#Islamic banking course

[thisgingerhasnosoul]

You know, it’s funny, because I was a non-Zionist for most of my life, and an anti-Zionist during my late teens and early 20s. But you know what? 10/7—and more importantly, the increasingly horrific reaction to it from the western left—has turned me into a Zionist, because at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how “good” we are; how ethically consistent or introspective or selfless. You’ll justifying torturing, raping, slaughtering, and erasing us no matter what.

But I still want to thank you, anti-Zionists, because you finally made me realize something important: why should we have to live under your thumb of persecution and cultural genocide just to get your approval, anyway?

[lonniemachin]

Laila reached out to me to help share her fundraiser. She is a 22-year-old Palestinian architecture student urgently raising money to evacuate Gaza and continue her education in Cairo. She has only raised €2,489 out of her €35,000 goal so far! Please donate, and if you can’t donate, please share!

From Laila’s GFM:

My name is Laila Auda. I’m writing to you while my heart is heavy, my tears are pouring down out of fear and despair. My only shimmer of hope to achieve my dream of being an Architect relies on you.

I’m 22-year-old dreamer and 178 days genocide survivor. I’ve endured unimaginable hardships including four major aggressions and countless military escalations. I’m still reluctant to believe that I’m reliving the 177th day of the fifth war in my prime years. Not only have these wars destroyed my dreams, but they have also deepened my trauma and depression.

In 2018, I was granted the opportunity of a lifetime through the ACCESS Micro scholarship Program funded by the US Department of State for 2 years English learning.

In 2020 I graduated from Arafat for gifted high school with honor degree 94.4%. And I was granted to a scholarship for 2 years in EL-UNRWA College pursuing my dream of being an Architect. In addition of finishing 3 external courses of software's used in architecture beside the college. I’ve put immense amount of pressure on my back to fulfill my dreams in my early twenties, having a message of being an inspiring soul of success. I was already in my small circle as three of my siblings want to be architects too! They see how I stay up all night making study models.

Now I’m a third-year architecture student completing my bachelor's degree in the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG). The dream of completing my bachelor's degree in my homeland became almost impossible after the IOF bombed all the buildings of my university and amidst the terrifying conditions we endure daily being stripped of every human right imaginable.

I’m sure you’re aware of the situation we have been living. My words are laconic, but my pain is profound and my mental health has been irreversibly damaged due the state of war. Switching from a person who’s addicted to learning to a person who is thinking of how can I escape death. My dream is completing my bachelor's degree in Cairo university, come back to my homeland and be an active architect in the rebuilding programs.

My target is to raise 35000€, which will be allocated as follows:

(1500$) university registration fees.

( 5000$ ) education fees per year (*4 years > 20000$) as I’ll lose 1 one more year with the courses equivalence due to the difference between the plans.

for life expenses as student for 4 years. ( 10000$ )

Add to that 2.9% GoFundMe would take and the fees on money transfer the bank would take.

The overall sum amount is approximately 35000€ considering the bank my cousin- who's launching this campaign- is engaged which operates in Belgian currency.

Your support could mean the difference between dreams realized and dreams shattered. Together we can make a difference. Together we can ensure that the voices of those trapped in conflict zones are heard, and their dreams are not forgotten.

I love studying and I dream of a life where I can breathe giving. I want to help people to rebuild their homes thinking with them of every detail. I want to see people’s happiness by creating spaces that lies warmth within their souls..

I’m truly grateful for your time, consideration, and support. Your generosity will make a lasting impact in my life, illuminate the path toward a brighter and more hopeful chapter.

Every contribution, no matter the size it will be a step forward achieving my dream

If you would like to confirm the validity of this campaign, you can message Laila on X

Username: Laila_EYO

With gratitude

Laila Auda

[aqlstar]

JVP and Cair Background - Holy Land Foundation

Okay Jumblr- are we familiar with the Holy Land Foundation and the case of USA v. HLF?

The Holy Land Foundation was the undisputed single largest Islamic charity organization in the USA, until it was shut down in 2001 after Bush added it to the list of designated terrorist organizations. It was a big deal.

Fast forward to 2007, and the US government is prosecuting a criminal case against them.

The US Court of Appeals 5th Circuit issued an opinion that summarizes the jist of the case more clearly than I can-

In this consolidated case, we address the appeals of five individuals and one corporate defendant convicted of conspiracy and substantive offenses for providing material aid and support to a designated terrorist organization. The terrorist organization at issue is Hamas, which in 1995 was named a Specially Designated Terrorist by Presidential Executive Order pursuant to authority granted by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, 50 U.S.C. § 1701 et seq. Hamas was further designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in 1997, as contemplated by 18 U.S.C. § 2339B.

Although this case is related to terrorism, it does not involve charges of specific terrorist acts. Instead, it focuses on the defendants’ financial support for terrorism and a terrorist ideology. The defendants were charged with aiding Hamas by raising funds through the corporate entity Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, a Texas-based, pro-Palestinian charity that the Government charged was created for the sole purpose of acting as a financing arm for Hamas. Although the charged conspiracy began in 1995 when Hamas was first designated as a terrorist organization, the defendants’ connection to Hamas arose much earlier. Established in the late 1980s, the Holy Land Foundation held itself out as the largest Muslim charitable organization in the United States. It raised millions of dollars over the course of its existence that were then funneled to Hamas through various charitable entities in the West Bank and Gaza. Although these entities performed some legitimate charitable functions, they were actually Hamas social institutions. By supporting such entities, the defendants facilitated Hamas’s activity by furthering its popularity among Palestinians and by providing a funding resource. This, in turn, allowed Hamas to concentrate its efforts on violent activity.

The results of the case were as follows:

Shukri Abu Baker, 50, of Garland, Texas, was sentenced to a total of 65 years in prison. He was convicted of 10 counts of conspiracy to provide, and the provision of, material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization; 11 counts of conspiracy to provide, and the provision of, funds, goods and services to a Specially Designated Terrorist; 10 counts of conspiracy to commit, and the commission of, money laundering; one count of conspiracy to impede and impair the Internal Revenue Service (IRS); and one count of filing a false tax return.

Mohammad El-Mezain, 55, of San Diego, California, was sentenced to the statutory maximum of 15 years in prison. He was convicted on one count of conspiracy to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization.

Ghassan Elashi, 55, of Richardson, Texas, was sentenced to a total of 65 years in prison. He was convicted on the same counts as Abu Baker, and one additional count of filing a false tax return.

Mufid Abdulqader, 49, of Richardson, Texas, was sentenced to a total of 20 years in prison. He was convicted on one count of conspiracy to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization, one count of conspiracy to provide goods, funds, and services to a specially designated terrorist, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Abdulrahman Odeh, 49, of Patterson, New Jersey, was sentenced to 15 years in prison. He was convicted on the same counts as Abdulqader.

HLF, now defunct, was convicted on 10 counts of conspiracy to provide, and the provision of, material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization; 11 counts of conspiracy to provide, and the provision of, funds, goods and services to a Specially Designated Terrorist; and 10 counts of conspiracy to commit, and the commission of, money laundering.

The Court reaffirmed the jury’s $12.4 million money judgment against all the defendants, with the exception of El Mezain, who was not convicted of money laundering.

Here's the full press release from the US DoJ-

I promise I'll get to the part where this has anything to do with CAIR or JVP in the next post.

[eternal-echoes]

Ordinary Palestinians want to build a prosperous, functioning society. Hamas, in its obsession with annihilating Israel, doesn't care about that. It wishes only to bring about a genocidal Islamist dystopia. It is Hamas, after all, that holds Palestinians hostage in Gaza, setting up military installations in — and launching rockets from — civilian areas in the full knowledge that counterstrikes will kill innocent people. It is Hamas that impoverishes Palestinians by stealing humanitarian aid to fund its terror. This is what 'by any means necessary' truly signifies: supreme callousness towards Palestinian life. If you genuinely want to see peace between Israelis and Palestinians, or more generally between Muslims and Jews in the Middle East, then Hamas should be your enemy. And even if — like many in the West, as we can now see — you don't care at all about Israeli or Jewish lives, even if you care only about the lives of Palestinians, Hamas is still your enemy. After all, Hamas ruthlessly persecutes any Palestinians who disagree with it: a 2022 U.S. State Department report found that, among other abuses, Hamas detained and assaulted critical journalists. It is especially hostile to public figures associated with its rival Fatah, the Palestinian party voted out of office in Gaza in 2006, but which still runs the West Bank. Hamas harasses its own dissidents, and has invaded the home of at least one young critical activist, telling his parents to keep their son under control — or else. As a Dutch MP in 2004 and 2005, I travelled to the West Bank and met Palestinians. In public, they spouted all the usual lines about Israel being their 'oppressor'. But once the cameras were switched off, they spoke more truthfully. They complained bitterly about their treatment by Hamas and other radical groups, and told me how money meant to feed the people was being taken to fund those organisations' activities and their leaders' luxurious lifestyles. Arabs and Palestinians alike told me how fed up they were with conflict, and how ready they were for peace. Hamas, like other Islamist groups, has done its best over the course of decades to stomp all over those wishes. And it has been successful. The shocking rise in anti-Semitism in the West owes much to the entrenched Islamist networks that have spent years stirring up this ancient hatred. Europe must now wake up to these fifth columnists who shamelessly celebrate violence and bigotry, promoting hatred of the Jewish minority in Europe. The West must also wake up to the moral corruption of its own Hamas supporters, from Left-wing university students to flag-waving street thugs. Meanwhile, elite human-rights organisations need to do far more to name terrorism when they see it. It is horrifying to see Amnesty International claiming that one of the 'root causes' of the crisis is 'Israel's system of apartheid imposed on Palestinians'. Human Rights Watch, meanwhile, should do more than merely equivocating in its insistence that no injustice can justify another. This is not to argue that Israel should be immune from criticism. My point is that much of the criticism is at best misguided and at worst thinly veiled anti-Semitism. Hamas, like Lebanon's Hezbollah, Isis in Syria and Iraq, Nigeria's Boko Haram, Somalia's Al-Shabaab and several other groups, are fighting not for the liberty and prosperity of Muslims but, ultimately, for the annihilation of Israel and the imposition of an Islamic state. If Palestinians and other Muslims have to suffer for that aim, then so be it.

