JANUARY-DECEMBER 2021 ISSUE

THINK-ISRAEL is a magazine-blog that features essays, contextual analyses and commentaries on the war Islam is waging against Israel and the West. We specialize in the history of the inhabitants and the legal resolutions that indicate that the Jews, and only the Jews, own the Land of Israel by international commitment. We report on global anti-Semitism, the growth of salafism and Sharia creep.

 

 

WHAT WE ARE TALKING ABOUT

  1. Facts/Quotes
  2. General Introduction (Lipkin)
  3. Biblical Archeology (Hertog, Kempinski, Borschel-Dan, Jewish Voice, Berkowitz, Plank, Jewish Website, Arutz Sheva, Shragai, Spencer Vainstub, Plank, TPS, Ross)
  4. (Media PR and Propaganda) (Hausman, Van Brugen&Jekielek, Lipkin, Culper, Tal&Salman&Schwartz, Taylor, Rasley, Spencer, Reitzes)
  5. Specific Anti-Israel Media Propaganda (Rosenthal, Friedman, Savage, Phillips, Bernstein, Ini, Flatow, Litman, van Koningsveld, Raza, Kemp, Rotberg, Balanson, Abu Toameh, Klein, Spencer)
  6. Muslim Brotherhood (Korol, Chesler, Phillips, Kedar, ben Menachem, Ettinger, Greenfield, Benson, Kedar, Ranhotra, Bongarra, Meotti)
  7. History (Gift of Tears video, Auerbach, Reiss, Sharpe, Friedman, Medoff, Preskar, Greenger, Simmons, Tauber, Harrison)

 

 

FACTS/QUOTES

Re a Palestinian Arab State:

Re a Palestinian Arab State: “So the question is, why is it so important that these particular Arabs, who have given the world so much — airline hijacking, suicide bombings with rat-poison laced shrapnel, the Qassam rocket — should have a state of their own? … They are mostly the descendents of Arabs from Syria and Egypt who moved to Palestine during the latter part of the 19th century and the Mandate period, mostly to take advantage of better economic conditions there — thanks to the Zionists — than in their homelands. In the years since 1948, and particularly since 1967, they have created a mythology of a ‘Palestinian’ civilization that extends back hundreds, indeed thousands, of years. But that’s what it is, a myth. ‘History’ invented from whole cloth.”(Daniel Greenfield “The Palestinian Muslim Money Hole”.)

After all, distilled and

“After all, distilled and in the eyes of the non-believer, Sharia law is nothing less than a legal system built atop the words and deeds of a 7th century Arab, whose behavior — from pedophilia and sex-slavery to war mongering and plundering — was very much that of a 7th century Arab. Having enticed or enslaved his contemporaries into following him, his teachings continue to entice and enslave their descendants; and, now as then, it is always the innocent who suffer.”(Raymond Ibrahim. July 21, 2011.)

Well, a reader reminded me

“Well, a reader reminded me that there is something Muslims and the media like to call Islamophobia. In rebuttal, though, I pointed out that Islamists are ignorant, blood-thirsty cretins, and there is nothing irrational about being terrified of these sociopathic Neanderthals. They are creatures, barely human, after all, who have apparently decided that having explosives surgically implanted in their bodies is one swell way of expressing their religious faith.”(Burt Prelutsky, July 2011.)

Re Israel’s ownership of Israel

Re Israel’s ownership of Israel, Golan, Samaria, Judea and Gaza: “Nothing that Israel’s legal system says can change the facts that: (1) the legal binding document is the Mandate of the League of Nations and (2) the obligations of the Mandate are valid in perpetuity.”(Professor Julius Stone.)

Within less than a century

Within less than a century, between 7 million and 10 million Balkan refugees have been uprooted from their homes. After WW2, between 12-16 million Germans were forced out of Sudentenland (Czechoslovakia), Romania, Hungary and Poland into Germany; many of them had not supported the Nazis during the war. 14 million people were exchanged between Hindu India and Moslem Pakistan. In 1994, 540,000 Moslems fled Christian Armenia for Azerbaijan and 360,000 Armenian Christians fled Azerbaijan for Armenia. As Israel did with the Jewish refugees from Arab countries, Armenia absorbed the Christian refugees, while — just like the Arab refugees from Israel — the Moslem refugees languish in Azerbaijani refugee camps. From the late ’80s on, 75,000 non-Moslem blacks from Mauritania were exiled to Senegal and Mali, while 75,000 Arabs fled to Mauritania. Ethnic conflicts in the Sudan continue — between Muslim Arabs and black animists in the South; and between Muslim Arabs and black Muslims in Darfur. 3 t0 4 million black farmers of Darfur have fled Arab-dominated Khartoum, where some 200,000 to 400,000 black Muslims have already been killed. Cyprus has been split between Christian Greeks and Moslem Turks; this included a population exchange, where 200,000 Greeks and 50,000 Turks were shifted. Even before Israel became a state and increasingly after that, more than 800,000 Jews were forced to flee the Arab countries, where many of them had lived way before the Arabs Conquest; most of them came to Israel. Starting even before the Arabs invaded Israel when it became a state in 1948, Arabs left to avoid the coming war. They fled in fear incited by their own press or were forced by their leaders to leave Israel. The Arabs claim 650,000-750,000 up to a million refugees, while the UN Acting Mediator in October, 1948 (unispal.un.org) set it at 472,000, of which 360,000 required aid (UNRWA is now supporting 4.5 million of their “descendants”.) Of all the refugees, only these Arabs have demanded the right of return.(Data mostly taken from Ben-Dror Yemini, MidEast Truth Forum, January 15, 2009.) See also the Addendum here.)

By 1920 the Ottoman Empire

“By 1920 the Ottoman Empire had exercised undisputed sovereignty over Palestine for 400 years. In Article 95 of the treaty of Sevres, that sovereignty was transferred to England in trust for a national homeland for the jews. The local Arabs had never exercised sovereignty over Palestine and so they lost nothing. Their rights were fully protected by a provisio in the grant: ‘…it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine…’ The proviso has been fully observed by the Israelis. Since 1950 the Arabs have built some 261 new settlements in Judea and Samaria — more than twice as many as the Jews, but you never hear of them. They fill them with Arabs from Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan and by the grace of God they become Palestinians. Allahu Akbar! The Arabs call Judea “the West Bank’ because they would look silly claiming that Jews are illegally living in Judea.”(Comment by Wallace Brand on Martin Peretz “Narrative Dissonance” The New Republic, July 1, 2009.)

… during the late 1940s

“… during the late 1940s, more than 40 million refuges around the world were resettled, except for one people. They [Palestinian arabs] remain defined as refugees, wallowing 60 years later in 59 UNRWA refugee camps, financed by $400 million contributed annually by nations of the world to nurture the promise of the “right of return” to Arab neighborhoods and Arab villages from 1948 that no longer exist.”(Noam Bedein, Jerusalem Post, January 6, 2009.)

What is ironic is that Israel

“What is ironic is that Israel belongs exclusively to the Jews by International Law. (Google Think-Israel for articles by Howard Grief, Yoram Shifftan, Wallace Brand, for the legal basis of Israel’s ownership of Israel and the Territories.) So why do the Arabs insist the land is theirs? Because the Jews have been so crazy for peace, they have been willing to share, to give up pieces of their tiny country, for a piece of paper. The Arabs created a phony people in 1964, called the “Palestinians” and blanketed the world with the mantra that they were the Palestinians and Palestine was theirs. There has not ever been a country or a state called Palestine. There have been Palestinians. During the time of the British Mandate — from 1922 to 1948 — the Jews called where they lived Palestine. They played music in the Palestine Philharmonic. They read the Palestine Post (now the Jerusalem Post.) As the Palestine Brigade, they fought in the British Army in World War 2. The Arabs also fought hard — for Hitler.”(Eliezar Edwards, December, 2008.)

A Palestinian State? You want that?

“A Palestinian State? You want that? OK. BUT not in Israel. No way. Not now. Not ever. Put this Arab state in Dubai or Kuwait or Saudi Arabia or Libya or Syria. Make it big. Fill it with the Po’ Arab “refugees”. And with the Arabs of Gaza and Samaria and Judea (AKA West Bank). And treasonous Arabs who have Israeli citizenship. Build a big fence around it. Let them learn to develop the infrastructure of a state. Or let them destroy themselves, if that’s what they prefer. If they ever become civilized, then it’s time to consider letting them join the human race.”(Eliezar Edwards, August, 2008.)For an early excellent solution,read Eli E. Hertz, “The U.S. Congress in 1922,” here.

To Israeli Secularists:

To Israeli Secularists: “You want a normal country, like everybody else? I will tell you how. Forget ads featuring bikini-clad hotsies. Forget promoting “alternative” life styles. The secret is to adopt the right attitude. A normal country doesn’t give up an inch of land that belongs to it. A normal country doesn’t let its citizens go hungry while it feeds its enemy and gives them medical care. A normal country doesn’t let foreigners take over its holy sites; Hebron, the Temple Mount, Joseph’s Tomb. Looking at what counts, it’s the religious Jews of Samaria and Judea and the Golan that are acting normal, not you.”(Eliezar Edwards, March 20, 2008.)

It has no heart

“It has no heart. It has no spine. Its mouth serves as its anus. It has a diffuse net of nerves instead of a brain. Is it a jelly fish or an Israeli politician? Pick one. Whichever one you picked, you were right.” (Eliezar Edwards, June 20, 2005.)

The total for all the 22 Arab League countries

The total for all the 22 Arab League countries is 6,145,389 square miles(SM). By comparison, all 50 states of the United States have a total of 3,787,318 SM. Israel has 8,463 SM, about one-sixth of that of the State of Michigan. Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and Afghanistan are Muslim but not Arab and are not included.World Arab population: 300 million; World Jewish population: 13.6 million; Israel’s Jewish population: 5.4 million.(reference: Dr.Wilbert Simkovitz, http://dehai.org/archives/dehai_news_archive/apr04/0223.htmldehai.org/archives/dehai_news_archive/apr04/0223.html)

Two Imperatives

Two Imperatives: “To ensure its long term survivability as the Jewish nation-state, Israel has to deal effectively with two imperatives: The Geographic and the Demographic. The first imperative calls for Israeli control (i.e. sovereignty) over all the territory east of the coastal plain up to the Jordan River—to prevent intolerable risks to its physical survival; the second imperative calls for significant reduction of the Arab presence in the territory under Jewish sovereignty to forestall the emergence of an intolerable demographic threat to its dominant Jewish character.” (Martin Sherman; see here and here.)

How dreadful are the curses

“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia [rabies] in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.

“A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property — either as a child, a wife, or a concubine — must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.

“Individual Moslims may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.” (Winston Churchill, The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan, Vol II, pages 248-250, 1899.)

Re Israel’s irrevocable ownership of Israel

Re Israel’s irrevocable ownership of Israel, Samaria, Judea, the Golan and Gaza: “Nothing that Israel’s legal system says can change the facts that: (1) the legal binding document is the Mandate of the League of Nations and (2) the obligations of the Mandate are valid in perpetuity.”  (Professor Julius Stone)

Some 900,000 Jews…

Some 900,000 Jews left behind $300 billion in assets when they were forced to flee for their lives from the Arab countries in the 1940s. They hold deeds for five times Israel’s size.  (Independent Media Centre, Winnipeg)

It Should be Remembered that…

It Should be Remembered that…

“It should be remembered that in 1918, with the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Britain and France were handed more than 5,000,000 square miles to divvy up and 99% was given to the Arabs to create countries that did not exist previously. Less than 1% was given as a Mandate for the re-establishment of a state for the Jews on both banks of the Jordan River. In 1921, to appease the Arabs once again, another three quarters of that less than 1% was given to a fictitious state called Trans-Jordan.”   (Jack Berger, May 31, 2004.)

Refugees

“… during the late 1940s, more than 40 million refugees around the world were resettled, except for one people. They [Palestinian arabs] remain defined as refugees, wallowing 60 years later in 59 UNRWA refugee camps, financed by $400 million contributed annually by nations of the world to nurture the promise of the “right of return” to Arab neighborhoods and Arab villages from 1948 that no longer exist.”  (Noam Bedein, Jerusalem Post, January 6, 2009.)

Total size for all Arab Countries

The total for all the 22 Arab League countries is 6,145,389 square miles (SM). By comparison, all 50 states of the United States have a total of 3,787,318 SM. Israel has 8,463 SM, about one-sixth of that of the State of Michigan. Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and Afghanistan are Muslim but not Arab and are not included.     World Arab population: 300 million; World Jewish population: 13.6 million; Israel’s Jewish population: 5.4 million.  (Dr. Wilbert Simkovitz, http://dehai.org/archives/dehai_news_archive/apr04/0223.html)

End the Unjust Jewish Occupation of Arab Land!

End the Unjust Jewish Occupation of Arab Land!

“It should be remembered that in 1918, with the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Britain and France were handed more than 5,000,000 square miles to divvy up and 99% was given to the Arabs to create countries that did not exist previously. Less than 1% was given as a Mandate for the re-establishment of a state for the Jews on both banks of the Jordan River. In 1921, to appease the Arabs once again, another three quarters of that less than 1% was given to a fictitious state called Trans-Jordan.”   (Jack Berger, May 31, 2004.)

We are told that there is a difference between extremist Islam and peaceloving normal Islam.

We are told that there is a difference between extremist Islam and peaceloving normal Islam.

We are told that there is a difference between extremist Islam and peaceloving normal Islam. Judging by their behavior, Muslims are anti-West, anti-Democracy, anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, anti-Buddhist, and anti-Hindu. Muslims are involved in most of the conflicts going on in the world: in Afghanistan, Algeria, Bangladesh, Bosnia, Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Cyprus, East Timor, India, Indonesia (2 provinces), Kashmir, Kazakastan, Kosovo, Kurdistan, Macedonia, the Middle East, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Somalia, Sudan, Russia-Chechnya, Tajikistan, Thailand, Uganda and Uzbekistan. Muslims practice terrorism, intimidation, criminal acts, hijra, taqiyya, bribery and stealth jihad in Western countries. And Muslim Sunnis and Muslim Shiites battle each other in most of the Middle East.Doesn’t this mean that extremist Islam is the norm and peaceloving normal Islam is extremely rare?

The Palestinian people does not exist

“The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism.
“For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa. While as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.”   (PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhsein, March 31, 1977, interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw.)
 
The Palestinian leadership, including Ahmed Shukar and Yasser Arafat, has openly admitted Palestinian “peoplehood” is a fraud; See here.

