who seized power in 1958. Iraq became a republic. In a show of exceptional barbarism, the corpses of King Faisal II, his uncle Abdelilah, and Prime Minister Nuri al-Said were dragged, naked, through the streets of Baghdad.

Iraqi Jews who were still living in the country – 98 percent had already left by 1951 – remember that ghoulish episode. For some it was the final signal to leave forever. They could not stomach the brutality with which Iraq treated its royal family.

Conditions had already deteriorated quite badly for the Jewish community by the time King Faisal II took the throne in 1953. When the photo was taken, only 6,000 Jews out of 150,000 still lived in Iraq, a fractious country.

The Queen was a comforting symbol of unity and stability to whom British and Commonwealth Jews have always pledged loyalty. Faisal I, Iraq’s first king, Faisal II’s grandfather, from the Hashemite dynasty, also commanded the respect of the Jewish community in Iraq. Still today he is thought of as a wise and tolerant king.

Iraq was a post-WW1 concoction of three Ottoman provinces under British mandate. The Jews experienced their golden age under Faisal I in the 1920s. He pledged to treat the Jews, Christians and Muslims in his kingdom equally.

The Hashemites were brought in from the Arabian peninsula by the British as a reward for fighting alongside them against the Ottoman Turks. The Allies had promised Faisal I the throne of Syria. But he was double-crossed by the British and the French and offered the throne of Iraq instead. Faisal never appeared to forgive the British and arrived in Baghdad with a coterie of disgruntled ex-Ottoman and Syrian nationalists. During his reign Iraq became a hub of Arab nationalism.

Check out the new Hebrew Jewish prayer for King Charles III - Read here

Since the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the traditional prayer that UK Jews have been reciting for hundreds of years has changed to include the name of King Charles III, as well as Prince and Princess of Wales William and Kate.

In addition, in the coming months, the United Synagogue will print a new version of its siddur (prayer book), with the updated version of the prayer for the royal family.

Jewish communities around the world have been accustomed to reciting a special prayer for the survival and peace of the heads of state in the countries they live in. In the UK, the prayer blessed Queen Elizabeth, and in the United States, it is a blessing to the president.

A source in the United Synagogue, the largest umbrella organization of synagogues in the UK, which is considered central to Modern Orthodoxy, has said they were planning on printing a new version of the siddur anyway – but now that the queen has died and there is a new king, they have decided to quickly edit the existing text to say: “He who gives salvation to kings and dominion to princes, Whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom – may He bless Our Sovereign lord, King Charles, our gracious Queen Consort Camilla, the Prince and Princess of Wales, and all the Royal Family.”

“Chief Rabbi … you have to get home for the Sabbath…”

Beautiful anecdote by @chiefrabbi Mirvis, about the lengths HM #KingCharles went to, in order to ensure the Chief Rabbi could attend the faith leaders reception & return home in time for Sabbath.pic.twitter.com/3ZTmoAAdDE
— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) September 18, 2022

Tom Gross: UK royal record on Israel & Holocaust not as good as some claim & questions over bin Laden donations

False claims of Nazi spies masquerading as Jews provided excuse to limit Jewish immigration to America during the Holocaust

The Ken Burns documentary that started being broadcast last night, The US and the Holocaust, has prompted me to dig up little known stories about how the US severely limited Jewish immigration.

One reason that the US gave for limiting immigration was the fear that some of the immigrants were in fact Nazi spies.

The New York Daily News reported on November 26, 1940 - a year before the US entered the war - about a secret Gestapo school in Prague to train spies to act as Jews for espionage purposes.

The article makes it clear that this fear would end up dooming thousands of Jews.

I cannot find any independent report during or after the Holocaust about this supposed "Jewish institute."

There are cases of Nazis who masqueraded as Jewish refugees in Europe. One such ring was reported in Holland and the Dutch authorities easily discovered them, as JTA reported:

The disclosure that Nazi agents masquerading as refugees had helped the Nazi parachutists landing in the Netherlands recalled today that the Dutch authorities had several months ago discovered a group of such agents through the medium of botched circumcisions.

