Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, October 28, 2022

Terrorists always win the PR battle in a TikTok world

Ambulances aiding victims of Elad terror attack

There is one thing missing in all the media coverage of IDF operations in the West Bank.

Why they are there.

For years, the IDF rarely entered Area A. The Palestinian Authority took responsibility for security there, and they generally cooperated with Israel in rooting out terrorists - who were enemies of the PA as well. The system wasn't perfect, but it mostly worked, to everyone's benefit.

But earlier this year there was a wave of terror attacks in Israel:

March 22: Doris Yahbas (49), Laura Yitzhak 43), Rabbi Moshe Kravitzky and Menahem Yehezkel, (67) were killed and two more were injured during a stabbing and vehicle-ramming attack in Beersheba.

March 27: Yezen Falah and Shirel Abukarat, two Border Police officers, were shot dead by two terrorists.

March 29: Amir Khoury (32), Ya’akov Shalom (36), Avishai Yehezkel (29), Victor Sorokopot (38), and Dimitri Mitrik (23) were killed during a series of drive-by shootings in Bnei Brak.

April 7: Tomer Morad (28), Eytam Magini (27), and Barak Lufan (35) were shot dead at a downtown Tel Aviv bar , seven others were wounded and hospitalized.

April 29: Two Palestinian terrorists murdered Vyacheslav Golev (23), a security guard, at the entrance to Ariel.

May 5: Boaz Gol (49), Yonatan Havakuk (44), and Oren Ben Yitfah (35) were killed in a terrorist attack in Elad.

Most (if not all) of the terrorists came from the West Bank. Israel could not sit back and wait for more attacks, so it went on the offensive to break up the terror cells that were planning these attacks.

That's why the IDF is there.

This is not ancient history. It is 5 to 7 months ago.

How many news reports mention the terror spree that sparked this current escalation?

When people's attention spans are limited to one-minute videos and 240 character tweets, the media isn't going to bother to give any context. Easier to pretend that Israel attacks Palestinians for no apparent reason, and they are locked into a never ending conflict that has no history. And the media doesn't mention the basic fact that these IDF operations are meant to root out terrorists that the PA could not - or now, refuse to - do themselves.

This helps the terrorists. When they attack Israeli civilians, they know that the world will forget the attacks - but not Israel's responses, which are framed as constant and never-ending. The impression given to those who are only casual consumers of news is that Israel is virtually always the aggressor, and therefore always at fault. And then the occasional fatal Palestinian terror attack is the response to Israeli aggression, not the other way around.

Israel doesn't want anything to do with Area A. It has been forced to react to terrorism, to bring the battle to the terrorists and away from Israeli civilians. And for the most part it has worked - there have been no fatal attacks on civilians in months.

But the Israeli lives saved by these operations are definitely not something the media will mention.

In the realm of public relations, terrorists cannot lose as long as the media panders to the lowest common denominator of news consumer who they assume cannot understand context that requires more than two explanatory sentences.

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!

Two Palestinian Authority security services members were killed this morning near the Huwara checkpoint as they shot at the soldiers there.

Whenever incidents like this happen, before a terror group takes responsibility, Palestinian media (and even other terror groups) first respond by claiming that the IDF shot innocent civilians in cold blood.

Islamic Jihad called it a "cold blooded execution."

PA prime minister Mohamed Shtayyeh called it "a heinous field execution committed by the occupation forces."

Then as more information started coming out that they were involved in an attack, the tenor of the responses changed.

The PFLP was cautious, saying they"were martyred in a new crime committed by the occupation" but implying that they were attacking at the time by saying "our people's response to the occupation and its aggression and the escalation of resistance against it proves the determination of our people to continue the confrontation until freedom and victory are achieved."

Then the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades took explicit credit for the attempted attack, saying they shot at the IDF soldiers at point-blank range at 1:05 AM, a "zero-distance clash with the Zionist enemy at the Hawara checkpoint in the city of Nablus, and that all the usurpers and settler herds are targets of the battalion fighters, and that the battle is open with this usurper occupation."

So now the responses change from "innocent victims" to "heroic martyrs."

Hamas praised '"the two martyrs of the armed clash with the Zionist occupation forces."

The narrative changed on a dime.

Note that two members of the Palestinian Authority security forces were also terrorists for the Fatah Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. Either Mahmoud Abbas is too weak to enforce that his own security forces are not terrorists, or he supports it. Either way, negotiating with him for peace is impossible.

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!

I've seen bias from the UN before, but I don't recall ever seeing a document that looks like it was written by a hardened Israel hater.

The reports usually at least pretend to be unbiased. Not this one.

Francesca Albanese, UN "Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967," issued a report in September that apparently was just made public. The summary gives a flavor of how crazily biased it is.

One of her goals in this report, in the inevitable path to soon officially calling Israel an apartheid state, Albanese accuses Israel of "settler colonialism" without going into any arguments why, just footnoting lots of equally biased papers.

Israel is not a settler colonialist state.

Throughout the report, Albanese fully accepts the Palestinian narrative as true and doesn't even mention any Israeli counter-claims. The reader sees only one side of the argument, and is not even informed that perhaps Israel has its own arguments. Albanese doesn't want to acknowledge even the possibility that Jews have a right to their own state.

Her one-sidedness is quite deliberate. She describes the Palestinian right to self-determination this way:

The right to self-determination is an “inalienable right” of the Palestinian people, as affirmed by the General Assembly. The origins of Palestinians’ right to self-determination can be traced back more than a century, preceding the first codification in the Charter of the United Nations. The people of Palestine (Muslims, Christians and Jews), like other peoples in the Levant, also had their right to self-determination recognized under the Covenant of the League of Nations of 1919. Article 22 of the Covenant stipulated that “Class A” mandates (Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Trans-Jordan and Syria) would enjoy provisional independence “until such time as they are able to stand alone”. The “wishes” of the local communities were to be “a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory”.