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GENERAL INTRODUCTION

 
This issue has sections on Biblical Archeology and History. In addition, we focus on an entity that actively works again Israel and misinterprets anything Israel does to make it sound evil. As jobs in the media dry up, the television and particularly newspapers are much more controlled by fewer people, who from their activities are clearly anti-Jewish. The New York Times has gone from covered dislike of Judaism to open animosity, misinterpreting and/or inventing incidents as needed. The Muslim Brotherhood is perhaps the most successful terrorist group acting to destroy Israel and the Western countries. It begets multiple groups engaged in terrorism. On one end of the spectrum, some groups have a virtuous face, apparently seeking only to make the 'real Islam' understood by their neighbors. On the other end, some are openly terrorist towards Israel and the West. We can only present a few cases. The media doesn't give Islam, particularly stealth jihad, the publicity its activities warrant. We suggest you subscribe to Jihad Watcj and receive a more realistic account of jihadi activities. Subscribe to www.JihadWatch.org, managed by Robert Spencer.

Editor's Note:

Think-Israel tends to use salafist rather than extremist or Islamist or militant or fundamentalist or activist to describe generically a pious Muslim, one who sticks as closely as possible to the unfiltered words and actions of Mohammad and the first three generations of Muslims, including, especially, the Companions of the Prophet. In modeling himself as closely as he can on the preachings and practices of Mohammad, a salafist can in modern terms be precisely described as an uninhibited terrorist, a theological supersessionist, a political supremacist who believes Islam and sharia law must dominate and a social barbarian, who wages jihad with whatever tools are available. Thanks to the high quality of whitewash supplied by sympathetic propagandists, he seldom is so described.

 

Return to What We Are Talking About

 

Biblical Archeology

General Introduction to BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGY

The Democratic Party's far-left socialists have long accepted the Arab assertion that Jews have little long-term association with the Land of Israel. This was strongly reinforced, first, by the belief that the five books of Moses had little basis in fact and second, that the modern world has science and thus has little need of God as explanation for all that is still not understood. Curiously, as the socialists increasingly assert these arguments more vocally in more places in our educational system, there are opposite trends being heard more often. First, Israel archaeology is finding more and more evidence for the relevance and historicity of the Bible. And more scientists are asserting both that science and religion are not necessarily contradictory As an example, it is now possible to assert that intelligent design and evolution by small incremental and possibly random steps both had roles to play. There is also recognition of the mathematician Kurt Godel's dictum that any system of logic, e.g., math or science in general, doesn't operate outside its sphere, therefore it has nothing to say about religion. Belief in religion or non-belief are both outside its ken. See for example the video featuring the mathematician Stephen Meyer on religion at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_8PPO-cAlA/. See also https://www.perrymarshall.com/articles/religion/godels-incompleteness-theorem/ and https://evo2.org/read-prove-god-exists/.
 
This section comprises articles on archeological finds that underscore that the Jews own the Land of the Jews and have for a very long time. The so-called Palestinians are the local Arabs from various Arab countries, most of whose ancestors came into what is now Israel after 1900. Yasir Arafat declared them to be the ancient Palestinians in 1964. Membership was redefined in 1968 when the Arabs living in Judea and Samaria also became Palestinians. It does make the notion that Palestinians are an authentic group sound rather silly, doesn't it?
 
Here are some unusual videos of Jerusalem:
 
(1) https://pulseofisrael.com/2021/05/09/memories-divided-jerusalem/ - Jerusalem when it was divided during the 19 years starting in 1948 when Jordan invaded and grabbed a part of Jerusalem as well as Samaria and Judea.
 
(2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFL6wHoSndE - original photographs from 1853 on
 
(3) https://youtu.be/kvZRAVjwKWg - Leah Rosenberg, 1913 -The Oldest Video Footage Of Jerusalem You Will Ever See.
 
(4) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gyu7jFnj9Nw - Jerusalem from 1920 TO 1939.
 
(5) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VD4Fd7jZhIA - Spielberg Jewish Film Archive: The White City
 
(6) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDoD6W2z01s - The Spielberg Jewish Film Archive - The Land of Promise, 1935
 
 

SECRETS OF THE CAVE OF THE PATRIARCHS EXPOSED

by Nadav Shragai, November 2, 2021
The Cave of the Patriarchs — the Machpelah — is a series of caves in Hebron and is said to be the second holiest site in Judaism after the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. It is where the Patriarchs and Matriarchs are buried; i.e., Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah. In this article, Nadav Shragai writes of Noam Arnon’s comprehensive doctoral dissertation on the Cave of the Patriarchs, which covers the 2500 year history of the site, using geographical, geological, archeological, Jewish and historic sources. Most of the existing information is about the above ground structure. Little is known of the underground caverns below the Herodian above ground structure, because access to them has been limited by the Muslims. It was recorded that these caves were visited by Col. Richard Meinertzhagen in November 1917, by jack Seklan in 1933 and by several others more recently. Arnon’s thesis puts together what information is available, a fascinating project. AUTHOR: Nadav Shragai is an Israeli journalist and author of books focusing on Jerusalem.
This article was published November 2, 2021 by Nadav Shragai and is archived at https://www.israelhayom.com/2021/11/02/the-secrets-of-the-cave-of-the-patriarchs/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/shragai.caveofthepatriarchs.html

ISRAELI ARCHAEOLOGISTS DISCOVER ANCIENT WINEMAKING COMPLEX

by The Jewish Voice, October 12, 2021
This article contains photos of some recent finds in a winemaking location dating back some 1,500 years discovered in Yavne, south of Tel Aviv. These include “five wine presses, warehouses, kilns for producing clay storage vessels and tens of thousands of fragments and jars.” “Israel’s Antiquities Authority said the discovery shows that Yavne was a wine-making powerhouse during the Byzantine period. Researchers estimate the facility could produce some 2 million liters (over 520,000 gallons) of wine a year.”
Yavne is important in its own right. After the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem in 70 CE, Yochanan ben Zakkai moved the Sanhedrin, the legislative body that ruled on Halacha (Jewish law), to Yavne, where new religious services were formulated as substitutes for Temple services that could no longer be performed.
AUTHOR: This article was written by the Jewish Voice Staff, without attribution.
This article was published October 12, 2021 by The Jewish Voice and is archived at https://thejewishvoice.com/2021/10/watch-israeli-archaeologists-discover-ancient-winemaking-complex/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/the-jewish-voice.winemakingcomplex.html/. 

ARABS HAVE DESTROYED 80% OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITES IN JUDEA AND SAMARIA

by Yoni Kempinski, October 8, 2021.
Yoni Kempinski writes that Arabs in Judea and Samaria have undertaken systematic destruction of 3,000 years of Jewish history in Judea and Samaria. Jewish heritage sites in Judea and Samaria are being systematically vandalized and destroyed by local Arabs, according to a watchdog group which monitors archaeological sites in the area.
“Adi Shragai, operations organizer for the Shomrim Al HaNetzach organization, said in an interview with Arutz Sheva that the phenomenon of Arab vandals targeting archaeological sites in Judea and Samaria has grown worse in recent years. Unlike archaeological sites inside the pre-1967 Green Line, which fall under the direct protection of the Israel Antiquities Authority, sites in Judea and Samaria are under the authority of the Staff Officer of Archaeology, an office in the Defense Ministry’s Civil Administration for Judea and Samaria.” Here, enforcement of the law has been poor.
AUTHOR: Yoni Kempinski made aliyah from Toronto Canada in 1985. He started at Arutz Sheva as video producer and anchor. He is now Deputy Editor and Correspondent.
This article was published October 8, 2021 by Arutz Sheva and is archived at https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/314699/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/kempinski.arabsdestroyarchaeology.html 

HAVE ARCHAEOLOGISTS UNCOVERED THE REMAINS OF NOAH’S ARK? DIMENSIONS MATCH BIBLICAL DESCRIPTION

by Josh Plank, October 3, 2021
Josh Plank writes, “Researchers studying a boat-shaped formation in the mountains of Turkey have announced plans to conduct archaeological excavations at the site after new data suggests that the formation could be a man-made structure that appears to match the biblical description of Noah’s ark. “The researchers “are hoping to perform further scans of the site, collect core drilling samples, and ultimately conduct archaeological excavations to determine what really lies beneath the mysterious formation.” “According the biblical book of Genesis, Noah’s ark came to rest on the ‘mountains of Ararat’ after the great flood. The Durupinar site is located in the foothills of the Akyayla Mountain, about 32 kilometers (20 miles) south of the summit of Mount Ararat.” AUTHOR: josh Plank is an author at World Israel News.
This article was published October 3, 2021 by World Israel News and is archived at https://jewishwebsite.com/featured/rare-biblical-balm-of-gilead-engraving-found-on-2000-year-old-seal-in-jerusalem/76375/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/plank.noahsarksearch.html

COSMIC AIRBURST DESTROYED SODOM, CONSISTENT WITH BIBLE, NEW EVIDENCE SUGGESTS

By Josh Plank, October 1, 2021
Josh Plank writes, “A cosmic airburs obliterated a Middle-Bronze-Age city northeast of the Dead Sea approximately 3,600 years ago, an event which may have been recorded as the biblical account of the destruction of Sodom, according to research published last week in the journal Scientific Reports. The report was written by a group of 21 co-authors including archaeologists, geologists, geochemists, geomorphologists, mineralogists, paleobotanists, sedimentologists, cosmic-impact experts, and medical doctors. “Examining evidence from 15 years of archeological excavations at the site of the destroyed city, known as Tall el-Hammam, the authors concluded that the only plausible formation mechanism that can account for the city’s unique destruction is the tremendous detonation of an incoming space rock.” The description in Genesis of the destruction of an urban center in the Dead Sea area is consistent with having been an eyewitness account of a cosmic airburst, researchers concluded. AUTHOR: josh Plank is an author at World Israel News.
This article was published October 1, 2021 by World Israel News and is archived at https://worldisraelnews.com/cosmic-airburst-destroyed-sodom-consistent-with-bible-new-evidence-suggests/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/plank.airburstdestroyedsodom.html

HOW AND WHY THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS ENDED UP IN QUMRAN

by Daniel Vainstub, September 30, 2021
Israeli researchers are finally discovering how and why the Dead Sea Scrolls ended up in Qumran. Analysts at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev put the puzzle together using an ancient Hebrew document that was hidden in Cairo some 1,000 years ago. Dr. Daniel Vainstub, lecturer at BGU and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, explains the recent findings and his theory. He believes that the annual meeting of some 3000 or more members of the Sect from communities all over the country took place in Qumran, because it had the requisite enormous ritual bath and sufficient water reservoirs. Vainstub says also that one of the Qumranic documents, the Damascus Document, contains the rules and regulations applicable to the annual gathering. He suggests they brought scrolls to and took scrolls from Qumran at these annual meeting. AUTHOR: Daniel Vainstub is at Ben-Gurion University in Beer Sheva, Israel in the Department of Bible, Archaeology and Ancient Near East. Contact him at vainstub@bgu.ac.il/.
This article was published September 30, 2021 by United With Israel and is archived at https://unitedwithisrael.org/watch-how-and-why-the-dead-sea-scrolls-ended-up-in-qumran/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/vainstub.renewalceremonyatqumran.html/

‘LET THE STONES SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES’

by Roger Hertog September 30, 2021
As Roger Hertog writes, “… biblical archaeology [is], a subset within the larger field dating back to the 19th century, and somewhat controversial in that some of its practitioners have aimed to codify the authenticity of the Bible. In the process, its discoveries have indeed helped to validate the Jewish historic claim to the Holy Land, challenging those who see modern Israel as a nation of interlopers.” What has proven challenging is identifying structures that some say conform to Biblical descriptions and others deny the connection. For example, conventional thinking asserts David and his predecessor Saul were not kings as described in the Bible but “tribal chieftains” with hilltop strongholds. So when Eilat Mazar, who was not strongly religious, uncovered the remains of a 3000-year old stone structure she identified as King David’s Palace, many denied the possibility. ‘Gedaliah son of Pashhur’ and ‘Jucal son of Shelemiah’, names mentioned in the Bible as hearing the words of Jeremiah were found on 2700-year old seals at the dig. Besides the tunnels under the complex, intricate wall designs also add credence, but many continue to deny Mazar’s claims. They might be right but possibly they talk this way because they are committed politically to denying that the Jews have lived in Judea a very long time and that the Bible is historical evidence of this. The verdict is still not in, but look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sRaY8zv3Xc, a delightful reconstruction of what might have been.
AUTHOR: Roger Hertog is vice chairman emeritus of AllianceBernstein LP, president of the Hertog Foundation, and past chairman of the Tikvah Fund.
This article was published August 10, 2021 by Israel National News and is archived at https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/314699/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/hertog.stonesspeak.html/

GOLD EARRING DISCOVERED BY ARCHAEOLOGISTS CONFIRMS BABYLONIAN CONQUEST OF JERUSALEM

by Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz | August 12, 2019
Adam Berkowitz writes that they have discovered an earring in Jerusalem on Mount Zion, which is evidence of the Babylonian conquest of the city in 586 BCE. Dr. Rafi Lewis, co-director of the project said that “this find is quite literally priceless. We can establish the context as the destruction of the First Temple without any doubt. We have made similar finds outside of the city but this is the first time we made such finds inside the city.”
Dr. Lewis noted that in the field of archaeology, the Bible and science could coexist. “The Bible is certainly one of our sources,” Dr. Lewis said. “You have to treat it respectfully. It represents something spiritual and was not written as a history book. It was written as a religious book but there is a historical base and root. But we cannot reject the Bible when studying archaeology. I would not rely on the Bible exclusively just like I would not rely on any other source exclusively. We need as many sources as possible and the Bible can be one of them.”
AUTHOR: Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz is an ordained rabbi and a featured writer at Breaking Israel News, where he writes, edits and posts articles in a variety of subjects.
This article was published August 12, 2019 by Israel365 News and is archived at https://www.israel365news.com/135163/gold-earring-discovered-archaeologists-confirms-babylonian-conquest-jerusalem/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/berkowitz.babylonianconquestconfirmed.html 

BIBLICAL DISCOVERY: ISRAELI ARCHAEOLOGISTS FIND 1ST INSCRIPTION RELATED TO BOOK OF JUDGES

 by TPS, July 12, 2021
“This is the first time that the name Jerubbaal has been found outside the Bible in an archaeological context. [A]n inscription dating from the time of the biblical Judges some 3,100 years ago and relating to the Book of Judges has been recovered from excavations at Khirbat er-i, near Qiryat Gat. “The inscription was written in ink on a jug a small personal pottery vessel that holds approximately one liter, and may well have contained a precious liquid such as oil, perfume or medicine. Apparently, much like today, the vessel’s owner wrote his name on it to assert his ownership. “The inscription has been deciphered by epigraphic expert Christopher Rolston of George Washington University, Washington DC. It clearly shows the Hebrew letters yud (broken at the top), resh, bet, ayin, lamed, and remnants of other letters indicate that the original inscription was longer.” AUTHOR: This article was written by TPS of the United With Israel staff.
This article was published July 12, 2021 by United With Israel and is archived at https://unitedwithisrael.org/in-first-inscription-dating-to-biblical-judges-era-and-relates-to-book-of-judges-found-in-israel/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/tps.bookofjudgesinscription.html

