Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Everybody in the Biden administration is all juiced up to reward Hamas for attacking Israel by giving the Palestinians a state, one presumably run by the Palestinian Authority (PA). People who make this suggestion, who include Biden and his running dog Anthony Blinken, seen to be ignorant of the fact that the PA is a terror-promoting organization that in some ways is even worse than Hamas, for it produces schoolbooks that have brought up generations of Palestinians to hate and want to kill Jews.
If you want to know why neither Hamas nor the PA (nor even a revised version of the PA) should be running Gaza and the West Bank after the war, read the Tablet piece below, which is reasonably short and full of facts. The author, Gaudi Taub, is also a broadcaster, a screenwritere, and a historian. Click the headline; it’s a free read:
The title of the article is startling, but it is accurate. For the PA has placed a value on the stipend a terrorist will get depending on how many Jews he’s planned to hurt, actually hurt, or killed. And the more Jews you kill, the more money a jailed Palestinian gets, all through the “Martyr’s Fund” described in Wikipedia. (It’s often called “pay-for-slay”.) I and others have talked about it before, yet many people still seem surprised that it exists. Not only that, but it’s funded in part by American taxpayers (via fungible money we give to NGOs, which becomes extra money for the PA), and, if the terrorist is killed (and becomes a martyr, or shahid), the terrorist’s family gets a stipend for life.
Now if anything is genocide, a program whereby Palestinians are financially rewarded for killing Jews is that. Imagine if Jews got paid for each Palestinian they killed! The world would be outraged, and it would properly be called “genocide” (which Israel is not committing now).
The Martyr’s Fund takes up a huge portion of the PA;’s budget: about 7%, and according to Tablet ,the PA considers it the most important item in its budget, one that cannot ever be dispensed with. Below is a table of what dead Jews are worth to a jailed Palestinian; monthly stipends to prisoners (or their families) are calculated based on the time a terrorist is sentenced to jail. (A New Israeli Shekel is worth 27¢ U.S, so divide by about four to get the monthly salary in dollars.
The PA, as I said, also creates and promotes terrorism through its schools, producing materials that are also used in UN (UNRWA) schools:.
Schools are a critical part of the socialization of Palestinian children into this culture. Not only do Palestinian school books contain direct incitement in the form of explicit murderous antisemitic ideology, but also every subject, including grammar and math, drills the same message into children’s brains. Take the following exam questions that Shemesh cites (p. 20):
“Hamas shoots a rocket which weighs 50 kilos in the direction of occupied Tel Rabia [Tel Aviv], which is 90.25 kilometers away. What speed does it need to fly, what would be the maximum height, and how long will it take it get there?”
Or:
“Two people are carrying on their shoulders a coffin weighing 200 Newton in the funeral of a martyr weighing 800 Newton.” The students are asked to calculate the strength the two men would need.
. . . . In other words, the cult of death reigns everywhere you turn. Regardless of how much well-meaning Israelis tried desperately to imagine otherwise over the years, the Palestinian national ethos is built around a genocidal war to ethnically cleanse Palestine, from the river to the sea, of Jewish presence.
Finally, the PA itself not only encourages terrorism, but also practices terrorism:
By now, moreover, we know that PA security forces personnel are directly involved in terror attacks. In fact, even as the press in Israel and in the West tries to ignore it, PA officials brag about their complicity in terrorism in Arabic to their own people. They cannot stand to lose their competition with Hamas in the national Jew-killing contest.
A Palestinian Media Watch report published in February, titled “Terrorists in Uniform,” quoted a PA spokesperson bragging that “roughly 63-65% of the number of Martyrs in the West Bank … are members of the Fatah Movement. And most of them are members of the [PA] Security Forces or their sons.” The police forces Israel armed and the U.S. military trains are active participants in the terror they were supposed to stop. Using the guns we gave them to stop terror, they instead kill Jews—in the process securing the livelihoods of their families.
There’s more, but just these three aspects of PA-induced terrorism should make Americans very wary of trying to have the organization help run a postwar government in Gaza—or any government ruling entities created in the now-impossible “two state solution. One of the morons who’s been roped into PA corral is Thomas Friedman of the NYT, who seems to have ignored this:
Regardless of this bloody track record, the White House and the State Department, along with pro-Democratic Party Israeli think tanks, former IDF generals nurtured on a woke ideological diet in American universities, and the Israeli press, are careful to maintain a conceptual barrier between Hamas as a terror organization, and the PA. The latter, they maintain, is a crucial partner in the fight against terrorism—the same PA that, in reality, glorifies and incentivizes terrorism.
The last sentence—the “solution” that Thomas Friedman, Biden, and Blinken love so much—is risible. No, the PA will never be “a crucial partner in the fight against terrorism”, for it is an explicit promoter of terrorism. If you hear somebody touting the PA as a “nicer” version of Hamas, one that can work with America, remember the things above, especially the pay-for-slay program.