But she doesn't mention the Mandate for Palestine which specifically says that Jews have the right to self-determination - and no one else!

The Mandatory shall be responsible for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home, as laid down in the preamble, and the development of self-governing institutions, and also for safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion.

This is lying by omission. Albanese knows the contents of the Mandate document - but wants to hide it from those reading this propaganda. And it happens over and over again.

She offers a brief history of the region where Jews are the only people who ever do anything wrong:

The culmination of centuries of antisemitism and persecution of Jews in Europe in the genocidal horror of the Holocaust strengthened support for political Zionism. This movement saw Palestine as the land to realize a “State for the Jews” through settlement and colonization. However, in that land a native Palestinian Arab population had resided for millennia. In 1947, the United Nations resolved to reconcile the separate claims to the land of the indigenous Palestinian people and the largely European Jewish settlers and refugees from Europe, by recommending the partitioning of British Mandate Palestine into an “Arab State” and a “Jewish State”. Soon after, the creation of the State of Israel in most of the territory of Mandate Palestine was accompanied by massacres and the mass expulsion, wholesale denationalization and dispossession of most of the Arabs of Palestine. They continue to be deprived of their right to self-determination, together with their descendants, the refugees further displaced in 1967 and other non-refugee Palestinians.

She doesn't once mention that Jews have historical ties to Israel. She doesn't mention the attacks by Arabs on Jews in Palestine decades before 1948. She doesn't mention that the Arabs rejected partition. She doesn't mention that the Arabs attacked the Jews. She doesn't mention that the territories annexed by Jordan ethnically cleansed every single Jew.

It would take weeks to show the depth of Albanese's dishonesty, but here is just one paragraph of many:

The transformation of the Gaza Strip into a heavily populated, impoverished enclave controlled by Israel through a suffocating sea, land and air blockade, is part and parcel of that same settler-colonial design. The containment of the colonial population into heavily controlled reserves is at the core of the settler-colonial goal to ensure the demographic supremacy and prevent Palestinian self-determination.

How do these assumptions fit in with the fact that Israel forcibly removed every Jew from Gaza in 2005? Was that part of the plan too? And did Israel plan for Hamas to take over Gaza so it could have an excuse for blockading it?

This is not just re-writing history. This is Soviet-level propaganda.

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!

10/27 Links Pt2: Marking 4 years since Tree of Life massacre, Biden rues ‘ugly rise’ of antisemitism; Melanie Phillips: The unholy alliance between Republicans and Islamists; BigLaw’s Jewish Problem

From Ian:

Marking 4 years since Tree of Life massacre, Biden rues ‘ugly rise’ of antisemitism

US President Joe Biden led memorial messages and vows to combat antisemitism on Thursday, marking four years since a gunman shot dead eleven Jewish worshipers and injured seven others at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

“A quiet Shabbat morning was shattered by gunfire and hate, and a place of sanctuary became a place of carnage,” Biden said in a statement.

“As we grieve this deadliest act of antisemitism in American history, we stand with the community of Squirrel Hill — and Jewish communities across America and around the world — in resolving to combat antisemitism and hate in all of its forms,” he said.

“This is especially true as we witness an ugly increase in antisemitism in America.”

Listing action the administration has taken to confront antisemitism, Biden noted the appointment of Holocaust expert Deborah Lipstadt as Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, an ambassador-level role.

He also cited the largest-ever increase in funding for security for synagogues and other religious institutes, and other actions announced last month at the United We Stand Summit.

“The rabbis teach that ‘what comes from the heart, enters the heart,'” Biden said, citing the eleventh Century Rabbi Moses ibn Ezra.

“On this difficult day, our hearts are with the families of the victims, the survivors, and all those impacted by the Tree of Life shooting. May their memories be a blessing, and may we continue to bridge the gap between the world we see and the future we seek.”

US Antisemitism Envoy: France ‘Ground Zero’ for European Antisemitism

France has become the epicenter of 21st century antisemitism in Europe — a phenomena which is now beginning to replicate in other countries around the world, the US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism has warned.

“I think that in many ways France has proven to be ‘Ground Zero’ for European antisemitism, in part because of the large Muslim population,” the envoy, Deborah Lipstadt, told a panel hosted by the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF) and the World Jewish Congress (WJC) in Paris on Monday. “If we’d been having this conversation 15 years ago, I would have said France is a unique situation – sadly, it’s not unique anymore.”

In her remarks, which follow a week-long trip to Belgium and France to meet with EU officials on combating antisemitism, Lipstadt cited some of the deadly antisemitic and terrorist attacks that have plagued France over the last twenty years, among them the 2006 kidnapping and murder of Ilan Halimi, a young cellphone salesman, by an antisemitic gang known as “The Barbarians”, as well as the 2012 and 2015 respective gun attacks on a Jewish school in Toulouse and a kosher supermarket in Paris.

Other incidents included the 2017 murder of Sarah Halimi, a Jewish woman who was beaten and thrown to her death from the third-floor window of her Paris apartment by her neighbor, Kobili Traore, during a frenzied antisemitic assault. French Jews were outraged in April 2021 when the country’s highest court upheld an earlier decision that Traore could not be held criminally responsible for Halimi’s death because his intake of marijuana on the night of the killing had rendered him temporarily insane.

Lipstadt warned the evolution of antisemitism which once limited to France had now spread to other countries, including the United States. “I think that in many respects, France emulates what we’ve seen in other places, because it’s not just Islamist extremist antisemitism, it’s also from the right and from the left,” she said.

Lipstadt also noted that the convergence of antisemitic criticism of Israel from the fringes of both right and left wing ideologies is occuring not only in France, but in the US and UK as well.

