The Right To Destroy Jewish History

[Sixties Fan]

Part 4

An adjective as such, ‘Palaistina’ was attributed to the larger and more important province of Syria, rendered as ‘Syria - Palaistina’ and denoting the southern part, somewhere from the anti-Lebanon mountains down to Arabia Petraea and Nabatea, and so named specifically to try and erase any Jewish connection to the land.


And so remained the usage of the word throughout subsequent Arabic - Islamic colonisation of the Middle East where it was picked up as ‘Jund Filastin’, bearing the typical p-to-f slide in Semitic languages. It is in this mispronunciation that Arab politicians still refer to this land.


But as empires raged on and Jews were relegated to distant lands and a perennially inferior position, unable and afraid to stake political claims, the eminent backwater nature of this land, and more prominently of Jerusalem, took its toll and saw initial promises of patronage trickle down to mere royal titles, such as those floundered by the House of Hapsburg or the Emirate of Transjordan.


Significantly, however, what buildings we now see in Jerusalem are patently not Arab but Turkish, as in Ottoman, particularly the fortified walls, initiated and paid for by Suleiman the Magnificent in 1537. Emphatically, there is no Arab architecture in Jerusalem.

Dome of the Rock

The only building in Jerusalem that might have some Arab heritage is the Dome of the Rock, its history itself a testament of colonialism and imperial abuse: as Christian Patriarch of Jerusalem, Sophronious, impudently disregarded Jewish rights on the city and surrendered it to invading Arab armies, the new colonial occupiers, wanting to show off the supremacy of their then-newly-found monotheistic religion against its precursor, renovated what seems to have possibly been an octagonal commemorative structure erected by the Romans on the ruins of (a temple to Jupiter, itself built on top of the desecrated ruins of) the Second Jewish Temple and erected a copy of the dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, furthering the colonial arrogance and disregard for older - and hence stronger - Jewish claims to that land.

Palestine: A story of Colonialism through the ages

Decades of media propaganda, academic mis-theorising and NGO support, banished common sense from the minds of brainwashed thousands. Op-ed.

www.israelnationalnews.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 5

Like the Romans, Christian, Arab/Islamic conquerers of Jerusalem boasted their conquest of Jewish homeland in vain attempt to portray their respective religions as superior, for, the logic went, if their God allowed for Jews to be made despondent, it must be that this is wholly deserved and righteous because their own deity is, logic would go, superior, aka “akbar”, i.e “bigger” in Arabic, from ‘kabir’ - ‘big’. So much did the Islamic Waqf of Jerusalem like this supremacist idea that in their 1925 guide to the Dome and its surroundings mentioned the tradition that the building stands on the ancient Temple of Solomon, never realising the colonial abuse inherited through the ages.


Such powers that be today do not seem to be as fond of this argument if applied in reverse, though, and hate when point is made that the same God that earlier allowed Jewish despondency, in 1948 re-granted Jews dominion over their homeland and allowed vastly larger foreign armies to be defeated by the nascent Jewish state - just as countless Jewish prophets prophesised - that God would re-gather its people to its homeland.



Such deep is the hate and fear for Jewish dominion over Jewish homeland that to this very day countries far and wide on the globe maintain their embassies to the Jewish State not in its designated capital city - like they do in any other country - Jerusalem, but in Tel Aviv.


With typical ambiguity then, in 1917, Britain picked up the word in question and made it into a country name in English as ‘Palestine’, bearing the common ‘-ne’ ending for names of countries.


In their plan to overthrow Ottoman control of the Middle East and fearful of jeopardizing the political double - no, triple - dealings they were playing at the time, specifically the negotiations with 1) the Zionist Movement represented by Chaim Weizmann, 2) a confederation of Arabian tribes lead by Sharif Hussein, King of Hejaz and 3) with France, represented by Picot, the British government issued the famous Balfour declaration, carefully wording it to specify support for re-establishment of the Jewish homeland “in Palestine” - and not ‘of Palestine’ as undoubtedly Weizmann pleaded for.



And thus, articulated in the English language of colonial reputation, has this word - and it promiscuous history - entered the international consciousness.


Building on the said ambiguity but also the British smart move of emphasising the geographic - administrative understanding of the term, both the worldwide Jewish community and gentiles initially made use of the word, understanding “Palestine” as a Jewish country. So revailing was this understanding that in a 1939 football match in Australia, the Israeli team is referred to as ‘Palestinians’,


But that, as all good things, was short-lived and the initial technical designation of the land and its inhabitants gave way to the intense politicisation of the word that followed overtures by Haj Amin al Husseini (not of local “Palestinian” but of foreign Hejazi Arab origin) to a Nazi regime bent on extending its own colonial arm all the way to the then-newly discovered gas fields in Iraq.