Last February the Paris newspaper L’Ouevre reported that 16 Nazi spies who entered the Netherlands in the guise of Jewish refugees — even taking the precaution of being circumcised — were unmasked when it was determined through a rabbi that they were not circumcised according to the Jewish ritual.

According to the report, the Gestapo had selected 16 men who looked as Jewish as possible, had them attend synagogue services for several weeks to acquaint ports stamped with “J” (Jew) and sent them into Holland.

The Netherlands anti-espionage service, suspecting that they were spies, arrested the men. After examining them, the authorities called a rabbi and, without informing him about the details of the case, asked him to ascertain whether they had been circumcised in the Jewish manner. He reported that they were not.

But (so far) I cannot find any such case in the US. The closest was the case of Herbert Karl Friedrich Bahr, a German-born American citizen who arrived in the US on the Swedish-American liner SS Drottningholm in 1942. The media originally said that he pretended to be a Jewish refugee but that wasn't true, as JTA reported at the time:

The Nazi spy, Herbert Karl Friedrich Bahr, who was arrested aboard the diplomatic exchange ship Drottningholm, will face a speedy trial, it was announced today. Full information of the arrest released here indicated that the 29-year-old spy was posing as a “friend of Jews in Germany,” and not as a Jewish refugee as was generally reported yesterday when the news of his arrest was made public by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Inquiry at the FBI office here elicited the information that Bahr was provided by the Nazi military espionage office with full information concerning a Jewish family in Germany in order to be able to explain to U.S. authorities how he happened to be in possession of $7,000 in American currency. He was instructed by the Nazi espionage headquarters to say that a Jewish friend of his in Germany, a member of the old Social-Democratic party, had been beheaded by the Nazis, that the man’s wife had sold a valuable stamp collection for $7,000 and given him the proceeds to take out of the country for her.

In 2015, the Smithsonian Magazine wrote an investigative report on Bahr and noted that in fact the rumors of Nazis posing as Jews to spy on the US were essentially baseless:

Government officials from the State Department to the FBI to President Franklin Roosevelt himself argued that refugees posed a serious threat to national security. Yet today, historians believe that Bahr's case was practically unique—and the concern about refugee spies was blown far out of proportion.

In the court of public opinion, the story of a spy disguised as a refugee was too scandalous to resist.

Immigration restrictions actually tightened as the refugee crisis worsened. Wartime measures demanded special scrutiny of anyone with relatives in Nazi territories—even relatives in concentration camps. At a press conference, President Roosevelt repeated the unproven claims from his advisers that some Jewish refugees had been coerced to spy for the Nazis. “Not all of them are voluntary spies,” Roosevelt said. “It is rather a horrible story, but in some of the other countries that refugees out of Germany have gone to, especially Jewish refugees, they found a number of definitely proven spies.”

Here and there, skeptics objected. As the historian Deborah Lipstadt points out in her book Beyond Belief, The New Republic portrayed the government’s attitude as “persecuting the refugee.” The Nation didn’t believe that the State Department could “cite a single instance of forced espionage.” But these voices were drowned out in the name of national security.

Government agencies like the State Department used spy trials as fuel for the argument against accepting refugees. But late in the war, government whistleblowers began to question this approach. In 1944, the Treasury Department released a damning report initialed by lawyer Randolph Paul. It read:

“I am convinced on the basis of the information which is available to me that certain officials in our State Department, which is charged with carrying out this policy, have been guilty not only of gross procrastination and wilful failure to act, but even of wilful attempts to prevent action from being taken to rescue Jews from Hitler.”

The FBI, State Department and media couldn't resist pushing the narrative of Jewish spies, the result being that tens of thousands of Jews who could have been saved in the US were murdered instead.

One other point: It would have been easy for the FBI to hire religious Jews to vet the immigrants to ensure that at least the religious ones were who they said they were. But it seems that the antisemitism of the day precluded considering American religious Jews as truly American and trustworthy for such a task.

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Examples of materials in Israeli Arab textbooks that Palestinians consider offensive

Today, Arab schools in Jerusalem are on strike because Israel has been trying to encourage them to use the Israeli Arab curriculum instead of the antisemitic Palestinian curriculum. Israel provides additional funding for the schools that adopt the Israeli curriculum, but it is not mandatory; many schools have adopted it.