Statement from Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt on Recent Antisemitism pic.twitter.com/UBdbJdtGLx
— Special Envoy Deborah Lipstadt (@StateSEAS) October 26, 2022

A dead family in Gaza: The other half of the story

Last year, during the May 2021 fighting in Gaza, an IAF missile destroyed an apartment in Gaza City, killing a mother and two of her children - Rima Telbani(31), Zeid(4) and Maryam(2).

Israel was blamed for targeting civilians. The New York Times published a photo of the children.

Today, another victim of that attack succumbed to his wounds. His name is Muhammad Ouda Yousef Al-Telbani.

He was a Hamas terrorist.

In fact, in the building at the same time were two other senior Hamas terrorists who were killed - who were not mentioned by PCHR.

Which means that the building was almost certainly a command and control center - and the cute Telbani kids were human shields for Hamas, including for their father.

That changes the story a bit, doesn't it?

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!

Israel Doing Same Things Other Countries Do Somehow Worse Because JEWS (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

Haredi at Kotel Tel Aviv, October 30 - International organizations calling attention to the Jewish State's actions and how they affect Palestinians stressed the importance today of maintaining focus and pressure on the country and its government because of those actions, which take place in most every other state in the world, but require greater urgency and severity in response because Jews.

Representatives of United Nations agencies and various global human rights groups agreed in separate interviews Thursday that the world must maintain its insistence on giving Israeli policies and behaviors prominence in new coverage and human rights criticism even as regimes near and far perpetrate violations equal to or far worse than Israel's alleged crimes, because "you've got to start somewhere" and that somewhere for every single one of those organizations and agencies has to be Israel because Jews.

"Israeli brutality is the root of brutality elsewhere," explained an activist with the BDS movement in the southern English city of Brighton. "The world was an entirely peaceful place until the Zionists came and disturbed everything. If we can reverse the establishment of Jewish sovereignty and security in a place of their choosing, we can restore the bliss that the world knew before 1896. That's why when Israel destroys a rocket-launch site in Gaza that targeted Israelis, it's worse than China's treatment of its Muslim Uighur minority, which, between you and me, can you even prove?"

"Tens of millions of ethnic German refugees had to leave the homes they knew in Czech, Polish, and other territory at the end of and after World War Two," observed Chris Gunness, a former Gaza coordinator for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees who had to operate out of Tel Aviv because Gazans would have killed him for his homosexuality. "Then there was the creation of Pakistan out of the former British possession of India - tens of millions on both sides of the partition line who had to move to the new entity on the other side, through abundant suffering and abuse. They were permanently resettled in their respective new countries despite generations, even ancient, presence of their families in the previous location. Then the world stopped treating those issues as important. But with Palestinians and Israel we need to perpetuate the refugees and their descendants in that stateless status until Israel agrees - or is forced to - destroy itself, because... it's Israel. Everyone knows that's different."

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!

10/27 Links Pt1: How Americans, Europeans Embolden Palestinian Terrorism; Republicans must defund the UN and stop appeasement of Iran; Russian official: Chabad Lubavitch is a neo-pagan cult

From Ian:

Bassam Tawil: How Americans, Europeans Embolden Palestinian Terrorism

Instead of assuming its responsibility for halting terrorist attacks from areas under its control, the Palestinians continue to violate the agreements they signed with Israel.

In the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian Authority did not take real measures to stop Hamas from building a massive terrorism infrastructure. Hamas later used its weapons arsenal not only to attack Israel, but also to overthrow the PA regime and seize full control of the Gaza Strip.

The same scenario is now being repeated in the West Bank, specifically in areas controlled by Mahmoud Abbas's security forces.

This is the twisted logic of the Palestinian leadership: Instead of denouncing the terrorists for targeting Israelis, as they have officially and repeatedly committed to doing, they lash out at Israel for defending itself against the current wave of terrorism.

When a senior Palestinian official such as Habbash says that the terrorists are entitled to carry out "resistance" attacks, he is actually telling them to continue targeting Israelis. Such statements are not only a violation of the agreements the Palestinians signed with Israel, but also incitement to launch more terrorist attacks against Israelis.

The Palestinian leadership, in a policy is known as "pay-for-slay," already provides monthly stipends to Palestinian terrorists..... The families of the Nablus terrorists will also presumably benefit from these payments.

The Palestinian leadership's endorsement and glorification of terrorism comes as no surprise. What is surprising – and intensely disturbing – is that those foreign governments that are providing financial and political aid to the Palestinian Authority, especially the Americans and the Europeans, are not calling out Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian leadership for their public support of terrorism and their ongoing breach of the agreements they voluntarily signed with Israel.

"We will not resort to weapons, we will not resort to violence," Abbas declared in his last speech before the United Nations General Assembly, "we will not resort to terrorism, we will fight terrorism." His words were directed to the international community, not to his own people.

The silence of the Americans and Europeans toward the actions and rhetoric of the Palestinian leaders is tantamount to a green light to the Lions' Den and other terrorists to continue their terrorist attacks.

If the Biden administration and the Europeans believe that Abbas or any other Palestinian leader is going to stop a terrorist from murdering Jews, they are engaging in staggering self-deception.

Jonathan Tobin: Republicans must defund the UN and stop appeasement of Iran

While the U.N. as a whole is an ongoing disgrace, last week’s report of the HRC’s Commission of Inquiry on Israel has highlighted the issue of the world body’s anti-Semitism. The HRC can’t be reformed. The only proper response is to do everything possible to shut it down and to punish those of its officials who are responsible for its trafficking in blatant Jew-hatred and its efforts to isolate and destroy the one Jewish state on the planet.