The Tablet article ends eloquently:
Less than two weeks after the Oct. 7 attack, the PA’s Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs included an infamous Hadith—a saying attributed in the tradition to the messenger of Islam—in its official guidelines that provided imams with talking points to use in their Oct. 20 Friday sermon in Palestinian mosques. The Hadith says that judgment day will only come after the believers have exterminated the Jews. On that day, it says, even rocks and trees will help in the cause of jihad. They will say, “Oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew hiding behind me; come and kill him.”
This horrific image, nature itself partaking in ridding the world of the unnatural Jewish scourge, is even more jarring against the backdrop of the Oct. 7 attack on the Nova nature festival, where partygoers attempted to hide behind rocks and bushes in the Negev desert to escape the slaughter.
The PA, the U.S. partner that Washington wants to put in charge of Gaza, has since added the families of the “martyrs,” the terrorists who were killed while committing the horrors of that terrible Shabbat morning, to the list of pay-for-slay beneficiaries.
Yes, the trees all say to come and kill the hiding Jews.
Every day rockets are fired from southern Lebanon into northern Israel by the terrorist group Hezbollah, funded by (of course) Iran with the purpose of destroying Israel. (Israel only strikes back when Hezbollah does this, but never initiates firing.) Sometimes the Western press reports on this near constant rain of missiles, but often it doesn’t.
I haven’t, for example, seen much news about the Hezbollah rocket that actually hit an Israeli hospital last Thursday, but, thank Ceiling Cat, it didn’t explode. However, the Hezbollah missile rain is near constant, for the group is located right up to the border between Lebanon and Israel. If Israel had fired such a rocket at Palestine, targeting only civilians in a hospital, the world would have been outraged.
Another thing that few people know, but should, is that the United Nations has a substantial force of “peacekeeping” troops in Lebanon—thousands of them—tasked with preventing terrorists from coming close to the Israeli border, and ensuring peace in the country. But they don’t do their job, and nobody forces them to, as the troops are afraid of Hezbollah and the United Nations is cowardly and hypocritical. Hezbollah is located right up to the of Israel, and UN troops just observe and cower as the rockets are fired.
The troops are members of UNIFIL, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, originally established in 1978 to ensure Israel withdrew from Lebanon after a battle, and to buttress the elected Lebanese government—a parliamentary democracy— in running the country, as well as restoring security and peace in general. Later, in 2006, a UN resolution dictated that any terrorists were not to operate from south of the Litani River (in red below), which is about ten miles north of the border with Israel.
Unfortunately, the UN has failed. There is no peace and security in Lebanon. Hezbollah has become the de facto government of Lebanon: no ministers or President can be chosen without Hezbollah’s approval, and for the past two years there’s been no President of the country because Hezbollah hasn’t found one to its liking. Despite UN restrictions, Hezbollah operates south of the Litani River, where UN troops are supposed to be the only armed force, and fires rockets from that area.
Did I mention that the U.S. helps fund UNIFIL?
Why isn’t there an outcry about this egregious violation of a UN mandate? You already know, of course: it’s okay to violate a UN mandate if the violation is bad for Israel. (Look at UNRWA!)
The article below (click headline to read), which is short, gives you ten facts YOU NEED TO KNOW about UNIFIL, and yes, you do need to know these things. It’s from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a nonprofit think tank. If you doubt the claims, check them yourself.
I’ll quote just the first five facts, plus the last one on US funding, so you can see how the UN is operating in Lebanon. But it’s useful to read the whole short piece.
UNIFIL was established in 1978 to end war, restore peace and security
On March 11, 1978, Lebanese-based terrorists massacred 38 Israeli civilians near Tel Aviv, including more than a dozen children. Three days later, Israel invaded Lebanon to push terrorist groups away from Israel’s northern border. In response, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) called for Israel to withdraw and established UNIFIL on March 19, 1978, “for the purpose of confirming the withdrawal of Israeli forces, restoring international peace and security and assisting the Government of Lebanon in ensuring the return of its effective authority in the area.” Following the arrival of UNIFIL forces four days later, Israeli forces withdrew from hard-won positions in Lebanon.
Despite UNIFIL’s presence, Hezbollah’s military infrastructure dominates southern Lebanon
UNIFIL’s failure to counter Hezbollah has enabled an extraordinary military buildup by the Iran-backed group, including its accumulation of an estimated 150,000 rockets and missiles. Israel assesses that Iran has helped Hezbollah establish facilities in Lebanon to convert rockets and missiles to precision-guided munitions potentially capable of penetrating Israeli defenses and striking significant, high-value targets throughout Israel. In October 2009, a large explosion occurred at a house containing a Hezbollah weapons cache south of the Litani River. Hezbollah immediately closed the area to UNIFIL and the LAF and, using large trucks, began transferring salvaged weapons to another location. The incident demonstrated UNIFIL’s basic acceptance of Hezbollah’s dominance in southern Lebanon.