MAGNIFICENT BUILDING FROM SECOND TEMPLE-PERIOD REVEALED

 by Arutz Sheva Staff, July 08, 2021
“The Western Wall Heritage Foundation and the Israel Antiquities Authority are enabling the public to view impressive new sections of one of one of the most magnificent public buildings uncovered from the Second Temple period. … Part of the structure, to the west of Wilson’s Arch and the Temple Mount, was discovered and documented by Charles Warren in the nineteenth century, followed by various archaeologists in the twentieth century. Now that its excavation is complete, we know that it contained two identical magnificent chambers with an elaborate fountain between them.” Dr. Shlomit Weksler-Bdolach, excavation director on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, noted that “The building, which apparently stood along a street leading up to the Temple Mount, was used for public functions it may even have been the city council building where important dignitaries were received before entering the Temple compound and the Temple Mount.
A video discussing the building is available at https://youtu.be/TRFE-GfDzpY/.
AUTHOR: This article was written by the Arutz Sheva Staff, without attribution.
This article was published July 08, 2021 by Arutz Sheva Staff and is archived at https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/309480/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/arutz-sheva.buildingfromsecondtempletime.html

BIBLE SCROLL FRAGMENTS AMONG DAZZLING ARTIFACTS FOUND IN DEAD SEA CAVE OF HORROR

By Amanda Borschel-Dan,
March 16, 2021
Amanda Borschel-Dan writes of 2000-year old biblical scroll fragments, Greek translations of the books of Zechariah and Nahum, that have been found in Judean Desert Caves. The finds are part of a concerted effort since 2017 to rescue such ancient artifacts, given the massive looting that has been going on ever since Bedouin shepherds discovered the Dead Sea scrolls some 70 years ago. The intent is to preempt artifact thieves rather than try to track artifacts that have been looted. The article contains impressive photos of some of the finds, including a skeleton of a young girl and scraps of fabric and sandals. Additional information is to be found at https://www.israelhayom.com/2021/03/16/new-dead-sea-scrolls-discovered-in-judean-desert-caves/, in an article written by Yori Yalon.
AUTHOR: Amanda Borschel-Dan is The Times of Israel’s Jewish World and Archaeology editor.
This article was published March 16, 2021 by Times of Israel and is archived at https://www.timesofisrael.com/bible-scroll-fragments-among-dazzling-artifacts-found-in-dead-sea-cave-of-horror/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/borschel-dan.biblescrollfragments.html

THE PILGRIMS PATH; THE JUDAIZATION OF JERUSALEM?

by Adam Ross, July 10, 2019
Adam Ross writes, “Archaeologists laud the path used by pilgrims to visit the Temple as one of the most significant finds from ancient Jerusalem. It was the walkway used 2,000 years ago by pilgrims to Jerusalem. It ran from the Pool of Shiloah to the Temple Mount.” “Discovered by accident in 2004, inside David’s City (Ir David), it took 13 years to excavate. Consisting of 10,000 tons of stone, it is 25 feet (over 7.5 meters) wide and 2,000 feet (over 600 meters) long. It was walked by tens of thousands of Jews during each of the pilgrimage seasons of Sukkot, Pesach and Shavuot.” There is nothing like this in Jerusalem, Dr Joe Uziel, who has worked for six years on the project, told Aish.com. This isn’t just another street. We are talking about the path that pilgrims took on the final part of their journey to reach the Temple. It is made up of 10,000 tons of stones and a monumental connection to ancient Jerusalem. This discovery has not been welcomed by the Palestinian Authority, which has accused Israel of attempting to Judaize the Old City. “Doron Spielman, Vice President of the City of David where the excavations are taking place, answered the claims. ‘You can’t Judaize what is already Jewish.'”
AUTHOR: Adam Ross has recently returned to Israel having served as the campus rabbi at Leeds University for Aish UK. His background is in media and news broadcasting. Since moving to Israel in 2005, Ross has been involved in Jewish education, teaching at many post college programs. He has a weekly blog with thoughts and stories for the Shabbat table at www.athoughtforshabbat.wordpress.com
This article was published July 10, 2019 by the Aish organization and is archived at https://aish.com/the-pilgrims-path-the-judaization-of-jerusalem/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/ross.pilgrimspathtotemple.html

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MEDIA PR AND PROPAGANDA

In the section we examine the growing unreliability of the newspaper and TV media. Instead of reporting events, the media have become yet another source or biased views, sinking so low that often it doesn't just narrate the news weighted towards a particular point of view, it creates the news it wants promulgated from whole cloth. Attribution of pictures has also become more reckless. Some magazines, journals and social media sites that consider themselves above the fray nevertheless produce anti-Israel garbage worthy of the New York Times. Perhaps the worst result of information distortions by the global media is the impact they have on Israeli administrators and politicians. A particularly pernicious example is how Israel has reacted to the false accusations that Israel treats Palestinian Arabs inexcusably harshly. In fact, Israel takes extraordinary actions to minimize harm to its enemy, which continues to do as much damage as it can to Israelis. It warns the Arabs it will be blowing up a building fortified by terrorists. It avoids damaging buildings stockpiled with weapons where the Arabs have installed human shields, often young Arab children. It punishes soldiers who shoot terrorists prematurely, where prematurely is determined post hoc. To put it bluntly, Jews die unnecessarily because Israeli administrators, focused on avoiding criticism in the media, make rules that put Jews at risk. It would appear that these administrators have forgotten the lesson of Genesis 22 where Abraham binds Isaac, the Akedah, preparatory to killing him. Abraham is then forbidden by God to kill his son. The lesson is clear: Jews are explicitly forbidden to kill their children, a standard practice for various reasons including sacrificial rites in most cultures. The extended meaning is: no more human sacrifice of the Jewish people. Israelis would be better off if, instead of weakening their security, they attacked the other side, physically and verbally; if they went for the jugular. They should be highlighting barbaric Arab behavior. As it stands, they weaken their security by softening their responses. An appalling example was in Jenin and again in Gaza, where Jewish soldiers died because they were forced to enter houses that were of course booby-trapped rather than shooting up the houses and their inhabitants from the outside. We have reached the point where the media have gone insane, declaring the death of a single child by the Israelis is totally unacceptable, while ignoring that the Syrians and Iranians routinely kill thousands of their own and other people

HOW THE MEDIA LIES WHILE BEING FACTUAL, SORT OF

by Bernice Lipkin, December 21, 2021
https://youtu.be/h57jjV8cFkk is a video produced June 29, 2021 and featuring Dr. Steve Turley of TurleyTalks.com, who emphasizes that the media is perceived as dead last in trustworthiness internationally. Yet the media never introspects on how to change this. Instead it functions as “the international glue that holds the international globalist order together.” It is a telecommunications part of a “worldwide political and economic system.”
Turley explains that the media engages in several consecutive processes in presenting the news: Framing, Priming, and Confirming Bias.
Framing encompasses selecting events, giving them weights and organizing them into a coherent narrative that has emotional and often, unfortunately, political overtones.
Priming is feeding the articles to the public with headlines that hint at a topic, its importance and how it should be viewed. This is of underestimated importance, in that many readers only read the headlights, thus making assumptions the authors wish to promote but can’t put into the main text because many of the details are blatantly incorrect. Headline writing has become an art in and of itself.
Add to this Confirmation Bias, where, in a sense, the media works backwards. The media knows the end goal; it has a ‘believe this’ message to sell and so it cherry picks talking points that support the predetermined conclusion. Mathematically, the game is equivalent to writing a regression equation where all the facts, events and observations are written as a set of variables. These variables are given weights determined by the author or more likely by the owners of the media corporation that hires him. Many facts will be unstated (i.e., they have a weight of 0) or they will be mentioned but treated as insignificant (i.e., given low weights in the equation.). There is seldom doubt as to what the reader is expected to absorb as the truth.
I wish Turley had also discussed a technique which allows the newspaper to seem to have presented the facts properly. When the article is published, it often contains ‘evidence’ to rebut eventual charges that it was unfair and distorted or ignored important issues. The New York Times is a whiz at this. It will have a huge headline and statements pointing the reader to a particular conclusion; the important issues are treated as unimportant. Contradictions to the main focus and important nuances are relegated to end of the article many pages away. Often, assuming he’s got the complete message on page 1, the reader has given up long before reading far into the article. Thus, the NYT can in retrospect say truthfully that it wrote much about the holocaust, yet the obliteration of millions of Jews wasn’t known widely until after the War. How could it happen that news that appeared in the ‘newspaper of record’ was barely known? As Laurel Leff wrote ( here, the NYT did write about the holocaust — in vague terms and almost never was it a front page story. THE NYT didn’t spell out the significance of the fact that, despite its growing wartime demands, the German State continued to devote major resources to specifically target Jews for death solely because they were Jews. The NYT preferred calling the victims ‘refugees’. The horrors of the concentration camps were understated so they appeared to be just bad things we expect to happen in wartime.
And there’s ‘ye old reliable’, the half-truth. Often, the media will cite a quote which is accurate but they blur or change the timing or context in which it was said. Larry Horist in “The Media Lies in Half-Truths” ( here provides us examples that bolster his assertion that ‘[t]he lie-by-half-truth has been the key strategy in the left-wing media’s attack on Trump, the Republican Party and conservatives.’ As one example, ‘Morning Joe’ show host Joe Scarborough raised an old favorite to prove that President Trump was a racist; i.e., Trump did not really criticize the neo-Nazi faction at the Charlottesville turnout. In fact — and this is the ignored half-truth — Trump said ‘there are good people on both sides.’
As Horist writes, ‘What the media shamelessly omits is that Trump DID specifically condemn violence AND specifically the neo-Nazi type. The ‘good people on both sides’ was a later reference to the people who believe we should remove Confederate statues and those who believe they should remain.” As Horist writes, “The granddaddy of all half-truth propaganda was the four-year claim by Democrat leaders and their media cronies that Trump and his campaign conspired with Russian meddling in the 2016 election. They bolstered their bogus bullsh*t by never reporting the facts that questioned the validity of the false narrative. They were facts that ultimately led to Trump’s total exoneration by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. But that was only after Democrats and the media inflicted enormous political damage on Trump and others.”
We might add, that after the Steele document, which purposed to detail Trump’s collusion with the Russians, was completely exploded, readers needed to search hard to learn that the gross and ugly lies about Trump and the Russians were manufactured by Hillary Clinton’s associates. One would think that the bits of evidence that have been coming out for a while now about the outrageous falsehoods invented about the President of the United States would be a large part of the daily news – remember how vague possibilities and suppositions, not facts, were headlined when the Mueller Investigation was active. Instead, we have witnessed another way the media suppress news by giving it the silent treatment. The story just disappeared from the news. What is ironic is that it was Hillary that colluded with the Russians, giving Russia control of a large supply of uranium.
Condemnation by context-free details is a popular propaganda technique but the impact of supposed analyses by often credentialed experts may be more lasting. The boldness of the ‘there’s no need to question me’ tone and the assurance that ‘what follows is the analysis’ often make these articles compelling. The ‘last word’ comes from an expert, who is kind enough to instruct us peons. So sure is he of his verdict, he seldom needs to provide details. To be more precise, what pass as details are incorrect, one-sided conclusions or telegraphic mantras, which we are not to question.
The biggie newspapers such as the NYT and no-longer-funny magazines such as the New Yorker and propagandistic TV newscasts present such articles with a straight face. In turn, these write-ups are accepted uncritically by many who assume they must be true because, after all, would the NY Times lie? J. Peder Zane’s article entitled ‘Conspiracies Pass as Wisdom on the Left’ here points out the results of this collusion of superior publisher and expert author often are “paranoid and often apocalyptic delusions.” He uses as “an instant classic of derangement passing as wisdom” an essay called “Our Constitutional Crisis Is Already Here” by Robert Kagan in the Washington Post (see here).
Zane provides multiple examples of Kagan’s pronouncements. Here is yet another example of Kagan’s style that wasn’t mentioned: Kagen wrote: “the amateurish ‘stop the steal’ efforts of 2020 have given way to an organized nationwide campaign to ensure that Trump and his supporters will have the control over state and local election officials that they lacked in 2020. Those recalcitrant Republican State officials who effectively saved the country from calamity by refusing to falsely declare fraud or to ‘find’ more votes for Trump are being systematically removed or hounded from office.”
Kagan dismisses ‘Stop the steal’ with its more than a thousand signed affidavits of witnessed fraud, with its details of specific violations of the Constitution and multiple examples of computer forgeries and miscounting as ‘ameraturish’. But he had no problem with the Mueller 3-year investigation of President Trump that had zero evidence at its start and after 3 years of intense searching the investigation ended with no evidence. He apparently believes state officials are being turned out of office for “refusing to falsely declare fraud”, ignoring that the authority assumed by these official close to the 2020 election was directly against the rules written in the Constitution. He wisely doesn’t mention the computers that allowed external input in direct violation of the law and flipped Trump votes to Biden. It should also be noted that the ballots counted by the computer — and this wasn’t open to tampering — were often far fewer than the number of paper ballots. And I’d love to know how he explains the mail-in ballots that had to be folded twice to fit the legal envelops yet miraculously, when counted, had no creases.
Zane’s estimate of this article that has won the hearts of many on the far left is spot on target: “[H]ard evidence is beside the point as Kagan is manufacturing propaganda, not analysis.”
And, most bothersome, there is a new phenomenon — at least for me. I don’t remember this being used seriously until recently: you give a bad project or procedure a wholesome description and then you assault your detractors by claiming they are the ones who don’t want to see justice or fairness or goodness done. Let me see if I can make this clear by an actual example. Most people would agree that the goal in voting is this: with voting regulations in place, every living adult citizen who is registered to vote should have the opportunity to vote, (once and once only), and have the vote be what was initially marked on the ballot. But these far left congressmen purport to be fearful of what they call ‘voter suppression’. They want to pass a bill which would stretch out the voting period from a day to a week or more. It doesn’t take much to understand that the more time you allow for shenanigans, the more fraud you will have. The 2020 election showed us that. Then they accuse those who object to a stretched out voting period of curtailing people’s right to vote. Now that’s what I call chutzpah. It does seem that if people can stand in line to get into a store having a sale or to buy tickets tor a popular concert, they can stand in line to vote. Moreover, we already have a fairly secure system in place for people to mail in their vote if they aren’t able to vote in person.
As another example, the same group of congressmen want to spend $4 trillion dollar to repair our roads and bridges and tunnels. And certainly, too many of these structures are in bad shape. What they don’t tell you is, in the words of the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste (CCAGW), that “[h]undreds of billions of dollars in Biden’s infrastructure scheme would be used to pay for handouts to big labor unions, implement the Green New Deal, and fund a huge wish list of Socialist programs and policies. It would even redefine ‘infrastructure’ to include public housing and childcare, among other completely unrelated programs.” Opponents of course are accused of not caring for repairing.
Judging what is truth and what are lies has become increasing difficult. We’ve always had the problem of judging text, particularly when important information is left out or downplayed. Now, our faith in pictures is being shaken because scenes taken from particular angles can suggest interpretations that don’t fit the facts.
Videos seemed trustworthy, especially those taken in ‘real time’. Within the past decade, however, even this is starting to fail us. Tucking snippits into a new script has been has been easy-to-do for some time. But now, we have new technology soldered onto older software that has the chilling ability to mimic truth, both in voice and in action. These faked videos are called deepfakes. There is now the ability to create moving images that meld the face of the person being maligned and the behavior of someone with a somewhat similar body type, and this can be made into an elaborate movie. See an article entitled “Defamatory Political Deepface And The First Amendment” by Jessica Ice in Case Western Reserve Law Review, Vol 70, Issue 2, Article 12, 2019. Ice concludes that “It is clear that defamatory political deepfakes could cause serious harms to individuals and society. Such harms, however, must be balanced against protecting freedom of speech under the First Amendment. Courts have rightfully been skeptical of restraints on expression, especially if they have the possibility of restricting protected speech. But in the case of deepfakes, courts have an opportunity to specifically define the form of expression that is defamatory. Courts also bear a far lower risk of misclassifying speech as defamatory because deepfakes are purposefully designed to be false. Thus, courts should draw lessons from both obscenity and copyright law to allow some narrowly crafted permanent injunctions against deepfakes. Such narrowly crafted injunctions will help prevent the spread of misinformation that might undermine elections or trust in public officials while providing the least restrictive means possible of limiting expression.”
It is cheering that such fakes are easy to identify. It is depressing that taking the fakemakers to task might become a matter of deep expense and a huge amount of time. Moreover, it won’t be effective until long after the damage has been done.
Altogether, propaganda writing, whether by textual or by photographic means, by blunt instrument or subtle suggestion, has always been able to take many forms. But as time passes, some differences between then and now are now showing up clearly. For one, there are fewer topics that are off limits. My impression is that once upon a time, one needed to be more careful or more clever in phasing or more circumspect or appear to be so erudite people just knew you were right, whether they understood what you were saying or not. Now, just have the right political opinion and almost anything will do. And there is less fear of telling outright lies. Writing propaganda is becoming easier all the time, more stark and more the echo output of a limited number of original sources.
AUTHOR:
Bernice Lipkin is managing editor of Think-Israel.
This article was published December 21, 2021 by Think-Israel.org and is archived at https://www.think-israel.org/lipkin.propagandatips.html/.