While some find it hard to work up much indignation against the U.N., or regard efforts to rein it as tilting against windmills, the Commission of Inquiry’s effort to aid the destruction of Israel illustrates how dangerous it can be. Indeed, documents like this report are useful tools for the spread of anti-Semitism via the BDS movement and to those wishing to aid the likes of Iran and its terrorist allies, which seek Israel’s extinction. While the administration opposed the Commission’s report, it isn’t prepared to hold those responsible for this outrage by withdrawing from or defunding the HRC.

It’s up to Republicans to pass legislation defunding the HRC and the Commission of Inquiry. More than that, the House, with the backing of Senate Republicans, must use its leverage over the funding of the State Department to ensure that the administration doesn’t find a way to evade restrictions in this realm.

That will require a degree of intestinal fortitude that past GOP congressional leaders have lacked. But what must be understood about this is that by refusing to use its fiscal power, the DC establishment has stood by while this administration uses taxpayer dollars to enable the U.N. to spread anti-Semitism.

If the GOP is serious about stopping Biden’s toxic policies, it can’t waste precious time on rhetorical exercises. 2023 must be the year this comes to an end.

continues a longstanding pattern of unfairly singling out Israel and does nothing to establish conditions for peace.” /2

More on the UN’s Pillay Commission which reports today to the UNGA: https://t.co/lVRGTkoo2s pic.twitter.com/jTaE6SpVKs
— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) October 27, 2022

Today's report to the UN by the Pillay Commission condemns only Israel & underscores why the inquiry is a travesty of justice that is as fair and objective as the Spanish Inquisition. We drafted this resolution to begin the process to disband the inquiry: https://t.co/RZdOBkGw6f pic.twitter.com/5oNQjbH9w6
— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) October 27, 2022

Arabs upset that Gigi Hadid denounced antisemitism

Model Gigi Hadid, who has posted anti-Israel messages on Instagram along with her model sister and her mogul father, reposted a message against antisemitism that comedian Amy Schumer had written.

Ynet also reported that she seems to have removed her older, anti-Israel posts, apparently including accusing Israel of "greed:"

Arab media is very upset about this. And they seem more upset over her support of the Jewish people than for her removal of her anti-Israel posts. Here is Al Arabiya's reporting:

Her sister Bella Hadid also wrote her own recent post against antisemitism, but did not appear to make any waves in Arab media for that.

What makes these statements significant is that they may not only be a response to Kanye West's antisemitism, but from their own father Mohamed's hate. Three weeks ago, he compared Jews to Nazis on his own Instagram: "Hitler labeled the Jews as terrorist and the Germans believed and cowardly did the crime of the century. And the Zionists labeled the Palestinians terrorists in their own land.” He extended the comparison: "Yet, the Jews got all their money twice from Germany and Poland and other why is this such double standards? How can they decide that that’s their home in Germany? Not only they steal our homes, they demolish them with people in them most of the time and make sure they are humiliated and homeless.”

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!

Tharwat el-Kherbawy is an Egyptian lawyer who used to lead the Muslim Brotherhood but left the group in 2002 and became a strident critic of the Brotherhood since then.

He gave a TV interview with his analysis of the Brotherhood which was reported in major Egyptian media. He described how dishonest the Muslim Brotherhood is, and emphasized it in a way that any Egyptian would immediately identify with:

He emphasized that the Brotherhood is like the Jews; They never recognize the truth, take advantage of the social media, spread false ideas, and spread rumors.

When reaching for an example of the paradigmatic liar, and knowing that he is speaking to a national Egyptian audience, Kherbawy says that they are as bad as the Jews.

Not Zionists - Jews.

And not one Egyptian media outlet found this to be problematic. Of course, the Jews are known to be the biggest liars in the world! It is axiomatic. Why would anyone disagree?

A 2010 Pew poll found that 95% of Egyptians have an unfavorable attitude towards Jews. The ADL finds "only" 75% of Egyptians have antisemitic attitudes.

And modern anti-Zionists keep insisting that these Arabs are not antisemitic, but only anti-Zionist, and that Jews lived in peace and harmony in Arab countries before 1948.

There are definitely liars in this world - but they aren't the Jews.

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!

Black conservatives engaging in casual antisemitism while being clueless why Kanye is offensive

Jason Whitlock is a sports journalist with half a million Twitter followers who is politically conservative. He has been tweeting in defense of Kanye West and getting thousands of retweets:

When will the Bible be de-platformed and canceled? Revelation 2:9: "I know thy works, and tribulation, and poverty, (but thou art rich) and I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan." #Kanye
— Jason Whitlock (@WhitlockJason) October 26, 2022

He displays a similar casual antisemitism as Kanye himself, retweeting this:

Whitlock has an online show where he discusses Kanye's words and the reaction, and at one point (8:50) asks his panelists a basic question:

This is where I need help, and somebody jump in here. there seems to be a group of people that they're calling black or Hebrew Israelites and this seems to be very offensive, these people what they believe is very offensive that they're arguing that black people are the original Jews or are the Jews ...again I'm not plain dumb I really don't understand uh why it's offensive, or I'm not even sure what's the logic behind the argument, does anybody know?

Two of the panelists say what they know about the Black Hebrew movement and admit they don't know why this is offensive. One, author Shemeka Michelle, reads a dictionary definition of "semite" and says, sure, it sounds like Black people are Semitic, why is this offensive to Jews?

Finally, former football player TJ Moe says, "My takeaway, again rudimentary understanding, and I don't know if Kanye did this, but a lot of the [Black Hebrew] movement they are not just saying that hey, there's a lost tribe of black people who are Jews too. They're saying you guys are imposters

and that's where it becomes anti-semitic, and that's where I could see them being offended ...He may have actually said it on Tucker, if I remember right, he said I think black people are the real Jews."

So there is a clear element of cluelessness going on here - not only how offensive the idea that Jews who have been persecuted for millennia for being Jewish are being called imposters is, but that if we are imposters than the centuries of expulsions and pogroms and the Holocaust becomes meaningless. Our dead aren't martyrs, they are just dead.

