Exposing The Lie Of Israel Apartheid / Moscow's role

[Sixties Fan]

The Noyan family opened a Chinese restaurant in Herzliya in 1985, called Asia. After more than three decades in business, it closed in 2020 due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Tongi has fond memories helping out after school, as a child. During the Chinese New Year, they made Vietnamese dishes due to popular demand, including pho soup, banh bao (dumplings) and Vietnamese spring rolls.

Tongi also recalls how American Jews would follow the same tradition they had back home and go out for Chinese food on Christmas Day.

When asked what religion he followed, Tongi was silent for a moment. Then, he said that the majority of Vietnamese Israelis are Buddhists, like his father, with some being Christian, like his mother. Some, he said, have also recently converted to Judaism. Many Vietnamese also practice ancestor worship regardless of what faith they profess, showing a form of religious syncretism.

“While in Israel, we still celebrate Tết Nguyên Đán, or the Vietnamese New Year,” he said. “There is no Buddhist temple, so we have to conduct ceremonies at someone’s home. It is a tight-knit group and most of us know each other,” he added.

Tongi speaks Hebrew and Vietnamese, but admits that he is not as fluent in his ethnic tongue as his three older siblings are. When he visited Vietnam in the past to see his parent’s home villages, many locals pointed out his foreign accent almost immediately.

While noting that many members of the community have since left Israel for the United States, France or other countries, including Vietnam, to him the Jewish state is home.

“Of course I’m a true Israeli. I love surfing in the morning, I speak Hebrew, I was born and raised here,” he said. “I’m sincerely grateful to this country for taking in my family and giving us the opportunity to rebuild our lives here,” he said.



(full article online)

45 years on, Vietnamese refugees are still writing their story in Israel

“Of course I’m a true Israeli. I love surfing in the morning, I speak Hebrew, I was born and raised here,” Tongi Noyan says.

www.jns.org

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

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[surada]

• The breakdown in Israel-Soviet relations was later compounded by Israel's defensive victories against the Arabs in 1967 and again in 1973. Over this period all hope of Israel becoming a Soviet client had steadily evaporated. Arab armies sponsored, trained and equipped by the USSR had been humiliated, and so had Moscow. Thus the Soviets progressively developed a policy of undermining Israel. Their primary objective was to use the country as a weapon in their Cold War struggle against the US and the West.
• "We needed to instil a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States." — Yuri Andropov, Chairman of the Soviet KGB, later General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, as reported by General Ion Pacepa, former chief of Romania's intelligence services.
• As well as mobilising the Arabs to the Soviet cause, Andropov and his KGB colleagues needed to appeal to the democratic world. To do so, the Kremlin decided to turn the conflict from one that sought simply to destroy Israel into a struggle for human rights and national liberation from an illegitimate American-sponsored imperialist occupier. They set about transforming the narrative of the conflict from religious jihad — in which Islamic doctrine demands that any land that has ever been under Muslim control must be regained for Islam — to secular nationalism and political self-determination, something far more palatable to Western democracies. This would provide cover for a vicious terrorist war, even garnering widespread support for it.
• To achieve their goal, the Soviets had to create a Palestinian national identity that did not hitherto exist and a narrative that Jews had no rights to the land and were naked aggressors. According to Pacepa, the KGB created the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the early 1960s, as they had also orchestrated so-called national liberation armies in several other parts of the world. He says the 1964 Palestinian National Charter was drafted in Moscow. This document was fundamental to the invention and establishment of an artificial Palestinian nationhood.
• The details of Moscow-sponsored terrorist operations in the Middle East and elsewhere are set out in 25,000 pages of KGB documents copied and then smuggled out of Russia in the early 1990s by senior KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin and now lodged in the UK, at Churchill College, Cambridge.
• The initial charter did not claim the West Bank or the Gaza Strip for "Palestine". In fact, it explicitly repudiated any rights to these lands, falsely recognising them respectively as Jordanian and Egyptian sovereign territories. Instead, the PLO claim was to the rest of Israel. This was amended after the 1967 war when Israel ejected the illegal Jordanian and Egyptian occupiers, and the West Bank and Gaza for the first time were re-branded as Palestinian territory.
• Moscow first took its campaign to brand Israeli Jews as the oppressors of their invented "Palestinian people" to the UN in 1965. Their attempts to categorise Zionism as racism failed at that attempt but succeeded nearly a decade later in the infamous UN General Assembly Resolution 3379.
• Zuheir Mohsen, a senior PLO leader, admitted in 1977: "The Palestinian people do not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity... Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct 'Palestinian people' to oppose Zionism. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity exists only for tactical reasons."
• The Mitrokhin documents show that both Yasser Arafat, and his successor as PLO chief, Mahmoud Abbas, now President of the Palestinian Authority, were KGB agents. Both were instrumental in the KGB's disinformation operations as well as its terrorist campaigns.
• For his dealings with Washington, Ceaușescu told Arafat in 1978: "You simply have to keep on pretending that you'll break with terrorism and that you'll recognize Israel — over, and over, and over."
• Ceaușescu's advice was reinforced by North Vietnamese communist General Vo Nguyen Giap, whom Arafat met several times: "Stop talking about annihilating Israel and instead turn your terror war into a struggle for human rights. Then you will have the American people eating out of your hand".
• Like his predecessor Arafat, Abbas's consistent rejection of every offer of peace with Israel, while concurrently talking the talk about peace and while sponsoring terrorism, shows the continuing influence of his Soviet masters.
• Meanwhile the Palestinian movement created by Moscow, in the words of American historian David Meir-Levi, is "the only national movement for political self-determination in the entire world, and across all of world history, to have the destruction of a sovereign state and the genocide of a people as its only raison d'être."
• Moscow's campaign was significantly undermined by the 2020 rapprochement between Israel and Arab states. The lesson here is the importance of American political will against authoritarian propaganda, which led to the game-changing Abraham Accords.

