Israel and West Bank Settlements

[jhu72]

What the heck... “Finish Them!”...

Them being Hamas. What's the problem with that?

... it is naive. Israel has put itself in a position where it can't finish them, even if the US gave them all the bombs they think they need. The more Palestinians die, the more Israel loses.

[PizzaSnake]

What the heck... “Finish Them!”...

Them being Hamas. What's the problem with that?

How do you defeat an idea? Hamas, as reprehensible as they are, did not spontaneously arise from nothing. It is an inevitable reaction to the past history in the area.

And you can say the same exact thing about the hardline Israeli reaction...inevitable reaction to pas history in the area.

70+ years of this line of thinking has done......what, exactly for both sides?

They're doing this to themselves....both sides. Both sides are losing this unending battle.

Because both sides honestly hate each other and are unwilling to ever compromise. I'm no expert but I don't see a light at the end of the tunnel. I would like to see a two state solution. Under the right leadership Gaza would be a gem on the Mediterranean. Kinda like what Beirut went through decades ago. I believe they are slowing coming back.

Just skip the warehousing of huge quantities of ammonium nitrate…

[cradleandshoot]

What the heck... “Finish Them!”...

Them being Hamas. What's the problem with that?

How do you defeat an idea? Hamas, as reprehensible as they are, did not spontaneously arise from nothing. It is an inevitable reaction to the past history in the area.

And you can say the same exact thing about the hardline Israeli reaction...inevitable reaction to pas history in the area.

70+ years of this line of thinking has done......what, exactly for both sides?

They're doing this to themselves....both sides. Both sides are losing this unending battle.

Because both sides honestly hate each other and are unwilling to ever compromise. I'm no expert but I don't see a light at the end of the tunnel. I would like to see a two state solution. Under the right leadership Gaza would be a gem on the Mediterranean. Kinda like what Beirut went through decades ago. I believe they are slowing coming back.

Just skip the warehousing of huge quantities of ammonium nitrate…

Otherwise know as fertilizer. When my unit was at the JOTC in Panama we had an interesting class. He was a wiley hard ass hard core veteran of too many tours of duty in Vietnam. Any paratrooper that had a gold star above his jump wings was badass all day long. The Viet Cong may have come up with possibly the first truly effective IED. It was as simple as simple could be. A galvanized bucket, a heaping helping of chickenchit, a healthy amount of anything sharp a flint and a piece of wire. It also required a good week or so to simmer in jungle. Crude yet very effective.

[Typical Lax Dad]

It such a mess in that region. Going to get worse before it ever gets better.

[old salt]

Before the territories comprising Gaza & the West Bank were lost to Israel in the Arab-Israeli Wars, they were part of Egypt & Jordan respectively, & their Palestinian residents were citizens of those countries.

Now that Israel & all the other Arab nations are apparently willing to live together in peace (except for Iran's proxies), maybe it's time for the Palestinians, & the territory they occupy, to return as citizens & sovereign territory to Egypt & Jordan. Other wealthy Arab nations who seek regional peace & stability could finance the rebuilding, resettlement, & economic development.
Make it an opportunity, not a burden, for Egypt, Jordan, Israel & the region.

[Typical Lax Dad]

https://apple.news/AfipnWe9VQ5avRfB--Ge9QA

[jhu72]

The Israeli government banned (gaged) the reporting of the Mossad threating international prosecutors by Haaretz two years ago, now being reported by the foreign press. The story is now coming out more widely at a worse time for the government. It is what fascist governments do.

[a fan]

Before the territories comprising Gaza & the West Bank were lost to Israel in the Arab-Israeli Wars, they were part of Egypt & Jordan respectively, & their Palestinian residents were citizens of those countries.

Now that Israel & all the other Arab nations are apparently willing to live together in peace (except for Iran's proxies), maybe it's time for the Palestinians, & the territory they occupy, to return as citizens & sovereign territory to Egypt & Jordan. Other wealthy Arab nations who seek regional peace & stability could finance the rebuilding, resettlement, & economic development.
Make it an opportunity, not a burden, for Egypt, Jordan, Israel & the region.

