THEY ARE LYING ABOUT THE JEWS AGAIN!
There is never a dull day for the creative antisemites. It is par for the course to see viral social media messages blaming Jews for COVID 19, and posters on street posts in Toronto assigning responsibility to Israel for the Beirut explosion which killed innocent civilians. Let us not forget the inane claim a few years ago that the sharks that appeared on the coast of Egypt were sent by Israel, and the more recent claim that Israel destroyed a Palestinian Arab coronavirus testing site. None of these obnoxious statements is true, but that doesn’t matter, they are out there, repeated, used to denigrate the Jews and Israel, and fuel hatred.
We are constantly asked, what can be done to stop antisemitism? What can be done to roll back the hatred? What can be done to make campuses safe for Jewish students, and the streets of Europe, Canada, and America safe for people who are identifiably Jewish? With so many Jewish organizations, why are we not seeing decreasing rather than increasing hate crimes against Jews?
CAEF points to a few priorities to counter antisemitism.
All levels of government must adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism and its associated principles, and create and implement an action plan.
All institutions in the public domain must also adopt and implement IHRA.
Each level of government needs to appoint a person or entity with responsibility and accountability for monitoring antisemitism and taking the lead on combating it, which includes pressing organizations to adopt IHRA and implementation plans as well as consequences for antisemitism when it occurs. This role must include data collection and reporting.
Jewish organizations must cultivate allies. We are small community and cannot battle this hatred alone, nor should we. History has proven that what begins with the Jews, never ends with the Jews. It is time for civil society to stand up against antisemitism to preserve all our freedoms.
We must stand Proud as Jews and Zionists. This means educate ourselves, and our children and grandchildren so they don’t get caught up in the lies, the BDS campaigns and the cancel culture.
Meet An Unapologetic Zionist!
Last week’s Web Talk featured Unapologetic Zionist Naomi Linder Kahn, the Director, International Division, Regavim. Many of our viewers were surprised, if not shocked, by the information that Naomi shared. She provided maps that were carefully constructed with facts on the ground researched by Regavim, showing exactly where Jewish settlements and communities are situated in Judea and Samaria and where there are Arab communities, towns and settlements.
What most people do not realize is that there are vast numbers of illegal Arab settlements or structures on land placed by Arab squatters; over 180 such settlements exist in fact. To understand the meaning of this, the threat they pose, the laws the operate under or laws they disregard, the foreign funding that created and supports them, the overall Palestinian Authority strategy to claim the entirety of the area allocated to the Jews, watch this video. Learn how Regavim, an Israeli NGO is battling to preserve the land of Israel, protecting its natural resources and Israeli sovereignty.
Regavim has been waging the legal battle to preserve Israel's most precious resource: the land itself. Day after day, week after week, year after year, a small but dedicated staff of fieldworkers and attorneys have documented, researched, and prosecuted the abuses of Israel's resources and sovereignty that threaten the very foundations of the Jewish State.
Another Lie: The Palestinian Authority Wants Peace with Israel
One need only follow the news about normalization of relations between the UAE and Israel, to see how the Arabs who occupy the land of Judea and Samaria choose to further conflict rather than seek peace. Instead of celebrating a major regional breakthrough, the opportunity for Israel and the Emirates to further productive exchanges, scientific developments and tourism, benefiting both countries, the beneficiaries to include Arab Israelis and Arab “Palestinians,” the PA and Hamas instead shake their fist, threaten retribution (against whom it is unclear) while Iran, which has nothing to do with either country, claims it will boycott the UAE. Good for Iran.
There is a surprising story in the New York Times, an unlikely place for a story sympathetic to any good news from Israel, an Op Ed from Thomas Friedman, published August 13th, 2020. The first line itself is a shocker, imagine someone stating agreement with President Trump. Below are a few excerpts:
“For once, I am going to agree with President Trump in his use of his favorite adjective: ‘huge.’
The agreement brokered by the Trump administration for the United Arab Emirates to establish full normalization of relations with Israel, in return for the Jewish state forgoing, for now, any annexation of the West Bank, was exactly what Trump said it was in his tweet: a “HUGE breakthrough.”
“It’s a geopolitical earthquake.”
“This deal will certainly encourage the other gulf sheikhdoms — Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia — all of which have had covert and overt business and intelligence dealings with Israel, to follow the Emirates’ lead. They will not want to let the U.A.E. have a leg up in being able to marry its financial capital with Israel’s cybertechnology, agriculture technology and health care technology, with the potential to make both countries stronger and more prosperous.
Three other big winners here are:
King Abdullah of Jordan. He feared that Israeli annexation would energize efforts to turn Jordan into the Palestinian state. That threat is for the moment defused.