There is another point that is offensive - the idea of truth. There is no evidence that Black people are originally Jews, no matter how many rappers make that claim. To have a group of people come and hijack our history based on clearly false and constructed arguments is not only offensive to Jews but to history.

The conversation notes that Black people have poetically identified with Jews since the days of slavery, which is certainly true. One interesting point again made by TJ Moe was summarized by Whitlock, that Kanye was saying "that Jewish equals oppression, black people have been oppressed for centuries, ergo black people are the real Jews." The poetry of Negro spirituals like "Go Down Moses" has morphed into many Black people literally believing that the Bible is about them.

But even though Whitlock heard these explanations, he himself enthusiastically seemed to reject them - and reject Jews as Jews - in the tweet at the top of this article, written after this video was made.

Also, Whitlock seems to accept without question that Jews control the music industry and are therefore guilty of oppressing multimillionaire rappers. It isn't true that Jews control the industry, and it isn't true that Black performers are treated differently than any other in their contracts.

Whitlock's cluelessness doesn't end there - he cannot understand why Jews are offended by analogies of Black people getting abortions with the Holocaust. He thinks that is valid.

Without bothering to ask a Jew why we are offended by Kanye's clearly hateful statements, he is taking wild guesses based on pure ignorance - and drawing conclusions based on wrong information.

Yes, it is antisemitic to compare the Black experience in America today with the Holocaust. It is antisemitic to blame Jews for unfair contracts in the music industry. It is antisemitic to say that Jewish history is a lie. It is antisemitic to say that Jews are imposters and that some other group is the real Jewish people, based on fake history and lies. it is antisemitic to to pretend that Kanye is being persecuted by a vast Jewish cabal and that he did nothing wrong. And it is offensive to assume that the Jewish outrage at Kanye's words are overblown and unfair without even understanding why they are offensive to begin with.

And it might not be antisemitic, but it is definitely offensive, that so many supporters of Kanye West don't even bother to ask the question of why his words are so hateful and offensive to begin with.

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!

10/26 Links Pt2: After West Jerusalem shift, will Australian Labor also turn on Israel at the UN?; Will canceling Kanye West turn the tide on anti-Semitism?; What Explains Ireland's Extreme Antisemitism?

From Ian:

Dave Sharma: After West Jerusalem shift, will Labor also turn on Israel at the UN?

The government’s signalling that it no longer considers Israel to be sovereign over West Jerusalem leads to some odd conclusions.

Far from advancing the cause of peace, which Labor professes to support, this reversal only sets peace back. The only states and entities that assert Israel has no claim to West Jerusalem are the same ones that assert Israel has no entitlement to a sovereign state whatsoever: Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It is very odd company for the Labor government to be keeping.

Will Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong now refuse to meet Israeli counterparts in Jerusalem, as countless of their Labor predecessors have done, and as the UAE Foreign Minister did just in September? If Labor considers West Jerusalem to now be disputed territory, this is the only feasible conclusion.

Of equal importance, does this presage a larger shift in Labor’s attitude towards Israel in international forums?

The Howard government in 2004 altered Australia’s voting position on a number of annual, one-sided UN General Assembly Resolutions that single out Israel as the obstacle to peace, whilst remaining silent on the obligations of other parties. Under the Rudd/Gillard governments, many of these positions were reversed, before being reversed again under subsequent Coalition governments. It appears likely that the Albanese government will once again shift these votes.

The bigger question though is whether the government will follow through on the commitment in the ALP’s official platform to unilaterally recognise a state of Palestine, absent the usual criteria for statehood. In 2021, in a motion introduced by Wong, Labor’s national conference adopted this as official policy.

If the Albanese government goes through with this, it would separate Australia from some of its closest allies and partners, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, New Zealand, France, Germany and Canada.

A profound shift such as this would not make the emergence of a future Palestinian state any more likely. But it would break a strong Labor tradition of support for the state of Israel, and harm one of Australia’s closest and most valuable relationships in the Middle East.

Foreign policy should proceed on the basis of established facts and national interests. Labor’s approach risks ignoring both.

Sky News corrects claim that Australia 'recognised Tel Aviv' as capital

We tweeted several Sky News [UK] editors and journalsts before one responded, upholding our complaint regarding an Oct. 19 Sky News article, written by Amarachi Orie, falsely claiming that Australia recognised Tel Aviv as Israel’s capital. The article in question focused on news that officials in Canberra had rescinded the previous government’s recognition of West Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

However, the country’s decision to no longer recognise Jerusalem didn’t mean that it therefore recognised Tel Aviv as the capital – as the official government statement on the matter from the foreign ministry shows.

David Collier: What Explains Ireland's Extreme Antisemitism?

Collier said there are different causes behind the virulent anti-Zionist/anti-Israel atmosphere in Ireland. The first is the "distinct anticolonial strand going through the whole of Irish politics" which is evident in the rise of Sinn Fein, "historically the Republican Independence Movement" political party. Many Irish people, who "hate England," mistakenly believe "Britain gave the Jews Israel" and are convinced that the Jewish State epitomizes "settler colonialism." Ironically, as Israel was being established post-1945, the Zionists fought to oust the British from its mandate in Palestine.

The second cause of rampant antisemitism in Ireland is found in the country's "strand" of "classic antisemitism," now seen coming from both the "far left and the far right." Collier pointed out that even though the Irish were "officially independent" during World War II, "many of the Irish Republicans sided with the Nazis." The third cause of Irish antisemitism is rooted in the second — particular "ideologies within Christianity", which are "very strong in the Irish Catholic Church." The church is replete with belief in "replacement ideology, supersessionism, or the idea ... the Christians are the new Jews."