+1. Pump money in, as you and I have been saying. Make it an economic success.

[jhu72]

May 22, 2024, residents of Palm Beach County filed a groundbreaking lawsuit alleging that the county comptroller and clerk of the Circuit Court, Joseph Abruzzo, violated his fiduciary duty by investing $660 million of local tax revenues in Israel bonds in the months following the October 7 attack.

Palm Beach is now the single largest investor in Israel Bonds. The investment amounts to 15% of the county's investable dollars. There is no market for the bonds and they are at below market rates, the bonds must be held to maturity.

The Israel Bond story

[jhu72]

Fascist Israeli finance minister vows to turn the West Bank to ruins.

[PizzaSnake]

May 22, 2024, residents of Palm Beach County filed a groundbreaking lawsuit alleging that the county comptroller and clerk of the Circuit Court, Joseph Abruzzo, violated his fiduciary duty by investing $660 million of local tax revenues in Israel bonds in the months following the October 7 attack.

Palm Beach is now the single largest investor in Israel Bonds. The investment amounts to 15% of the county's investable dollars. There is no market for the bonds and they are at below market rates, the bonds must be held to maturity.

The Israel Bond story

Ah, A Fan's and OS's "money pump" gambit. Just the wrong target...

Joseph Abruzzo had better hope this "investment" works out -- rich people really don't like it when people steal from them.

[jhu72]

KKR CEO and wife make $20 million donation to Harvard. So much for the monied class boycotting the Ivies.

[a fan]

May 22, 2024, residents of Palm Beach County filed a groundbreaking lawsuit alleging that the county comptroller and clerk of the Circuit Court, Joseph Abruzzo, violated his fiduciary duty by investing $660 million of local tax revenues in Israel bonds in the months following the October 7 attack.

Palm Beach is now the single largest investor in Israel Bonds. The investment amounts to 15% of the county's investable dollars. There is no market for the bonds and they are at below market rates, the bonds must be held to maturity.

The Israel Bond story

Ah, A Fan's and OS's "money pump" gambit. Just the wrong target...

Joseph Abruzzo had better hope this "investment" works out -- rich people really don't like it when people steal from them.

Who's the target, if not Palestine?

[a fan]

May 22, 2024, residents of Palm Beach County filed a groundbreaking lawsuit alleging that the county comptroller and clerk of the Circuit Court, Joseph Abruzzo, violated his fiduciary duty by investing $660 million of local tax revenues in Israel bonds in the months following the October 7 attack.

Palm Beach is now the single largest investor in Israel Bonds. The investment amounts to 15% of the county's investable dollars. There is no market for the bonds and they are at below market rates, the bonds must be held to maturity.

The Israel Bond story

Whoa.

[jhu72]

META and OpenAI disrupt Israeli covert operation.

[OuttaNowhereWregget]

Pro-Palestinian protesters rally outside Warren’s Cambridge home
By Danny McDonald Globe Staff, June 2, 2024


CAMBRIDGE — More than 100 pro-Palestinian demonstrators, many of them Jewish, rallied outside the home of US Senator Elizabeth Warren on Sunday afternoon, urging the Massachusetts Democrat to do more to stop the bloody conflict in Gaza.

The protesters shut down the leafy side street just off Massachusetts Avenue, chanting “Free, free Palestine” and “What is your red line?” and singing “We Shall Not Be Moved.”

“I’m absolutely sickened by what’s going on,” said Rabbi Shifra Freewoman, a Jamaica Plain resident. “I feel like a genocide is being committed in the name of the Jews, in the name of protecting us. I think it’s so wrong.”

The rally was organized by IfNotNow Boston, a Jewish group that supports an end to what it calls “US support for Israel’s apartheid system.”