FACEBOOK FINALLY ADMITS IT: ITS FACT CHECKS ARE JUST OPINION

 by Robert Spencer, December 15, 2021
This and the next article are about organizations other than news media that also indulge in propaganda by text and by photo. For years now, Facebook and the other social media giants have been acting as the guardians of acceptable opinion, banning even the president of the United States for stating views they decided had to be forcibly suppressed. But now, facing a serious legal challenge to their massive censorship of dissidents from the Leftist agenda and ongoing infringement of the freedom of speech, Facebook has finally admitted what its foes have contended from the beginning: its fact checks are not really factual at all, but are simply opinion. As Facebook put it, The labels themselves are neither false nor defamatory; to the contrary, they constitute protected opinion. This is a sleazy tactic, given Facebook’s current power over the public discourse. Reclaim The Net noted that Facebook wants the ability to allow fact checkers to accuse their users of lying and censor and ban users based on those fact checks, but not to have any liability for accusing those users of lying. Lovers of freedom can only hope that this startling admission is the beginning of the end of the social media giants hegemony.
AUTHOR: Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 23 books including many bestsellers, such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), The Truth About Muhammad and The History of Jihad. His latest book is The Critical Quran.
This article was published December 15, 2021 by Front Page Magazine and is archived at www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/facebook-finally-admits-it-its-fact-checks-are-robert-spencer/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/spencer.facebookfactchecks.html

MEDIA BIAS: WHY THE UNINFORMED HATE ISRAEL

 by Amer Tal, Abeer Salman and Mike Schwartz, December 12, 2021
PIX: ~/active/jan2021/hamas.header.jpg
This article focuses on how Israel is maligned by misleading headlines, but it is just as true that headlines can be a powerful weapon anywhere. As Amer Tal, Abeer Salman and Mike Schartz point out, “Headlines matter because they frame the way we relate to a story before we even read it. And if you scroll through your social media feed, all you know about the incidents that you don’t click on are whatever the headlines say. They make their point by presenting some headlines that twisted Arab “shooting and stabbing attacks, as well as the response of Israeli security forces.” As example, an Associated Press headline read “Palestinian teen fatally shot after stabbing” [ here.] Clearly, those that wrote the headlines didn’t just happen to put the consequences before the instigation or make the answer to ‘who did the stabbing’ ambiguous. To be truthful, the headline should read: “Palestinian Arab terrorist stabbed Jerusalem border police and was shot before he could harm others. Some hitting-the-bulls-eye examples are within a video entitled: https://youtu.be/45PvGj6buL4/.
AUTHORS: Amir Tal writes for CNN and some US newspapers.
Abeer Salman is a reporter and a producer for CNN. She writes freelance for many papers.
Mike Schwartz writes for CNN Jerusalem.
This article was published December 14, 2021 by United With Israel and is archived at https://unitedwithisrael.org/watch-media-bias-why-the-world-hates-israel/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/abeer-salman-schartz.misleadingheadlines.html.

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF JOURNALISTIC INTEGRITY

by Matthew Hausman, December 1, 2021
Mathew Hausman describes how mainstream reporters vent propaganda rather than communicating facts. They “manipulate news to fit their politics, disparage opponents, and belittle those who dare to expose their biases.” The US Constitution envisioned a unhampered press that would “safeguard against governmental excess and tyranny, [but] journalists abdicate this role when they engage in political activism through lobbying and selective reporting.” As Hausman says, “The decline of American journalism has been realized by reporters and editors acting as partisan foot soldiers instead of watchdogs.” They help enable “authoritarian government and dictatorial rule.” AUTHOR: Matthew Hausman is a lawyer, practicing litigation in Connecticut. He is also a long-time writer and commentator, writing on on a variety of topics, including science, health and medicine, Jewish issues and foreign affairs, and has been a legal affairs columnist for a number of publications.
This article was published December 1, 2021 by Liberty First Organization and is archived at https://libertyfirst.org/the-decline-and-fall-of-journalistic-integrity/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/hausman.newsintegrity.html/. 

PHOTOGRAPHER BEHIND VIRAL PHOTO DEBUNKS NARRATIVE THAT BORDER PATROL AGENTS ON HORSEBACK ‘WHIPPED’ HAITIAN REFUGEES

 by Sarah Taylor, September 24, 2021
Sometimes the political angle determines the angle from which a picture is shot. More often, the description is what is fraudulent. The Palestinian Arabs have become adept at this. As has often been said, once perfected, anti-Israel propaganda can be used elsewhere to malign local groups in other countries who have become hated by the media. Sarah Taylor writes that In September 2021 the New York Times published a dramatic picture that, examined casually, would seem to be showing members of the Border Patrol on horseback whipping poor defenseless Haitians crossing into the USA. The Times was eventually forced to retract the false implications, but not before anger was stirred against those trying to defend our borders against illegal entry. This wasn’t an unintended mistake — the NYT knew the true story before it published its false news. The next two articles examine the event and look at the consequences As Chris Enloe wrote here, “the photographer who snapped the infamous images of the skirmish between Border Patrol and the Haitian migrants had already said, before the Times published its story, that he did not witness the alleged abuse of Haitian migrants.” But that didn’t stop the NYT from printing it. What a brouhaha over a non-event!
AUTHOR: Sarah Taylor writes for Conservative Patriot and other media blogs..
This article was published December 24, 2021 by United With Israel and is archived at https://unitedwithisrael.org/watch-media-bias-why-the-world-hates-israel/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/abeer-salman-schartz.misleadingheadlines.html/

BIDEN’S BORDER PATROL WHIPPING HOAX

by George Rasley, September 23, 2021
The previous article by Sarah Taylor wrote of the rash and rapid denigration by the President and some of his staff of the border patrols, claiming they were whipping people trying to come across the border. In this article, George Rasley suggests the politicians weren’t as naive as they seemed. He points out that “With basic knowledge and two brain cells, anyone knows those agents use split reins. They do use them as a whip, on their horses.” So Biden’s quick embrace of the false narrative that Border Patrol agents were ‘whipping’ ‘people of color’ is about as transparent a ploy to open the border as one could imagine but it may be working.”
AUTHOR: George Rasley is an editor at Conservative HQ. He was formerly a White House Staff Member.
This article was published September 23, 2021 by Conservative HQ and is archived at https://www.conservativehq.org/post/biden-s-border-patrol-whipping-hoax/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/rasley.whippinghoax.html

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: A PUBLISHING HOME FOR ANTI-ISRAEL HATE AND PROPAGANDA

 By Peter Reitzes, June 29, 2021
Over the past two years, Scientific American has published a series of biased attacks on Israel, even accusing Israel of  vaccine apartheid and medical apartheid. Such actions are not surprising considering that in 2021, a Senior Editor at Scientific American tweeted that Israel is an apartheid state and Zionism is white supremacy. #FreePalestine. Peter Reitzes notes that a few weeks earlier an article titled As Health Care Workers, We Stand in Solidarity with Palestine was removed from the Scientific American website just hours after the publisher received a letter signed by more than 106 scientists and physicians, including three Nobel Laureates. The letter criticized Scientific American editors for publishing one-sided political propaganda, ignoring easily verified facts, and covering important historical and political issues superficially, inaccurately, and prejudicially. (A full text of the now removed column is available here.) Criticism by reputable scientists doesn’t seem to have had much of an effect on the magazine.
AUTHOR: Peter Retzes is a board member of Voice4Israel of North Carolina and writes about issues related to antisemitism and Israel.
This article was published June 29, 2021 by Algemeiner and is archived at https://www.algemeiner.com/2021/06/29/scientific-american-a-publishing-home-for-anti-israel-hate-and-propaganda/
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/reitzes.unscientificamerica.html/

LARA LOGAN: PROPAGANDISTS & POLITICAL ASSASSINS HAVE INFECTED THE MEDIA

by Isabel van Brugen and Jan Jekielek, May 18, 2021
Our profession today is unrecognizable says investigative journalist Lara Logan. She has reported on everything from war zones to gang warfare to the Benghazi scandal, making her an excellent choice to inquire “how has the media landscape radically transformed in recent years?” From aiming for neutrality, nowadays, “[m]any journalists in their reporting now blur the lines between fact and opinion.” What is true for the media is equally true for companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google. She wisely points out, “If they control the narratives, they control this flow of information, they control what we report, what we don’t report, how we report it, what we do with it, what people say about it they manage perception, they distort perception. A frightening situation that has come to fruition. The video is here. AUTHORS: Isabel van Brugen is an award-winning journalist and currently a news reporter at The Epoch Times. She holds a master’s in newspaper journalism from the University of London. Jan Jekielek career has spanned academia, media, and international human rights work. He joined The Epoch Times in 2009. full time. He is the producer of the award-winning Holocaust documentary film “Finding Manny.”
This article was published May 18, 2021 by The Thinking Conservative and is archived at https://www.thethinkingconservative.com/lara-logan-propagandists-and-political-assassins-have-infected-the-media/. It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/brugen-jekielek.laralogan.html

MISSING CONTEXT’ IS A ‘FACT-CHECKING’ CATCH-ALL

by Andrew Culper, January 25, 2021
Fact checkers often disqualify an article because they claim context is missing. As Andrew Culper points out, “‘missing context’ isn’t about truth or clarity at all. It’s a catch-all tactic that ‘fact-checkers’ can use whenever it suits them, particularly when content they disagree with doesn’t tell their story. It’s an intellectually dishonest practice conducted in bad faith.” He asks rhetorically, “Can a George Washington quote be flagged because it doesn’t tell America’s story through the eyes of the King of England? Should we only quote politicians when we can cite ‘context’ in the footnotes (imagine a meme with footnotes)? Who gave the ‘fact-checkers’ the right to be the universal interpreters of context in the first place?” AUTHOR: Andrew Culper Right Analysis: Andrew Culper writes for The Patriot Post, weekday digest of news analysis, policy and opinion.
This article was published January 21, 2021 by Patriot Post and is archived at https://patriotpost.us/articles/77229-missing-context-is-a-fact-checking-catch-all-2021-01-25/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/culper.missingcontextfactcheck.html/

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SPECIFIC ANTI-ISRAEL MEDIA PROPAGANDA

Today, when Israel and Jews are under attack throughout the world, when international organizations have been turned into lie factories targeting Israel, when the Jewish State is accused of the very crimes terrorism, murder, apartheid, genocide that her enemies are either guilty of or aspire to, an Israeli newspaper, owned and operated by Jews, is a primary propaganda organ of those enemies. Information on Ha'aretz is the subject of the first article in this set. The other articles also focus specifically on media's calumny against Israel, which is, unfortunately, commonly accepted without question. Admittedly, they are aided and abetted by Palestinian leaders who have refined lying into a fine art when concocting narratives for the media. Jews started returning to their ancient homeland in droves in the late 19th century, restoring Judea, Samaria (often called the West Bank to conceal the ancient affinity of the Jews and their land) and what is now Israel. By 1920, when the Western allies had conquered the Ottoman land, the entire League of Nations gave the Jews a legal trust to their ancient land, anchored in the April 25, 1920 San Remo Resolution, that could not be broken. Jordan invaded the newborn Israel in 1948, grabbing Judea, Samaria and a piece of Jerusalem. When the Arabs invaded the Jewish State again in 1967, Israel was strong enough to redeemed its land. What the Arabs have been able to do is convince the world that the Jews did not live in Judea and Samaria until 1967, when they occupied the land militarily. Based on that wide-spread belief, Palestinian spokesmen have invented countless fantasies which have had the success the Arabs haven't had on the battlefield. They have portrayed Israel as an outrageously repressive regime, routinely committing atrocities against the Palestinian people, a group of innocents that have done no harm. Their phony accusations have often been taken up eagerly and amplified by the media and such unbiased institutions as the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the UN