UNSC Resolution 1701 expanded UNIFIL after a 2006 Hezbollah kidnapping triggered war (BOLDING WITHIN PARAGRAPHS BELOW IS MINE)
On July 12, 2006, Hezbollah operatives ambushed an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) patrol along the Israel-Lebanon border, killing eight soldiers and kidnapping two others. Israel responded with precision air strikes on Hezbollah assets, prompting the launch over the next month of some 4,000 Katyusha rockets targeting northern Israeli cities. At least 157 Israeli soldiers and civilians were killed during the 34-day war, with nearly 400,000 driven from their homes for the duration. An estimated 1,000 Lebanese were killed, including an unknown number of Hezbollah terrorists. Passed in August 2006, UNSC Resolution 1701 ended the hostilities, expanded UNIFIL, required Lebanon to assert its sovereignty in the south, forbade the rearming of terrorist groups, and required the “unconditional release” of the kidnapped soldiers — whose bodies Hezbollah only returned as part of a 2008 prisoner exchange with Israel.
UNIFIL’s mandate requires southern Lebanon up to the Litani River be exclusively peaceful
UN Security Council Resolution 1701 expanded UNIFIL’s mandate to have its peacekeeping force “accompany and support the Lebanese Armed Forces” as they deploy in the area between the Blue Line — the informal border with Israel — and the Litani River. The resolution charged UNIFIL with helping the LAF to establish “an area free of any armed personnel, assets, and weapons other than those of the Government of Lebanon and of UNIFIL.” UNIFIL is to ensure that its area of operations “is not utilized for hostile activities of any kind” and that the peacekeeping force “resist[s] attempts by forceful means to prevent it from discharging its duties.” However, despite the United Nations having strengthened and expanded its contingent of peacekeepers in Lebanon, Hezbollah is now the world’s most heavily armed non-state actor, with much of its arsenal concentrated in UNIFIL’s area of operations.
Hezbollah has repeatedly fired into Israel from UNIFIL’s area of operations
Since Hamas attacked Israel from Gaza on October 7, 2023, an estimated 100,000 residents of northern Israel have had to evacuate their homes due to the threat from Lebanon. On December 7, a guided missile attack from south Lebanon killed an Israeli civilian, one of 11 Hezbollah attacks that day, prompting Israeli threats of harsh retaliation if attacks continue. On December 9, 2023, Hezbollah launched several rockets at Israel, including one that originated 20 meters from a UNIFIL compound. UNIFIL acknowledges and condemns Hezbollah activity but does little else. As of January 9, 2024, 12 IDF soldiers and five Israeli civilians have been killed, and over 150 other Israelis injured, in hundreds of anti-tank missile, mortar, and drone attacks. Without naming Hezbollah, in late November, UNIFIL’s head of mission expressed his “deep concern” about the situation and “the potential for wider and more intensive hostilities.” Thus, Israel remains on the precipice of a two-front war in which it will have to confront not just Hamas but also a better-armed adversary on its northern border.
The only reason Hezbollah hasn’t crossed the border to attack Israel is because it knows that it wouldn’t win; Israel has the capability to pursue a two-front war.
. . . . . 10. The U.S. contributes substantial sums to sustain UNIFIL – with insufficient return on investment
The United States contributes annually to UNIFIL’s budget even as the peacekeeping body fails to fulfill its mission. In 2023, Congress appropriated $143 million to UNIFIL, accounting for over one-quarter of the peacekeeping body’s approximately $510 million budget. Since the war in 2006, Washington has spent more than $2.5 billion to support UNIFIL. The United States has likewise invested a similar amount in the LAF since 2006, a portion of which is intended to facilitate cooperation between the LAF and UNIFIL in southern Lebanon. Neither the LAF nor UNIFIL lacks the funding or manpower necessary to carry out its responsibilities. The problem is a lack of will.
The U.S. recently announced that its contributions to UNRWA are suspended for what may be a very long time, looking to funnel aid to Palestine through other organizations (17 other countries have also withdrawn funding). It should do the same with UNIFIL. The US should not be supporting UN organizations that foster terrorism or fail to stop it when that is their mission.
Two readers sent me this 44-minute video posted by Tom Gross, showing Emily Hand, a 9-year-old girl kidnapped by Hamas, comforting her father Thomas, an Irishman, as he’s interviewed by Piers Morgan. (Hand’s wife died of cancer, and Thoma’s ex-wife, who served as Emily’s stepmother, was killed by Hamas.) It’s ineffably moving to see young Emily stroke her father’s face, wiping the tears from his eyes as he recounts the family’s ordeal.