Some of the demonstrators carried banners, one of which called out the state’s two senators by name: “Warren and Markey no $ for war crimes.” Others carried smaller placards, reading “Let Gaza Live” and “No safety in apartheid.”

Last week, an Israeli airstrike ignited a fuel tank and triggered a fire that killed at least 45 people at a refugee camp in the Gazan city of Rafah. The tent camp inferno has drawn widespread international outrage, including from some of Israel’s closest allies, over the military’s expanding offensive into Rafah.

The deaths in Rafah were a driving force behind Sunday’s demonstration, with organizers calling it a “barbaric massacre.”

“We as American Jews are horrified that these massacres are being committed in our name,” said Isaiah Newman, a member of IfNotNow Boston and a Cambridge resident.

Newman was among those to call Warren out for hypocrisy, saying the senator has recently called for a cease-fire but last month voted to send billions in military aid to Israel.

“This is horrific and we think this is aligned with dangerous pro-war lobbying groups,” he said.

A Warren spokesperson declined to comment on the demonstration.

Fawaz Abusharkh, of Boston Coalition for Palestine, was born in Gaza. He said he was at the rally “for me, for my people, we are being slaughtered, we are being killed.”

“We need to do something,” he said. “It has to stop.”

To drive home the point that the demonstrators thought Warren has blood on her hands, some protesters covered their hands in red paint. Others wrote out chalk messages on the street in front of her house: “No bombs for Israel” and “Genocide is not a Jewish value.”

About 10 uniformed police officers stood on the sidewalk nearest Warren’s house as the rally unfolded.

During the demonstration, one man, Alex Safian held aloft an Israeli flag and walked among the crowd. He was followed at times by Cambridge police officers and security for the rally. Safian yelled “Kapo!” repeatedly at one of the rally’s speakers, a term referencing Nazi concentration camp prisoners who supervised their fellow inmates during the Holocaust.

Safian said he was there “because of people who have no idea what they’re talking about.” Hamas, he said, are the ones who brought disaster upon Gaza and Israel, and he accused the Cambridge protesters of supporting Hamas.

“In order to solve this problem, Hamas has to go,” said Safian, a Cambridge resident. As he spoke to the press, one protester yelled that he was a racist.

The demonstration came one day after Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, called a permanent cease-fire in Gaza a “nonstarter” until long-standing conditions for ending the war are met, appearing to undermine a proposal that President Biden had announced as an Israeli one.

Israel on Friday confirmed its troops were operating in central parts of Rafah. The ground assault has led around 1 million Palestinians to leave Rafah and thrown humanitarian operations into turmoil. The World Food Program has called living conditions “horrific and apocalyptic” as hunger grows.

Sunday’s action was the latest local demonstration related to the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict. Last week, in another part of Cambridge, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s university-wide commencement was disrupted by pro-Palestinian protesters with a couple hundred demonstrators walking out of the ceremony.

Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.


Danny McDonald can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @Danny__McDonald.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/06/02/ ... idge-home/

[Seacoaster(1)]

The left is not a monolithic think-tank. It is literally no surprise at all that folks on the left would be sharply divided over the Israeli-Hamas war and the United States' activities and diplomacy related to it. The media prefers to note the strife within the always shaky coalition that is the left in this country, rather than focusing on the intractable choices on every conceivable side of the issue.

[OuttaNowhereWregget]

The genocide claim against Israel doesn’t add up
The ratio of combatant-to-civilian casualties in Gaza should be recognized as a historical achievement of protecting civilian lives
By SHLOMO COHEN and YAACOV SAMET 2 June 2024


“The genocide in Gaza” cause has been roiling university campuses in the US and around the globe. The genocide accusation is the subject of a lawsuit filed by South Africa against Israel at the International Court of Justice and has been repeated by a few other countries, some scholars, endless activists, and one US congresswoman. Its political importance is not restricted to Israel. President Biden, it is argued, might be punished in the upcoming elections by progressive voters for complicity with this alleged genocide. The accusation could thus exert tremendous influence on world politics. This is a fascinating socio-political phenomenon since it is easy to prove that there is no genocide. Here we present a once-and-for-all clear-cut refutation.