And so, misguidedly supported by Nelson Mandela, and empowered by Soviet propaganda against United States, the term made its way into polite society of NGOs and academia, leading to a plethora of equally misguided anti-colonial literature that now tried to portray ‘Palestine’ as an indigenous project.


And since academic virtue-signalling is really nothing much without the right dose of violence, the term made headlines around the world again during the First Intifada, that left behind some four years of atrocities, many dead and many more hurt.

Palestine: A story of Colonialism through the ages

Decades of media propaganda, academic mis-theorising and NGO support, banished common sense from the minds of brainwashed thousands. Op-ed.

www.israelnationalnews.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 6

And so we reach the zenith of this misnomer with the development and spread of the ‘Free Palestine’ slogan: based on decades of media propaganda, of academic mis-theorising, national funding from supposedly friendly countries, NGO and union support, common sense and reason seem to vanish from the minds and hearts of thousands of people, allowing themselves to be brainwashed and summoned at will on the streets of our cities only to tire their throats shouting this English language call replete with colonial abuse in an apparent deep - and how can it be other than - deliberate ignorance of its inherently genocidal and murderous aim.


And it is in this profoundly antisemitic usage that the word is circulated nowadays, aimed at denying Jews dominion and ownership of their homeland, at uniquely demonising and scapegoating every human failure on the Jews, at engendering exclusion of Jews in politics, academia and NGOs, at facilitating and normalizing further Arab colonization in Samaria and Judea, generously funded by the European Union and other ‘friends’, at allowing a sick immigration experiment to template future tactics of erosion of nationhood - that we now see in full swing with the Palestinization of Ukraine - , at obscuring international alliances, at tokenizing in foreign politics from Ireland to Venezuela and from Corbyn to the EU via Iran, at virtue-signalling to peers a disguised sense of superiority amongst GenZ, at whitewashing historical crimes for which guilt seems too much to bear, at passing as “White” profoundly POC people, the Jews.


And this is only about the notion of “Palestine”, let alone the reality, the reality of the vast amounts of money - I heard once that a full quarter of UN budget is used to attack Israel - poured into a myriad of organizations, one with a more nefarious activity than the other; the litany of articles, the intrinsic corruption of “Palestinian” organizations, like the PA, the torture, abuse and fundamental disregard for human rights at the hands of vast networks of organized crime that, under the serene eye of the UN and the world at large, have engulfed Arab towns in Samaria and Judea where Jews and Israel were blocked from exercising sovereignty but also the deep corruption of our Western leaders who pay lip-service to freedom and human rights while lavishing our tax money on perpetuating the sick notion of “Palestine”.

And I haven’t yet said a word about the equally colonial notions of ‘the 'West Bank'’ and ‘cis-Jordan’. Perhaps in a next article.

Palestine: A story of Colonialism through the ages

Decades of media propaganda, academic mis-theorising and NGO support, banished common sense from the minds of brainwashed thousands. Op-ed.

www.israelnationalnews.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

This Jerusalem Tour is One the Palestinian Arabs Don't Want You to See

Why? Because it further proves the Jewish connection to Jerusalem.

www.israelunwired.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

It's October, and Arab media are talking about their "victory" in the Yom Kippur War 49 years ago.

There is no doubt that the beginning of the war was disastrous for Israel, and the repercussions of that failure were felt for years.

But somehow the Arab media never mentions the position of the Israeli forces at the time of the final ceasefire:

1. The IDF surrounded Egypt's Third Army and Suez City inside Egyptian territory and could have crushed them.
2. There was nothing between the IDF and Cairo.
3. Israel ended up on the outskirts of Damascus.
4. Israel lost 114 planes during the war, but only 20 in battle. Israeli pilots shot down at least 450 Arab aircraft in dogfights.
5. About 2700 IDF soldiers were killed - a horrific amount. But Syria and Egypt lost over 11,000 soldiers.

By any objective measure, the Arab side lost badly. Calling it a "victory" is ridiculous. But when people have a zero-sum mentality, and they can see that Israel was hurt - which it was - they cannot distinguish between "Israel hurt" and "Arab victory."

Arabs still claiming to have won the Yom Kippur War

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

elderofziyon.blogspot.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

On the one hand, Nevel claims, “antisemitism is directed at Jews as Jews. Criticism of Israel or Zionism is directed at a nation-state,” implying that there is no connection between criticism of Israel and hostility towards Jews. But on the other hand, she wrote, “for many of us who are Jewish, we feel an obligation to make clear Israel does not have our support and to speak out about the injustices being committed.” If Israel is just any old nation-state, just like any other, then why does Nevel feel that being Jewish gives her a special obligation to speak about it?

She is, moreover, either blissfully ignorant of Jewish history, or appallingly disingenuous. She wrote:

Zionism is a political movement that resulted in the dispossession and expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their land and homes. Opposing that movement in favor of a movement that honors and respects all who live there is an important principle to uphold. That is not remotely antisemitic. In truth, conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism turns the focus far away from fighting antisemitism and envisioning a world in which all people are treated with dignity, and, instead, is about building support for Israel’s unjust, discriminatory system that privileges Jews over all others and continues to engage in land theft and enormous violence against Palestinians.