Full article

The emphasis are mine.

[tamamita]

world politics and international conflicts should never be boiled down to "good guys" and "bad guys". This is the real world; it's complex and multi-faceted in ways that can't be reduced into pure black and white. You can say "the fight for Palestinian freedom from genocide is good" (objectively true, apartheid states should be dismantled) but ignoring all nuance regarding the parties at play will only lead to malformed understanding of how these situations arise. It will make you more susceptible to propaganda and propaganda isn't good even when it comes from the people you agree with.

Interestingly enough, we all know at the end that an Islamic emirate is the least desirable form of government, considering that a lot of Palestinians are secular. Hamas operates in Gaza and of course, it's easier to recruit when you're the're the only resistance group that's actively putting up a fight against the settler colonial entity. Yes, Hamas is better than the IOF in the context of occupier vs the occupied. But the Palestinian people, with all their strength and might, will come together and form the nation which they desire, but I doubt that an Islamic emirate will be one if we consider the people from the West Bank.

We will see.

[remusinfurs]

[emphasis mine]

“The decolonization narrative has dehumanized Israelis to the extent that otherwise rational people excuse, deny, or support barbarity. It holds that Israel is an “imperialist-colonialist” force, that Israelis are “settler-colonialists,” and that Palestinians have a right to eliminate their oppressors. (On October 7, we all learned what that meant.) It casts Israelis as “white” or “white-adjacent” and Palestinians as “people of color.”

This ideology, powerful in the academy but long overdue for serious challenge, is a toxic, historically nonsensical mix of Marxist theory, Soviet propaganda, and traditional anti-Semitism from the Middle Ages and the 19th century. But its current engine is the new identity analysis, which sees history through a concept of race that derives from the American experience. The argument is that it is almost impossible for the “oppressed” to be themselves racist, just as it is impossible for an “oppressor” to be the subject of racism. Jews therefore cannot suffer racism, because they are regarded as “white” and “privileged”; although they cannot be victims, they can and do exploit other, less privileged people, in the West through the sins of “exploitative capitalism” and in the Middle East through “colonialism.”

This leftist analysis, with its hierarchy of oppressed identities—and intimidating jargon, a clue to its lack of factual rigor—has in many parts of the academy and media replaced traditional universalist leftist values, including internationalist standards of decency and respect for human life and the safety of innocent civilians. When this clumsy analysis collides with the realities of the Middle East, it loses all touch with historical facts.

Indeed, it requires an astonishing leap of ahistorical delusion to disregard the record of anti-Jewish racism over the two millennia since the fall of the Judean Temple in 70 C.E. After all, the October 7 massacre ranks with the medieval mass killings of Jews in Christian and Islamic societies, the Khmelnytsky massacres of 1640s Ukraine, Russian pogroms from 1881 to 1920—and the Holocaust. Even the Holocaust is now sometimes misconstrued—as the actor Whoopi Goldberg notoriously did—as being “not about race,” an approach as ignorant as it is repulsive.

Contrary to the decolonizing narrative, Gaza is not technically occupied by Israel—not in the usual sense of soldiers on the ground. Israel evacuated the Strip in 2005, removing its settlements. In 2007, Hamas seized power, killing its Fatah rivals in a short civil war. Hamas set up a one-party state that crushes Palestinian opposition within its territory, bans same-sex relationships, represses women, and openly espouses the killing of all Jews.

Very strange company for leftists.

Of course, some protesters chanting “from the river to the sea” may have no idea what they’re calling for; they are ignorant and believe that they are simply endorsing “freedom.”

[…]

I should also say that Israeli rule of the Occupied Territories of the West Bank is different and, to my mind, unacceptable, unsustainable, and unjust. Settlers under the disgraceful Netanyahu government have harassed and persecuted Palestinians in the West Bank: 146 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem were killed in 2022 and at least 153 in 2023 before the Hamas attack, and more than 90 since. Again: This is appalling and unacceptable, but not genocide. The Palestinians in the West Bank have endured a harsh, unjust, and oppressive occupation since 1967.

Although there is a strong instinct to make this a Holocaust-mirroring “genocide,” it is not: The Palestinians suffer from many things, including military occupation; settler intimidation and violence; corrupt Palestinian political leadership; callous neglect by their brethren in more than 20 Arab states; the rejection by Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian leader, of compromise plans that would have seen the creation of an independent Palestinian state; and so on. None of this constitutes genocide, or anything like genocide. The Israeli goal in Gaza—for practical reasons, among others—is to minimize the number of Palestinian civilians killed. Hamas and like-minded organizations have made it abundantly clear over the years that maximizing the number of Palestinian casualties is in their strategic interest. (Put aside all of this and consider: The world Jewish population is still smaller than it was in 1939, because of the damage done by the Nazis. The Palestinian population has grown, and continues to grow, at a substantial and healthy rate. Demographic shrinkage is one obvious marker of genocide. In total, roughly 120,000 Arabs and Jews have been killed in the conflict over Palestine and Israel since 1860. By contrast, at least 500,000 people, mainly civilians, have been killed in the Syrian civil war since it began in 2011.)

If the ideology of decolonization, taught in our universities as a theory of history and shouted in our streets as self-evidently righteous, badly misconstrues the present reality, does it reflect the history of Israel as it claims to do? It does not. Indeed, it does not accurately describe either the foundation of Israel or the tragedy of the Palestinians.

According to the decolonizers, Israel is and always has been an illegitimate freak-state because it was fostered by the British empire and because some of its founders were European-born Jews.

In this narrative, Israel is tainted by imperial Britain’s broken promise to deliver Arab independence, and its kept promise to support a “national home for the Jewish people,” in the language of the 1917 Balfour Declaration. But the supposed promise to Arabs was in fact an ambiguous 1915 agreement with Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who wanted his Hashemite family to rule the entire region. In part, he did not receive this new empire because his family had much less regional support than he claimed. Nonetheless, ultimately Britain delivered three kingdoms—Iraq, Jordan, and Hejaz—to the family.

The imperial powers—Britain and France—made all sorts of promises to different peoples, and then put their own interests first. Those promises to the Jews and the Arabs during World War I were typical. Afterward, similar promises were made to the Kurds, the Armenians, and others, none of which came to fruition. But the central narrative that Britain betrayed the Arab promise and backed the Jewish one is incomplete. In the 1930s, Britain turned against Zionism, and from 1937 to 1939 moved toward an Arab state with no Jewish one at all. It was an armed Jewish revolt, from 1945 to 1948 against imperial Britain, that delivered the state.

Israel exists thanks to this revolt, and to international law and cooperation, something leftists once believed in. The idea of a Jewish “homeland” was proposed in three declarations by Britain (signed by Balfour), France, and the United States, then promulgated in a July 1922 resolution by the League of Nations that created the British “mandates” over Palestine and Iraq that matched French “mandates” over Syria and Lebanon. In 1947, the United Nations devised the partition of the British mandate of Palestine into two states, Arab and Jewish.

[…]

The concept of “partition” is, in the decolonization narrative, regarded as a wicked imperial trick. But it was entirely normal in the creation of 20th-century nation-states, which were typically fashioned out of fallen empires. And sadly, the creation of nation-states was frequently marked by population swaps, huge refugee migrations, ethnic violence, and full-scale wars. Think of the Greco-Turkish war of 1921–22 or the partition of India in 1947. In this sense, Israel-Palestine was typical.

At the heart of decolonization ideology is the categorization of all Israelis, historic and present, as “colonists.” This is simply wrong. Most Israelis are descended from people who migrated to the Holy Land from 1881 to 1949. They were not completely new to the region. The Jewish people ruled Judean kingdoms and prayed in the Jerusalem Temple for a thousand years, then were ever present there in smaller numbers for the next 2,000 years. In other words, Jews are indigenous in the Holy Land, and if one believes in the return of exiled people to their homeland, then the return of the Jews is exactly that. Even those who deny this history or regard it as irrelevant to modern times must acknowledge that Israel is now the home and only home of 9 million Israelis who have lived there for four, five, six generations.