J STREET AND NEW YORK TIMES REVISE THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

by Stephen M. Flatow, November 2, 2021.
J Street is an anti-Jewish, anti-Israel group that insists it is a Jewish organization; the New York Times (NYT) is a distributor of anti-Israel propaganda. I’m not sure that they still insist they print only news that’s fit to print. If they do, given their output, I wonder what they mean by ‘fit’. Stephen Flatow writes that the NYT reported that “the Israeli government advanced plans on Wednesday to build more than 3,000 new settlement units” in the West Bank. These largely involved apartments within existing communities, but calling them “settlement units” conveys a much more sinister image that sounds more menacing. It is a rhetorical trick and a rhetorical weapon to make Israel look bad when the facts alone won’t accomplish that objective. To make sure nothing cracked their shell game, they called apartments in the building in the town “settlement units.” J Street went further. They called Israel’s plan “settlement expansion.” During the past three decades, the Israeli government has authorized exactly one new settlement in the West Bank. Since 1992, the only Jewish construction authorized in the territories by a succession of Israeli governments has been within existing communities. While Israel is sacrificing availability of housing for Jews, the Arabs build where ever they want, whether it’s their land or not.
AUTHOR: Stephen M. Flatow is an attorney and the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is the author of the book, “A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror.
This article was published November 2, 2021 by Jewish News Syndicate (JNS). It is archived at https://www.jns.org/opinion/j-street-and-new-york-times-revise-the-english-language/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/flatow.townscalledsettlements.html/

THE NEW YORK TIMES SELLS A COMICAL ACCOUNT OF ISRAEL

by Gilead Ini, October 27, 2021
Gilead Ini writes of a New York Time (NYT) reporter who queried Israelis on how happy they were living in Israel. Almost all of them were unhappy. Given that Israel is ranked in the top 10% on the World Happiness Report, the Times being able to find only unhappy Israelis suggests it ignored most Israelis. It was looking for people that represented the cartoonish point of view of the NYT attitude toward Israel. I wonder how many interviewees Patrick Kingsley, Jerusalem bureau chief for NYT, had to reject before he found the disgruntled Israelis he mostly cites in his article. One of the pleasures of reading Ini’s article is his compilation of the words Kingsley chose to describe Israel. When it is impossible to omit a good feature such as coexistence, Kingsley is quick to label it a “deception”. The NYT has decided oppositional facts can not be allowed to interfere with the view of Israel it feeds its shrinking number of readers. NYT writers have other restrictions: only the Palestinian Arabs have a history in the land worth writing about, never mind that the 95% of the Arabs came into the Holy Land in the twentieth century. They came for economic reasons. They had no history of attachment to the land. In fact, the Palestinian Arabs in Israel only became a people in 1964, when Arafat decreed that the Arabs living in Israel were Palestinian but Arabs living in Samaria and Judea (aka the West Bank) were not. The Arabs living under the 1948 Jordanian conquest of Samaria and Judea became part of the Palestinian people when the Jews won back their land from Jordan in 1967. Archaeology and the Bible indicate the Jews have a long long connection with their Land. You’d never know this if your only source of information was the NYT and its fellow propagandists.
AUTHOR Gilead Ini is a Senior Research Analyst at CAMERA. His commentary has appeared in numerous publications, including the Jerusalem Post, Christian Science Monitor, Columbia Journalism Review and Commentary, and has been featured on national and international radio programs. He has lectured widely on media coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Ini is co-author of the monograph “Indicting Israel: New York Times Coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict.”
This article was published October 27, 2021 by Camera and is archived at https://www.camera.org/article/ny-times-sells-comical-account-of-what-it-means-to-be-israeli/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/ini.unhappyisrael.html

NEWSFLASH, MEDIA: ISRAEL’S ARAB MINORITY DOES NOT ‘LARGELY IDENTIFY AS PALESTINIAN’

by Akiva Van Koningsveld, October 6, 2021
Akiva Van Koningsveld discusses how Arab identity is defined by themselves and the foreign press. He writes, “Keeping in line with the theory of intersectionality, sociologists over the last decades have increasingly stressed the value of the self-definition of identity as a tool of empowerment. Contributors to newspapers, like The New York Times, have argued that it is crucial for minorities to “negotiate racial identities that reflect our heritage, culture, and experience, which includes how others perceive us. Why, then, when it comes to Arabs in Israel are international news outlets seemingly intent on defining their identity for them?” The rest of his article contains some facts and history about Israel’s population. It is very unlike what the NYT and the Muslims in the US Congress would like you to believe. But then again, if ignorance of the facts, thanks to NYT and others, were not wide-spread, Arabs such as Mahmoud Abbas couldn’t get away with pretending the ‘Palestinian” Arabs go back to the ancient Canaanites.
AUTHOR: Akiva Van Koningsveld left The Netherlands for Israel in the fall of 2020. Before joining the Honest Reporting team, he worked as a policy officer at the Center for Information and Documentation Israel, a Dutch organization dedicated to combating antisemitism and spreading awareness of the Arab-Israel conflict. He graduated from Utrecht University with a law degree, focusing on the intersection of human rights and civil liability.
This article was published October 6, 2021 by Honest Reporting. and is archived at https://honestreporting.com/newsflash-media-israels-arab-minority-does-not-largely-identify-as-palestinian/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/koningsveld.israelarabidentity.html

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS (AP) WAR OF WORDS AGAINST ISRAEL

by Howard Rotberg, October 04, 2021
Question: how does the AP describe an Israeli counter-terrorism operation? Answer: “Israeli troops kill Five Palestinians in West Bank gun battles.” What makes the AP reporting so pernicious is that AP “supplies international news to western news media who can’t afford their own international bureaus … The AP News Agency has approximately 15,000 media customers that in turn shares its reports to half of the world population every day…” Howard Rotberg writes, “There is no other country that AP subjects to such obvious journalistic lies, so we can consider AP to be an antisemitic organization.” AP’s word war on Israel isn’t new. “Way back on September 30, 2000, the Associated Press published a photo of a bloodied youth standing near an Israeli border policeman. As the pro-Israel media watch-dog Honest Reporting put it: ‘The caption identified the victim as a Palestinian, although the truth quickly surfaced: The person in question was actually Tuvia Grossman, a Jewish student from Chicago. The Israeli security officer was trying to protect him after he and two friends were pulled from their taxi by a mob in an Arab neighborhood of Jerusalem and severely beaten and stabbed.’ AP even has its own vocabulary. Savvy readers have learned that ‘Arab militants’ are actually ‘barbaric terrorists,’ and ‘protests’ is AP’s way of labeling Arab ‘violent riots’. What is still a mystery is why is AP targeting Israel? Do they have a particular reason for always slamming Israel? Is a particular person hung on Israel running this show? Is it a particular group with ingrained hatred? Or is the Associated Press leadership a bunch of run-of-the-mill anti-semites, who stand out only because they are big enough to do lots of damage?
AUTHOR: Howard Rotberg, a retired lawyer, is the “the author of four books concerning ideologies, political culture and values.”
This article was published October 04, 2021 by Arutz Sheva’s Israel National News and is archived at https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/314413/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/rotberg.associatepresswaronisrael.html/

CNN MANGLES JERUSALEM’S HISTORY

By David Litman, August 20, 2021
David Litman, writing about CNN’s series on the history of Jerusalem, describes his article as “[a] preliminary sample of how disconnected the CNN series is from reality and objectivity.” He points out, as example, “In a series supposedly about Jerusalem, CNN chose to largely conceal vital information about the majority population in the city at the time. Instead, the series producers created a false narrative about both Arabs and Jews that depicts Palestinian Arabs as victims. Similarly, it significantly underplays the role Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and close buddy of Adolph Hitler, “would play in fomenting bloodshed…” “Palestinian Jewry is virtually nonexistent in CNN’s narrative, which even manages to make the Holocaust about the Palestinians and their alleged voicelessness.” Litman concludes, “The CNN series is marred by historical error – all seemingly driving in the direction of distorting or omitting entirely the heavily one-sided aggression of the Arabs against the Jews – whether in the form of murderous Arab violence in the 1920’s and ’30’s, in the collaboration of the Palestinian Arab leader Amin al-Hussein with the Nazis or in the curious misrepresenting of Palestinian Arab allies in vital UN maneuvering.”
AUTHOR: David Litman writes about Jews in Israel and the US and the organizations and news media that distort the truth when writing about them.
This article was published August 20, 2021 by Camera and is archived at https://www.camera.org/article/cnn-mangles-jerusalems-history/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/litman.cnnjerusalemhistory.html

WHY ISRAEL RECEIVES SUCH DISPROPORTIONATE WORLD ATTENTION AND CRITICISM

by David E. Bernstein, July 5, 2021
Israeli sovereignty and military power means Jews are refusing to play the role assigned to them by Christian, Marxist, and Islamic ideologies Israel does indeed receive an amount of world attention disproportional to its size and harsh criticism that focuses on its supposed harsh occupation of land the ignorant believe belongs to the Palestinian Arabs. Israel’s large contributions to the betterment of mankind and its care in avoiding hitting civilians when retaliating on-going Arab terrorism is ignored. David Bernstein has previously explored various possibilities why this is. He now suggests that it is Israel’s sovereignty and strength that hits many people the wrong way. Theologically. Israel was for two thousand years at the mercy of the theological beliefs of whatever land it was in. Bernstein suggests that “[t]o see the Jews exercising dominion over Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land is a hard theological pill to swallow,” Then too Jews insist on being their own people. “Jews refusing to be victims is, ironically, seen as a betrayal of Christian ideals.” Jews have also overturned some important Muslims theology, including the belief that Islam must be first among religions, ruling over the inferior other religions. Moreover, the average Muslim assumes that “Judaism is expansionist and universalist like Islam.” Bernstein believes that dislike of the image of the new Jew is why any show of strength is derided as “disproportionate”. No amount of force is acceptable. Bernstein implies that these attitudes can’t change. I am more optimistic.
AUTHOR: David E. Bernstein is a professor and executive director of the Antonin Scalia Law School at the George Mason University Law School.
This article was published July 5, 2021 by The TImes of Israel and is archived at https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/israels-critics-are-repulsed-by-jewish-sovereignty-and-military-power/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/bernstein.jewishsovereignty.html

HA’ARETZ IS AN ENEMY OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE

by Victor Rosenthal, July 4, 2021
We’ve become accustomed to Israel being smeared and lambasted by foreign newspapers, but it comes as a shocker that Ha’aretz, a newspaper published in Israel, is as vile as they come. It plays the same role for foreign papers that citing a viciously anti-Jewish remark made by a (Jew-hating) Jew does. News media outside Israel need only quote Ha’aretz. Surely, Ha’aretz wouldn’t lie and distort information about its own country. Yah, right. As Victor Rosenthal writes, “Every day its writers present a slanted version of events in which Israel and Israelis are oppressors, occupiers, murderers, racists, thieves, and liars.” He carefully examines a situation that lays bare Ha’aretz’s distortions and straight-out lies.
AUTHOR: Victor Rosenthal is a writer whose subject matter is Israel, its friends and enemies. He writes much about Jew hate and the disastrous deals such as the Oslo Accords into which the desire for peace has led Israel.
This article was published by the Abu Yehuda Blog and was reposted July 4, 2021 by the Jewish Press.
It is archived at https://www.jewishpress.com/blogs/abu-yehuda/haaretz-is-an-enemy-of-the-jewish-people/2021/07/07/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at http://www.think-israel.org/rosenthal.hostilehaaretz.html/

THE PALESTINIAN POLICE STATE

by Khaled Abu Toameh, June 30, 2021
Khaled Abu Toameh makes clear what is actually going on in the Palestinian Authority, and it is hugely different from what we read in much of the Western press. He writes of the “Palestinian leaders who have turned the Palestinian Authority-controlled areas of the West Bank into a police state where political opponents are beaten to death, arrested, tortured and intimidated.” Abu Toamah writes that this crackdown has been pretty much ignored by the Western media, until the death of Nizar Banat, “a political activist and outspoken critic of the Palestinian leadership who was allegedly beaten to death on June 24 by Palestinian security officers.” He points out that “[i]t was ignored because the perpetrators were not Israeli policemen or soldiers. It was ignored because the media could not find a way to blame Israel for the fact that the Palestinian government was harassing, intimidating and torturing Palestinians.” He asks, “What will the western world, beginning with the Biden Administration, do with the testimony of the Palestinian journalists and political activists, who are being targeted and silenced by their own leaders? Will the Biden administration and the Western world actually legitimize — and reward with millions of dollars and possibly even a state — political leaders who brutalize, torture and murder their own journalists and citizens? To gain what? A legacy of America championing a regime like that?”
AUTHOR: Khaled Abu Toameh is an Israeli Arab journalist, lecturer and documentary filmmaker. He lives in Jerusalem and writes for The Jerusalem Post and for the New York-based Gatestone Institute, where he is a senior distinguished fellow. He is a producer and consultant for NBC News since 1989. His articles have also appeared in numerous newspapers around the world.
This article was published June 30, 2021 by The Gatestone Institute and is archived at https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17515/palestinian-police-state/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/abu-toameh.palestinianpolicestate.html

THE NEW YORK TIMES RELIES ON AMNESTY AND HRW SOURCES IN MISLEADING GAZA VIDEO

By Naftali Balanson, June 30, 2021
This is the Executive Summary of Naftali Balanson’s article: “The New York Times continues to present anti-Israel propaganda as news. In the latest example, the paper published a 15-minute video alleging Israeli war crimes during the May conflict in Gaza. The sources called upon by the Times to back up these claims are exclusively members of NGOs [Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW)] known for their hostility to Israel. Not a single genuine expert on either the specifics of the incident in question or international law was used as a source in the Times‘s highly misleading and biased report.” The facts are simple enough. Israel counter-attacked Gaza, and, as we’d expect, all their bombs precisely hit their intended targets and no other buildings or streets. No one disputes this, not even the NYT, although they carried a video, which smudges the issue. While the Israelis were bombing a portion of a vacant street that housed a tunnel and command center under it, nearby (I’m guessing they were nearby) apartment buildings in this upscale neighborhood in Gaza collapsed. Actually, only one, the Abul Ouf Building, is identified by name and 22 people were killed in its fluke collapse. Israel did not target or strike this apartment house. It is assumed that the foundations of the collapsed building were unexpectedly dislodged when the bombs exploded in the nearby tunnels. Altogether, three buildings are said to have collapsed, but it doesn’t appear the other two collapsed unexpectedly; in fact, it appears they were targeted because they sat on stores of weaponry, Nevertheless, the three buildings are lumped together as ‘collapsing.’ Whatever the cause, Hamas was not blamed for running tunnels under civilian housing, hospitals and schools. Israel was not praised for making sure the area over the Hamas command center was vacated. Instead, Israel was blamed for not warning the civilians in the buildings that unexpectedly collapsed. In high dudgeon, the NYT and its NGO ‘experts’ insisted Israel had committed war crimes. Compare this show of indignation to their lack of complaints when the Arab leadership deliberately puts Arab children (not their own, of course) in hospitals and schools that are loaded with weapons, knowing the Jews will be condemned were they to bomb the place or, more likely, they won’t bomb a place that contains children. And the Arabs will get to use the weaponry.
AUTHOR: Naftali Balanson is Chief of Staff at NGO Monitor. He oversees all of NGO Monitor’s publications and helps develop strategic goals and objectives. His articles and op-eds have appeared in many publications including the Jerusalem Post, the Forward, The Jewish Chronicle, and Ynet.
This article was published June 30, 2021 by the BESA Center and is archived at https://besacenter.org/new-york-times-amnesty-hrw-gaza-video/.
It is archived at Think-Israel.org at https://www.think-israel.org/balanson.nytinadequatesources.html