To sustain the charge of genocide, the Genocide Convention (1948) requires that one prove both an “intent to destroy” a group and that acts were committed to implement that intent. Since intent is elusive, battles of narratives with respect to it can be interminable. Implementation, on the other hand, refers to empirical facts, and here the numbers swiftly refute the possibility of genocide – indeed, they attest to the exact opposite.

It is widely admitted that Israel has a right to retaliate against the perpetrators of the October 7 massacre and to seek to free its hostages, yet Israel is accused of leading a military offensive that resulted in an excessive – and therefore unjustified – level of civilian casualties in Gaza. While no one seems ready to offer a criterion for “excessiveness,” one parameter that would be flatly incompatible with genocide is an inordinately low combatant-to-civilian ratio. That this is precisely what the numbers show has been intimated but never properly demonstrated.

Numbers provided during war are never accurate, but let us work with the numbers we have. On February 29, the Gaza authorities reported a total of 30,035 Gazans dead. On the very same day, the Israel Defense Forces tallied the number of killed Hamas militants in Gaza at “over 13,000.” (Multiple analyses – e.g. here, here, and here – make the numbers released by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry extremely hard to believe, but we’ll treat them as accurate anyway; and if, for argument’s sake, we believe Hamas, it behooves us to believe Israel too.)

Now thirteen thousand militants out of 30,000 total dead spells a combatant-to-civilian ratio of 13:17. During war people do not stop dying of non-war-related reasons, however. The CIA World Factbook assesses 3/1000 deaths yearly in the Gaza Strip. This translates to about 2,500 non-war-related deaths between October 7 and February 29 (given a population of 2.1 million). Since Hamas militants make up about 1.5% of the Gazan population, virtually all these 2,500 deaths are civilians. Hence the war-related combatant-to-civilian ratio drops to 13:14.5. Of course, not all civilians who died of war-related reasons died because of Israel: Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fired some 12,000 rockets during this war, roughly 12% of which fell within the Gaza Strip. That’s 1,440 rockets falling indiscriminately on civilians. Hamas also opened fire on civilians who tried to follow IDF instructions and evacuate the fighting zones so as to stop serving as Hamas’ human shields. And so on. We do not know how many civilians died in these ways, but it is reasonable to conclude that the combatant-civilian death ratio stands at about 13:14, which is less than 1:1.1.

And now the crucial question: What should we make of this figure? It can only be evaluated meaningfully by comparison to historical references. The combatant-to-civilian ratio of wartime casualties varies widely according to the character of the war theater. A wide comparative historical analysis suggests a (conservative) ratio of 1:1 on average. Crucially, however, in urban warfare the ratios climb very sharply. The Washington DC-based Center for Civilians in Conflict reports that “In cities […] civilians account for 90 percent of the casualties during war.” Similarly, in its global survey of armed conflicts from 2011 to 2020, the NGO Action on Armed Violence found that “91% of those reported killed or injured by explosive weapons in populated areas were civilians.” Even when attacks were “explicitly coded as targeting armed actors” specifically, civilian casualties in populated areas still accounted for 69%. The (less than) 1:1.1 ratio of combatant-to-civilian casualties of war in the inordinately densely populated Gaza Strip is astonishingly low in historical comparison. Not only is this conceptually incompatible with genocide – it is its very polar opposite.

Notice also that since the 1:1.1 ratio is inordinately low compared to the norm in urban warfare, then even if, hypothetically, the final true numbers turn out to be doubly worse, they would still be low in historical comparison and therefore incompatible even with a prima facie suspicion of genocide.

Since nobody attributes to the IDF extreme ineptitude in killing, the 1:1.1 ratio of combatant-to-civilian casualties achieved in Gaza should be recognized as a historical achievement of protecting civilian lives. Thus the numbers also testify to a lack of genocidal intent.