Of course, the Palestinian Arabs who became refugees in 1948 mostly fled from a war that they, along with five Arab nations, started. As CAMERA has written before,

Historians agree that there was no single cause of the Arab flight from Palestine. In large part, the masses fled because they saw the Palestinian elite doing the same thing. In part, it was in response to exhortations by Arab military and political leaders that Palestinian civilians evacuate their homes until the end of the fighting. Vast numbers were simply fleeing the heavy fighting that surrounded them, or that they expected to soon disrupt their lives. In some instances, Palestinians were forced from their homes by the Jewish military.

The Jews who lived in the war-affected area, in contrast, did not flee—because they had nowhere else to go.

Nevel also appears oblivious to 1300 years of history in which Jews who lived in Muslim-majority lands lived as second-class citizens known as dhimmis, a kind of Middle Eastern Jim Crow. Similarly, her claim that Israel engages in “enormous violence” against Palestinians ignores decades of terror attacks against Israeli civilians, wars launched by Hamas, and rejection of peace and independence offers. Her allegation of “land theft” is of course baseless.

Antisemitism is not simply, as Nevel claims, “like all forms of injustice.” It functions differently than other forms of bigotry; it can flourish in certain circles because it is viewed as “punching up,” and it often manifests as the demonization or delegitimization of the Jewish state. In order to fight it, people must understand it. That’s why IHRA is so important—and also why people like Nevel attack it.

(full article online)

Sun-Sentinel Opinion Writer Undermines a Crucial Tool for Fighting Antisemitism

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism has been adopted by 38 countries, a majority of US states, and most of the organized

www.camera.org

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 1


Roger Waters is on tour, and that means, unfortunately, that he’s back in the public eye. Rolling Stone has done a wide-ranging interviewwith him, that, to the magazine’s credit, pushed back on many of Waters’s most bizarre claims. (Roger Waters: A Contentious Political Discussion, October 4 on Apple Podcasts.) Both the print version and the podcast also included introductions that put some of those claims into context. Because, podcast host Brian Hiatt said, Waters’s tour provides him the opportunity to propagate his views to large audiences, the magazine felt they should take him seriously. Hiatt makes clear, however, “it’s not that we’re presenting this as something we endorse.”

Hiatt and journalist James Ball spent more than ten minutes introducing the podcast. Hiatt called Waters’s politics “fringe,” and said that, “sometimes he refuses to acknowledge what, I would think, the majority of experts agree to be facts on certain subjects.”

During the interview, Ball did an adequate job pushing back on some of Waters’s most outrageous claims, including that American and British Jews are responsible for Israeli actions “because they pay for everything.” And in the introduction, Ball notes that this assertion “ties into some very old and very dark tropes,” while Hiatt flatly says that Waters’s assertion that Jews don’t have ancestral ties to the region of Israel is “of course not true.”

Ball brings up the term “Gish Gallup,” which he calls “a form of argument … [in which] you throw out so many bad arguments quickly that the person arguing against either needs far more time and also a lot of knowledge to unpack it, [and] it won’t be very convincing to someone just coming to it cold.” This is something that anyone who spends time online advocating for Israel has likely experienced. Hiatt and Ball noted, however, that “it’s an interview, ultimately, not a debate,” so there were points at which it was necessary for them to simply move on. That’s where CAMERA picks up.

Waters’s Fundamentally Flawed Worldview

As the interview moved from discussions of Ukraine and Syria to a more general discussion of Waters’s philosophy, Waters brings up UK politician Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, who was recently suspendedfrom the British Labour Party for speaking at an event hosted by a group that was “banned by Labour … for downplaying claims of systemic antisemitism within the party.” After Waters described his letter in defense of Wimborne-Idrissi, Ball asked him, “it felt to me there was a sense that when there are clashing narratives, as you research, is your first principal, believe the less powerful, the less privileged group? Would that be fair?” Waters responded, “partially, I suppose, but mainly that is because the oppressor normally has a closer grip on the narrative, so they can write the narrative, but at a certain point sometimes things become much more graphic and clearer and the narrative starts to slip from their grasp, again like I would say like Israel Palestine now, but even when it does it’s still very difficult for the oppressed to get out from under the heel of the jackboot.”

This is an important insight into Waters’s views, and shows how Waters’s entire view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is based fundamentally on a flawed perception of reality. Although Waters clearly considers Israel the “oppressor,” it is Israel that has a free press, and Israel whose citizens have free speech and freedom to participate in organizations critical of the government. In the West Bank and Gaza, in contrast, it’s the PalestinianAuthority and Hamas, respectively, that keep a “close grip on the narrative.” But Waters proceeds on a faulty assumption that privileges the Palestinian narrative. In other words, he’s got everything backwards.