Arab media is falsely claiming that the Israeli curriculum is being "imposed" on Arab Jerusalem schools.

The preacher of Al-Aqsa Mosque, Sheikh Ikrima Sabri, told thousands of worshipers on Friday that “it is not permissible by Sharia to teach the Israeli curricula, and whoever teaches them is sinful, and so is whoever supports teaching them, and whoever sends his son or daughter to the school that teaches these curricula."

Shehab News among others shows examples of the highly offensive materials in Israeli Arab textbooks.

Prepare to be shocked!

"The countries surrounding the homeland"

"There are different religions in Israel but all worship one God"

"Sabbath is a holy day for the Jews, and the Wailing Wall is one of the holy spots for Jews"

"Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, where the Knesset, ministries, Supreme Court and other government institutions are"

The Palestinians are upset at materials that encourage tolerance. And no wonder. Compare these to materials issued by the Palestinian Authority that teach:

"Jihad for the sake of Allah for the liberation of Palestine is a private obligation for every Muslim."

"The obligations towards Al Aqsa Mosque: Protecting and defending it, chasing away the Occupation, committing jihad, and dying as a martyr for the sake of liberating it."

"It is the right of any people captive under foreign occupation to use armed force for their freedom, independence, and right to self-determination."

"It is my duty to defend my motherland and not to neglect it; to redeem it with blood, possessions, and with the most precious things we have."

“The Jews are foreigners in this land, and Palestine is for its Arab Muslim population.”

There is no room for Jews in the Palestine that the children are taught to spill their blood for.

There is direct line from these materials to terrorism. And that is really what they are fighting for.

(h/t Abu Ali Express)

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Palestinian and other Arab media have been whipped into a frenzy over the idea that more Jews will be visiting the Temple Mount during the upcoming holidays, with daily stories about how the Jews want to blow the shofar and bring the "arba minim" during Sukkot.

The Waqf wants Muslims to respond with large turnout of their own during the Jewish holidays.

The Ministry of Awqaf and Religious Affairs has warned of the danger of reviving “Jewish holidays” inside Al-Aqsa Mosque, and desecrating its sanctity and profaning it through the implementation of provocative rallies, calling for a public mobilization to travel to Al-Aqsa and to confront the settlers’ incursions into it on the eve of the alleged holidays.

She stressed that "Al-Quds and Al-Aqsa are a red line, and it is a sacred right that belongs to Muslims and the Jews have no connection with it..."

The Awqaf called on the Palestinian people in Jerusalem and all those who can reach Al-Aqsa to intensify their presence in the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Rabat there during the festive period to limit the implementation of these incursions and marches.

This will make the Temple Mount look more like it did...in the times of the actual Temple!

During the Second Temple period, according to Josephus, there was an outer court of the Temple where gentiles could gather and buy animals to be sacrificed by the Jewish priests. It is mentioned in Christian scriptures as well. I don't believe that this courtyard is mentioned by name in the Talmud but Menachot 73b does say that many Gentiles did come to the Temple (or send offerings to the Temple from remote regions) to relay various kinds of sacrifices of their own.

The site of Al Aqsa Mosque, which is built on one of the Herodian extensions of the Temple Mount and therefore of lesser sanctity, is very possibly part of this so-called "Court of the Gentiles." (Various Christian maps of the Temple place this court in different locations, but most of them seem to say that the southern part where Al Aqsa Mosque is was at least part of it.)

Effectively, the Waqf is asking that Muslims make a pilgrimage to the site of the Temple on the Jewish holidays, including Sukkot, the same occasions that one may presume that gentiles traveled to the Temple Mount two thousand years ago to be part of the Jewish pilgrimage holidays.

So in a small and indirect way, the Waqf is asking Muslims to mimic what non-Jews did at the Temple so long ago. They are coming to the Temple at the times the Jews flock there to show their respect for what everyone knows has always been the most sacred Jewish spot.

Hajj Sameach!

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