Most migrants to, say, the United Kingdom or the United States are regarded as British or American within a lifetime. Politics in both countries is filled with prominent leaders—Suella Braverman and David Lammy, Kamala Harris and Nikki Haley—whose parents or grandparents migrated from India, West Africa, or South America. No one would describe them as “settlers.” Yet Israeli families resident in Israel for a century are designated as “settler-colonists” ripe for murder and mutilation. And contrary to Hamas apologists, the ethnicity of perpetrators or victims never justifies atrocities. They would be atrocious anywhere, committed by anyone with any history. It is dismaying that it is often self-declared “anti-racists” who are now advocating exactly this murder by ethnicity.

[…]

The open world of liberal democracies—or the West, as it used to be called—is today polarized by paralyzed politics, petty but vicious cultural feuds about identity and gender, and guilt about historical successes and sins, a guilt that is bizarrely atoned for by showing sympathy for, even attraction to, enemies of our democratic values. In this scenario, Western democracies are always bad actors, hypocritical and neo-imperialist, while foreign autocracies or terror sects such as Hamas are enemies of imperialism and therefore sincere forces for good. In this topsy-turvy scenario, Israel is a living metaphor and penance for the sins of the West. The result is the intense scrutiny of Israel and the way it is judged, using standards rarely attained by any nation at war, including the United States.

But the decolonizing narrative is much worse than a study in double standards; it dehumanizes an entire nation and excuses, even celebrates, the murder of innocent civilians. As these past two weeks have shown, decolonization is now the authorized version of history in many of our schools and supposedly humanitarian institutions, and among artists and intellectuals. It is presented as history, but it is actually a caricature, zombie history with its arsenal of jargon—the sign of a coercive ideology, as Foucault argued—and its authoritarian narrative of villains and victims. And it only stands up in a landscape in which much of the real history is suppressed and in which all Western democracies are bad-faith actors. Although it lacks the sophistication of Marxist dialectic, its self-righteous moral certainty imposes a moral framework on a complex, intractable situation, which some may find consoling. Whenever you read a book or an article and it uses the phrase “settler-colonialist,” you are dealing with ideological polemic, not history.

[…]

The Israel-Palestine conflict is desperately difficult to solve, and decolonization rhetoric makes even less likely the negotiated compromise that is the only way out.

Since its founding in 1987, Hamas has used the murder of civilians to spoil any chance of a two-state solution. In 1993, its suicide bombings of Israeli civilians were designed to destroy the two-state Olso Accords that recognized Israel and Palestine. This month, the Hamas terrorists unleashed their slaughter in part to undermine a peace with Saudi Arabia that would have improved Palestinian politics and standard of life, and reinvigorated Hamas’s sclerotic rival, the Palestinian Authority. In part, they served Iran to prevent the empowering of Saudi Arabia, and their atrocities were of course a spectacular trap to provoke Israeli overreaction. They are most probably getting their wish, but to do this they are cynically exploiting innocent Palestinian people as a sacrifice to political means, a second crime against civilians. In the same way, the decolonization ideology, with its denial of Israel’s right to exist and its people’s right to live safely, makes a Palestinian state less likely if not impossible.

The problem in our countries is easier to fix: Civic society and the shocked majority should now assert themselves. The radical follies of students should not alarm us overmuch; students are always thrilled by revolutionary extremes. But the indecent celebrations in London, Paris, and New York City, and the clear reluctance among leaders at major universities to condemn the killings, have exposed the cost of neglecting this issue and letting “decolonisation” colonize our academy.”

Simon Sebag Montefiore is the author of Jerusalem: The Biography and most recently The World: A Family History of Humanity.

[deborahdeshoftim5779]

AMAZING NEWS: Qaid Farhan Alkadi, an Israeli kidnapped by Palestinians on October 7, was rescued from an underground tunnel and is now in a stable condition in hospital.

Some comments on this:

1- First of all, the IDF once again deserves ENORMOUS praise and credit for this achievement. These men on the front lines are absolute heroes, fighting some of the worst fascist criminals on the planet. Over 700 have died fighting Hamas, many of them barely out of their teens or barely into their twenties. They could have carried on their lives as usual, but they chose to go into the mouth of the dragon to fight pure evil and to bring back Israel's hostages. GOD BLESS THEM ALL.

2- Second of all, this rescue occurred at the time that the hostage negotations are said to have broken down. Yet another hostage rescue proves those negotations either have a limited value or, as I suspect, are almost entirely useless. None of us will forget Israel's astonishing rescue of four hostages in the al-Nuseirat neighbourhood in June, a complex operation requiring months of preparation. In this case, the IDF said they did not have precise info on Alkadi's whereabouts. Shortly before this, the IDF had located the bodies of six hostages, also in a tunnel.

3- Hamas' murder of hostages both on and since October 7 shows that the terrorist group is not serious about negotiating. And of course, as many in the West would conveniently like to forget, Palestinian captors are beating, starving, and raping Israel's hostages on a regular, if not daily, basis. Rescued hostages have testified to being held in cuffs and treated as slaves. Hamas and its Palestinian supporters know full well that abuse of the hostages will only prolong this war, yet they continue doing it. Alkadi being in hospital to recuperate from being held in a tunnel only demonstrates the savagery and the inhumanity of Palestinian terrorists, and the total lack of ethics of many Palestinian civilians. That leads me onto point number 4.

4- Alkadi was held hostage for 326 days, and not a single Palestinian helped him escape, nor alerted the IDF to his whereabouts. The same can be said for all other hostages held by the Palestinians. For ten months, Palestinians have kept silent as Israel's hostages have been subjected to near-constant assaults and violations, including repeated rapes. For ten months, Palestinians have not assisted with the rescue of a single hostage; instead, their response to hostage rescues has been complaint, rather than celebration-- even though hostage rescue makes the end of the war more likely. Most importantly, for ten months, not a single Palestinian lawyer or judge in Gaza or the West Bank has prosecuted Palestinian murderers, rapists, kidnappers, and other deviants who attacked Israel on October 7. The total moral failure of Palestinian society is exposed each time Israel either rescues a hostage, or sadly has to recover the body of a murdered hostage.

5- The rescue of Alkadi and other Israeli hostages shows the success of Israel's war in Gaza, the need to remove Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad from power, and the need to ensure that the Palestinian terrorist network, including tunnels, are permanently destroyed. Those who have been pressuring Israel into a quick exit have been proven wrong yet again. Over 100 hostages remain in Gaza, and since the Palestinian terrorists and Palestinian civilians have no intention of rescuing them, let alone returning them to Israel, the war is necessary to bring them back.

6- When you next hear Western pro-Palestinian activists, or Western journalists, or others insisting that "Hamas isn't there", you'll know it's a lie. After all the noise made about the "danger" of IDF operations in Gazan cities, we discover the truth yet again: that Hamas has militarised almost the entire Gaza Strip, that civilian buildings have been turned into military bases, that Hamas' terror tunnels are used for keeping hostages, that those terror tunnels are accessed via secret openings and via buildings, and that numerous Palestinians assist with the daily terrorist operations and cover-up. Anyone at this point continuing to peddle the myth of total Palestinian innocence and Hamas' mysterious disappearances every time there is an IDF operation is determined to make themselves a fool.

I send my good wishes to Mr. Alkadi and his family, and I send the IDF my full support in rescuing all of Israel's remaining hostages.

BRING THEM ALL HOME!

[intersectionalpraxis]

The hospital was not bombed by Israel, it was a result of a faulty missile launch by the Islamic jihad. There are video evidence for that, and probably more to come.

Israel is committing war crimes right now and has been relentlessly bombing Gaza: killing now up to 3000 innocent Palestinian civilians JUST these past several days. Most of whom are children because they represent 50% of Gaza's population.

There have been innumerable Israeli propaganda videos dehumanizing Palestinian people, yet without fail -videos of Israeli soldiers in Gaza and West Bank brutalizing Palestinian civilians and often proudly spewing genocidal rhetoric about oppressing the Palestinian people -are often taken down.

Israeli apartheid has been ongoing violently for 75 years, and NO major western/European power had openly condemned this deliberate ethnic cleansing, which had been systemically done by the Israeli government by settling illegally on Indigenous Palestinian land in the first place with help from Britain and the United States, displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinian people during thr Nakba of 1948 (which forced these people into Gaza) and an estimated tens of thousands were murdered if they did not go).

Do you think for one second that I would believe ANYTHING that comes out of Israeli governmental/military mouths when they lied about Hamas beheading 40 Israel babies heads (when Israeli military actually beheaded 10 Palestinian babies heads), or the fact they LIED about an assault on a German woman, as well as countless other sexual assault allegations, which in this case was proven to be false and something to further their violent agenda. Less we also conveniently forget to mention the amount of Palestinian women that the IDF/Israeli officials have raped and brutalized during 'interrogations,' which of course Isreal/Netanyahu vehemently denies because it's not becoming of a democratic nation right?

Rampant crimes against humanity, breaking of Geneva Conventions, getting 3 BILLION in military aid EVERY year from the United States. Controlling what goes in and out of Gaza for decades, and making Gaza the largest concentration camp in the world. Intending to decimate Palestinian people and some of ya'll can't stop to actually think about what is really happening? To see how Western media, without fail, has been almost immediately spreading Isreali propaganda without sharing content and videos from the ground in Palestine (it certainly doesn't help the Israeli government cut electricity and wifi).