He exemplifies this backwardness immediately, as he goes on to say of the Palestinians, “we were sort of living here and then you came along and tried to throw us all out and now you’re killing us all, and we have no recourse to the law… Palestinians … don’t even have a right to life.” Can you count the number of outright falsehoods in that passage?

Ball does make an admirable attempt to put Waters into context, but his interview is not error-free either. For example, he refers to “Israel and Palestine,” seemingly unaware that there is not, and never in history has been, any sovereign entity known as “Palestine.”

In addition, Ball refers tangentially to the “absolutely appalling killing of Shireen” Abu Akleh. This is an example of an incident in which it was the Palestinians, and not the Israelis, that had the “close grip on the narrative.” As CAMERA has detailed at great length, the actual facts were far more complicated than the narrative that was widely presented.

Waters, however, takes off from Ball’s comment about Abu Akleh, saying, “every Palestinian shot to death by the IDF is appalling.” In every modern, western system of law, killing in self-defense or defense of another is considered justified. But for Waters, Israelis alone lack the right to self-defense. And later on in the interview, Waters claims Israelis “are trying to force the Palestinians into another intifada. … they’re murdering so many Palestinians every day now, the time will come when there will be another armed uprising.” So he engages in victim-blaming, claiming that Palestinian violence against Israelis is the fault of Israelis, even while describing Israeli defense against that violence as “murder.”

Waters on Antisemitism

When Ball asks Waters, “where is the gap between being very critical of Israel and being antisemitic?” Waters responds, “nowhere near the IHRA definition.” He then goes on to attribute the definition to someone called “George Steven, George somebody or other, who wrote it,” who has since come out against it. Waters appears to be thinking of Ken Stern, a critic of the IHRA definition who has attempted to take much of the credit for it. But as the actual drafters have written, “this is simply not true.” (Fifty-one out of the 53 members of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish organizations, including CAMERA, have endorsed the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, as have 38 countries, the U.S. Education Department, and a majority of U.S. states.)

Ball then asks what it is about the IHRA definition Waters objects to, and Waters replies, “well, that it says that criticism of Israel is antisemitic, it’s simple.” This is just another of Waters’s flights from reality; in fact, the definition says the exact opposite: “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.”

Ball does attempt to push back here, distinguishing between criticism of Israel and criticizing “the right of Israel to exist.” Waters’s contempt for Israel comes through in his voice as he says, “the right of Israel to exist as an apartheid state, complaining about that, saying Israel does not have a right to exist as an apartheid state any more than South Africa did, or anywhere else would, is not antisemitic.” Waters claims, “it’s not disapproving of the people who live there, or the Jewish faith … it’s disapproving of the fact that they are a supremacist settler colonialist project that operates a system of apartheid.” But, again as CAMERA has detailed at great length, calling Israel a supremacist and/or an apartheid state is itself an antisemitic libel. Israel is a multi-ethnic democracy in which all citizens have equal rights.

When Ball attempts to push back on the term “settler,” Waters sounds as if he is frothing at the mouth: “There are seven hundred thousand settlers!” He seems to be referring to Jews who have bought land and built homes in the disputed territory of Judea and Samaria, frequently called the West Bank. Waters is quite angry at Jews for daring to live in a place where some people think they shouldn’t. But there’s no legitimate legal or moral reason that Jews shouldn’t live in the West Bank.

At one point, Waters tries to rely on the ADL to claim that he is not antisemitic. But the ADL has written of him, “his activism has increasingly been characterized as playing into antisemitic tropes, including those about Jewish or “Zionist” power; comparing Israel to Nazi Germany; and disparaging anyone who conveys even tangential support for Israel’s existence.” It then goes on to provide examples of “inflammatory and/or antisemitic statements from Waters.” And when Ball brings this up, Waters replies that he doesn’t “waste his time reading the ADL.”

Roger Waters and the Gish Gallup

Waters claims that he’s “absolutely not” antisemitic, yet he uses euphemistic language to argue against the existence of one tiny state in which Jews

www.camera.org

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 2

The Gish Gallup Continues

Jews have lived there “no longer than Arab people have,” Waters claims, and “those people are not from there, they are not the descendants of indigenous people who’ve ever lived there, they’re all from Northern Europe or America, or somewhere else, so that people of the Jewish faith from other places who’ve come to Israel and then gone over the border into a country that is not Israel, contravening the Geneva Conventions and the UN Charter and settled the land, in absolute contravention of the Fourth Geneva Convention and all international law, they are settlers and occupiers of the land. It is not theirs, they have no right to it historically, whatever is written in the Old Testament or the New Testament.” Again, try to count the number of false statements (for hints, click the added links).