The American Jewish community. If Israel had annexed part of the West Bank, it would have divided every synagogue and Jewish community in America, between hard-line annexationists and liberal anti-annexationists. This was a looming disaster. Gone for now. And
Joe Biden. Biden, if he succeeds Trump, will not have to worry about the thorny issue of annexation, and he should have a much stronger pro-American alliance in the region to work with.
The big geopolitical losers are Iran and all of its proxies: Hezbollah, the Iraqi militias, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Houthis in Yemen and Turkey. This is for a number of reasons. Up to now, the U.A.E. has kept up a delicate balance between Iran and Israel, not looking to provoke Iran, and dealing with Israel covertly.”
No Lie from Hamas—They Simply Don’t Want Peace
While the UAE has signed a treaty with Israel, the Abraham Accords, marking a major milestone in Arab-Israel relations, the Arabs in the neighborhood are much less interested in peace. Mahmoud Abbas denounced the Accord and all parties associated with it.
Read the words of Hamas Leader, Ismail Haniyah in an excerpt from an article entitled, Hamas’s Leader Makes Clear That No Amount of Money Can Buy Peace, translated from Arabic by Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), dated August 11, 2020. This is two days before the Accords were announced but clearly states that Peace with Israel is never going to be acceptable to Hamas.
In a recent interview with a Qatari television program, Ismail Haniyeh, the head of the Hamas politburo, made this point brutally clear:
Haniyeh . . . said in a July 26, 2020 interview . . . that Israel has previously agreed to the establishment of an airport and seaport in the Gaza Strip in exchange for ceasefire, but that the Palestinian Authority (PA) and other Arab parties have blocked this from taking place under the pretext that it would constitute a separation between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. He said that under such an arrangement, Gaza would become like Singapore, [and] then claimed that a certain Arab country has offered as much as $15 billion for ports and economic projects in Gaza.
Haniyeh summed up his response to this offer, and the ensuing conversation, thus:
“We said to [this Arab country’s representatives], ‘That’s great. We want an airport and a seaport, and we want to break the siege on the Gaza Strip. This is a Palestinian demand, but what are we supposed to give in return?’ Of course,. . they want us to disband the military wings of [Hamas and other terrorist groups], and incorporate them into the [PA] police force.’
“Naturally, we completely rejected that offer. . . . We cannot, in exchange for money or projects, give up Palestine and our weapons. We will not give up the resistance, Jerusalem, our people in the West Bank, or our right of return to the land of Palestine. So we did not go along with those plans.”
Lies by Omission-Did You Hear about Israel’s offer of Aid to Lebanon?
It is striking how little of Israel’s humanitarian efforts are reported and shocking that Canada’s national radio station ignored it completely this past week in regards to the tragedy in Lebanon. Within only a few hours after the dreadful crisis arising from the explosion on August 4th in Beirut, Israeli offers of assistance were made. They may have been among the first offers to come only hours after the tragic destruction of lives and property was wrought on Beirut, the result of neglect by yet to be confirmed people or entities. It may be assumed that these chemicals were in storage for Hezbollah, the terror organization with tremendous influence and control in Lebanon.
There was immediate outreach by the Israeli government, individual medical personnel and hospital administrators from major Israeli hospitals, offering medical assistance. One Arab doctor begged the President of Lebanon to send injured victims of the explosion to Israel for treatment, but no report on any response was provided, because none came. Might Lebanon have accepted aid from its sworn enemy to save the lives of its own people, and reversed the decades of alienation of its people against Israel, and ceased to allow Hezbollah to maintain a reign of terror?
What is the circumstance that allowed the storage of unprotected explosive materials to be left at the port of Beirut? Just why would these chemicals even be necessary? One might consider the military buildup by Hezbollah, funded by Iran, along Israel’s northern border.
Read several stories here:
One news outlet, Middle East Monitor which is well described by Haaretz reporter Anshel Pfeffer as a "conspiracy theory-peddling anti-Israel organization" claimed the offer of aid was made to “whitewash the barbarism.” of Israel.
Just days before this fatal tragedy, the US congress failed to stop funding to the Hezbollah dominated Lebanese army, which one would have thought posed an obvious security threat to the US as well as to Israel.
Here is an excerpt on this gutless gutting of an act to stop terrorism, from an article by Adam Kredo published August 4th, 2020 in the Washington Free Beacon:
“Just days before the Iranian-funded terror group Hezbollah waged a terrorist attack on Israel’s northern border, congressional Democrats gutted legislation that would have halted U.S. funding to the Lebanese military, which is almost entirely controlled by the terror group.