So before you come on my page and try to proclaim/claim that Israel is innocent or is not at all at fault for this massacre, maybe unpack it more and bear witness to Palestinians losing their lives for simply existing in what Israeli settlers consider to be their right to control.

Here is a series of tweets that convey information about this strike and also with original evidence of the strike, which people have already distinguished as NOT a rocket (which is what the Israeli government said initially):

This person also did great work debunking the EDITED video Israel posted about the bombing if you want to take a look:

And we now how confirmation this happened:

FREE PALESTINE 🇵🇸

[mightyflamethrower]

So much for the idea that if women were in charge the world would be a much kinder and less violent place.

Peruse campus literature. Watch clips from university protests. Scan interviews with pro-Hamas protestors. Read the chalk propaganda sketched on campus sidewalks. Talk to raging students in the free speech area. And the one common denominator— besides their arrogance—is their abject ignorance. Take their following tired talking points:

“Refugees” 

We are told that the Palestinians after more than 75 years of residence in the West Bank and Gaza are “refugees.” If that definition were currently true, then, are the 900,000 Jews who were forcibly exiled from Muslim countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia after the 1947, 1956, 1967 wars still “refugees?”

Most fled to Israel. Do they now live in “refugee” camps administrated by the UN? Are they protesting to recover their confiscated homes and wealth in Damascus, Cairo, or Baghdad? Do Jews on Western television dangle their keys to lost homes in Damascus a half-century after they were expelled?

How about the 150,000-200,000 Greek Cypriots who in 1974 were brutally driven out of their ancient homes in Northern Cyprus? Are they today living in “refugee” camps in southern Cyprus? Are Cypriot terrorists blowing themselves up in “occupied” Nicosia to recover what was stolen from them by Turkey?

Turkish president Recep Erdogan lectures the world on Palestinian “refugees,” but does he mention Turkey’s role in the brutal expulsion of 40 percent of the residents of Cyprus?

Are there campus groups organizing against Turkey on behalf of the displaced Cypriots? After being slaughtered and expelled, are the Cypriots a cause celebre in academia? Do the “refugee” cities of southern Cyprus resemble Jenin or Jericho?

For that matter, how about the 12 million German civilians who between 1945-50 were expelled, and mostly walked back from, East Prussia and parts of Eastern Europe, some with Prussian roots going back a millennium and more. Perhaps 1 million died during the expulsions.

Are any current survivors still “refugees?” If so, are they organizing for war to get back “occupied”  “Danzig” and “Königsberg” for Germany? So why does the world damn Israel and romanticize the Palestinians in a way it does not with any other “refugee” group?

“Apartheid”

Israel is said to practice “apartheid,” although since 2005-06 Gaza has been autonomous. Mahmoud Abbas runs in his fashion the West Bank. Like the Hamas clique, he held elections one time in 2005, and then after his election, of course, cancelled any free election in the fashion of the one election, one time Middle East. Who forced him to do that? Zionists? Americans?

At any time, Gaza could have taken its vast wealth in annual foreign aid and become completely independent in fuel, food, and energy, without need of any such help form the “Zionist entity.”

Gaza could have capitalized on its strategic location, the world’s eagerness to help, and the natural beauty of its Mediterranean beaches. Instead, it squandered its income on a labyrinth of terrorist tunnels and rockets. Today, it snidely snickers at any mention of following the Singapore model of prosperity–a former colonial city whose World War II death count vastly surpassed that of the various wars over Gaza.

Are the Israeli Arabs—21 percent of the Israeli population—living under apartheid?

If so, it is a funny sort of oppression when they vote, hold office, form parties, and enjoy more freedom and prosperity than almost anywhere else in the Middle East under Arab autocracies. Are those in sympathy with Hamas fleeing from Israel into Gaza or the West Bank or other Arab countries to live with kindred Muslims under an autocratic and theocratic dictatorship, or do they prefer to stay in the “Zionist entity” under “apartheid?”

Where then is real apartheid?

The Uyghurs in China, fellow Muslims to Middle Easterners, who are ignored by Israel’s Islamic enemies, but who reside in China’s segregated work camps to the silence of the usually loud UN, EU, and Muslim world?

How about the Muslim Kurds? Are they second- or third-class citizens in Muslim Turkey? And how about the tens of thousands of foreign workers from India, Pakistan, and other Asian countries who labor under the kafala system in the Arab Muslim Gulf countries, and are subject to apartheid protocols that allow them no free will about how they live, travel, or the conditions of their labor?

Are campuses erupting to champion the Uyghurs, the Kurds, or the subjugated workers of the Gulf?

“Disproportionate”

Israel is now damned as “disproportionally” bombing Gaza. The campus subtext is that because Gaza’s 7,000-8,000 rockets launched at Israeli civilians have not killed enough Jews, then Israel should not retaliate for October 7 by bombing Hamas targets–shielded by impressed civilians— because it is too effective.

Would a “proportionate” response be counting up all the Israelis murdered, categorizing the horrific manner of their deaths, and then sending Israeli commandoes into Gaza during a “pause” in the fighting to murder an equal number of Gazans in the same satanic fashion?

Does the U.S. lecture Ukraine not to use to the full extent its lethal U.S. imported weaponry since the result is often simply too deadly? After all, perhaps twice as many Russians have been killed, wounded, or are missing than Ukrainian casualties. Should Ukraine have been more “proportionate?” Has President Biden ordered President Zelensky to offer the Russian aggressors a “pause” in the fighting to end the “cycle of violence?”

Or did U.S.-supplied artillery, anti-armor weapons, drones, and missiles “disproportionally” kill too many Russians? Or does the U.S. assume that since Russia attacked Ukraine at a time of peace, it deserves such a “disproportionate” response that alone will lose it the war?

For that matter, the U.S. certainly disproportionately paid back Japan for Pearl Harbor, and the Japanese brutal take-over of the Pacific, much of Asia, and China—and the barbarous way the Japanese military slaughtered millions of civilians, executed prisoners, and mass raped women. Should the U.S. have simply done a one-off retaliatory attack on the imperial fleet at Yokohama, declared a “cease-fire,” and thus ended the “cycle of violence?”

Civilian casualties

Campus activists scream that Israel has slaughtered “civilians” and is careless about “collateral damage.” They equate retaliating against mass murderers who use civilians to shield them from injury, while warning any Gazans in the region of the targeted response to leave, as the moral equivalent of deliberately butchering civilians in a surprise attack.

So did protestors mass in the second term of Barrack Obama when he focused on Predator drone missions inside Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen to go after Islamic terrorists who deliberately target civilians?

At the time, the hard-left New York Times found the ensuing “collateral damage” in civilian deaths merely “troubling.” No matter—Obama persisted, insisting as he put it, “Let’s kill the people who are trying to kill us.” Note Obama did not expressly say the terrorists in Pakistan or Yemen were killing Americans, but “trying” to kill Americans. For him, that was, quite properly, enough reason “to kill” the potential assassins of Americans.

What would the Harvard President today say of Benjamin Netanyahu saying just that about Hamas?

We have no idea how many women, children, and elderly were in the general vicinity of a targeted terrorist in Pakistan or Yemen when an American drone missile struck. Then CIA Director John Brennan later admitted that he had lied under oath (with zero repercussions), when he testified to Congress that there was no collateral damage in drone targeted assassinations.

Obama was proud of his preemptive assassination program. Indeed, in lighthearted fashion he joked at the White House Correspondence Dinner about his preference for lethal drone missions, when he “warned” celebrities not to date his daughters: “But boys, don’t get any ideas. I have two words for you, ‘predator drones.’ You will never see it coming. You think I’m joking.”

Did the campuses erupt and scream “Not in my name” when their president laughed about his assassination program? After all, Obama had also admitted, “There is no doubt that civilians were killed who shouldn’t have been.” Did he then stop the targeted killings due to collateral damage—as critics now demand a cease fire from Israel?

“Genocide”

Genocide is now the most popular charge in the general damnation of Israel, a false smear aimed at calling off the Israeli response to Hamas, burrowed beneath civilians in Gaza City.

But how strange a charge! Pro-Hamas demonstrators the world over chant “From the River to the Sea,” unambiguously calling for the utter destruction of Israel and its 9 million population. Are the Hamas supporters then “genocidal?”

Is genocide the aim of Hamas that launched over 7,000 rockets into Israeli cities without warning? What is the purpose of the purportedly 120,000 rockets in the hands of Hezbollah if not to target Israeli noncombatants? Is all that a genocidal impulse?

Do Hamas and Hezbollah drop leaflets to civilians, as does Israel, to flee the area of a planned missile attack—or is that against their respective charters?

Hamas leaders in Qatar and Beirut continue to give interviews bragging about their October 7 surprise mass murdering of civilians. They even promise more such missions that likewise will be aimed at beheading, torturing, executing, incinerating, and desecrating the bodies of hundreds of Jewish civilians, perhaps again in the early morning during a holiday and a time of peace.

Is that planned continuation of mass killing genocidal? Does the amoral UN recall any other mass murdering spree when the killers beheaded infants, cooked them in ovens, and raped the dead?