You may remember Thomas Hand saying, when he thought his daughter was dead in Gaza, that her death was probably for the best, for her fate would have been worse had she been taken alive: he imagined what Hamas would do to Emily.(A clip from that interview is at 11:42.) I’m sure he feels differently now! But he did have to explain to Emily, after she returned, that her stepmother was dead.
My friend said this:
You have to watch this—it’s insanely powerful. I’m crying. He just lays it all out. Makes me want to move to Israel and help. . .
Towards the end, Thomas Hand gets very angry and calls Western university students “idiots”. . . and he mentions Harvard.
Here are Tom Gross’s notes:
Thomas Hand, the Irish-born father of Emily Hand who was released after 50 days in Hamas hell, gave an in-depth interview yesterday evening to Piers Morgan on Britain’s TalkTV. Emily was 8 when she was kidnapped and turned 9 in captivity.
One viewer said: “How she wiped her father’s tears, caressed and cared for him when he started to cry in the interview. Melted my heart.”
Also of note is when Thomas Hand says ignorant critics of Israel in the West “don’t know a thing” and have “no idea what they are talking about”.
Hand is no conservative: he brought up Emily on a kibbutz because he liked its socialist atmosphere. As for Emily’s kidnapping during a sleepover and the attack on the kibbutz, you’ll have to listen to the interview.
Three bits are worth noting: about 30 minutes in, Thomas explains how he told Emily that her stepmother/caretaker was dead. (See especially from 31:15 on.)
At 32:25, the discussion turns to politics, Israel’s response, and how the West has reacted. Thomas gets quite exercised, especially when he gets to the accusation that Israel is an “apartheid state.”
At 43:00, Piers asks Thomas to ask Emily (in Hebrew) how she felt when she saw her father again after her release.
A final word from me: of the roughly 200 people taken hostage by Hamas, from several countries, about 136 remain in Gaza. That there is no world outcry about this; that the UN hasn’t condemned Hamas for this; and that the Court of Justice in the Hague is not putting Hamas on trial for real genocide, including taking civilian hostages, firing rockets into Israel, swearing to keep attacking Israel until all the Jews are dead (as specified in its charter) and many other terroristic war crimes—all of this should bring deep shame to the West
As with many YouTube videos, this one is periodically interrupted with annoying advertisements. Nothing is immune from being monetized these days.
Here’s a 26-minute i24 documentary of the Nova Music Festival, during which 364 people were killed, most (but not all) Israelis. It show you how scary the whole thing was, and includes the testimony of survivors.
The campus climate of hate and divisiveness is not limited to MIT, Harvard, Princeton, or Columbia; it’s now metastasized to the University of Chicago. It’s largely promoted by the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and UChicago United for Palestine (UCUP), who are constantly demonstrating on campus and have had its members arrested for trespassing in the admissions office. They also confront groups of prospective students and their parents touring the campus, telling them that the University they’re considering is complicit in the genocide of Palestinians (the administration has deemed these confrontations to be okay so long as they do not interfere with “university activities”) . In contrast, demonstrations of Jewish students are few, legal, not raucous, and don’t violate campus regulations.
While a lot of the demonstrations constitute legal free speech, something I defend, some are not, like demonstrating without a permit, blocking university entrances, sitting-in in university buildings, and disturbing classes with loud chants through a megaphone.
Regardless of the legality issue, the student newspaper, the Chicago Maroon, is being dominated by letters from the SJP, news reports on the SJP written by a member of that organization, and other reportage about anti-Jewish and anti-Israel activities. Since the Jewish students at Chicago are largely fearful and intimidated, I thought I’d give some brief pushback here about the SJP’s self-promotion in the student newspaper. Curiously, the paper, the Chicago Maroon, publishes very long SJP op-eds, and “news articles” by SJP members, running to thousands of words—lengths that regular news article don’t get. One might almost think that the newspaper itself is promoting the kind of hatred and divisiveness purveyed by SJP.
The most odious instance of this is the 2453-word op-ed below, a new reprint of a piece written by UChicago’s SJP on October 11 (there’s an update at the end which is just as biased and hateful as the article iteself). Click to read:
The article begins with the usual accusations of Israel for defending itself, but also includes a justificaiton of Hamas’s butchery of October 7. Here are the first two paragraphs, with my emphasis in bold (there’s a postscript of more recent events that doesn’t correct any of the article’s lies and misstatements):
The events of the past week have been historic and unprecedented by all measures. Last Saturday, for the first time in history, Palestinian resistance groups broke out of Gaza, reclaimed land from the Israeli occupation, and seized control of numerous Israeli military posts. Scrambling to recover from this humiliation and collectively punish Palestine’s population for the accompanying violence inflicted on Israeli soldiers, settlers, and civilians, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has—predictably—resorted to openly genocidal tactics. In addition to bombing Gaza’s population centers with white phosphorus and systematically targeting its hospitals and shelters, Israel has announced a “total blockade” on the besieged enclave, endeavoring to starve the 2.3 million Palestinians held captive within it into submission—or worse. Israel’s war minister made the occupation’s exterminationist aims explicit yesterday, declaring that “there will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. We are fighting against human animals, and we are acting accordingly.”