That the Jews have returned to their ancient homeland in Israel creates a "major ideological problem" for the Catholic Church, driving it to align with the Palestinians. Collier said that Christian charities will donate to anti-Israel non-governmental organizations (NGO's), some of which are affiliated with Palestinian terrorist groups. He said an exception in Ireland to the widespread antisemitism is that Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom, and whose predominantly Protestant citizens identify with the British, tend to be pro-Israel.

The fourth and final issue driving Irish antisemitism, Collier said, is attributable to "Islamist extremism." Whereas the U.S. and England experienced Islamist attacks after mistakenly, over the past three decades, "placing the bar for extremism far ... too high," he said Europe is "paying a deep price for it now." In Ireland, which has not experienced a large influx of Muslim migration, the antisemites there share the same "anti-colonial, anti-imperial" messages with Islamists, whom "they've accepted ... wholesale." The Islamists, essentially, are "coming in speaking the same anti-colonial, anti-imperial messaging, that the Irish do." Collier said, "anti-Zionist rhetoric," unabashedly rife on Irish streets, also creates a "hostile environment" for Jewish students on campuses. He said there are mosques preaching hate, Irish universities with Islamist academics, and the local church, all in league "bashing the state of Israel."

Collier believes that Sinn Fein's growing popularity will be accompanied by an "escalation" of antisemitism in Ireland, which he tracks through social media. He is dismayed at the trends because he said Hitler and the Holocaust "didn't just happen." Rather, their emergence can be traced back to "European antisemitism and beyond it, Christian antisemitism."

Yair Lapid, for now, is the caretaker prime minister of Israel. Next week at the polls, however, Israelis will determine his fitness to remain as head of their government. One factor that voters may wish to take into account is his lack of an education: Yair Lapid never matriculated from high school.

Informed of this juicy tidbit, Israelis not to the right will laugh in your face. The fact is, however, indisputable. The naysayers may go to Google to prove you wrong, pointing to the scanty text falling under Lapid’s official Knesset biography, which suggests that he has, at the very least, attained a baccalaureate degree:

Education:

Studies toward MA in Hermeneutics and Culture Studies, Bar Ilan University.

But dig a little further and one arrives closer to the truth, as in this Hebrew-language biography of Lapid at Ynet:

:השכלה של יאיר לפיד

בוגר הגימנסיה העברית הרצליה, ללא זכאות לתעודת בגרות. התקבל ללימודי תואר שני במסלול מהיר לדוקטורט מטעם אוניברסיטת בר אילן, אך עזב לאור איסור המל"ג על קבלת סטודנטים ללא תואר אקדמי.

Google translates this as (emphasis added):

Yair Lapid's education:

Graduated from the Herzliya Hebrew High School, without eligibility for a matriculation certificate. He was admitted to master's studies on a fast-track path to a doctorate on behalf of Bar Ilan University, but left in light of the ban on accepting students without an academic degree.

In other words, it’s against the rules, but the university was going to look the other way and give Lapid a master’s. Unfortunately, someone noticed and that someone was the Council for Higher Education (CHE), the official authority for higher education in Israel and the body responsible for this country’s higher education policy. In 2012, CHE recommended sanctions* for Bar Ilan as a result of its offer to give Lapid some lickety-split education on the sly (emphasis added):

The Council for Higher Education will recommend on Tuesday imposing sanctions on Bar-Ilan University for violating regulations on accepting students for advanced degrees. The investigation was launched after Haaretz revealed that Bar-Ilan had accepted Yair Lapid directly to a Master's and then a doctoral program without him having [a] B.A. degree.

The CHE ordered its committee on supervision and enforcement to investigate the matter, and the committee will meet on Tuesday and recommend action against the university.

All other Israeli universities were asked to report any similar violations by the middle of February, but the Council of University Presidents said Tuesday that, as far as it knows, only Bar-Ilan admitted such students against the rules. However, a Bar-Ilan official said he thinks all of the universities do the same.

Lapid was accepted onto Bar-Ilan's prestigious culture and interpretation graduate program, which accepts only candidates who received a B.A. degree with honors. Lapid, a news and media personality whose recent announcement of his Knesset candidacy was accompanied by reports of skyrocketing popularity in polls, has no undergraduate degree.

In response, the CHE launched an investigation. The university says Lapid was accepted into the demanding master's and doctoral programs on the basis of his "literary and journalistic achievements."

Someone might want to tell Haaretz that not only does Lapid not have an undergraduate degree, he did not even pass the bagrut—the rigorous Israeli high school matriculation examinations. Should we be disturbed by Lapid’s lack of academic credentials? And isn’t it kind of embarrassing for Israel to have a prime minister who didn’t finish high school?

That depends on your point of view. Is he otherwise qualified?

Abraham Lincoln Marovitz

Well, let’s put it this way, he’s no Abraham Lincoln Marovitz. Marovitz earned his Bachelor of Laws in 1925 at the age of 19, when he was still 20 months too young to sit for the Illinois bar exam. He took the exam when he turned 21, and passed it on his first try. But Marovitz attended law school without benefit of a college degree. "In those days, you didn't need a college degree to go to law school," Marovitz later said. "So that's how I wound up the only sitting federal judge who never went to college."

Of course, even the boy wonder that was Marovitz, matriculated from high school.

Bar Ilan’s claim that it accepted Lapid for a masters and subsequent doctoral program (!) because of his “literary and journalistic achievements” doesn’t even begin to pass the smell test. It is far more likely that Lapid’s political star had begun to rise, so he thought he’d talk to someone and snag a couple of college degrees PDQ, because hey. That lack of education: It’s not a good look for a prime minister.

Lapid, like me, is a writer and a journalist. He never studied political science. He’s not a lawyer or an economist. But he does have great hair and his English is good. Also his father was Tommy Lapid.