Perhaps students at Harvard, Yale, Cornell, and Stanford will protest the real genocide in Darfur where some half-million black African Sudanese have been slaughtered by mostly Muslim Arab Sudanese. Did the Cornell professor who claimed he was “exhilarated” on news of beheaded Jewish babies protest the slaughter of the Sudanese? Did the current campus protestors ever assemble to scream about the Islamists who slaughtered the indigenous Africans of Sudan?

Are professors at Stanford organizing to refuse all grants and donations that originate from communist China? Remember, the Chinese communist Party has never apologized for the party’s genocidal murder of some 60-80 millions of its own during the Maoist Cultural Revolution, much less its systematic efforts to eliminate the Uyghur Muslim population?

These examples could easily be expanded. But they suffice to remind us that the Middle-East and Western leftist attacks on Israel for responding to the October 7 mass murdering are neither based on any consistent moral logic nor similarly extended to other nations who really do practice apartheid, genocide, and kill without much worry about collateral damage.

So why does the world apply a special standard to Israel?

To the leftist and Islamist, Israel is guilty of being: 1) Too Jewish; 2) Too prosperous, secure, and free; 3) Sufficiently Western to meet the boilerplate smears of colonialist, imperialist, and blah, blah, blah.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Julian Borger at The Guardian:

More grave violations against children were committed in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel than anywhere else in the world last year, according to a UN report due to be published this week. The report on children and armed conflict, which has been seen by the Guardian, verified more cases of war crimes against children in the occupied territories and Israel than anywhere else, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar, Somalia, Nigeria and Sudan. “Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory presents an unprecedented scale and intensity of grave violations against children,” the report said. The annual assessment – due to be presented to the UN general assembly later this week by the secretary general, António Guterres – lists Israel for the first time in an annex of state offenders responsible for violations of children’s rights, triggering outrage from the Israeli government.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, issued a statement that the UN had “added itself to the black list of history when it joined those who support the Hamas murderers”. The report details only cases that UN investigators were able to verify, so it accounts for just part of the total number of deaths and injuries of children in the course of last year. In all, the UN verified “8,009 grave violations against 4,360 children” in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank – more than twice the figures for the DRC, the next worst place for violence against children. Of the total number of child victims verified, 4,247 were Palestinian, 113 were Israeli.

In all, 5,698 violations were attributed to Israeli armed and security forces, and 116 to Hamas’s armed wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades. Israeli settlers were judged responsible in 51 cases, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s al-Quds Brigades was involved in 21. Between 7 October and the end of December last year, the UN verified the killing of 2,051 Palestinian children, and said the process of attributing responsibility was ongoing, but the report noted: “Most incidents were caused by the use of explosive weapons in populated areas by Israeli armed and security forces.” The report conceded it reflected only a partial picture of the situation in Gaza.

“Owing to severe access challenges, in particular in the Gaza Strip, the information presented herein does not represent the full scale of violations against children in this situation,” it said. The report also found grave abuses by Israeli forces in the West Bank, with 126 Palestinian children killed and 906 detained. The UN verified five cases where soldiers used boys “to shield forces during law enforcement operations”.

A soon-to-be published UN report reveals that more grave violations against children’s rights were committed in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories of Gaza and West Bank than elsewhere in the world last year.

[eretzyisrael]

by Dion J. Pierre

The University of Pennsylvania’s Hillel chapter announced that it will hold a “massive” Shabbat event this Friday in response to a controversial festival taking place on campus that will feature a gamut of anti-Zionist activists who have promoted antisemitic tropes and called for violence against Israel.

“We will be inviting students from across campus — Jewish and non-Jewish alike — to join us for a night celebrating Jewish pride, unity, and togetherness,” the Ivy League school’s Hillel said in an open letter posted on social media. “Prominent politicians and Penn alumni will be coming to celebrate along with hundreds of students, to show — contrary to what antisemites like Roger Waters would have us believe — that Jewish Penn students will NEVER stop showing their pride in Israel, their Jewish identity, heritage, and beliefs.”

Waters, the former Pink Floyd frontman, is a scheduled speaker at the “Palestine Writes Literature Festival,” which the University of Pennsylvania is set to host from Friday through Sunday. In recent years, Waters has made comments about “Jewish power” and compared Israel to Nazi Germany. In May, during a concert held in Berlin, he performed in what looked like a Nazi SS officer uniform. A projection that played during the concert also compared Holocaust victim Anne Frank to Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh — who was accidentally shot and killed last year while covering an Israeli military raid in the West Bank — and the show was deemed as “deeply offensive to Jewish people.”

Another speaker listed on the festival’s itinerary, Palestinian researcher Salman Abu Sitta, previously said during an interview that “Jews were hated in Europe because they played a role in the destruction of the economy in some of the countries, so they would hate them.”

Islamic University of Gaza professor Refaat Alareer — who said in 2018, “Are most Jews evil? Of course they are.” — was initially scheduled to speak. However, StopAntisemitism, a nonprofit organization that tracks antisemitic incidents and hate crimes around the world, reported last week that Alareer had been removed from the speakers’ lineup.

The festival itinerary includes a host of other speakers who have praised terrorism against Israel and spoken out against Zionism.

In response to the festival, the University of Pennsylvania’s Hillel wrote in its letter that it has three goals for Friday’s event, which is titled the “Shabbat Together Event.” They include a guarantee that Jewish students will not be forced to attend “Palestine Writes” against their will, excluding speakers “who espouse explicit anti-Jewish hate,” and the removal of Penn branding from the event as well as the issuance of statements condemning the “antisemitic backgrounds” of certain speakers.

The letter also said that the school’s Hillel — which is part of a larger Jewish campus organization for college students — is “grateful for the holy work of supporting Jewish life at the University of Pennsylvania, and knows that there is great work to continue to do together in the new year.”

According to the school’s Hillel, the group recently met with high-level university administrators to discuss “Palestine Writes,” explaining that some of the listed speakers made them feel “less safe” on campus and presenting a list of “demands, asks, and suggestions.”

UPenn Hillel’s message came as Susan Abulhawa, executive director of the “Palestine Writes” festival, publicized a letter she had written earlier this month to the university’s leadership amid backlash over the event. In her letter, Abulhawa claimed that Palestinians are indigenous to the land of Israel and have “encompassed many identities over millennia — including religious identities of Judaism, Christianity, Islam,” which critics have argued is an apparent attempt to appropriate Jewish history and identity.

Abulhawa has previously accused Israel of committing “a dozen kristallnachts [sic],” referring to the infamous pogrom carried out against Jews in Nazi Germany in November 1938. Abulhawa’s viewpoints are so controversial that a sponsor of an Australian festival she was scheduled to participate in pulled its support.

News of the “Palestine Writes” event has subjected the University of Pennsylvania, widely considered one of America’s elite institutions of higher education, to sharp criticism from the American Jewish community.

Earlier this month, US House Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) called on the school to move the event off campus, saying in a letter to its president that he is “dismayed that this is now occurring at my alma mater” and that “if the university’s goal is to promote mutual understanding and bring students together, it will fail so long as antisemites and anti-Israel advocates are given a platform to spew hate.”

Last week, Middle East experts and nonprofit leaders told The Algemeiner that the festival is an “Israel hate fest” and noted that City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center professor Marc Lamont Hill, a former associate of Louis Farrakhan who has accused Israeli police of training American officers to kill Black people, will be speaking there.

“Hill in particular is a longtime advocate of violence against Israel and staunch Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions [BDS] supporter who was fired from CNN after a 2018 speech in which he called for the destruction of the Jewish state,” said Asaf Romirowsky, executive director of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa and Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. “Once again we are seeing how propaganda is masqueraded as ‘scholarship.’ UPenn should take a very careful look at where it draws the lines between free speech and hate speech, especially from individuals who have a track record of racism and antisemitism.”

The University of Pennsylvania did not respond to The Algemeiner’s requests for comment on the “Shabbat Together” event and Abulhawa’s letter.

The school responded to the criticism last week, however, issuing a statement to The Algemeiner signed by school president M. Elizabeth Magill, provost John L. Jackson, and dean of the School of Arts and Sciences Steven J. Fluharty.

“We unequivocally — and emphatically — condemn antisemitism as antithetical to our institutional values,” the statement said. “As a university, we also fiercely support the free exchange of ideas as central to our educational mission. This includes the expression of views that are controversial and even those that are incompatible with our institutional values.”

The high-level administrators added, “This public event is not organized by the university.”

Following the statement, StopAntisemitism accused the university officials of countenancing “Jew hatred” and called their response “pathetic.”

[girlactionfigure]

The territory over which Palestinians have full “security” and civilian control once again becomes fertile soil for terror groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad who seek nothing less than to destroy Israel.

This has been the case with Gaza ever since @ 2006, and it is again the case with Jenin today.

The primary reasons the West Bank have been comparatively “quiet” in recent years are:  1) the scope of Israel’s operation “Defensive Shield” in 2002, which crushed terror infrastructure, 2) the much-maligned security barrier (the so-called “Apartheid Wall”) separating Palestinian enclaves from Israeli population centers, 3) the tenuous and partial cooperation in keeping quiet provided at times by the Palestinian Authority, who recognize the relative prosperity of the West Bank relative to Gaza, and most of all 4) the valiant and surgical efforts of Israel’s security forces.