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The lie of "Israeli apartheid" was dreamt up in Moscow during the Cold War and driven home by a relentless Soviet propaganda campaign until it took hold in the UN and across the Middle East and the West. This included the repeated comparison of Israel with South Africa in the Soviet media and in books such as "Zionism and Apartheid", an official state publication of Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union.

The sometimes naive, sometimes malign students who will again be holding their poisonous "Israel apartheid week" at universities across the globe this year will be parroting the same Soviet propaganda as their predecessors have done for decades. They, and many other Israel-haters use the apartheid slogan regardless of the reality that under no rational measure can Israel be considered an apartheid state. They do so because its meaning is easily understood, it disgusts people and rallies them to the anti-Israel cause. That is why it was invented by Moscow.

Exposing the Lie of Israel Apartheid

The breakdown in Israel-Soviet relations was later compounded by Israel's defensive victories against the Arabs in 1967 and again in 1973. Over this period all hope of Israel becoming a Soviet client had steadily evaporated. Arab armies sponsored,

www.gatestoneinstitute.org

Operation Susanna drove Nasser into the arms of the Soviets.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Operation Susanna drove Nasser into the arms of the Soviets.

Nasser hated Jews. The Soviet hated Jews. That is what drove him to the USSR. As did Arafat.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Yesterday, US President Joe Biden landed in Israel for his first official visit as the American leader.

Shortly before he left on his trip, the president sat down with Israel’s Channel 12 News to discuss various issues, including Iran, Saudi-Israel normalization as well as the Squad’s obsession with hating Israel.

The president also had choice words for anti-Israel Democrats who spread lies about the Jewish state.

FEW & WRONG: Biden Blasts Squad’s Anti-Israel ‘Apartheid’ Slur | United with Israel

he American president had choice words for anti-Israel Democrats who spread lies about the Jewish state.

unitedwithisrael.org

 

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Ethiopian immigrant goes from shepherd to one of world's top head surgeons​

After making Aliyah, Mero Getta pursued his dream to become a doctor, inspired by his father's role as the village healer; 'My dream is very simple: Heal people and be a good doctor, and simultaneously, be a good dad and husband'​

Ethiopian immigrant goes from shepherd to one of world's top head surgeons

After making Aliyah, Mero Getta pursued his dream to become a doctor, inspired by his father's role as the village healer; 'My dream is very simple: Heal people and be a good doctor, and simultaneously, be a good dad and husband'

www.ynetnews.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Baha'i family in Iran whose home was burned down

From Iran International:

Security forces laid siege to a village in northern Iran Tuesday and started demolishing houses and farms belonging to members of the persecuted Baha’i faith.