War is invariably replete with human tragedies. Nothing written here overlooks this. Our point is only that a historically low overall ratio of combatant-to-civilian casualties refutes the possibility of genocide. Stories of specific tragedies are surely an important aspect of the coverage of war; but focusing exclusively on those at the expense of the overall statistics amounts to informational manipulation.

The conclusions presented here are based on simple reasoning and information available to all. That the ICJ judges in The Hague, who proceed with the genocide trial, cannot produce simple reasoning is deeply disturbing. If they can, yet proceed, this is alarmingly worse. The Jewish people and the Jewish State have been repeatedly victims of blood libels. This looks like yet another one – if you just do the math.


Shlomo Cohen is an associate professor of philosophy at Ben-Gurion University, specializing in ethics, and a medical doctor. His book The Concept and Ethics of Manipulation is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

Yaacov Samet is a vascular surgeon. He is a major in the IDF, who has served for months in the Gaza Strip during Iron Swords.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-genoc ... nt-add-up/

[OuttaNowhereWregget]

The progressive left hates the Jews
The bigotry is obscured by identity politics, which provides an excuse to ignore Hamas’s terrorism and violence against Jews
JUN 4, 2024, 4:23 PM


The following is an edited and adapted excerpt from Blindness: October 7 and the Left, a long-form essay published by Jewish Quarterly.

The Corbyn era was an extremely weird time for British Jews, but an eye-opening one, and I now think it prepared many of us for the left’s reaction to October 7, whereas American Jews I know seemed far more surprised. The gaslighting (it didn’t happen), the defenses (and if it did, they deserved it), the hectoring moral superiority (how can you care about that when this is so much more important?): all that we saw after October 7, we had seen under Corbyn. It also woke me up to something that I really hadn’t understood before: the progressive left hates the Jews.

Now is not the place to rehash the (many) examples of Jeremy Corbyn’s jaw-dropping attitudes towards Jews, never mind Israel, ideas some of us naively thought had died out with Stalin. Those are specific to Corbyn, whose political relevance is now, thankfully, in the past. But two general truths emerged from that era that would prove extremely relevant after October 7. The first was how little people across the left cared when Jews pointed out the obvious antisemitism they saw in the Labour Party. In 2018, 86 percent of British Jews said they believed Corbyn was antisemitic, and still the left supported him, and still The Guardian backed him in the 2019 general election.

The left doesn’t care about antisemitism if they deem it inconvenient to their cause. They just call it “anti-Zionism” and carry on, and that was – it turned out – a good lesson to learn. There was another lesson, too. Corbyn railed frequently against the horrors of Israel, and yet he had frequently been a paid contributor to Iranian and Russian state TV. He had referred to Hamas and Hezbollah as “friends” in a parliamentary meeting, and after October 7 initially refused to describe Hamas as a terrorist group. I was surprised by how little Corbyn’s hypocrisy and blindness to Islamist terrorism bothered the young progressive left. Then he was pushed out of Labour in 2020 and I dismissed him as a classic useful idiot – which was right – and a blip, an aberration, one I needn’t think about again – which was wrong. Because then October 7 happened. I realized that the Corbyn era had opened a Pandora’s box and some ghosts cannot be controlled.

Antisemitism found a new point of entry through identity politics, which was developed on US and – to a lesser degree – UK university campuses over the past 20 years. This ideology has now escaped to the wider world as students schooled in it have moved into workplaces. Identity politics argues that in order to see the world clearly, we need to divide it up into particular group identities, specifically racial and sexual identities, and quantify the degrees of their oppression. As Yascha Mounk writes in The Identity Trap, adherents of identity politics believe that, in the name of fairness, liberal democracies need to jettison universal values such as free speech and respect for diverse opinions – values long championed by the Jewish Diaspora. Instead, we should now see everyone through the prisms of race and sexual orientation and treat them differently, depending on their identity group and how much oppression they have historically suffered.