In the face of these alarming developments—not to mention the escalating involvement of the U.S. military and the wholly inadequate and unacceptable statement issued this week by the University—it is necessary to underscore a number of crucial facts that have been consistently and deliberately obscured by mainstream media coverage and Zionist propaganda. These forces continually attempt to frame the conversation around condemnation of individual atrocities while ignoring the structural causes of violence. It will not be possible to address the root causes of this situation or bring a just peace to the land until these basic realities are acknowledged, confronted, and addressed directly.
This is simply shameful justification of barbarism as a simple “breaking out of Gaza and “reclaiming land from the Israeli occupation”. There is no mention that the land wasn’t reclaimed, but hundreds of innocent Israelis were killed, raped, and tortured. The SJP doesn’t mention this. There were also about 240 hostages taken, a huge war crime that also isn’t mentioned in the SJP’s letter. The white phosphorus claims have been rejected by the IDF (there’s no good evidence for them) and of course hospitals and shelters are targeted by the IDF because Hamas uses them as command and weapons centers. Note that the only allusion to the horrific attack of Hamas on October 7 is a mention of “individual atrocities” that are outshined by “structural causes of violence.”
The tenor is that the Israelis brought this attack on themselves, an inversion of morality that completely discredits the SJP—as if it needed discrediting.
The rest of the article is full of the usual lies and exaggerations, and I’ll give one example. Readers should be savvy enough to see through this, as I’ve discussed these claims before:
First, Gaza is a concentration camp. This is not hyperbole. The Israeli occupation has herded millions of Palestinians into a strip of land just 25 miles long and six miles wide. More than two-thirds of these Palestinian hostages are refugees, more than half of them children. Since 2007, Israel has subjected Gaza to a merciless blockade by air, sea, and land, deliberately denying its inhabitants access to food, water, electricity, and life-saving medical treatment. On top of these structural violences, Israel has subjected Gaza to a series of massacres and military assaults over the last two decades in an effort to “punish, humiliate, and terrorize” its captive civilian population into submission.
They don’t mention terrorist attacks by Hamas and other Palestinians on Israel over the years, the thousands of rockets fired at Israeli civilians from Gaza (another war crime) or the fact that Gaza was given to the Palestinians by Israel in 2005, that Hamas takes huge amounts of money meant as aid for Palestinian civilians, and that tghe “merciless blockade” is used only to prevent weapons and other aid to terrorism from entering Israel.
One of the biggest deceptions in the article is the display of the top half of the map below, with a caption saying, ” The apt historical analogy here would not be the war between Russia and Ukraine, in other words, but the project of Westward Expansion and Native Genocide perpetrated by Western powers on Turtle Island.”
Anybody who knows anything about the history of Israel and the claims about “Palestinian land” can see right through this map, but rather than go through it, I’ve put a video below showing why every panel in the upper map is a lie (I can’t speak to the lower map, but it’s certainly true that Native Americans were displaced by white settlers from Europe and other places. )
Here’s an explanation of why the top part of the map is bogus; the narrator is Kiki Hausdorff, Assistant Parliamentary Counsel at City of London Corporation.
If you want to see another explanation of why the top row of maps are misleading, go here. The fact is that this representation of the shrinking of “Palestine” is grossly wrong, but has been embraced by many people ignorant of what the green and white areas really represent. The Maroon op-ed of course ignores the repeated Palestinian rejections of Israeli offers of peace. This confected map is in fact an up-to-date version of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion“, a forgery written by Tsarists to show a fictional plan for Jews to take over the world. The “Protocols” are mentioned prominently Hamas’s founding document, its Covenant of 1988. Hamas, it seems, will swallow and perpetuate every lie that furthers its aims, which is the erasure of Israel followed by further Islamism meant to swallow the world.
The update at the end of the op-ed concentrates on the IDF’s attack on Gaza and civilian deaths, deeming these, falsely, to be a “genocide”. And the University of Chicago is said to be complicit in this genocide:
What is still more disheartening is the fact that neither the U.S. government nor the University of Chicago has been willing to take the most basic of moral stances in the face of this unfolding genocide: divesting from Israel’s military and calling for an immediate ceasefire. Instead, the Biden administration has deployed U.S. troops and shipped U.S. weaponry to the genocide’s perpetrators, while the University has spent weeks refusing even to meet publicly and transparently with its students about its investments in Israeli arms suppliers. We encourage students to follow UChicago United for Palestine’s ongoing campaigns against the University’s complicity in this atrocity and to follow news outlets that report on Palestine with the factual credibility and moral consistency so often lacking in corporatized U.S. media. We particularly recommend Middle East Eye, The Intercept, Electronic Intifada, Jewish Currents, Mondoweiss, Peoples Dispatch, Al-Jazeera, +972 Magazine, and Al-Mayadeen.