Israel’s opponents in the West continually call for Israel to “end occupation” - i.e. to withdraw from more territory and cede it to the Palestinians, for the Palestinians (however bellicose) to have no limits on ingress and egress, and for these territories to be Jew-free (although of course Israel is not expected to be Arab free).

But they fail to reckon with this fact:

Palestinians have full autonomy (both security and civil) over their population centers.  This has been the case since the mid 1990s.  These areas are in no respect “occupied”.  There are external limits on movement for very valid security reasons.  Even then, tens of thousands of Palestinians work in Israel.

Have the Palestinians been responsible stewards of their proto-sovereignty?

No.  Time and again, the land ceded to the Palestinians becomes a launchpad for violent attacks against Israel.  Rockets, tunnels, shootings, stabbings, kidnappings, vehicle ramming. (A similar dynamic prevailed when Israel withdrew from South Lebanon - now Hezbollahland, btw).

And yet, the argument goes, the Palestinians should be given still more land, and Israel should yield even more security control, as a way to tamp down conflict.  

The core issue is this:  

There is no interest in Palestinian responsibilities, only Palestinian rights.

And there is no interest in Israeli rights, only Israeli responsibilities.

Peace requires recognition of the right of the Jewish people to self-determination, and the responsibility of Palestinians to be good neighbors who exercise police power appropriately.  

Until that happens, the status quo will prevail.  More Israeli land concessions would fuel conflict, not squelch it.

Kamel Amin Thaabet

[mariacallous]

Iran makes no secret of its commitment to seek Israel’s destruction. Its strategy is to keep it under constant pressure and consume it in ongoing conflicts on its borders. While that is plain to see, Israel’s current approach seems, ironically, to be playing into Iran’s hands.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has long assumed that Israelis will leave the country if they feel constantly under pressure from military threats. What some refer to as a “ring of fire” around Israel is driven by this assumption.

It doesn’t matter so much whether Khamenei and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah are wrong—after all, Israelis, even with their all disagreements, have demonstrated unmistakably that they will fight for their country and remain in it. What matters is that Khamenei and Nasrallah believe so and are designing their military strategy accordingly—and to its detriment, Israel’s government is falling into their trap.

Nasrallah said in a January speech that Israelis are not rooted in the land and under pressure, they will flee it. Khamenei has said “reverse migration” would spell the end of Israel.

According to this logic, the two leaders believe the appropriate long-term strategy is forcing Israel to fight on all fronts: in Gaza, on its northern border with Lebanon, and in the West Bank, especially with Iranian arms, explosives, and money being smuggled into all of these theaters—provided, of course, that this does not draw Iran directly into a conflict and does not cost the Islamic Republic its most important proxy, Hezbollah.

If there were any lingering doubts about Iran’s desire to avoid all-out wars, they should be removed in the aftermath of the Israeli targeted killing of Fuad Shukr, arguably the second-most important figure in Hezbollah, and the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, the political head of Hamas. While both Khamenei and Nasrallah promised there would be a “harsh response” and Israel would pay a high price for these acts, they have so far avoided acting in a way that could trigger escalation. When Hezbollah finally responded, Nasrallah claimed a great success (to avoid doing more), even though he was derided on Arab social media for his claims.

While Khamenei and Nasrallah haven’t backed their retaliation threats with deeds, they are intent on keeping Israel under constant pressure and consumed by wars of attrition. Indeed, wearing Israel down in quagmires that cost it militarily and isolate it politically on the world stage is the core of Iran’s strategy. As Khamenei argued in March, Israel is “suffering a crisis” because the “entry of the Zionist regime in Gaza created a quagmire for it. If it comes out of Gaza today, it will have failed. And if it doesn’t come out, it will also have failed.”

Israel’s current policies are validating the Iranian strategy. Israel is now fighting wars of attrition in Gaza, on its northern border, and increasingly with larger forays into the West Bank. Each in isolation might make sense, but collectively, they amount to playing on Iran’s terms.

This is not to argue that Israel should seek all-out wars now with Hezbollah or Iran. But Israel needs a new strategy.

This is easier said than done. It would require a number of difficult but necessary decisions by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Biden administration. The next U.S. president should be prepared to take steps that make some of these hard choices easier to rationalize.

For Israel, such a strategy must start with ending the war in Gaza. The Biden administration is trying to facilitate that by reaching a hostage deal that sets in motion a path to a permanent cease-fire. Unfortunately, it makes Haniyeh’s replacement, Yahya Sinwar, the arbiter of whether there can be a deal, even assuming Netanyahu is serious about doing a hostage deal, which many Israelis doubt.

While I hope the U.S.-led efforts succeed, there should be a plan B in which the focus is on ending the war to get the hostages released as opposed to getting a hostage deal to end the war. For this, Netanyahu needs to be able, credibly, to claim success based on dismantling the Hamas military, destroying much of its military infrastructure (weapons depots, weapons labs, weapons production facilities, and tunnels), and ensuring an end to smuggling to prevent Hamas from being able to reconstitute itself. Israel is very close to achieving this, having dismantled both Hamas as a military force and much of its military infrastructure as well.

Netanyahu’s focus on Rafah and the Philadelphi Corridor is not wrong because there must be an end to the smuggling aboveground and below it there; however, his answer of keeping the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) there is wrong because there are alternatives to an Israeli presence and such a presence will cost him what he also wants, which is an alternative to Hamas rule in Gaza—the real proof of Israeli victory.

Egypt, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, and other countries are prepared on an interim basis to administer Gaza alongside non-Hamas Palestinians and provide security—but not if Israel remains in Gaza, and Netanyahu has repeatedly said he does not want that. The Biden administration can help prevent smuggling by providing new scanning technologies and committing to help finance an underground barrier to tunnels and arrange for the presence of Emirati forces along with specially trained and equipped security contractors policing the corridor.

If Netanyahu declares an end to the war if the hostages are released, Sinwar would face enormous pressure not just from Arabs but from Palestinians to release them—in no small part as this has been Hamas’s condition all along. Yes, there would still be negotiations on the sequence, the pace of IDF withdrawals and Palestinian prisoners, but the entire context would change, and Israel would be able to claim the high ground politically and tell its citizens that it’s ending the war on its terms.

Israel could then address the northern border. Nasrallah has made it very clear that he will stop firing into Israel if there is a cease-fire in Gaza—that would set the stage for working out a deal that would allow both Israeli and Lebanese citizens to return to their homes on both sides of the border. Even if Iran might prefer the war of attrition to continue there, Nasrallah does not, given the price paid by Hezbollah’s Shiite base in southern Lebanon, where roughly 100,000 Lebanese have had to evacuate their homes.

The 60,000 evacuated Israelis will return home only if they feel certain that Hezbollah forces and weapons will not return to the border. There is no simple way to guarantee this—U.N. peacekeepers in the country and the Lebanese Army have proved that they will not prevent Hezbollah from doing anything or going anywhere. But there is one thing the United States could do to deter Hezbollah from violating such an understanding: make a commitment to back Israel, rhetorically and with resupply, as it acts, including on the ground, should Hezbollah move any forces back toward the border.

Rather than simply saying that Washington could not prevent the Israelis from acting, Nasrallah needs to know that the United States will back the Israeli move if Hezbollah violates the agreement. Nasrallah understands the consequences of an all-out war, and Hezbollah is the one proxy Iran is not prepared to sacrifice.

As for what is increasingly a third front, the West Bank, Israel can’t simply pursue a punitive policy. The IDF’s current operations there will succeed in destroying bomb-making labs and killing and arresting wanted terrorists—and like its previous forays, Israel will have to keep repeating these operations.

There is a significant Iranian effort to smuggle arms and explosives in and to pay large number of unemployed younger Palestinians to carry out acts of terrorism against Israel—and that must be cut off. Most of the smuggling is coming across the Jordanian border into the West Bank and originates in Syria. Jordan makes an effort to stop it but lacks the technology and manpower to do the job—and here, again, there is a U.S. role to play by providing technology, drones, and even personnel.

But Israel must also address the fertile ground that Iran is exploiting in the West Bank. It should allow vetted Palestinians again to work in Israel—something that would greatly reduce unemployment; stop withholding taxes it collects for the Palestinians to ease the deep economic stress of the Palestinian Authority, which is paying only 50 percent salaries to its employees, including its security forces; and crack down harder on violence coming from Jewish settlers.

So long as Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, the messianic nationalists in the current Israeli government, are able to shape Israeli policies toward the West Bank, little can change. They want the PA to collapse—and that would leave a vacuum in the West Bank, one the Iranians would welcome and are only too happy to fill.

Palestinians also need hope that they have a future and that secular non-Islamists and non-rejectionists can provide it. The Saudis can play a larger role in helping to provide a political vision for the Palestinians, something that is also necessary to prevent further radicalization in the West Bank. The Saudis, the Biden administration, and Netanyahu all continue to be interested in a Saudi-Israeli normalization deal.

For their part, the Saudis demand a defense treaty with the United States and what they call a credible pathway toward a Palestinian state. The Biden administration is ready to finalize the defense treaty and present it to the U.S. Senate after the election, but a credible pathway to a Palestinian state requires an adjustment in Israeli policy.

Since Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7, 2023, the Israeli public, not just Netanyahu, has been leery of Palestinian statehood. The Israelis are right to want to know that a Palestinian state cannot and will not be led by Hamas or rejectionists and that the identity of Palestinians will be based on coexistence with Israel, not resistance.