Simin Fahandej, a spokeswoman for the Baha’i International Community, told Iran International Tuesday that over 200 security forces were deployed to block the roads leading to Roshankouh, a village in Mazandaran Province, and begin demolition of the houses and farms belonging to Bahai’s.

According to Fahandej, security forces arrested some Bahai’s who tried to stop the operations, confiscated mobile phones of some villagers to prevent them from recording videos and publishing them on social media, and warned locals not to take any photos or videos of their operations.

A video posted on social media by the Baha'i International Community Tuesday shows security forces using heavy construction machinery to demolish buildings in Roshankouh.

Since early June security forces and the judiciary of the Islamic have intensified pressure on the followers of the Baha’i faith, raiding over a dozen households, arresting tens including three of the former leaders of the community, and shutting down businesses.

Iran's persecution of Baha'i fits Human Rights Watch and Amnesty's definitions of apartheid far better than Israel's treatment of Palestinians. This was pointed out in an article by South African Winston Nagan for PBS back in 2012: "Having grown up with the indignities of the apartheid system in South Africa, I bristle whenever I hear anyone equate a government's treatment of a portion of its citizenry to apartheid. Usually, the claims are exaggerated. But in Iran today, the government's treatment of the Baha'i community bears striking similarities."

He pointed out:

Both Blacks in South Africa and Baha'is in Iran have been excluded from being legislators.

Both have been excluded from universities.

Both have been limited under the law from building their own educational institutions.

Both have been excluded from certain jobs.

Both have had their property confiscated for no reason.

Hundreds of members of both groups have been executed for their political beliefs.

Iran has even banned Baha'i from burying their dead according to their laws. It has demolished Baha'i cemeteries and built parks and cultural centers on top of them.

Since that article, things have only gotten worse:

Under Iranian law, Zoroastrians, Jews and Christians are the only religious minorities accepted. Baha'is are considered to be "unprotected infidels,"according to a July 2019 report by the UN special rapporteur to Iran, Javaid Rehman.

Despite facing persecution, Bahai's are forbidden by their faith to lie about their religion. This means that the new identity card application prevents them from applying for and obtaining official identification, as they cannot claim affiliation to one of the three legally recognized minority religions.

Iran's policy towards the Baha'i is arguably worse than that of apartheid-era South Africa towards Blacks, because it is meant to ultimately ethnically cleanse them from the country altogether - something that is nearly complete in Yemen.

Even though Israel has none of the discriminatory laws against Arabs that Iran has towards the Baha'i, major human rights NGOs have decided to declare only Israel guilty of apartheid. This hurts the Baha'i because these NGOs resist using the term anywhere else for their own anti-Israel propaganda purposes. This means that the Baha'i are not able to easily use that appellation to pressure Iran to treat them better.

Iran's persecution of Baha'i is real apartheid

Blogging about Israel and the Arab world since, oh, forever.

elderofziyon.blogspot.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Times of Israel reports:

A group of Palestinians took off to Cyprus on Monday, for the first time using Ramon Airport outside the southern city of Eilat as part of a pilot program allowing the facility to be used by residents of the West Bank for certain flights, part of a series of gestures from Israel aimed at easing the lives of Palestinians.

Until today, Palestinians wishing to fly abroad needed to travel to Jordan and board a flight from there, or secure a hard-to-come-by entry permit into Israel to fly from Ben Gurion Airport.

Arkia Airlines is operating the inaugural service, which is flying 40 residents of Bethlehem and Hebron from Ramon Airport at 11:30 a.m. to Larnaca. A return flight is scheduled for Friday. The route will also serve Israelis, who will be seated alongside the Palestinian passengers.

So much for "apartheid."