Model of Second Temple, which was destroyed in 70 CE
Waters, like many people, is completely ignorant of the history of the region so it must be reiterated here: the Arabs conquered and occupied the Levant in the seventh century, roughly two thousand years after the Jewish tribes established their first kingdom there. Jews have been living on that land continuously for 3,500 years.

Twice, Waters argues that non-Jews living in Israel should have equal rights – seemingly unaware that they already do. In the second of those instances, he misquotes the Balfour Declaration, which refers to “the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities,” and does not even use the word “indigenous” as he claims it does, to refer to Palestinians.

Waters responds “yes,” when asked whether Israel should be able to continue to exist if it were to find a two-state solution or a negotiated solution that, in Waters’s view, would no longer qualify it as an “apartheid state.” Later on, however, he says that the two-state solution is “gone … and everybody with half a brain agrees that there is no two-state solution.” But Waters ignores, or perhaps is actually oblivious to, the fact that it was the Palestinians who repeatedly rejected plans that would have created the “two-state solution”: in 1948, in 2000, in 2008, in 2014, and again in 2020. If indeed the two-state solution is dead, it was the Palestinian leadership that killed it. Yet Waters would have Jews give up their own autonomy in retribution for Palestinian actions.

The only conceivable solution, Waters claims, is “a single state where everybody is a citizen and everybody has equal political rights.” So in Waters’s view, Israel should be able to continue to exist only if it ceases to be the world’s only Jewish state, and becomes, instead, the world’s 57th Muslim majority state. That’s just a semantic game. His goal is to eliminate the Jewish state.

In the Muslim-majority state that Waters envisions in what is now Israel, Israeli Jews will “just have to get on with it.” He continues, “no one is suggesting that they all have to leave, which is what they suggested to the indigenous people.” Of course, to repeat, it’s the Jews, and not the Arabs, who are indigenous. More importantly, the assumption that if Jews return to minority status, they will be able to “just … get on with it,” is divorced from history. For most of the time that Jews lived as minorities in Arab lands, they were subjected to second-class or “dhimmi” status; a kind of Middle Eastern Jim Crow. As dhimmis, Jews, as well as Christians and other religious minorities for that matter, among other restrictions, “were excluded from public office and armed service … were forbidden to bear arms. … not allowed to ride horses or camels, to build synagogues or churches taller than mosques, to construct houses higher than those of Muslims or to drink wine in public. … not allowed to pray or mourn in loud voices-as that might offend the Muslims. The dhimmi had to show public deference toward Muslims-always yielding them the center of the road.” Jews living as dhimmis in Arab lands were periodically subjected to violence with no recourse.

When Ball asks whether, in light of the Holocaust and the “incredibly traumatic birth of Jewish Israel,” Waters can sympathize with the need for a Jewish-majority state, Waters briefly concedes that point but then, shouting, claims, “their way of going about not letting that happen is criminally insane! And we can all see it from here!” Here, again, it’s Waters’s outsized anger that gives him away.

Theodor Herzl wrote The Jewish State in 1896, in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair.
Regarding Waters’s use of the phrase, “from the River to the Sea,” Ball asks, “are you aware it’s used as a shorthand for either the annihilation of Israel or to suggest Jewish people have no claim to any of the land on which Israel sits.” Waters responds, “bollocks, it’s just a geographical description of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, it has no connotation to me apart from that.” Can you imagine Waters telling African Americans that blackface is “just make-up,” and that they should forget the historical context that makes it so offensive to them, because “it has no connotation to me apart from that”? That’s roughly the equivalent of what he’s saying to Jews.

The creation of Israel was not predicated on the age-old persecution of the Jews; the founding of Israel is established in international law, based on Jewish indigeneity in the land, and won in a defensive war against multiple Arab states. But some history is instructive: In the wake of the Dreyfus affair, Jews began to realize that without a state of their own, they would never be safe from antisemitism. In the wake of the Holocaust, the nations of the world agreed. Waters claims that he’s “absolutely not” antisemitic, yet he uses euphemistic language to argue against the existence of one tiny state in which Jews control their own destiny and can find refuge from persecution. This is either denying the extent and depth of antisemitism, or denying Jews the right to determine their own response to it. That in itself is antisemitic.

Roger Waters and the Gish Gallup

Waters claims that he’s “absolutely not” antisemitic, yet he uses euphemistic language to argue against the existence of one tiny state in which Jews

www.camera.org

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

[ When Jews fall asleep, they help the enemy ]

In an interview with the Arabic-language channel Hala TV, Prime Minister Yair Lapid embraced wholeheartedly the Arab terminology regarding the Temple Mount––the site of two Jewish temples––when he announced: “We are not changing the status quo at Al Aqsa.”