Identity politics has proven astonishingly influential, especially in shaping US and UK policies, and no doubt many people pushing it are motivated by good intentions. (Some, of course, are pure grifters.) I initially assumed that a fear of being called racist had lobotomized them so they were unable to see the obvious idiocies of this ideology. (Is a poor white man in Glamorgan really more privileged than an extremely wealthy Black man in Nairobi?) But the more identity politics took hold, the more I understood that a lot of people on the left just want a very simple way of looking at the world, and they crave a group they can hate with impunity.

Identity politics is a zero-sum game, and for one group to be all good, the group with competing rights must be all bad.

*

It’s a similar story with the progressive left’s reaction to Israel and Palestine: a lot of it is about antisemitism, but identity politics obscures the bigotry, giving the left a preeningly self-righteous excuse to ignore Hamas’s terrorism and violence against Jews.

In March 2024, the progressive literary magazine Guernica took down an article by Joanna Chen, an Israeli translator who works for a non-profit that helps Palestinians, because it dared to express sorrow for the Israeli hostages as well as the people in Gaza. This, Guernica’s publisher explained, made the article “an apologia for Zionism and the ongoing genocide in Gaza”. In fact, Chen’s article was the opposite. But it didn’t paint Israelis as uniformly evil, and so it had to be deleted.

David Baddiel’s bestselling book about antisemitism,Jews Don’t Count, was published two years before October 7 and it addresses why the left is so antipathetic to the idea of Jews being oppressed. Baddiel memorably describes Jews as “Schrödinger’s whites,” meaning their whiteness depends on the politics of the observer. The far right sees them as suspicious, foreign and not white, whereas the left sees them as extremely white because they can pass as non-Jews. In fact, because of the left-wing antisemitic stereotypes about them – that they’re rich and powerful oppressors – they aren’t just white, they are ultra-white.

Since October 7, this perception of Jews and Israelis as being extra-white has been especially popular. “YOU’RE EITHER ON THE WHITE OR RIGHT SIDE OF HISTORY,” one popular march placard has it, with images of the Israeli, British, American and French flags on one side, and the flags for Palestine, East Turkestan, the DRC and Sudan on the other. Never mind that around half of Israelis are Mizrahi, meaning they have roots in North Africa and all over the Middle East, and are descended from the Jews who were kicked out of those regions in 1948. So, very much not white.

*

Another of the central tenets of identity politics is that all oppressions are linked, so LGBTQ+ rights are the same as Palestinian rights, and so on (never mind that same-sex sexual activity is illegal in Gaza). Consider the sign outside an independent bookshop not far from my house that promises books about: Palestine, Feminist, LGBTQ+, Black Struggle, Migrants.

This is why so many Western activists – especially in the US – see the Palestinians as akin to black slaves and the Israelis as plantation owners, with a total lack of embarrassment about their historical ignorance. But the progressive left’s determination to see the Middle East through the prism of the US and UK reveals their arrogance and their ignorance. And given how horrified they profess to be about colonialism, it is a ludicrous irony that they narcissistically colonize the Middle East conflict with their own – entirely different, entirely irrelevant – Western issues. Israel and Palestine have nothing in common with the gay rights movement in the US or the desegregation of the American South, and while stupidity plays a big part in why so many people in the West believe otherwise, there are other issues, too. For some people online with big followings, there’s a lot of brand-building going on here, as they loudly reassure their followers that Palestine and Israel are a simple matter of good versus evil. Few things attract more followers on social media than someone reassuring them that they’re good and this other group is bad.