Who are the Palestinians traveling to Cyprus?

According to Ultrapal, they are doctors and pharmacists who work for a Ramallah-based pharmaceutical company who is paying for the trip. Their families are coming as well.

The employees were given a choice of whether they prefer to fly out via Amman or Ramon Airport. About 40 are leaving through Israel.

I wish my employer would pay for a free vacation for my family!

I can't determine which company is behind this. The Palestinian pharmaceutical sector is pretty successful; the largest company Jerusalem Pharmaceuticals has manufacturing facilities in Jordan and Algeria as well. There are several other major pharmaceutical companies in Ramallah.

Israel Hayom reports that when this initiative was first announced, many Palestinians expressed interest in taking the hours-long trip to Eilat to fly from Ramon, because travel to and from Jordan has been a nightmare.The Palestinian Authority has been discouraging Palestinians from using Ramon Airport, because anything that makes Israel look like anything other than a monstrous regime is anathema to them, and they would prefer their own people suffer than to allow them to benefit from anything Israel does to make Palestinian lives easier.

First Palestinians fly from Israel's Ramon Airport - and who they are may surprise you

Blogging about Israel and the Arab world since, oh, forever.

elderofziyon.blogspot.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

James Zogby is the founder and president of the Arab American Institute, Managing Director of Zogby Research Service which provides polling services, a visiting professor at New York University Abu Dhabi, and a former member of the Executive Committee of the Democratic National Committee. He is a leading anti-Israel voice in the media and social media.

On Saturday, he tweeted a link to Daniel Levy warning about Israel's reputation, saying, "It may be uncomfortable to some to hear the inescapable truth that Israel is an Apartheid State. The truth is often uncomfortable. And btw, it’s not antiSemitic to call Israel Apartheid - the problem is w/ Israeli behavior."

I responded with a thread:

I've looked at the actual legal definition of apartheid. Those accusing Israel of apartheid are knowingly lying. And I've shown this. No one has found any holes in my arguments.

Falsely accusing Israel of apartheid using made up definitions is indeed antisemitism.

And if you look at the history of the apartheid libel, it is blindingly obvious that the accusation came first, and the fake legal arguments were created after the fact to justify the lie.

B'Tselem's definition was absurd - it could prove that JEWS were victims of apartheid.




So HRW tried, very hard, to combine definitions from the Rome Statute with the ICERD to make it look like Israel was guilty of apartheid. But they ignored the part of ICERD that exonerates Israel. It was a conscious lie, and every legal scholar knows it.

Amnesty copied HRW's argument but tried to strengthen it by adding a 1971 case that they pretended is about apartheid - but it isn't.

It is clear: they all know they are wrong but they want to accuse Israel so much they MADE UP INTERNATIONAL LAW.

But even worse, in these NGOs' Jew-hating zeal, they want to make Israel look uniquely guilty. So the cases of real apartheid in the world, like Lebanese treatment of Palestinians, or Chinese of Uyghurs, others - are shunted aside and not given that label. Real victims suffer.

When you look at all the evidence and history (the Soviets made up the "Israel is apartheid" accusation originally) the desire to paint Israel with the label of apartheid has NOTHING to do with real facts, and everything to do with a desire to demonize the Jewish state. This is antisemitism, plain and simple.

My response received over 500 "Likes" and Zogby finally felt he could no longer ignore it, so he attempted to prove that, yes, Israel really is guilty of apartheid:

1. It’s apartheid when when Israel has two systems of law - one for Arabs & one for Jews; when they’ve expelled 750,000 from their homes & refuse to let them go back to their properties; when they’ve demolished 500 Palestinian villages, seized their land & businesses;…

To which I immediately responded:

Israel doesn't have two systems of law for citizens.

And what happened in 1948 was a war for survival, not apartheid.

But you know that. And lie anyway.

And, of course, by your definition every Arab country that expelled nearly all of their Jews are guilty of apartheid.
Not my definition - YOURS.
Trying to shoehorn a new definition of the term to fit Israel only is indeed antisemitic.