NEW YORK TIMES PUBLISHES PHOTO OF GIRL KILLED BY ISRAELIS WHO WAS ALSO KILLED BY ISRAELIS IN 2017

 By Robert Spencer, May 31, 2021
We owe Robert Spencer a debt for his meticulous tracking the audacious slandering of Israel by fake photo over the years. In this article, he tells us about an article that “was supposed to be heartbreaking: on Friday, the New York Times published a front-page series of photos with the headline ‘They Were Just Children,’ little Palestinian Arab children who had supposedly been murdered by the evil Israeli war machine during the latest round of Hamas jihad attacks. The only problem was that one of the photos, prominently featured on the top row, was of a little girl whom Palestinian Arab propagandists, using the very same photo, had reported murdered by the Israelis in January 2017.” (See here.) “The Times photo imbroglio came just over a week after Palestinian Arabs on Twitter claimed that a photo of another little girl depicted the victim of an Israeli airstrike; it was actually a photo of a Russian child model who has never been anywhere near Gaza and is still very much alive. Spencer describes other such ‘mislabeled’ photos that have been circulated by the Palestinian Arabs and their media friend for years. And his book, The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process “details the breadth and sophistication of this deception.” Let me use one more of his examples. < a href=”https://www.israellycool.com/2020/02/11/palestinian-fauxtography-of-the-day-baby-in-the-box-edition/”> Israelly Cool reported in February 2020 that Palestinian ‘journalist’ Mustafa Batnain tweeted a heartbreaking photo from Gaza depicting a baby inside a cardboard box, presumably the little one’s only shelter amid rampaging, savage, brutal IDF forces. Once again, there was a catch: the photo was actually not from Gaza at all, but from Idomeni, Greece. It’s all in a day’s work for the Palestinian factory of Israeli atrocities.” People have wondered why, if Israel is so wanton in its treatment of Palestinian Arab children, why the need to use fake pictures?
AUTHOR: Robert Bruce Spencer is an American writer, whose subject matter is radical Islam. His books on Islamic law, theology, history and terrorism are noted for being factual and for receiving bombastic smears from Muslims and their friends. He is the founder and director of the Jihad Watch and Dhimmi Watch, websites that focus on Islam-related events globally.
This article was published May 31. 2021 by Pajama Media and is archived at https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2021/05/31/new-york-times-publishes-photo-of-girl-killed-by-israelis-who-was-also-killed-by-israelis-in-2017-n1451060/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://spencer.arabsfakephotos.html

CAROLINE GLICK: ‘BLOOD OF JEWS’ ON HANDS OF LEFT-WING LAWMAKERS, MEDIA

By Joshua Klein, May 31, 2021
It isn’t really new news but it does show amazing gall that the media have portrayed Palestinian Arab aggressions against the Jewish State as all Israel’s fault. A sustained job of blaming the victim. Joshua Klein (here) writes of Caroline Glick’s anger at “congressional leftists and the left-inclined media for a recent wave of violent attacks against Jews, accusing the left wing and its lawmakers of hating the Jewish state and having ‘the blood of Jews’ on their hands, while blaming the media for ‘transforming America into an antisemitic state.’ “‘It’s pretty amazing that Hamas, a terrorist organization, attacked Israel with over 4,300 rockets and missiles and mortars in the space of 11 days,’ she said, adding that ‘Israel did not provoke Hamas at all.'” Glick is quite accurate. It is remarkable that the most of the global press have been able to portray Israel as starting the hostilities and perpetuating them. Standing firmly on this rock of balderdash, such epitomes of fairness as the U.N. Human Rights Council and “all of the bleeding hearts on all of the major networks in the United States …hate the Jewish State and .. blame it for the aggression that’s being perpetrated against it.”
AUTHOR: Joshua Klein is a journalist and an investigative reporter for Breitbart News, focusing on global politics.
This article was published May 31, 2021 by Breitbart News and is archived at https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/05/31/caroline-glick-blood-of-jews-on-hands-of-progressive-lawmakers-left-leaning-media/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at klein.glickonarabpropaganda.html/

TRUMPETS AND TANK ENGINES: A TURNING POINT IN GAZA?

by Richard Kemp, May 16, 2021
Richard Kemp writes of how Israel’s desire to minimize injuring Gaza’s civilians has influenced its style of warfare. Even though surprise is an important element is winning a war, Israel spends considerable effort, to the point of endangering its own people, in minimizing Arab civilian deaths during its ongoing war with Hamas, even notifying tenants when it will target a civilian site containing war weaponry. Nevertheless, as Kemp writes, “Over many years of conflict in Gaza, the majority of the world’s media have enthusiastically reported the deaths of Palestinian civilians as though they were the deliberate object of Israel’s callous and uncaring way of war. This blatantly false propaganda has been taken up by Hamas supporters and ‘useful idiots’ in the West…. Human rights groups around the world have been doing the same.” And the UN always condemns Israel. Nevertheless, Israel continues to do what Hamas won’t do for its own people: try to minimize civilian deaths in Gaza. Kemp also describes an IDF operation that “was reminiscent of the biblical Israelite leader Gideon’s famous stratagem against the Midianites. He had his men blow trumpets, light torches and yell battle cries, simulating a much larger force and causing the vastly superior enemy army to flee the field.” Well worth reading.
AUTHOR: Colonel Richard Kemp is a former Commanding Officer of the 1st Battalion, The Royal Anglian Regiment. He later commanded all British forces in Afghanistan and co-authored a book describing his experiences there. He writes often and accurately about Israel, particularly Israel’s army, routinely rebutting ignorant and/or malicious lies about the IDF. An article on him, his observations and his ability to rectify errors recklessly spouted by the media can be found here.
This article was published May 16, 2021 by The Gatestone Institute and is archived at https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17372/turning-point-in-gaza/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/kemp.trumpetandtanks.html

A MURDEROUS CO-OPERATION: THE PUBLIC HAS SCANT IDEA OF HOW IT IS BEING MISLED OVER ISRAEL AND THE PALESTINIANS

by Melanie Phillips, May 16, 2021
A building in Gaza that house news agencies such as the Associated Press and Agence France Presse is also a place where the Palestinian Arabs keep their bombs. Oddly enough, these newsy people don’t complain to Gazan officials about storing weapons this close to them. Instead, as Melanie Phillips writes, they complain to their readers that Israel is attacking the media because it favors the Arabs. Is it believable that they just don’t know their co-tenants are terrorists, obsessed with destroying Israel? Envision a Saturday Live episode of a terrorist holding a stack of guns which keep slipping and a reporter together on the elevator, both trying to ignore each other to understand how absurd is the notion that the news media really don’t know who their fellow-tenants are. Israel even gave the news agencies warning to evacuate before it bombed the building, but of course that doesn’t count. As far as the newsmen are concerned, Israel can do nothing right. If they didn’t believe that, Hamas wouldn’t let them stay in Gaza — Hamas has control of everything in Gaza. In fact, most of the ‘reporting’ for Western news agencies is done by “Palestinian stringers whose propaganda goes straight into national newspapers in Britain, America and elsewhere — sometimes even under the byline of a staff correspondent sitting in an office in a safe country — and is believed by the unsuspecting western reader who trusts the integrity of that newspaper.” One wonders why, if Israel will be blamed no matter how it tries to protects hostile civilians, why doesn’t it show more concern for its own citizens, who needlessly suffer from terrorism that could be stopped in record time, if Israel weren’t so worried about what the world will say. This is in marked contrast to the Arab leaders, who often force their own civilians to ignore such warnings and stay put in the line of fire where they’ve deliberately placed them, in order to get that all-important western media coverage of child fatalities.
AUTHOR: Melanie Phillips is a British journalist and author. As cited in the Jew Age Organization, “she began her career on the left of the political spectrum, writing for such publications as The Guardian and New Statesman. In the 1990s she moved to the right, and she now writes for the Daily Mail newspaper, covering political and social issues from a conservative perspective. She has defined herself as a liberal who has ‘been mugged by reality’.”
This article was published May 16, 2021 on the Melanie Phillips website and is archived at https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/a-murderous-co-operation/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/phillips.newsterroristcooperation.html

WHAT’S REALLY GOING ON IN GAZA?

 posted by Michael Savage, May 16, 2021 and written by his friend
This is a letter written to Michael Savage by a friend who stated he was tired of hearing all the misinformation about the pitiful Gazans because there is an almost complete disparity between Gazan complaints and actuality. Gazan Arabs claim “Israel kept the vaccine from their population, that Israel starved and killed children, that Israel is a colonizer, apartheid nation …Poor Gaza. With no food, no fuel, no power, no vaccines.” Doesn’t the media notice they have more than enough money “to buy and launch 700 missiles [a day] with thousands more stockpiled for tomorrow, or the next day. (Each one is $45,000 USD so today’s war cost is $31,500,000 USD) ” Similarly, “Poor Gaza, who won’t feed their children with the trucks of aid paid for and delivered by the State of Israel and her citizens, that arrive every freaking day, while claiming to the world she is starving.” This is a true statement – not a typo – Israel is nutty enough to continue sending trucks of food daily, despite receiving back missiles targeting civilians. Gazans who deliberately target Jewish children walking to school and who deliberately place their own children in places they have stockpiled with weaponry have the chutzpah to moan that Israel is targeting Gazan children. Poor Gazans, indeed!
AUTHOR: unknown. He is a friend of Michael Savage, who posted his letter. Michael Savage was featured in a video in July 2014, talking about Israel and Gaza.
This article was published in 2021 on the Michael Savage website and is archived at https://michaelsavage.com/whats-really-going-on-in-gaza/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/savage.goingoningaza.html

LEGACY MEDIA PUSHES ISLAMIST PROPAGANDA ABOUT ISRAEL DURING WAVE OF TERRORISM

by Raheel Raza, May 12, 2021
Perhaps the degree to which the media are committed to condemning and distorting whatever Israel does is best shown when the Muslims are clearly in the wrong. In this particular instant, Muslim listeners to a hate-filled sermon in the mosque on the Temple Mount became a frenzied mob that attacked the Israel police with rocks and fireworks, which just happened to be stockpiled there. Raheel Raza writes about “Israel getting the raw end of the deal and with little or no context. The news stories portray a victimized Muslim/Palestinian community during the last important days of Ramadan (the holiest month of the Islamic calendar) being attacked indiscriminately by wicked Israelis. As a result, all over the Muslim world, Muslims are in a hysterical frenzy posting on media, social media, writing, and exposing the evil, ” The success of the media can be shown even in the comments to Raza’s article; almost all believe Israel routinely oppresses the Palestinians.
AUTHOR Raheel Raza is a Pakistani-Canadian journalist and author. She is known for her condemnation of Islamic terrorism and the ugly nature of what is known as Islamic extremism.
This article was published May 12, 2021 by The National Telegraph and is archived at https://thenationaltelegraph.com/world/mainstream-media-pushes-islamist-propaganda-about-israel-during-wave-of-terrorism/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/raza.ramadanriot.html

EIGHT TIPS FOR READING ABOUT ISRAEL

by Matti Friedman, Spring, 2021 
The political bent of most of the media is such that what is written about Israel is almost universally distorted, outrageous and false. Matti Friedman writes, “Some Western observers have formed a picture of Israel … only tenuously linked to reality… The shared narrative in Western Europe and North America is largely a negative one that grows increasingly negative as the ideological landscape of the West becomes more polarized and inflamed.” So how can one trust that what is written about Israel is factual? A cynic might say, “you can’t”, but Friedman suggests some ways to help the reader decide he’s getting “sane information or a narrative of a different kind.” Some are common-sense ways to vet the writers. Does he speak the language? Does he have a particular position — like being a member of Breaking the Silence or B”Tselem — that imposes an ideological filter on reality? What is the time frame? Clearly someone who is told that the initiating event of the Israel-Palestinian problem was Israel occupying the West Bank in 1967 will never know than it has been legally Israeli land since 1920 and inhabited by Jews way before then. In 1967, Israel got back land that Jordan snatched when she invaded Israel in 1948. Other tests where context and comparison are important take more thought and effort. This is a most useful article.
AUTHOR: Matti Friedman is a journalist and the author of three highly acclaimed books: The Aleppo Codex, Pumpkin Flowers, and Spies of No Country. A former Associated Press correspondent, Matti’s work as a reporter has taken him from Israel to Lebanon, Morocco, Moscow, the Caucasus, and Washington, D.C. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Tablet Magazine, and elsewhere. He currently lives in Jerusalem with his family.
This article was published Spring, 2021 in the Sapir Journal and is archived at https://sapirjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/eight-tips-for-reading-about-israel.pdf/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/friedman.eighttips.html

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THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD

The Muslim Brotherhood has been devoted to jihad since its start in 1928. What it says about itself and what it does depends on circumstances, but it never wavered from its mission to topple all religions but Islam and impose sharia law in all the countries of the world.

The Muslim Brotherhood holds no specific stake in the argument whether one has a better chance of destroying Israel (and later the West) by sustained and dramatic acts of violence or by quietly infiltrating and distorting our political, judicial and educational systems. They do both and they have the resources to do both, having large amounts of cash and using the far left as their invasive foot soldiers. Islamic Jihad may not be in the news, but it is very active, As the Billion Bibles organization puts it (see here), "The Muslim Brotherhood Movement (Hizb al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun) or simply 'Muslim Brotherhood' or 'Ikhwan' is the world's oldest, largest and the best camouflaged Islamic Jihad movement. To non-Muslims, the Muslim Brotherhood portrays itself as the 'acceptable branch of Islam' that promotes Muslims' socio-political integration, religious protection and economic welfare through charity, public relations and other peaceful actions. Muslims, however, know Muslim Brotherhood as a camouflaged Jihadi movement whose ultimate goal is to subjugate the world under Quran's Sharia law through 'Jihad.' The official motto of the Muslim Brotherhood makes this explicitly clear:

'Allah is our objective.
The Prophet is our leader.
The Quran is our law.
Jihad is our way.
Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.'