But the enthusiasm with which the West has taken up this idea suggests something else, too: how better to absolve your guilt about your own country’s historical wrongs than by dumping them on other countries now? The sheer volume of comparisons between anti-Black racism and Israel and Palestine coming especially from American activists strongly hints that there is more than a little displacement going on, and identity politics enables it. It is, I think, no coincidence that it was South Africa that accused Israel of genocide. For a start, South Africa is one of a very select group of countries that has diplomatic relations with Hamas, and so was predictably slow to speak up about October 7. It was even slower to speak out against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In a final twist of gruesome irony, only a week before South Africa accused Israel of genocide, the country’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, welcomed Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, a Sudanese warlord whose militia is accused of genocide in Darfur. Still, what better way to cleanse oneself of uncomfortable accusations than to point the finger at someone else?

*

Identity politics simplifies the world into literal black and white. But Jews complicate this because they are historically oppressed and yet are seen as successful and, in regards to Israel, in a position of power over the Palestinians. “Jews have always been a glitch in the binary of identity politics, and Israel is a glitch in it, because colonization as an idea is completely wrong, but at the same time, most colonists were not refugees,” says Baddiel.

But if you see the world this way, only in terms of the victimizers of the victimized, then you don’t see Jews as the victimized because they’re seen as white. So when Jews talk about antisemitism, I think it sounds to a lot of people like posh aristocrats claiming there’s a leak in their ancestral home when everyone else is going through a cost-of-living crisis.

In November 2023, the actress Susan Sarandon spoke at a pro-Palestine rally in New York, declaring that Jews who were feeling fearful of the rising antisemitism were “getting a taste of what it feels like to be Muslim in this country, so often subjected to violence.” She was then dropped by her talent agency and apologized on social media, saying “the phrasing was a terrible mistake.” But there’s no possible phrasing that would have made it better, because the sentiment was plain. Sarandon was clearly so wedded to the idea of Palestinians as victims and Jews as privileged oppressors that she could block out the murder of 11 Jews in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, the murder of four people in a targeted attack on a kosher deli in Jersey City the following year, the attack on a Texas synagogue in 2022, during which four Jews were taken hostage by a gunman, and so on.

Jews are, in fact, the biggest target of religious hate crimes in the US by an enormous margin. And that’s not even counting that – in living memory – American universities used to have quotas on the number of Jews admitted, and that Jews were explicitly or implicitly excluded from many sections of American public life well into the mid-20th century. I don’t know why actors are invited to talk about anything, given their literal job is to speak words other people have written for them. But Sarandon gave a handy insight into the amorality – or simple stupidity – required to subscribe to this progressive-left antisemitism.

*

It’s been an especially strange time to be a Jewish woman on the left. When we explain why we might not want trans women in our single-sex spaces, referring to past experiences of male violence, we are accused of  “weaponizing our trauma.” When we talk about our fear of Hamas, because Jews have some experience when it comes to genocidal fascist groups, we’re accused of “weaponizing the Holocaust.” Women in general – like Jews – tend not to be believed anyway when they describe violence committed against them. After all, according to a recent annual report from the victims’ commissioner for England and Wales, only 5% of reported rapes result in charges being brought, never mind convictions. So when stories started to emerge fairly soon after October 7 that Hamas had committed horrific sexual violence during the pogrom, I knew the reaction would be bad. I hoped, given we’d so recently come through the #MeToo movement, with its urgent messaging that women should be believed, that it wouldn’t be too bad. I was wrong.

The October 7 rapes of Israeli women – and men – were so brutal that Meni Binyamin, the head of the International Crime Investigations Unit of the Israeli police, said it was “the most extreme sexual abuses we have seen.”

It took UN Women fifty days even to acknowledge that these sexual assaults had happened. When Reem Alsalem, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, was asked why, she reportedly replied that the evidence of rape was “not solid,” even though there was video footage of Israeli women with blood-sodden crotches and reports from witnesses about dead Israeli women’s mutilated vaginas. On October 30, almost 150 “scholars in feminist, queer and trans studies” signed an open letter implying that to support Israeli women was to endorse “colonial feminism.” Not a single UK charity that purports to protect women from violence condemned Hamas’s brutality – except Jewish Women’s Aid. After I wrote an article in the Jewish Chronicle asking how this fitted in with [the charities’] feminist credentials, they replied with a statement saying that the reports of Israeli women being raped were merely “the Islamophobic and racist weaponization of sexual violence that presents it as an Arab, as opposed to a global, problem.”