Of course, no credible pathway to a state is possible if Israel can continue to act on the ground in a way that makes a Palestinian state impossible. Netanyahu must therefore choose Saudi normalization over the messianic nationalists in his government. In the near term, that means choosing U.S. President Joe Biden over Ben-Gvir.

Biden might make that easier by offering more than just a defense treaty to the Saudis as part of the normalization deal. The Israeli ethos of always defending itself by itself is understandable given Israeli history, but on the night of April 13, when U.S. forces—with the British, French, and Arab partners—intercepted many of the drones and cruise missiles launched by Iran, Israel was not defending itself alone. Because Iran does not want to get into a direct conflict with the United States, it could be time for a formal U.S.-Israeli defense treaty as well.

What I am calling for would constitute a daunting agenda for any Israeli government. But consider the threat that Iran and its proxies pose, and consider also the one issue Netanyahu has always defined as his special, historic mission: defending Israel from Iran. Currently, Netanyahu’s government is validating the Iranian approach, not undermining it.

The fact that Iran has demonstrated that it does not want direct conflict—certainly not with the United States—should underpin the collective strategy that Washington must take the lead in implementing. But Israel has a role to play, and its own interests dictate that should weaken rather than bolster Iran’s long-term strategy.

[stephenjaymorrisblog]

Israels Defense Is Indefensible

Stephen Jay Morris

8/30/2023

©Scientific Morality

            Want to hear an antisemitic trope? “Jews are so greedy. Not only do they want to own all the banks in the world, but they also want to take over the West Bank.” Okay, so that one fell flat on its face. The point I am making is a lot of uneducated people do not understand what qualifies as antisemitic. Making fun of Jewish people is not antisemitic. Calling them names isn’t either. Not allowing Jews on your golf course does qualify as antisemitic. Accusing Jews of being international bankers or communists is an accusation, not antisemitism. However, if taken seriously, it could lead to throwing them in death camps and exterminating them. Massive genocide. That’s antisemitic!!

            Ever hear of the Stockholm syndrome? It’s when someone who is taken hostage starts to sympathize with their captor. The revisionist Zionists hated Nazis so much that they started to imitate them. That is what you are witnessing right now in the mid-east. Ashkenazi Jews envy the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants so much that they want to be like them. Consider the last four letters in the word, “Ashkenazi.” There is a political party in Isael called, “Jewish Power.”

            In Israel, the supporters of the Likud Party are the most hateful people you’ll ever meet. If you ever witness them heckling “Free Palestine” protesters, you’ll hear them say the vilest things you’ve ever heard. Jewish women declare how they wish the Palestinian women would get violently and repeatedly raped. Jewish men threaten Palestinian men, hoping they get large sticks shoved up their asses. These right-wing Jews also laugh about how Palestinian children are getting blown up by American bombs.

            American politicians are no help, either. When it comes to campaign donations, A.I.P.A.C. overpays Democrats and Republicans handsome sums of money. Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, takes the same position as President Biden on arming Israel’s IDF. Biden’s administration capitulates and submits to Israel like it has enormous power over them. What’s going on there?

Well, I’ve got news for all you non-Jews. There is a reason that there are more Jews in America than in Israel. Israel wasn’t around when Jews were being persecuted in the diasporas before it became a state, so Israel is not important to American Jews. If any American politician were to tell Israel, “You’d better stop bombing women and children or we stop sending you arms,” or “If you don’t stop killing innocent civilians, we will invade your country, disarm you, arrest your prime minister, and outlaw the Likud Party,” Jews would still vote for them.  Also, those Jews you call settlers in the West Bank are actually squatters. We could arrest all of them and get them jobs in the States as re-po men. Just for once, I’d like to see an American president stand up to right wing Jews. Politicians, stop worrying about being called “antisemitic” and your donations being canceled. Don’t you know that Jews are neurotics and paranoids who call every non-Jew antisemitic? If a cop gives a Jew a speeding ticket, he will call the cop an antisemite.  Believe it or not, there are evil Jews.

            Once again, I call upon the Israeli people to do something to stop this Judeo-Fascist movement. Something! Anything! Israel will not be destroyed by Islamic terrorists; it will be destroyed by right wing Jews! Just keep on doing nothing and see what happens.

_____________________________________

Addition: 9/5/2024

Wild Cat Strike in Israel

Unionism in the USA has helped the working-class Jews since the early 20th Century. A lot of the garment industry businesses in New York were owned by Jews. Most of the single-needle operators were Jews. A majority of secular and religious Jews formed unions. Many Jews were lifted from poverty thanks to the trade unions. Jewish gangsters extorted hefty protection fees from the garment business owners, causing them to lose much of their hard-earned money. For decades, trade unions and Jewish gangsters were at the center of violent struggle for Jewish businesses. At any rate, unions have been a crucial part of the Jewish people for over two centuries now.

It is no surprise that Israel is a union country. However, the unions there are under government supervision and must get approval from their labor department to strike. On September 2, the Histadrut labor union called a strike. And not just any old strike, but a general strike, which means that all unions hit the bricks and shut the country down. Soon afterward, however, Israel’s Labor Court ordered the strike to end at 2:30 p.m. local time that day.

Did that stop the Israeli workers? Fuck no, it didn’t! Israel is now having a wild cat strike. With other nations boycotting Israel and the strike shutting down the country, this could be the end of the genocide.

Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud Party are anti-union. Does he think that this is a good idea? Unions saved the Jewish people. Jewish owners of companies were adversaries of the Jewish working class. One thing Jewish workers do not like is scabs, like Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud party. When the Jewish left unites the country, they really unite the nation. Right wing Jews divide the Jewish people because they believe that Jews are the master race. Uh…I don’t think so.

One more thing I want to say: I am fucking sick of those videos I see on social media of pro-Israel counter-protesters yelling stupid, hateful, ugly things at pro-Palestinian demonstrators! Especially Israeli women. A lot of those women are wives of orthodox Jews and are among the most oppressed women in the history of humankind. For example, when one is having her menstrual period, she is not permitted a seat at her family’s dinner table. Oh, here is another fact a freedom-loving human should know about orthodox Jews: It’s okay for a husband to rape his wife if she doesn’t put out. Yeah, just a ask an orthodox Rabbi.  So, the next time you tell an anti-war female to get raped, somebody will yell back, “I hope that your husband rapes you!”

Over and out.

[kendrixtermina]

Gaza is NOT totalitarian

One thing you always hear from Zionists or even unaffiliated random westerners who know little about the conflict as a reason why the war is, if not completely justified, then at least tragically unavoidable, is that Gaza is a totalitarian regime & they’re either all indoctrinated to hate Israelis, or get portrayed as passive victims with no agency that need to be „liberated“

But over the last weeks we have seen a lot of scenes of life out of gaza and i have also read many books & watched documentaries to further educate myself and there is just no trace of that anywhere.

No big posters of leaders in classroom, no symbols & logos everywhere, no political phrases in people’s everyday speech, many of the people in videos seem totally a-political & lament that their family had nothing to do with the resistance or the war. They spend more time talking about friggin olive trees and embroidery than politics.

You could glean a bunch about their culture from the videos – extended families live together in big shared houses, they are very affectionate with children, they value community, the sport they tend to be obsessed about is Football…

Saudi arabia, for example, bans booze, art, music & forces everyone to wear burqas – that’s just not the case in Palestine. There are woman doctors & journalists, a wealth of poets & painters. You can buy booze grown in the west bank. You see the occasional lady without hijab, like Bisan often has her hair out, which tells me the ones that DO wear it do so because they want to, which is their good right. There were several Christian churches apparently operating just fine inside Gaza, until Israel bombed them.

I heard that 4th way esoterism was influenced by Sufism which is an off-shoot of Islam, & seeing the religious mantras people cited I could see the relationship - they said stuff like they should trust in God's destiny, that God alone is enough for them etc. it has that same "accept what is & surrender to the universe, real strength comes from contact with divinity & then you need nothing else" vibe - though of course the esoterists believe less in a personal god & more in a panentheist "Unity Of Being". Ppl used to make a lot of bogeyman talk out of Islam meaning "submission" but now I think it's probably meant in a "surrender to the universe & accept what is" kinda way & that ppl ended up projecting the authoritarian character of Christianity onto it. Islam is alot more de-central & everyone does their own thing, innit? I remember that when Muslims hit a certain percentage in Germany they thought of introducing Islam classes to school (in addition to the Catholic & Lutheran classes they have - atheists & ppl of other religions get "ethics" instead which is basically moral philosophy) but one problem they ran into is that there's no central authority to get a course plan from. There is no such thing as a muslim pope. There are extremists who ARE authoritarian, like Saudi arabia (as there are of all religions; They're all the same, rly, it's probably down to some flaw in human brains) but that doesn't mean everyone's like that. You might pt down the authoritarianism there to Saudi Arabia being an absolutist monarchy...

(Of course, a lot of less educated westerners don’t know that the kind of extremism seen in the Saudis & Taliban is actually a fairly recent movement that was able to take over due to the ME being destabilized in the cold war… the area was once stable, organized & well-educated.)