The Muslim Brotherhood takes itself very seriously. So should we.

These are videos on the Muslim Brotherhood:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPwkCV0KSpM
and
https://www.jpost.com/american-politics/do-muslim-brotherhood-members-roam-the-halls-of-congress-video-report-587857

FORMER MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD MONEYMAN TELLS ALL

 By Pesach Benson, November 7, 2021
This is an important article in that it shows how terror groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood have ‘charities’ and ‘do good works’ to which they can point, while using the bulk of their money to support terrorists. As Abdurrahman Bin Subaih Al Suwaidi, a UAE national and the Brotherhood’s one-time director of funding, describes Hamas’ use of this technique, “Hamas says the money is for one thing, but [they] use it for something else. It’s the conflict between what Hamas talks and how Hamas walks.” Al Suwaidi told London’s Jewish Chronicle that ‘millions of dirhams’ (one million UAE dirhams is approximately $270,000) were given to charitable organizations, including Hamas.” Note that “the Hamas charter identifies itself as a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. The charter quotes Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan Al-Bana on Islam’s imperative to ‘obliterate’ Israel.” Al Suwaidi’s disclosures about Hamas funding has triggered calls for the British government to take further measures against illicit terror funding.” But, as Pesach Benson writes of the cagey way the Brotherhood supports Hamas, “To Israel’s chagrin, Britain currently bans the Hamas ‘military wing’ but not its ‘political wing,’ making it difficult for authorities to move against Hamas financing. European authorities face similar problems over the European Union’s refusal to blacklist Hezbollah in its entirety.” Moreover, it’s hard to trace ‘donations’ because they only use cash.
AUTHOR: Pesach Benson is a writer, editor and Israel advocate. He is a staff writer for United With Israel.
This article was published November 7, 2021 by United with Israel and is archived at https://unitedwithisrael.org/former-muslim-brotherhood-moneyman-tells-all/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/benson.charitymoneyforterrorism.html/

THE ISLAMIZATION OF FRANCE CANNOT BE STOPPED

by Giulio Meotti, October 18, 2021
Giulio Meotti warns that France is being rapidly islamicized. He cites journalist Eric Zemmour, “In 2050 we will be a half-Islamic country, in 2100 we will be an Islamic republic.” Several facts stand out in that they are typical of what happens when the Muslims become the majority in a city or section. Non-Muslims move because of racial tensions and fear of Arab gangs. Jew hate and acts of terrorism against Jews increase significantly. The government doesn’t react effectively, so Jews leave in large numbers and business and professional areas suffer. The environment and ordinary article in the surround change. Children toy shop display veiled dolls; libraries stock books introducing children to jihadist practices. Meotti notes that already “[e]very two weeks in France, a mosque is created and a church disappears.” Because France is a democracy, Muslims easily expand their power as their numbers rapidly increase because of a high rate of immigration and a high fertility rate. When their population is sufficient large to take control of an area, they suppress French law and substitute their own sharia law. They see to it that the process is not reversible. Meotti writes, “More than 500 districts in France are declared ‘sensitive’. To put it bluntly, we are talking about several million people who are subject to Islamist law”.
AUTHOR: Giulio Meotti is an Italian journalist who writes on Middle Eastern and Jewish issues. His columns have appeared in the Wall Street Journal and Commentary, in Il Foglio and in Yedioth Ahronoth and Arutz Sheva.
This article was published October 18, 2021 by Gatestone Institute and is archived at https://www.prophecynewswatch.com/article.cfm?recent_news_id=5019/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/meotti.islamizationoffrance.html

TWO DECADES ON, THE WEST’S CULTURAL FAULT LINE EXPOSED BY 9/11 REMAINS

by Melanie Phillips, September 13, 2021
Melanie Phillips describes her insightful article this way: “For the West, there are no ‘forever wars.’ Its wars are either won or lost; there are victors and vanquished. For Islamic extremists, war is indeed forever; defeat is only temporary.” She makes the point that “while real prejudice against Muslims is wrong, ‘Islamophobia’ was invented by the holy warriors of the Muslim Brotherhood to silence any adverse comment of Islam. It was a religious obligation to impose a Muslim law of blasphemy. By enlisting against ‘Islamophobia,’ the West has effectively bent its knee to Islam whose very name means submission.” If we are to fight Islam’s ambition to conquer all countries and vanquish all competing religions, we must start by describing the problem properly. Jihadi fundamentalism isn’t a perversion or outlier of Islam. It is intrinsic to Islam. And thanks to organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood, adherents don’t just argue theology. They actively undermine the political, judicial and educational systems of host countries. From their own documents, we have learned that their objective is to eliminate and destroy Western civilization from within.
AUTHOR: Melanie Phillips is a British journalist, broadcaster and author. Currently a columnist for “The Times of London,” her personal and political memoir, “Guardian Angel,” has been published by Bombardier, which also published her first novel, “The Legacy.” Her website is at melaniephillips.substack.com.
This article was published September 10, 2021 by Arutz Sheva and is archived at https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/313252/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/phillips.islamsforeverwar.html

THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD IS HERE

 by Sanbeer Singh Ranhotra, July 29, 2021
According to Sanbeer Singh Ranhotra, “The end of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), it seems, is very near. Death is knocking on the radical transnational, near-clandestine organisation’s doors. Founded in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood’s self-stated aim is the establishment of a state ruled by Sharia law-its most famous slogan worldwide being: “Islam is the solution”. The Muslim Brotherhood is indeed transnational, and as an end goal, wishes to establish radical Sharia and Islamic law over a vast state, or perhaps, even the whole world. Until then, however, its aim is to gain control over Egypt, but it has been losing out humiliatingly on that front, and now, Cairo has just pushed the organisation into its grave.” In addition to Egypt, Tunisia is forcing the MB out of power. Austria has banned it. The governments of Bahrain, Egypt, Russia, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates consider it a terrorist organization. This is all good news. Would that it applied to the Western countries!
AUTHOR: Sanbeer Singh Ranhotra is a producer and commentator for CNN at News18.com. His videos at ar Firstpost. He writes on national affairs and geopolitics.
This article was published July 29, 2021 by TFI Global and is archived at https://tfiglobalnews.com/2021/07/29/the-beginning-of-the-end-of-the-muslim-brotherhood-is-here/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/ranhotra.endofmuslimbrotherhoodinme.html/

TOWARD A PALESTINIAN STATE? THE U.S. CONFERS LEGITIMACY ON THE PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY AND HAMAS

by Lt.-Col. (res.) Dr. Mordechai Kedar, March 5, 2021
As yet another example of President Biden’s disastrous reversal of President Trump’s policies and actions, the Biden administration is again promoting a Palestinian State to be planted in Jewish territory. To help this happen, suddenly after fifteen years of Abbas’ 4-year term of office, Hamas announced a new election. Moreover, Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, is back in Washington after being excluded during Trump’s presidency. As Mordechai Kedar writes, “Portraying the group as a civic organization and a legitimate political party rather than the genocidal terrorist group that it is constitutes the best way to legitimize it in the US media and in international politics.” And of course, the word ‘freedom’ is tossed around as if it had any meaning in the Palestinian Authority. Kedar speculates who in the Biden Administration is giving Abbas “constructive ideas.” A Palestinian State certainly isn’t wanted by the majority of Israelis, who fear “that such a state will turn into a much more dangerous terror entity than the one that exists in Gaza.”
AUTHOR: Lt. Col. (res.) Dr. Mordechai Kedar is a senior research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA). He served for 25 years in IDF military intelligence specializing in Syria, Arab political discourse, Arab mass media, Islamic groups, and Israeli Arabs, and is an expert on the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups.
This article was published March 5, 2021 by the Begin-Sadat Center and is archived at https://besacenter.org/us-legitimacy-palestinians-hamas/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/kedar.legitimizinghamas.html/

THE PERILS OF NONVIOLENT ISLAMISM BY ELHAM MANEA: A REVIEW

By Phyllis Chesler, February 22, 2021
“Non-Violent Islamism” sounds so innocuous, so different from the violence we associate with open jihad terrorism. But as Elham Manea has pointed out, ‘nonviolent Islamism,’ is the basic building block that leads to violent jihad. And our misreading of that reality can lead to real harm. It will come as a surprise to many that indiscriminately labeling critics of salafism as islamophobes also reduces the impact of Muslims who work to reform sharia law. This article is a review by Phyllis Chesler of the well-reasoned arguments by Manea on how Western repression of the politically incorrect terminology that correctly characterizes Islamism can lead to repressing any condemnation of Islamism. And that does Muslims who wish to reform outmoded practices no good at all. Manea has also pointed out that it is a mistake for Westerners to consider the Muslim Brother as a reliable source of expertise. As Manea writes, “One cannot combat an ideology and fundamentalism by working with the very groups that promote that ideology. […] The Muslim Brotherhood is structured and organized globally so that it can indoctrinate successive generations into ‘radicalized Islam’ or hate ideology, the kind that leads to funding and perpetrating violent jihad; gender segregation; closed communities especially in the West; the veiling of women, child marriage; infidel hatred, especially Jew-hatred, etc.”
AUTHOR: Phyllis Chesler is an Emerita Professor of Psychology and Women’s Studies at the City University of New York (CUNY), and the author of 20 books, including Women and Madness (1972), and A Family Conspiracy: Honor Killings. (2018). She is a Senior IPT Fellow and a Fellow at MEF and ISGAP.
This article was published February 22, 2021 by the Phyllis Chesler website and is archived at https://phyllis-chesler.com/articles/the-perils-of-nonviolent-islamism-by-elham-manea/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/chesler.manea.nonviolentislamism.html/

PRESIDENT BIDEN AND THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD TRAP

by Amb. (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, February 11, 2021
The Muslim Brotherhood is not just antithetic to Western countries but also to Muslim states that wish to remain sovereign. Yoram Ettinger writes, “President Biden is about to reembrace the Muslim Brotherhood in the mold of the Obama/Biden Administration in defiance of all pro-US Arab countries, which consider the Muslim Brotherhood a clear and present, existential terrorist threat.” He points out that the Brotherhood’s core ideology is to establish a “universal Islamic society; replacing Western global domination and submitting itself to Allah and the Quran, while rejecting/toppling all national (Muslim and non-Muslim) regimes via politics, violence and martyrdom.” The Brotherhood has a veneer of non-violence. It may seem to conform to western ideas of political administration. In reality, it holds firm to its vision of a universal adherence to sharia law, with Islam as the religion to which all must conform. Nevertheless, the current Biden administration seems to see only the veneer. This is unlikely to help stabilize an already unstable Middle East.
AUTHOR: Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger is an international speaker, writer and commentator. He, can be read at The Ettinger Report. He is author of “Second Thought: a US-Israel Initiative.”
This article was published February 11, 2021 by Israel National News and is archived at https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/296643/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/ettinger.bidenandmuslimbrotherhood.html

WASTED LIVES

by Tabitha Korol, January 13, 2021
Tabitha Korol writes, “The Muslim Brotherhood produced The Project (see here), a document that contains its plan for radical Islam to infiltrate and dominate the west. Among their aspirations is to make ‘Palestinians’ a cause, and to instigate a constant campaign of inciting hatred against Jews, by any means. As a member of BDS (Boycott Divestment, Sanctions) and SJP (Students for Justice in Palestine), Susan Abulhawa, a jihada, advocates the economic and civilizational destruction of Israel.” Her book, Mornings in Jenin, tracks “the lives of four generations of the fictional terrorist family of Yehya Mohammad Abulheja.” In this article, Korol outlines the plot, which is how Abulhawa carries out her mission of demonizing Israel, hence making its destruction acceptable. In doing so, Abulhawa has no problem inverting historical facts. We learn from the book that the Arabs of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq were invaded by the new-born state of Israel. In actuality, it was Israel that was invaded, and survived by a miracle. Throughout, Abulhawa attributes to Jews the disgusting acts actually committed by the Arabs. The Jews are of course accused of rape, even though, as Korol writes, “Islam teaches and justifies violence against women. […] Islamic apartheid also fosters rape of boys by older men ‘of status,’ an age-old, self-perpetuating Islamic practice of humiliation and emasculation. If it were not so false and ugly, accusing Israeli Jews of rape is laughable. Many of you may remember that “in 2017, an anti-Israel activist declared that Israelis are racist because they don’t rape Palestinian women!” Korol describes some other Inversions, lies and wrongful attribution that characterize the book. She insightfully notes, “The ambition of a depraved warlord of the 5th century continues to waste the lives of Muslims and their victims in the 21st century.”
AUTHOR: Tabitha Korol’s articles on Islam and the West have appeared in many publications. She is author of Confronting the Deception, which deals with the media’s hiding the “truths about Islam’s invasion into other countries and our own, concealing the consequent tectonic changes in the intruded societies, with the result that America’s needs for urgent analysis and discussion are suppressed.”
This article was published January 13, 2021 by Renew America and is archived at http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/korol/210113/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/korol.wastedlives.html/

SAUDI ARABIA VS. THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD

 By LT. Col. (res.) Dr. Mordechai Kedar, January 4, 2021
Mordechai Kedar writes of the early history of the Muslim Brotherhood, pointing out that a major reason for its establishment was to counter western influence. “Whereas the Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamic thinking is revolutionary, Saudi religious thinking serves and entrenches the existing political order. Because there is no way to bridge between these mindsets, they are always in sharp tension,” despite the fact that they are both Sunni. Their “hatred explains why Brotherhood groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad turn to Shiite Iran to aid them in their struggle against Riyadh and its allies. Tehran is well aware of the rift in Sunni Islam and is glad to help these groups, thereby strengthening the coalition against their common nemesis, Saudi Arabia. That is why Iran gives refuge to leaders of al-Qaeda, which also had its origins in the Muslim Brotherhood.”
AUTHOR: Lt. Col. (res.) Dr. Mordechai Kedar is a senior research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. He served for 25 years in IDF military intelligence specializing in Syria, Arab political discourse, Arab mass media, Islamic groups, and Israeli Arabs, and is an expert on the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups.
This article was published January 4, 2021 by the Besa Center as Perspectives Paper No. 1,867, and is archived at https://besacenter.org/saudi-arabia-muslim-brotherhood/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/kedar.saudiarabiavsbrotherhood.htlml