No, the most basic moral stance here is to condemn the Hamas slaughter of civilians on October 7, an attack that started the war by leading Israel to decide that Hamas could no longer be allowed to exist. In fact, our University cannot take a stand on the war because doing that would violate our Kalven principles of institutional neutrality. (And we do not make political or ideological decisions about investing.) Students for Justice in Palestine, by supporting the terrorism of October 7, has not only lost moral standing, but has given material support to terrorists. While this position may be considered free speech, it might also be considered giving moral support to terrorists, which may be illegal under U.S. law (see point 3 here).
The article below, published in the Grey City section, “The Maroon’s features and investigative journalism section”, is largely pro-Hamas propaganda. Click the headling to read. It’s 4126 words long, and the “investigation” is only the regurgitation of SJP’s lies by a reporter who is in fact part of SJP. So much for objectivity!
‘
The “objective” reporter:
I’m not going through it in detail (it’s a day-to-day report on the activities of SJP), except to recount a few of many lies (this was written on November 28):
As chants continue during the next passing time, around 12:30 p.m., a somber moment falls over the crowd. An SJP organizer’s voice chokes up as he announces the bombing of Al-Ahli hospital, where many displaced Gazans were seeking refuge and medical treatment from Israeli bombardment. According to Palestinian officials, the strike killed close to 500. Organizers call for a moment of silence. Grief-stricken, several protesters begin crying. Many embrace each other for comfort. Others don’t seem to know what to do with their hands. Some begin to channel their grief and outrage into chalking. One message on the sidewalk reads: “Never forget Oct. 17: Israel killed 500 in a Gaza hospital.”
The source of the strike is still contested. The Gaza Health Ministry blames an Israeli strike. US intelligence forces and the Israeli military blame a misfired rocket from militant group Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which has denied these claims. Israeli airstrikes have targeted several Gazan hospitals since October 17. The Israeli military says it is targeting Hamas in tunnels under these hospitals.
No, the strike’s source is not contested by those who have investigated it: it was, as the evidence shows, caused by a rocket launched towards Israel by the terrorist group Islamic Jihad, a rocket that landed in the hospital’s parking lot and killed far fewer than 500 people (see here, here, here, and here). And of course the IDF has now issued proof of the existence of both Hamas tunnels under hospitals and weapons in them. That’s not mentioned, either.
But the fact that the Maroon‘s investigative unit used a “reporter” who was part of the SJP’s protests discredits the narrative completely. The paper promises an upcoming piece written by a Jewish student, and we’ll see if it appears.
Finally, the third piece of SJP news in this week’s Maroon describes members of the organization putting up “art installation” on the quad that were removed every night by the university. That’s because those installations violate university regulations for where protests can take place, not because they violate our free expression laws. Click to read:
At least the paper notes that the “installations,” one of which is pictured below, were violations of University regulations. This is civil disobedience, but not of the type that is going to change people’s minds—in contrast to the marches of Martin Luther King and his followers. Those who created the installations should be subject to university discipline, but of course they won’t be. At least the University of Chicago administration didn’t buy burritos for the protestors! (That happened at Harvard.)
Nevertheless, instead of admitting that their installation violated university regulations, the SJP complains bitterly that its removal is inhumane:
Art installed by students from UChicago United for Palestine (UCUP) during an “emergency art build” on the main quad on Wednesday were removed overnight. The previous installation was removed over Thanksgiving break.
“UCUP condemns this removal of art as both a deeply disturbing act of disrespect against the martyrs in Palestine and a sinister message to Palestinian students everywhere who are increasingly targeted in hate crimes,” read a statement from UCUP to The Maroon.
According to the Student Manual, the installation of any structure on campus must be approved by the Director of the Student Centers or a someone designated by the director. UCUP confirmed that their recent installation was not registered.
Note the use of the word “martyrs”, which can refer to terrorists killed in the act of killing Jews. And of course hate crimes against Jews are far more numerous than those against Palestinians and Muslims, but the article don’t mention that. Doesn’t the paper do fact-checking?
Here is the group beavering away with their installation. Caption from the Maroon:
(From the Maroon): Photo by Feifei Mei. Members of UCUP creating art on Wednesday to replace a previously removed installation. The art installed Wednesday was also removed.