Lapid is notorious for not being the brightest candle in the Menorah, and if you check, you’ll find numerous YouTube clips featuring him claiming the astronomer Copernicus was an ancient Greek (he was an early Renaissance-era Pole), and insisting Rosinante was Don Quixote’s lover (it was his horse). So, he probably wasn’t even aware of his faux pas. But when the Arabs say “Al Aqsa,” they don’t refer to the mosque at the edge of the sacred compound, they mean the entire compound, and so, right off the bat, Shulamit Lapid’s slower child erased 3,000 years of Jewish history and didn’t even know it.

“We will secure the religious rights of Muslims in Al Aqsa,” Lapid continued. “It’s our duty as a government to offer the freedom of worship to any Muslim who wants to pray in Al Aqsa,” adding that his government maintains ongoing communication with Jordan and the Jordanian Waqf agency that runs the site, to make sure Muslims are not denied their God-given rights of worship.

As to Jews, remember them? “We permit the entry of Jews, but we don’t permit Jewish prayers on the Temple Mount (he got it right this time – DI). They ascend and are under supervision to make sure the status quo is not broken.”

“The status quo will not be broken,” he concluded resolutely.

Indeed, Defense Minister Benny Gantz and Internal Security Minister Omer Barlev have made very similar statements. But coming from the prime minister with such clarity, it is obvious that this not-very-bright man, who has been getting by on his looks and theatrical skills, should not be in office.

It’s also true that under his predecessor, and, hopefully, replacement, Benjamin Netanyahu, the same status quo was being claimed, but Netanyahu’s Justice Minister Amir Ohana maintained a wink and nudge enforcement policy whereby Jews were allowed to hold afternoon minyanim on the Temple Mount and police turned a blind eye.

Veering Further Left, Lapid Bans Jewish Prayer on Temple Mount

“The status quo will not be broken,” he concluded resolutely.

www.jewishpress.com

 

[rylah]

[ When Jews fall asleep, they help the enemy ]

In an interview with the Arabic-language channel Hala TV, Prime Minister Yair Lapid embraced wholeheartedly the Arab terminology regarding the Temple Mount––the site of two Jewish temples––when he announced: “We are not changing the status quo at Al Aqsa.”

Lapid is notorious for not being the brightest candle in the Menorah, and if you check, you’ll find numerous YouTube clips featuring him claiming the astronomer Copernicus was an ancient Greek (he was an early Renaissance-era Pole), and insisting Rosinante was Don Quixote’s lover (it was his horse). So, he probably wasn’t even aware of his faux pas. But when the Arabs say “Al Aqsa,” they don’t refer to the mosque at the edge of the sacred compound, they mean the entire compound, and so, right off the bat, Shulamit Lapid’s slower child erased 3,000 years of Jewish history and didn’t even know it.

“We will secure the religious rights of Muslims in Al Aqsa,” Lapid continued. “It’s our duty as a government to offer the freedom of worship to any Muslim who wants to pray in Al Aqsa,” adding that his government maintains ongoing communication with Jordan and the Jordanian Waqf agency that runs the site, to make sure Muslims are not denied their God-given rights of worship.

As to Jews, remember them? “We permit the entry of Jews, but we don’t permit Jewish prayers on the Temple Mount (he got it right this time – DI). They ascend and are under supervision to make sure the status quo is not broken.”

“The status quo will not be broken,” he concluded resolutely.

Indeed, Defense Minister Benny Gantz and Internal Security Minister Omer Barlev have made very similar statements. But coming from the prime minister with such clarity, it is obvious that this not-very-bright man, who has been getting by on his looks and theatrical skills, should not be in office.

It’s also true that under his predecessor, and, hopefully, replacement, Benjamin Netanyahu, the same status quo was being claimed, but Netanyahu’s Justice Minister Amir Ohana maintained a wink and nudge enforcement policy whereby Jews were allowed to hold afternoon minyanim on the Temple Mount and police turned a blind eye.

Veering Further Left, Lapid Bans Jewish Prayer on Temple Mount

“The status quo will not be broken,” he concluded resolutely.

www.jewishpress.com

Actually he didn't, and can't.

The Waqf is now more concerned with
'unidentified Jews' praying inside that Mosque.
And the Western Wall plaza, including the valleys
leading to it and the caves on the side, are not enough
for the streams of Jewish pilgrims coming from everywhere.

Now I agree - let's not fall asleep, our direction is the Temple Mount.