In an attempt to make people believe what had actually happened on October 7, the IDF compiled and edited the footage they had from Hamas’s GoPro cameras, made it into a film, called Bearing Witness, and took it around the world to show small, carefully selected audiences. Most journalists who watched it wrote afterwards about how traumatizing they found it. Others had different reactions.

The far-left activist Owen Jones, The Guardian’s most high-profile journalist, went to a screening of Bearing Witness and afterwards posted a 25-minute video review. He claimed that “the purpose of the film was made very clear: that we were to ‘bear witness,’ as it was repeatedly put, to the horrors committed by Hamas and also make the PR case for Israel’s onslaught against Gaza.” Others who attended the screening told me that no one said any such thing – the purpose was to provide video footage of the pogrom. Jones said, “If there was rape and sexual violence committed, we don’t see that on camera,” apparently unaware that the IDF had already said it only included footage that “preserved the dignity” of those killed.

When progressive-left identity politics takes you to a place where you are jazz hands-ing away the rapes of Israeli women by fascist Islamists, maybe you should ask yourself if this movement has outlived its purpose.

Identity politics has filled the gap left by the fall of communism, when people on the left could identify as part of a distinct tribe and duly subscribe to all of its beliefs, no matter how absurd, self-defeating and cruel…. It reveals such vanity, but also such bankrupt intelligence, this desire to outsource any critical thinking to an external, prefabricated ideology. And identity politics, like communism, like fascism, gives license to its followers to celebrate sadism and dehumanize entire demographics. Perhaps the thing that surprises me the most about human nature, even in my mature middle age, is how enduring this desire is.

—

This post is an edited excerpt from Blindness: October 7 and the Left, an essay published by Jewish Quarterly, which produces four long essays a year exploring Jewish culture and history. More information at: https://jewishquarterly.com/

ABOUT THE AUTHOR - Hadley Freeman is a Sunday Times columnist and author, whose books include House of Glass: The Story and Secrets of a Twentieth-Century Jewish Family and Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia.

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-pro ... TUuMC4wLjA.

[PizzaSnake]

Has the forum also been targeted?

“ campaign last year targeting U.S. lawmakers and the American public with pro-Israel messaging, as it aimed to foster support for its actions in the war with Gaza, according to officials involved in the effort and documents related to the operation.

The covert campaign was commissioned by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, a government body that connects Jews around the world with the State of Israel, four Israeli officials said. The ministry allocated about $2 million to the operation and hired Stoic, a political marketing firm in Tel Aviv, to carry it out, according to the officials and the documents.

The campaign began in October and remains active on the platform X. At its peak, it used hundreds of fake accounts that posed as real Americans on X, Facebook and Instagram to post pro-Israel comments. The accounts focused on U.S. lawmakers, particularly ones who are Black and Democrats, such as Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader from New York, and Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, with posts urging them to continue funding Israel’s military.

ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, was used to generate many of the posts. The campaign also created three fake English-language news sites featuring pro-Israel articles.
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The Israeli government’s connection to the influence operation, which The New York Times verified with four current and former members of the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and documents about the campaign, has not previously been reported. FakeReporter, an Israeli misinformation watchdog, identified the effort in March. Last week, Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, and OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, said they had also found and disrupted the operation.

The secretive campaign signals the lengths Israel was willing to go to sway American opinion on the war in Gaza. The United States has long been one of Israel’s staunchest allies, with President Biden recently signing a $15 billion military aid package for the country. But the conflict has been unpopular with many Americans, who have called for Mr. Biden to withdraw support for Israel in the face of mounting civilian deaths in Gaza.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/05/tech ... media.html