I want to emphasize that the hatred and divisiveness on American campuses is fomented not by Jewish students, who by and large engage in peaceful demonstrations, but by terrorist-supporting organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine. Their modus operandi include disrupting of campus events, intimidating Jewish students, yelling at prospective students and their parents, and having sit-ins in University offices and buildings. Some of this is illegal both under the law and under university regulations, so one can see it as civil disobedience. But the difference between this and the disobedience of, say, civil rights activists in the 1960s, is that the latter won over hearts and minds because their cause was just, and those arrested voluntarily took their punishment, including being attacked by police dogs and squirted with hoses. They did not beef about being arrested. In contrast, Students for Justice in Palestine is not changing hearts and minds because it abandoned the moral high ground. As you saw above, the group is morally bereft, having justified the deliberate killing of Israeli civilians on October 7. The group is reprehensible. And although some of its activities are both legal and consonant with campus regulations, SJP and UCUP have created an atmosphere here in which Jewish students have become fearful and intimidated. It is an atmosphere inimical to learning.
Solving this problem while adhering to our Principles of Free Expression is a very hard task for the administration. I have no solutions save that SJP stop purveying lies and disrupting campus. But this won’t happen. And the problem is all over America, as we saw from last week’s House hearings (I object to how they were conducted, but they did highlight the hypocrisy of universities when dealing with free-speech issues). Since up to now Jewish students here have been largely in the background (but see here), I’ve written this to give them support and to show that their opponents are morally bankrupt.
SJP proudly supports the Hamas butchery of October 7. That’s all you need to know about the organization.
Now I know why cops and army are all over Jerusalem. First, there was a bomb explosion in a Tel Aviv Park, and later Israeli security caught three Palestinians planning a serious bomb attack, but thwarted them (they could have been responsible for the first explosion). The terrorists love to attack during Jewish holidays.
More:
Hostile forces were gathering at the Gaza Strip’s border with Israel, as violent riots were anticipated later on Friday, with Palestinian terror groups releasing images of several improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
Palestinian reports indicated that incendiary balloons were being launched, for the first time in two years, and Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were firing crowd dispersal shots.
Gaza and the West Bank have been closed (except for humanitarian exceptions) over the three-day holiday, and every synagogue in Jerusalem is to have an armd guard.
Shana tova! (That’s the traditional Rosh Hashanah greeting. Ten to one there will be at least one terror attack when I’m asleep tonight.
It’s one thing to read about it in the U.S., but another to see the climate of fear and defense pervading this country. All because of a holiday!
The “blood libel” mentioned in the two articles below is a medieval antisemitic trope that’s explained by Wikipedia:
Blood libel or ritual murder libel (also blood accusation) is an antisemitic canard which falsely accuses Jews of murdering Christian boys in order to use their blood in the performance of religious rituals.
Often those “religious rituals” were said to comprise making the Passover matzoh (unleavened bread) with the blood of Christian children. The reason why both articles below make the analogy of this BBC interview with “blood libel” is that the BBC reporter uses essentially the same anti-semitic trope: that Jews were happy to kill non-Jewish children. I don’t think making this comparison is too far off the mark.
So the short video below shows Anjana Gadgil, a hostile and anti-Israel BBC reporter (is there any other kind?) going hard after former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett for the recent shootings of terrorists in Jenin. The raid into Jenin was meant to find terrorists responsible for some 50 recent deaths of Israelis, terrorists who holed up in the town. For a pretty objective view of the conflict, see the Reuters piece, “Why did Israel attack Jenin?”
Three or four of the 12 Palestinian dead were between 16 and 18, but, as Bennett notes and which has now been verified, all of the Palestinians killed in the Jenin raids were terrorists, including those 18 and under. (Had nonterrorist civilians been called, you better believe that the PA would have announced it, but there has been no such announcement.)
And, as the article at the bottom says, it’s not a violation of international law to kill child soldiers—even if you think terrorists of that age are “child soldiers”. It’s remarkable to me that the IDF went into Jenin targeting specific terrorist and got them all without any civilians being killed. Only Israel is that careful about who they go after in warfare. In contrast, the Palestinians target anybody, including Israeli civilians and children who are not “child soldiers.”
This is not a long video—8½ minutes long—and I urge you to listen to it to see the explicit and completely unhinged hostility towards Israel from the BBC. Gadgil’s repugnant statement, “The Israeli forces are happy to kill children” occurs at 1 minute, 16 seconds in.
And below are two articles—both invoking “blood libel”—defending Bennett against the BBC anchor. Click on either screenshot or on the links to the left:
Here’s the text of the second piece, which is short:
Here is a blood libel from the BBC.
In response to Naftali Bennett saying that every single person killed in Jenin was a terrorist, the presenter said, as a fact, “Terrorists but children. The Israeli forces are happy to kill children.”
Bennett’s answer was good, but here is another case where news interviewers are either ignorant or willfully twisting international law.
Child combatants are still combatants under international law. No matter whether they were forcibly recruited, whether they are under 14, whether they are girls – once someone is shooting at a soldier they are legitimate targets, according to every article I can find on the subject.