×ר ×××ת ××ש×ת - ×קצת ×ק×××ת ×¢××× ×ר×× ××ר ×××ת ×ס×××ת

אלפי עולי רגל גודשים את הר הבית בסוכות - כן ירבו • עדין חסרים רבבות יהודים שיגידו: חזרנו לאבא! • הבאנו מקצת מהקולות והמראות בחצרות בית ה' • כל יהודי שעולה בטהרה להר הבית מוסיף אור ומקרב בעוד משהו את בניין המקדש • חג שמח לכל בית ישראל!

har-habait.org

×ר ×××ת ××ש×ת - ש×× ×× ×××× ××: ××תר ×-7,000 ×¢××× ×¨×× ××ר ×××ת ×××× ×ª×©×¨×

עלייה דרמטית במספר עולי הרגל לתפילות בהר הבית • 7,130 יהודים מראש השנה • זינוק של 33% לעומת אשתקד • בחג הסוכות לבדו עלו להר הבית 4,673 יהודים

har-habait.org

 

[Sixties Fan]

One of the most absurd fronts in an ongoing Arab/Palestinian war on Israel’s legitimacy is the fight about food. Israelis are accused of food imperialism, i.e. appropriating Palestinian foods and even of “cultural genocide.” For example, James Zogby, founder and president of the Arab American Institute, tweeted in 2017:



CAMERA’s Gilead Ini examined this rhetorical offensive in depth, exposing the falsity of the underlying accusations as well as the motive behind them, in his 2020 Commentary article. As he pointed out:

The delegitimization of Israeli food is a predictable outgrowth of a broader campaign to denigrate Israel itself and to deny the culture and humanity of its Jewish citizens….
…If you take a map and highlight locales where hummus has long been a staple, you’d end up with florescent yellow across Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and the Palestinian-ruled West Bank and Gaza; and also Jaffa, Tiberias, Abu Ghosh, Akko, and Daliyat al-Karmel—towns and cities in Israel. Try as some might to scrub it away, Israel remains on the map of the Middle East…
…But it will remain the case that Israel is on the map; that Israeli towns, like Palestinian ones, are celebrated for Levantine cuisine; that Israeli citizens, both Arab and Jewish, are weaned on that food; and that Jews, whether Ashkenazi or Mizrahi, are not strangers in the land of their forefathers.

The inane offensive over ownership of original recipes as part of a campaign against the Jewish state would not succeed without the aid and abetment of the mainstream media. And the New York Times is the latest to join in.

In “Preserving a Palestinian Identity in the Kitchen,” (online-Oct. 19; print-Oct. 20, 2022) New York Timescontributor Aina J. Khan cites a Franco-Palestinian chef who created a cooking video series “aimed at reclaiming a cuisine that is part of a broader Arab tradition involving foods like hummus, falafel, tabbouleh, fattoush and shawarma that he felt was being co-opted by Israeli cooks.” She features and highlights his outlandish accusations:

“Food is being used to normalize the Israeli occupation by denying the origin of everything from hummus to falafel,” Mr. Kattan said. “The images of our grandmother’s hands working in the kitchen, rolling the vine leaves, dipping the bread of the mussakhan in oil.” He added, “These are images of beauty that are being stolen from us.”

That the food angle is just an excuse to expand on the greater theme of an illegitimately-created Jewish state is soon made clear by the article’s author. She writes:

Before 1948, when over 750,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes or fled as the state of Israel was created, a mass displacement Palestinians call the nakba or “catastrophe,” about three-quarters of the Palestinian population lived in villages centered around agriculture…

In fact, Palestinians were displaced, not as the result of the establishment of the Jewish state but as the result of a war of aggression launched by Arab armies to annihilate it. Most estimates of the numbers of Palestinians displaced as a result of this war vary between 500,000 -600,000, with the vast majority of Arab refugees having fled in advance of the fighting, to escape the fighting, or at the behest of Arab leaders who urged them to temporarily leave their homes during the fighting. Although there were some instances where Arabs were expelled from their homes by Jewish troops during the hostilities, these represented only a small minority of those who were displaced.

Khan further emphasizes the theme of Jewish dispossession of Arabs when she writes of large areas near Haifa having been “originally allocated to a putative Arab state by the United Nations in 1947” that “were occupied by Israeli soldiers in 1948 after Arabs rejected the U.N [partition] plan….Many Palestinian families returned to razed homes and slaughtered livestock.”

Again, it was not that Arabs passively rejected the U.N. plan that led to Israeli soldiers occupying the area, but that they launched an aggressive war, in violation of the UN Charter, besieging Jewish communities and attacking Jewish defense troops. That property and lives were lost during these hostilities was a direct result of the illegal and ill-conceived attempt by Arab leaders to annihilate the Jewish state. Disingenuously leaving out relevant parts of the story implies Israeli guilt; It is an easy way to attack Israel.

The New York Times has been increasingly showcasing the claims of anti-Israel activists and promoting their propaganda against the Jewish state, be it under the guise of a film review, and now, cuisine and food preparation. It is yet another entrée into the wholesale delegitimization of the Jewish state, in an attempt to make it more palatable to the general public.

New York Times Joins the Food Battle Against Israel

One of the most absurd fronts in an ongoing Arab/Palestinian war on Israel’s legitimacy is the inane fight about who owns the original recipe

www.camera.org

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

A Guardian op-ed (“This is why Liz Truss’s plan to move the British embassy to Jerusalem must be stopped”, Sept. 30), by London-based academic H.A. Hellyer, included the following claim:

To move the embassy to Jerusalem would be to recognise Israel’s invasion and occupation of east Jerusalem as legitimate.