He responded:

It was a deliberate planned expulsion to remove Arabs from the Galilee, the coastal cites and areas around Jerusalem. Ben Gurion’s letters, Moshe Sharret’s diaries, & others have testified to this fact. & what they did afterwards to those whom they expelled made the intent clear

To which I said:

Then why are there still two million Arabs in Israel? If there was a policy to expel them, what is taking Israel so long?


And how does that relate to the LEGAL DEFINITION OF APARTHEID? I am giving a legal argument, you are throwing stuff at the wall and hoping something sticks.

He doubled down:

2…when they have laws that provide that the Arab land they’ve seized & turned over to Jews can never be sold to Arabs; when they continue to seize Palestinian land to build Jewish-only housing & infrastructure, while Palestinians struggle to get permits to build;…
3…when any Jew can immigrate & become a citizen while descendants of those who were expelled cannot; when Israel has multiple laws & policies in place to control what they call the “demographic problem” - that is limiting or controlling the growth of the non-Jewish population…
4. These policies & laws that favor the rights of one group at the expense of Palestinians , constitutes Apartheid. You may not like it, but don’t deny it. Have you no regard for the humanity of Palestinians; no compassion for the discriminatory polices to which they subjected?

But then he moved the goalposts:

5. The problem isn’t our calling Israeli behaviors Apartheid. To try to make that the issue is an effort to deflect. The problem is Israel’s behavior - that’s what must change. And stop resorting to calling antiSemitic anyone who criticizes Israel & defends Palestinian rights.

Zogby's entire argument, repeated at least three times, was "Israel is apartheid!" Yet when challenged, he changed it to "Don't get hung up on the precise definition of apartheid!"
So I called him on it:

No, I am saying when Amnesty or HRW claims Israel is guilty of apartheid, they are lying because it has a specific definition. You know that I am right. Which is why you are changing the subject.
By your argument, every Arab state is guilty of apartheid, because they define themselves as Arab and discriminate against non-Arabs for citizenship.
Tell me, are they guilty of apartheid or not? And why not?
You won't answer because you want to say ONLY Jews are guilty.
Yes, it is antisemitic to say that the Jewish people do not have the right to self-determination. It is antisemitic to apply terms like "apartheid" ONLY to the Jewish state. It is antisemitic to have one standard for the world and another for Israel.
This thread proves it.

James Zogby, the great intellectual defender of Arabs and highly regarded figure in Democratic Party politics, responded....by blocking me on Twitter.

In the end, even the most articulate critics of Israel and defenders of Palestinian intransigence know that they are using their intellectual gifts not in the service of truth but for lies. They assume that their ability to use propaganda methods and gaslighting is the same as real arguments. (For their antisemitic fans, it actually is.)

When their hypocrisy is clearly called out, outside their usual bubble, they try to reframe their arguments to what they think is more solid ground.
When called on that, they are left with only one recourse: shutting down the discussion.

When an anonymous blogger can so thoroughly dismantle the arguments of one of America's leading Arab intellectuals in the constrained format of Twitter, it shows that the anti-Israel side has no argument to begin with.

Their running away from debate proves that they know it, too.

I demolished James Zogby's "Israel is Apartheid" arguments on Twitter so thoroughly, he blocked me

Blogging about Israel and the Arab world since, oh, forever.

elderofziyon.blogspot.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Mainstream media would like to have you think that Jews and Arabs in Israel aren’t able to coexist peacefully let alone spend recreational time together.

Check out Jews and Arabs playing backgammon together in Jerusalem’s Old City and proving such claims are as false as can be.

Coexistence in Israel is real!

WATCH: The Game Bringing Jews and Arabs Together | United with Israel

While the world assumes that Jews and Arabs don't coexist, check out the game that proves such a claim is as false as can be!

unitedwithisrael.org

 

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Newest "Apartheid?" poster - Israel elections edition​

This photo is not from today, but it is such a great picture of Arabs participating in the democratic process - the exact opposite of how Israel haters frame things.

Newest "Apartheid?" poster - Israel elections edition

Blogging about Israel and the Arab world since, oh, forever.

elderofziyon.blogspot.com

 

[Sixties Fan]