In 2000, a group of child soldiers in Sierra Leone known (in the West) as the “West Side Boys” captured a patrol of British soldiers from the Royal Irish Regiment along with their Sierra Leone Army liaison officer. Several of the British soldiers were held for two weeks before the British Army decided to free them in an operation that killed between 25 and 150 of the West Side Boys.
Was the deliberate, planned killing of those children a war crime? Of course not.
Absolutely no international law scholar disputes that the British Army had the right to free their fellow soldiers because they were held by combatants under 18. And no BBC reporter responded to the event by saying on the air, “The British Army is happy to kill children.”
No, only Jews are routinely accused of relishing the murder of children. The accusation is centuries old and it is as popular today in England as it was in 1144 when Jews were accused of happily murdering William of Norwich.
Unlike the West Side Boys, who were obviously children, the two “children” killed by the IDF in Jenin were heavily armed, fully grown near-adults. One was a member of Hamas’ Al Qassam Brigades.
UPDATE: The BBC has tendered a tepid apology after Gadgil made a fool of herself attacking Bennett in the video above. The apology is quite lame, but the tone is expected given that the animus that the BBC harbors towards Israel:
A BBC spokesperson told the JC: “BBC News has received comments and complaints concerning an interview with Naftali Bennett broadcast on the BBC News channel about recent events in the West Bank and Israel.
“The complaints raised relate to specific interview questions about the deaths of young people in the Jenin refugee camp.
“The United Nations raised the issue of the impact of the operation in Jenin on children and young people.
“While this was a legitimate subject to examine in the interview, we apologise that the language used in this line of questioning was not phrased well and was inappropriate.”
However, the corporation stressed the BBC covered the wider events in Jenin in an “impartial and robust way.”
I consider this tepid given the horrible things that the reporter said, implying that the IDF is a sadistic organization that likes to torture and kill children. A better apology would be a bit more contrite than just saying “the language used in this line of question was not phrased well and was inappropriate”. Perhaps something along the lines of “we are very sorry that the reporter implied that the IDF delights in killing children” would have been a bit more appropriate. But you can believe that this apology was issued through gritted teeth!
New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, like many government officials, can go to great lengths to avoid implicating religion—especially Islam—in any terrorist attack, even if it’s clearly inspired by Islamism. Take last Friday’s stabbing attack at a supermarket in West Auckland, which wounded six people (the perp was killed by police).
As the New York Times reports, this has every sign of a being terrorist attack: the method, the ideology, and the fact that the suspect had already been under surveillance for five years because of his “ideology”. (Could that be Islam? As HuffPost reports—which for some reason isn’t allowing comments on this story—”Ardern said the attacker, who was not identified, was ‘obviously a supporter of ISIS ideology,’ in reference to the Islamic State terror group.”) It has in fact been officially deemed a “terrorist attack.”
More from the NYT:
The suspect, a Sri Lankan national, was shot and killed by the police, officials said. He had been under constant, active surveillance at the time of the attack at the market in West Auckland, they said. The suspect was not immediately identified.
“A violent extremist undertook a terrorist attack on innocent New Zealanders in the New Lynn Countdown in Auckland,” Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said at a news conference, referring to the supermarket.
“What happened today was despicable, it was hateful, it was wrong,” she added. “It was carried out by an individual — not a faith, not a culture, not an ethnicity, but an individual person who is gripped by ideology that is not supported here by anyone or any community. He alone carries the responsibility for these acts; let that be where the judgment falls.”
. . .The prime minister said the suspect, who came to New Zealand in 2011, had been known to security forces since 2016. She described him as a lone actor who had been under constant monitoring because of concerns about his ideology.
“This was a violent attack,” she said. “It was senseless, and I’m so sorry it happened.”
Yes, of course the act was carried out by an individual. Cultures, faiths, and ethnicities cannot by definition carry out a terrorist attack because humans have to do the deed. But Ardern is thick-headed here, for can she deny that that individual was motivated, at least in part, by a religiously based movement: Islamism? In fact she admits that!
So what does she mean by her exculpation of faith, culture, or ethnicity?
What she means is apparently this: “Yes, this guy was inspired to stab people because he was gripped by Islamist ideology, but the ideology isn’t to blame.” It’s similar to the mantra used by American NRA-ites: “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”. Except the U.S.statement is milder, because guns don’t incite people to use them in shootings, whereas ISIS ideology promotes the extirpation of nonbelievers.
It’s hard to understand a mentality that argues that an individual can be motivated to attack others because of faith, but then adds that the faith is not at all responsible. I suppose that when ISIS starts raping, oppressing, and beating the women of Afghanistan, Ardern will say, “These odious acts are carried out by individuals—not a faith, not a culture, and not an ethnicity.”
I used to admire Ardern, but sometimes she’s osculates the rump of religion way too arde(r)ntly.