Are these CVs, added to his experience in office, enough to sway the balance against his failure to obtain a high school diploma? From this writer's perspective, it seems doubtful. And here is why:

Some years ago, I applied for a job with a Jerusalem think tank. They loved my cover letter and resume. I stood out from all the candidates. But there was nothing about education on my resume, could I just fill in for them that missing bit?

At that point, the jig was up and I had to tell them that I was not a college graduate. To which they said, “You’re otherwise perfect for us, but as a government-affiliated think tank, there’s no way we can hire someone without even a bachelor's degree.”

I was disappointed, but I had learned a lesson: I too, was no Abraham Lincoln Marovitz. If I wanted a job at that level, I was going to have to put in the time and work necessary to earn it. And if I wasn’t willing to do that, I had to set my sights elsewhere.

It’s pretty basic: without that college degree, I was not qualified for that particular job, no matter how much knowledge or wisdom I had managed to accumulate.

But like I said, even I matriculated from high school. Which leads to a thought:

It is not that difficult to arrange to sit for the Israeli high school matriculation exams, no matter one’s age or station in life. Shouldn’t the Israeli electorate, at the very least, demand that a prime minister have a high school degree under his or her belt? And shouldn’t this be codified into law?

*The Haaretz piece linked to here is behind a paywall.

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!

Mondoweiss is very upset:

Last week, the Thomas Reuters Foundation announced that award-winning Palestinian journalist Shatha Hammad would be the recipient of the prestigious Kurt Schork Local Reporter Award for 2022. Not 48 hours later, Zionist watchdog group Honest Reporting unleashed a vicious smear campaign against Hammad to pressure Reuters and the Kurt Schork Fund to revoke the award. The campaign succeeded.

Hammad is just the latest Palestinian journalist to be targeted by such groups. Earlier this month, the New York Times fired Palestinian photojournalist Hosam Salem for expressing support for Palestinian resistance, after Honest Reporting dug through Salem’s facebook posts to “expose” him to the Times. Honest Reporting is one of many Zionist watchdog organizations whose mission is to rush to the defense of one of the last colonial regimes in the world, effectively functioning as an international arm of Israeli “Hasbara” and providing a smokescreen for the continuous colonization and ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

As pointed out by a letter signed by hundreds of Palestinian and Arab journalists condemning these recent online attacks, these watchdog groups function similarly to Israeli intelligence agencies, digging “deep into journalists’ social media accounts, chasing after any expressions, statements, or even jokes said in childhood, taking them out of context and weaponizing them.”

This is what Honest Reporting did to Hammad, distorting several of her old facebook posts from 2014 in an attempt to paint her as an antisemite and “Hitler fan.” Hammad emphatically denies these outrageous claims, and even contends that one of the alleged facebook posts was outright fabrication.

The Kurt Schork Memorial Fund buckled under the pressure and promptly revoked Hammad’s award. This alone is concerning, as it shows a willingness to accept the accusations of a clearly partisan organization that uses questionable methods in producing “proof” of wrongdoing.

The article goes on to say that Honest Reporting is Zionist and partisan, that there are double standards being applied, that the social media posts being quoted are false out of context or old - a litany of excuses and accusations about the unfairness of reporters being fired for being "pro-Palestinian."

Yet somehow, this fearless media outlet doesn't once mention what these reporters actually wrote that got them fired.

Seems like a curious detail to leave out of a story, doesn't it? According to the terror supporting Mondoweiss, these innocent lambs are accused of doing something they don't want to reveal, but you should trust them - the journalists are innocent and the accusers are horrible people.

As HR reports, Salem has posted multiple times clear and unambiguous support for terror attacks, including the murder of four rabbis at prayer in Jerusalem.

In 2011, Salem took to Facebook to praise the Jerusalem bus bombing in which British Christian evangelical student Mary Jane Gardner was murdered, and 67 others were injured. Members of the Hamas cell had reportedly planned an additional attack but were stopped by Israeli security forces.

On November 18, 2014, Hosam Salem again used Facebook to express his joy over the massacre of four rabbis and an Israeli-Druze police officer in a synagogue in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Har Nof.

Citing the Quran, he encouraged his followers to “smite the necks” of unbelievers, adding: “[This is the] summary of the Jerusalem operation [sic] today.”

There’s more. In 2015, Salem applauded two acts of terror (see here and here); a shooting at the Gush Etzion Junction that killed an American teenager, an Israeli man, and a Palestinian bystander; and a Jerusalem stabbing that killed three.

Some three years later, after being hired by The New York Times, Salem called for more violence following an attack that killed two IDF recruits in the West Bank. “Shoot, kill, withdraw: three quick operational steps…to bring peace to the hearts of sad people like us,” the inciting post read.

Finally, he has repeatedly eulogized Mohammed Salem and Nabil Masoud. The two were responsible for a 2004 suicide bombing that killed ten workers at the Ashdod port, Israel’s second-busiest harbor.

What about Shatha Hammad?

The posts that HonestReporting uncovered included dozens of violent and antisemitic clarion calls, such as one in which she eulogized the “martyrs” who killed five “settlers” during the 2014 Jerusalem synagogue massacre where two Palestinian terrorists attacked worshipers with axes, knives and a gun.
In several posts in 2014, Hammad, who currently works for Middle East Eye and Al Jazeera, signed off her comments using the nickname “Hitler” and joked that she was “in agreement” with the Nazi leader who oversaw the mass extermination of six million Jews during the Holocaust.
In another post — originally written in Arabic but translated into English by HonestReporting — she described herself as “friends” and “one” with Hitler, adding they have the “same mentality, like, for example, the extermination of the Jews” alongside a smiley face emoji.

Honest Reporting has screenshots, so Hammad's claim of "fabrication" is ridiculous.

Mondoweiss wants its readers to be angry - but it sure doesn't want them to know the posts it is defending as mere "criticism of Israel." The article is filled with hyperlinks - but not one to Honest Reporting's articles that show the screenshots of these journalists promoting the murders of Jews.