The claim was repeated in a subsequent sentence:

To recognise the invasion and occupation as legitimate would also come at a time when the UK is rightly aiding and assisting Ukraine in its struggle against Russia’s invasionand occupation.

The word “invasion” is important, as the author uses it in an effort to draw an absurd comparison between Israel’s defensive war in 1967 and Russia’s unprovoked invasion, and partial occupation, of Ukraine.

However, the historical record is clear, as even the Guardian’s own coveragehas made clear.

On June 5th, hours after the war began, Israel sent a message to Jordan, which (illegally) controlled east Jerusalem, pleading with them to stay out of the conflict.

However, decieved by false Egyptian claims that the Arabs were winning the war, King Hussein ordered his army to attack Israeli west Jerusalem and moved infantry across the armistice lines. Jordanian forces took the Government House, the UN headquarters on the Biblical “Hill of Evil Counsel” in the no-man’s land between the two countries, directly threatening Israeli positions in southern Jerusalem.

Israel responded to Jordan’s attack with a counter-attack, which ultimately resulted in Israeli control of that part of the city.

The author – who, it should be noted, wrote an op-ed last year suggesting that Israelis insisting on the right of their country to continue existing as a Jewish state are arguably racist – responded to our tweet alerting him to the error with a GIF of a man yawning:




Evidently, Hellyer, whose area of specialty includes the Middle East, finds historical accuracy regarding his region of expertise a bit boring.

Guardian writer yawns when told of his Six Day War error

A Guardian op-ed ("This is why Liz Truss’s plan to move the British embassy to Jerusalem must be stopped", Sept. 30), by London-based academic H.A. Hellyer,

camera-uk.org

 

[Sixties Fan]

The Jewish people never really left the Holy Land. Certainly, many were killed or expelled at the time of Masada and later, but many Jews continued to live in “Palestine” (the name given by the Romans after the Bar Kochba revolt, 132-135 CE) for a considerable time afterward. The evidence is clear from the extensive archeological sites visible today, such as those at Beit Alpha, Beit She’arim, Tzippori (Sepphoris), Baram, and many others. Jews formed a majority of the population of Palestine until at least the fifth century CE, and an autonomous Roman-recognized Jewish patriarchate in Palestine existed until 429 CE.

Archeological ruins point to the establishment of more than 80 synagogues, particularly in the Galilee, during the six centuries after the destruction of the Temple. After Masada, the Jewish population was substantial enough for three serious revolts against Roman or Byzantine rule to occur; the last one, against the Emperor Heraclius, was in the seventh century.

Evidence from the Cairo Genizah, and the writings of the Spanish-Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela, indicate that Jews continued to inhabit a number of towns, including Jerusalem, after the Byzantine defeat by the Arabs under Omar Ibn Al Khattab in 637, and even during Crusader rule. In fact, the 12th century witnessed an upsurge in Jewish immigration from Europe; 300 rabbis from England and France, including a number of prominent Tosafists, immigrated to the Holy land in 1211, while the noted Spanish rabbi and philosopher Nachmanides (the Ramban) made aliyah in 1267.

The Jewish population increased and decreased as a function of immigration, natural disasters, and disease. The expulsions from Spain (1492) and Portugal (1497) led to the establishment of a sizable 16th century Jewish community in Tzfat (Safed), one that became a major Judaic center, as well as an important focus for the wool trade and the textile industry.

An earthquake destroyed the entire Jewish Quarter of Tzfat and part of Tiberius in 1837, and thousands of Jews died. Nevertheless, substantial numbers of Jews continued to inhabit other centers, such as Hebron and Jerusalem.

In the late 1700s and early 1800s, well before the onset of the First Aliyah in 1881, significant numbers of Hasidic Jews, as well as their rivals — the followers of the Vilna Gaon — made aliyah. By the mid 1800s, Jews constituted a majority of the population of Jerusalem.

Others have made the same observation I am making here. Bari Weiss refers to an inconvenient truth — that there has been a Jewish presence in the Land of Israel since the destruction of the Temple.

Tarek Fatah, a Canadian journalist of Pakistani origin, was even more explicit in an article in the Toronto Sun (2020). Fatah writes, “…far from being European occupiers of Palestine, as we were told, the Jews had been living around Jerusalem and the Levant for more than a millennium. In fact, it was the Arabs under Umar Al Khattab who first occupied the lands of Palestine.”


(full article online)

An Inconvenient Truth: The Jewish People Never Left the Land of Israel

A general view shows the plaza of the Western Wall in Jerusalem, amid the coronavirus pandemic, May 6, 2020. Photo: …

www.algemeiner.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

Israel is not a settler colonialist state.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(full article online)

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese's report to the UN is Soviet-level anti-Zionist propaganda

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

elderofziyon.blogspot.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]