Some of the people covering the war like Bisan, Plestia, Saleh etc. were normal instagrammers before, doing normal instagram things, not a hint of politics to be found.

I also recall this post by a gay ude saying that yeah it’s not super welcoming but there’s not really systematic persecution – your family might kick you out or quietly tolerate it while wanting nothing to do with it… so just like the more religious parts of the USA basically.

Also, I’d like to note that even if gaza WERE totalitarian, people in totalitarian countries don’t cease to be human and their lives don’t become worthless. Not everyone is a True Believer, most are just scared out of their mind. You need to read „Jugend Ohne Gott“, you need to watch „Das Boot“, you need to listen to stories of people who escaped from North Korea. Maybe if it’s easier to epathize with a fictional depiction, read 1984 or The Handmaid’s tale.

So, I consider myself German because that’s where I grew up & the only culture I have any emotional attachment to, but my parents are Cuban. Cuba is a fairly „soft“ totalitarian state in that dissenters are „only“ beaten & their job prospects ruined, not outright killed like in North Korea or under the Nazis, but even so, my grandma still rips up all papers before throwing them away because spies would go through people’s trash, and my parents needed to be told several times by friends that it’s OK to criticize politicians in public before they would feel comfortable riffing on then.chancellor Kohl.

Note, however, that people DID mock the Castros in private, among trusted family members. There are tons of jokes mocking them. Heck, even mocked Hitler behind closed doors – they used to call them Flüsterwitze („whisper jokes“) because if you say them out loud they shoot you. Just to illustrate how people trapped in totalitarian states are human.

Even in the early 2000s when I was still pretty young, I didn’t buy that it’s OK to kill Iraqis just because there is a Dictator. The citizens are victims, and unlike the leadership they are poor & can’t flee. What if someone invaded Cuba and killed all my cousins just to punish the bad guy opressing them? That din’t seem fair. They said I’d understand when I’m older but all I understood is what utter bullshit that war was.

We’ve heard so many Palestinians talking about their plight and there is hardly anyone speaking of repression or totalitarianism, including peole who left the country. (In stark contrast to Cubans, North Koreans or people who fled the Nazis, who don’t shut up about how much it sucked) There is not zero repression (like an incident where Hamas got Fatah-affiliated workers fired), but the same can be said of Israel or even the west – McCarthyism or the current withhunt against pro-palestine ppl.

Meanwhile we have that creepy song of Israeli children calling for murder, and many videos by Israelis saying they were indoctrinated. One person mentioned being outright told that arabs were their „enemy“, while two arab boys were sitting in her class. I also hear that many Israelis go most of their lives without even interacting with a Palestinian outside of military service.

So, yeah, I think it’s pretty clear who the indoctrinated ones are.

[underestimated-heroine]

In the 1990s, I was the field organizer for the Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment, a six-state coalition working to reduce hate crimes and violence in the Pacific Northwest and Mountain States region. We did a lot of primary research, often undercover. A cardinal rule of organizing is that you can’t ask people to do anything you haven’t done yourself; so I spent that weekend as I spent many—among people plotting to remove me from their ethnostate. It helped that, despite its blood-curdling anti-Black racism, at least some factions of the White nationalist movement saw me as a potential ally against their true archenemy. At the expo that year, a guy warily asked me about myself. I told him that I had come on behalf of a few brothers in the city. We needed to resist the federal government and we were there to get educated. I said I hoped he wouldn’t take it personally, but I didn’t shake hands with White people. He smiled; he totally understood. “Brother McLamb,” he concurred, “says we have to start building broad coalitions.” Together we went to hear Jack McLamb, a retired Phoenix cop who ran an organization called Police Against the New World Order, make a case for temporary alliances with “the Blacks, the Mexicans, the Orientals” against the real enemy, the federal government controlled by an international conspiracy. He didn’t have to say who ran this conspiracy because it was obvious to all in attendance. And despite the widespread tendency to dismiss antisemitism, notwithstanding its daily presence across the country and the world, it is obvious to you, too.

[...]

To recognize that antisemitism is not a sideshow to racism within White nationalist thought is important for at least two reasons. First, it allows us to identify the fuel that White nationalist ideology uses to power its anti-Black racism, its contempt for other people of color, and its xenophobia—as well as the misogyny and other forms of hatred it holds dear. White nationalists in the United States perceive the country as having plunged into unending crisis since the social ruptures of the 1960s supposedly dispossessed White people of their very nation. The successes of the civil rights movement created a terrible problem for White supremacist ideology. White supremacism—inscribed de jure by the Jim Crow regime and upheld de facto outside the South—had been the law of the land, and a Black-led social movement had toppled the political regime that supported it. How could a race of inferiors have unseated this power structure through organizing alone? For that matter, how could feminists and LGBTQ people have upended traditional gender relations, leftists mounted a challenge to global capitalism, Muslims won billions of converts to Islam? How do you explain the boundary-crossing allure of hip hop? The election of a Black president? Some secret cabal, some mythological power, must be manipulating the social order behind the scenes. This diabolical evil must control television, banking, entertainment, education, and even Washington, D.C. It must be brainwashing White people, rendering them racially unconscious.

What is this arch-nemesis of the White race, whose machinations have prevented the natural and inevitable imposition of white supremacy? It is, of course, the Jews.

[...]

The White nationalist movement that evolved from it in the 1970s was a revolutionary movement that saw itself as the vanguard of a new, whites-only state. This latter movement, then and now, positions Jews as the absolute other, the driving force of white dispossession—which means the other channels of its hatred cannot be intercepted without directly taking on antisemitism.

This brings me to the second reason that White nationalist antisemitism must not be dismissed: at the bedrock of the movement is an explicit claim that Jews are a race of their own, and that their ostensible position as White folks in the U.S. represents the greatest trick the devil ever played. [...] Contemporary antisemitism, then, does not just enable racism, it also is racism, for in the White nationalist imaginary Jews are a race—the race—that presents an existential threat to Whiteness. Moreover, if antisemitism exists in glaring form at the extreme edge of political discourse, it does not exist in a vacuum; as with every form of hateful ideology, what is explicit on the margins is implicit in the center, in ways we have not yet begun to unpack. This means the notion that Jews long ago and uncontestably became White folks in the U.S.—became, in effect, post-racial—is a myth that we must dispel.

Antisemitism, I discovered, is a particular and potent form of racism so central to White supremacy that Black people would not win our freedom without tearing it down.

[...]

The resistance I have encountered when I address antisemitism has primarily come since I moved to the Northeast seven years ago, and from the most established progressive antiracist leaders, organizations, coalitions, and foundations around the country. It is here that a well-meaning but counterproductive thicket of discourse has grown up insisting that Jews—of Ashkenazi descent, at least—are uncontestably White, and that to challenge this is to deny the workings of White privilege. In other words, when I’m asked, “Where is the antisemitism?,” what I am often really being asked is, “Why should we be talking about antisemitism?”

And indeed—why? Why, when the president of the United States appears bent on removing as many dark-skinned immigrants from the U.S. as he can, and when men who look like me are shot in the street or tortured to death in prison with impunity? Why, when the leadership of some mainstream Jewish communal organizations level false charges of antisemitism in order to silence critique—whether by Jews or non-Jews—of Israeli government policies? Why, after decades of soul-searching by Jewish antiracists has established a seeming consensus that Jews—with Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews posited as an exception—should regard themselves as White allies of people of color, eschewing any identity as a racialized people with their own skins at risk in the fight against White supremacy? Why, when Jews are safe and claims to the contrary serve to justify rather than to challenge racial and other oppressions, like conservative commentator Alan Dershowitz’s cynical recent attempt to discredit antiracist and anticolonial struggles by declaring intersectionality an antisemitic concept? Why, when Jews of European descent are supposedly “White,” have long been, will ever be?

I can answer this question as I have been doing and will continue to do: antisemitism fuels White nationalism, a genocidal movement now enthroned in the highest seats of American power, and fighting antisemitism cuts off that fuel for the sake of all marginalized communities under siege from the Trump regime and the social movement that helped raise it up. To refuse to deal with any ideology of domination, moreover, is to abet it. Contemporary social justice movements are quite clear that to refuse antiracism is an act of racism; to refuse feminism is an act of sexism. To refuse opposition to antisemitism, likewise, is an act of antisemitism. Arguably, not much more should need to be said than that. But I suspect that much more does need to be said. To the hovering question, why should we be talking about antisemitism, I reply, what is it we are afraid we will find out if we do? What historic and contemporary conflicts will be laid bare? And if we recognize that White privilege really is privilege, what will it mean for Jewish antiracists to give up the fantasy that they ever really had it to begin with?

[...]

Likewise, as much as I draw inspiration from the Jewish community, and as much as I adore my Jewish partner and friends, it was my organizing against antisemitism as a Black antiracist that first pulled me to the Jewish community, not the other way around. I developed an analysis of antisemitism because I wanted to smash White supremacy; because I wanted to be free. If we acknowledge that White nationalism clearly and forcefully names Jews as non-white, and did so in the very fiber of its emergence as a post-civil rights right-wing revolutionary movement, then we are forced to recognize our own ignorance about the country  we thought we lived in. It is time to have that conversation.

-from Eric K. Ward's essay Skin In The Game: How Antisemitism Animates White Nationalism