In fact, they are so upset at these revelations that they say, with a straight face, that "Zionist watchdogs are a danger to journalism." Not journalists who support murdering Jews - but the people who expose them.

Mondoweiss is afraid of the truth. It tries to hide the truth. Which proves that the truth is not on their side.

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!

10/26 Links Pt1: The UN goes DEFCON 3 on Israel; Iranian forces open fire as thousands mourn Mahsa Amini; Sanctioned Syrians benefit from UN contracts

From Ian:

Clifford D. May: The UN goes DEFCON 3 on Israel

Vladimir Putin is slaughtering Ukrainian men, women and children. Xi Jinping is committing genocide against the Muslims of East Turkistan. Ali Khamenei is murdering Iranian girls for wearing their hijabs in what he considers a provocative manner. What is the United States doing in response to these crises? It's going "death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE."

That quote, of course, is from a recent tweet by Kanye West. "DEFCON," an acronym for "defense readiness condition," is how the US military indicates states of alert, ranging from one (the highest) to five. Apparently, however, the performance artist who now calls himself "Ye" intended to convey that he was going on offense against Jews.

The so-called UN Human Rights Council is doing the same. Its so-called Commission of Inquiry is going on offense against the Middle East's only surviving and thriving Jewish community. Indeed, the COI is funded – Americans contributing the lion's share – for the express purpose of demonizing and delegitimizing Israel in perpetuity.

On Thursday, the COI released its second report – one was not enough! – assigning culpability for last year's 11-day war between Israel and Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood faction that holds power in Gaza, and is designated a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada and other nations.

The report urges UN members to prosecute Israeli officials for alleged violations of "international humanitarian law." What does the report say about Hamas and the more than 4,000 rockets it fired at Israelis, its routine use of Palestinian civilians as "human shields" and the support it receives from Tehran? Not a word. "Hamas," "rockets" and "terrorism" are not mentioned.

Israelis are protesting the report as they have protested such slanders in the past, and will in the future. They're also reminding anyone who will listen – not a large cohort – that one of the COI's prominent members, Miloon Kothari, has questioned why Israel is "even a member of the United Nations."

Caroline Glick: America—and the World—Must Stand With Iran's Freedom Revolution

Distressingly, rather than take these actions, the Biden administration speaks out of both sides of its mouth. Last week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with regime opponents and lobbyists in the same meeting at the State Department, and referred to both as civil society representatives. Due to this moral and diplomatic equivalence, the move was a transparent signal to the regime that the Biden administration is not supporting the revolutionaries. It was also a means to legitimize the regime's supporters.

Wearing State Department-minted badges of legitimacy, these Iranian regime lobbyists and supporters in turn have briefed friendly reporters with claims that the administration must not sanction the regime, because it will only harm the protesters. According to the lobbyists, the Biden administration should also maintain its policy of realigning U.S. Middle East policy toward the Iranian regime through its nuclear appeasement and lifting of sanctions, because diplomacy is the only answer.

The Biden administration is maintaining its policy of supporting the Iranian regime, even as the mullahs' security forces murder, torture, and terrorize the Iranian people, because the administration is so blinded by its zealous anti-colonialist ideology that it cannot see or understand what is actually happening. Like the Obama administration before it, the Biden administration subscribes to a Manichaean, anti-colonialist worldview that believes anti-Western revolutionary regimes like the Iranian regime are authentic representations of righteous hatred of the West.

Former President Barack Obama, President Joe Biden, their Iran envoy Robert Malley, Blinken, and their advisors and aides cannot understand that the oppressed people of Iran can be free of hatred of the West and even seek friendship and cooperation with the likes of Israel and the United States. As Obama explained last week, he refused to support Iran's 2009 Green Revolution because he feared that U.S. support for the revolutionaries would discredit them. Obama—like Biden today—could not countenance the notion that the Iranian people themselves do not hate America. An oversimplified anti-colonialist ideology doesn't allow for the possibility that a more nuanced state of affairs can exist.

The anti-colonialist creed of the Biden administration and its progressive supporters dictates that the only possible policy for dealing with "legitimate" regimes, such as the Iranian regime, is to appease them through payouts and strategic concessions. The nuclear deal, which does both of these things, is a perfect expression of the anti-colonialist foreign policy.

Under the circumstances, Congress and the American public should stand with the Iranian revolutionaries and demand that the Biden administration see the truth. For the first time since Iran's Islamic Revolution in 1979, we have a real chance of seeing this toxic regime fall. Every possible effort must be made to help make this possibility a reality.

Caroline Glick: Ahead of the elections, a massive escalation in Palestinian terror

Palestinian terror escalation
From there, Glick moves to the Palestinian arena. A week ahead of Israel’s elections, the Palestinians are in the midst of a massive escalation of their terror campaign against Israel, she says.

According to Glick, the caretaker government’s response to the Palestinian aggression is to redouble its efforts to appease them, at the expense of Israeli security.

Defense Minister Benny Gantz and caretaker Prime Minister Yair Lapid, like Meretz chairman Zehava Gal-On, she says, are all completely wedded to the fantasy that the Palestinians will cut a deal with Israel. This, while all layers of Palestinian society are demonstrating their complete mobilization for the war against Israel. This, she notes, includes a large portion of Israeli Arabs, as events over the past several months indicate.

The future after the elections
As Glick discusses the elections and their near-existential implications for Israel, its Jewish character and its national security and viability, Likud Knesset member Yoav Kisch joins the conversation. The two talk about the state of the race, a week out from the polls.

Kisch explains how a Likud-led government will enact the necessary reforms of Israel’s politicized legal fraternity, and discusses the implications of the revolution in Iran and the gas deal for Israel.

Join us for a can’t-miss discussion of the most important issues affecting Israel, the Middle East and the world.