EGYPT REVEALS THE FINANCIAL TERRORIST TIES BETWEEN THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD AND HAMAS

by Yoni Ben Menachem, December 30, 2020
Yoni Ben Menachem writes, “On Aug. 28, 2020, after seven years of an intense manhunt, the Egyptian security services arrested Mahmoud Ezzat, the acting general guide of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and head of its military wing, responsible for a series of attacks on senior Egyptian law enforcement officials.” His arrest also revealed information about the extensive network of Brotherhood investments, using money raised in other Arab countries as well as the financial aid coming from Iran. Ezzat himself controlled some 19 billion dollars in assets. Brotherhood investments were mainly managed by businessmen from various Egyptian companies who are loyal to the Brotherhood. As one example, the Brotherhood invested Hamas money in companies in Egypt and abroad, keeping 30% of the profits. The Egyptian government is curtailing these investment operations, but “there are still Arab and Muslim countries that allow the Brotherhood and Hamas to manage financial and monetary activities in their lands, such as Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Malaysia.”
AUTHOR: Yoni Ben Menachem, a veteran Arab affairs and diplomatic commentator for Israel Radio and Television, is a senior Middle East analyst for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA). He served as Director General and Chief Editor of the Israel Broadcasting Authority.
This article was published December 30, 2020 by JCPA and is archived at https://jcpa.org/egypt-reveals-the-financial-terrorist-ties-between-the-muslim-brotherhood-and-hamas/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/benmenachem.muslimbrotherhoodfinances.html

BIDEN’S BIGGEST FUNDRAISERS ARE TIED TO ISLAMIC TERRORISTS

by Daniel Greenfield, November 2, 2020
Joe Biden may have promised transparency but he effectively hid the names of his big-money fundraisers until close to Election Day. Jamal Abdi, executive director of National Iranian American Council (NIAC), an Iranian lobby, was one. Daniel Greenfield, citing Shervan Fashandi, wrote: “NIAC Action is the lobbying arm of NIAC and despite claiming to represent the Persian diaspora in America, Iranian-Americans have accused it of echoing the talking points of Iran’s regime.” NIAC lobbied for Iran and its nuclear program as well as sending Biden big money. In a timely coincidence, Biden asked to send money to Iran, money it could use for its nuclear program and international terrorism. The same interaction of money-raising and political influence apply to many other Muslims such as Ijaz Ahmad, head of the American-Pakistani Political Action Committee (APPAC), which is “militantly opposed to India’s attempts to stop Pakistani terrorism and Biden has been happy to pander to it, attacking India and expressing support for Islamic claims to Kashmir.” Greenfield says of these collutions: “These donations are the culmination of decades of Biden’s pandering to Iran, to Pakistan, and to the Muslim Brotherhood. These are the numbers in cold hard cash for which Biden is betraying America.”
AUTHOR: Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
This article was published November 2, 2020 by Frontpage Magazine and is archived at https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/bidens-biggest-fundraisers-are-tied-islamic-daniel-greenfield/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/greenfield.bidensfundraisersterrorists.html

EUROPE WARNED OF MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD’S ‘DIVISIVE’, ‘DANGEROUS’ INFLUENCE

by Francesco Bongarra, August 31, 2020
This article, written by Francesco Bongarra, is an interview with Dr. Lorenzo Vidino about his book, The Closed Circle. Vidino pointed out, “Defining the Brotherhood’s role in Europe is ‘very difficult’ because “unlike in the Middle East … there are no groups or individuals that openly identify themselves as (linked to the) Brotherhood in any European countries.” Starting in the 1960s, Middle Eastern individuals and groups with links to the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) started creating highly influential networks thought out Europe, supported with funds from Qatar and Turkey. They used the “Arabs are the victims” ruse effectively to create a mindset in the European Arab community of “them against us.” Not only has this affected integration, the MB has helped convince some Arabs to become terrorists, joining MB or groups affiliated with MB. It is also important to understand that the MB wants to convince European administrations and media that it is representative of the Muslim communities in Europe. Note that the ECR Group (European Conservatives and Reformists) has published The Muslim Brotherhood in Europe October 2021. It is available at https://ecrgroup.eu/files/MuslimBrotherhood.pdf/. Its introduction begins, “Understanding the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe is complex. Indeed it has been made deliberately so by the secrecy surrounding the organisation, and its tendency to operate more as an ideal than a formally structured political organisation. This has obscured understanding by policy makers in Europe. Given the number of former activists now emerging from this milieu, greater understanding of the Ikhwan’s nature and long term aims is now available. The European Union needs to listen to these voices, and compare them to what has been said by some of the Muslim representative organisations in Europe.”
AUTHOR: Francesco Bongarra is a journalist who writes for Arab News.
This article was published August 31, 2020 by Arab News and is archived at https://www.arabnews.com/node/1727071/world/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/bongarra.vidinoandeuropeanarabs.html

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HISTORY

Articles in this section range from Abraham's purchase of the Machpelah in Hebron through stories of the Holocaust

SHABBAT CHAYEI SARAH AND JEWISH MEMORY

by Jerold S. Auerbach, October 25, 2021
As Jerold Auerbach writes, “Long before Jerusalem was mentioned in the biblical text, Hebron was embedded as a site of pilgrimage for sacred memory. According to the biblical narrative (Genesis 23), Jewish history in the Land of Israel began in Hebron when Abraham, needing a burial site for Sarah, purchased the Machpelah cave from Ephron the Hittite. […] Once title to Machpelah passed to Abraham, Jewish history in the Land of Israel had begun.”
AUTHOR: Jerold S. Auerbach is Professor Emeritus of History at Wellesley College, where he taught courses on the United States in the twentieth century, the history of freedom of speech, and the history of Israel. Over the years, he authored books on History, Jewish History, Pueblo Indian history, and Justice. His articles and reviews have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Commentary, Harper’s, The New Republic, The Jerusalem Post, and the Harvard Law Review.
This article was published October 25, 2021 by the Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) and is archived at https://www.jns.org/opinion/shabbat-chayei-sarah-and-jewish-memory/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/auerbach.chayeisarahhebron.html

THE GIFT OF TEARS; AARON OF THE DRY BONES

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IILVZDhWcYU THE GIFT OF TEARS; AARON OF THE DRY BONES October 25, 2021.
We start this section with a video. A video that starts quietly with Rabbi Yisroel Meir Lau describing what happened when the first Americans to enter Buchenwald encountered a small boy there. Lau continues with a later event when hundreds of such boys, now living in an orphanage, all without families, all survivors of the camps, were visited by some distinguished dignitaries, The boys refused to acknowledge the belated presence of the visitors until … I’ll leave you to read the rest of the story. It helps define what makes us human.
AUTHOR This video features Yisrael Meir Lau (Lev Ezra Sokol). Rabbi Lau has served as the Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv, Israel, and chairman of Yad Vashem. When he was seven, he was imprisoned in a Nazi slave labor camp and then in Buchenwald concentration camp. He survived, was liberated and immigrated to Mandatory Palestine, now Israel, in 1945.
This video was published October 25, 2021 by The Jewish Learning Institute and is archived at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IILVZDhWcYU/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/lau.giftoftears.html/

FDR’S SECRET PLEA TO HITLER

by Rafael Medoff, October 3, 2021
Franklin Delano Roosevelt managed — indirectly when necessary — to support Britain’s ability to wage war against Nazi Germany, long before the United States entered World War 2. Similarly, he had a reputation for helping the Jews before and in WW2; because of this, many Jews are still loyal to the Democratic Party. But here, the facts paint a very different picture. FDR never spoke up about Hitler’s deadly anti-Jewish policies in the 1930s, nor did he do much if anything to help Jews escape German-controlled Europe and the Holocaust. Before the United States entered the war, interactions with the Nazi State were in support of American oil companies, although this often meant building up Germany’s ability to wage war. As an example, “at Hitler’s request, Standard Oil had obstructed the development of synthetic rubber in the United States, and instead provided the rubber technology to the Nazis.” As Rafael Medoff writes, “The president who presented himself to the public as a humanitarian and a champion of the downtrodden went out of his way to maintain good diplomatic and economic ties with the world’s most brutal violator of human rights.”
AUTHOR: As written in JNS, “Dr. Rafael Medoff is director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about the Holocaust and Jewish history. This essay is based in part on the research for his most recent book, ‘The Jews Should Keep Quiet: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and the Holocaust.'”
This article was published October 3, 2021 by Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) and is archived at https://www.jns.org/opinion/fdrs-secret-plea-to-hitler/. It first appeared in the Jewish Journal (https://jewishjournal.com/).
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/medoff.fdrpleatohitler.html

JEWISH INFIGHTING CONTRIBUTED TO FALL OF JERUSALEM IN 70 CE

by Fred Reiss, September 29, 2021
Using information from Dando Collins’ book Conquering Jerusalem: The AD 66-73 Roman Campaign to Crush the Jewish Revolt, Fred Reiss tells us of the maneuvering, scheming, plotting, and murder that highlighted the years from Herod’s reign starting in 37 BCE to the Jewish rebellion against Rome. The Jews fought well but internal conflict among the Jewish groups weakened them and prevented them from prevailing against the disciplined Roman military force.
AUTHOR: Fred Reiss, Ed.D. is a retired public and Hebrew school teacher and administrator. His newest book is The Jewish Calendar: History and Inner Workings, Fourth Edition. He may be contacted via fred.reiss@sdjewishworld.com.
This article was published September 29, 2021 by the San Diego Jewish World and is archived at https://jewishwebsite.com/featured/jewish-infighting-contributed-to-fall-of-jerusalem-in-70-ce/75419/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/reiss.fallofjerusalem.html

THE POLISH SPY WHO REPORTED ON AUSCHWITZ FROM THE INSIDE

By Donald H Harrison, October 18, 2021
As Donald Harrison writes, “Witold Pilecki, a member of the Polish resistance, learned of a new camp established by the German Nazis in the Polish city of Oswiecim, toward what end no one knew yet. He volunteered to do the unthinkable: to purposely be captured by the Nazis and to be sent to the camp, which came to be known as Auschwitz. […] As was the plan, Pilecki, who had carefully recruited other inmates to his cause, painstakingly documented what was occurring at Auschwitz – the sadistic treatment of prisoners, the random executions, the first experiments with Zyklon B to mass execute prisoners – and, at the risk of his life, managed to sneak these reports out to couriers, who carried them to Warsaw, from which they were transmitted to London.” But it remained undiscussed. As we now know, it known but not highlighted locally by the Polish resistance or broadly by newspapers of record such as the New York Times.
AUTHOR: Donald H. Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com[/author_info] [/author]  Donald H. Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com
This article was published October 18, 2021 by San Diego Jewish World and is archived at https://www.sdjewishworld.com/2021/10/18/polish-spy-reported-on-auschwitz-from-inside/.

HOW EDDIE JACOBSON CONVINCED PRESIDENT TRUMAN TO RECOGNIZE THE STATE OF ISRAEL

 by Rabbi Shraga Simmons, August 1 2021
“More than any other ‘first friendship,’ a remarkable example of influence is Eddie Jacobson in 1948 marching into the Oval Office unannounced and essentially convincing Harry Truman to recognize the new State of Israel. [Gary Ginsberg’s] First Friends details the mind-boggling intersection of events spanning decades, pressing them both to rise to the moment.” The friendship and mutual respect between Jacobson and Truman had survived 45 years, but in 1948, Truman was being hammered by multiple voices, including of course the US State Department, pressuring him not to recognize the new state of Israel, some arguing theology, some fearing the Arabs would punish the USA by reducing its supply of oil. Jacobson was able to convince Truman to give Chaim Weizmann a hearing, and ultimately, Truman recognized Israel when it became a state.
AUTHOR: Rabbi Shraga Simmons is the co-founder of Aish.com, and co-author of “48 Ways to Wisdom” (ArtScroll). He is Founder and Director of Aish.com’s advanced learning site. He is co-founder of HonestReporting.com, and author of “David & Goliath”, an account of anti-Israel media bias. He holds a degree in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin, and rabbinic ordination from the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem. He lives with his wife and children in the Modi’in region of Israel.
This article was published August 1, 2021 by the Aish organization and is archived at https://aish.com/eddie-jacobson-truman-recognize-state-of-israel/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/simmons.convincingtruman.html

THEODOR HERZL IS ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN NEW YORK

By Matti Friedman, June 3, 2021
We know Theoder Herzl was a writer who, in forming the Zionist Organization, pulled together the always-active dream of a Jewish return to Zion with the political means to implement such a plan. His organization didn’t happen by chance but was the consummation of seeing — after a period of successful absorption into the larger society — yet again the deterioration of the position of the Jews in society. In this essay, Matti Friedman drives home a point nervous Jews don’t often make; namely, how similar Herzl’s disintegrating social environment of the late 19th century was to ours. Then as now, Jews assimilated into the larger society, although approval came easier if the Jews spoke disparagingly of Judaism. It was when Herzl was in France, where a Jewish French army office named Dreyfus was accused of spying for Germany, a crime those in the know knew was committed by someone else, that the years of observation and unease coalesced and Herzl decided that leaving a more and more malignant Europe and returning to Zion where they could re-create a Jewish state and work the land, was the way to end attacks on the Jews. I find it fascinating that although he could not foreseen Israel’s impact on medicine and technology, Herzl wrote in his book Der Judenstaat what we are already seeing in Israel, “The world will be freed by our liberty, enriched by our wealth, magnified by our greatness. And whatever we attempt there to accomplish for our own welfare, will react powerfully and beneficially for the good of humanity.”
AUTHOR: Matti Friedman is a columnist and the author, most recently, of Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel.
This article was published June 3, 2021 by Tablet Magazine and is archived at https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/theodor-herzl-is-alive-and-well-and-living-in-new-york/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/friedman.herzlzionistorganization.htm

DRAMATIC CONSULTATIONS WITH PRIME MINISTER ABOUT YOM KIPPUR WAR

by Shlomo Witty, January 21, 2021
As noted here, newly opened state archives have enlarged our information about the Yom Kippur war of 1973, when Israel’s Arab neighbors again tried to destroy her, attacking on Yom Kippur, the day most Jews were in synagogue. Golda Meir, the then Israeli Prime Minister, was rightly pessimistic about the likelihood of obtaining much needed foreign aid. Her desperate plea to US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was rejected, even though he was himself a Jew and understood the dangers that beset Israel. ‘They’ve thrown us to the dogs,’ she said. Shlomo Witty writes of some of the guesswork decisions that led to spectacular repulsion of the Arab aggressors.
AUTHOR: Shlomo Witty is a writter for Arutz-Sheva, Israel National News. His articles include many on ancient and recent Israeli history.
This article was published January 21, 2021 by Arutz Sheva and is archived at https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/295351/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/witty.yomkippurwar.html

CHIUNE SUGIHARA – THE STORY OF JAPANESE SCHINDLER

By Peter Preskar, June 22, 2020
In 1939, Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese career diplomat, was sent to Kovno, Lithuania A few months later, Jewish Poles took refugee in Lithuania, fleeing the Nazis, who were occupying Poland. When the Soviets occupied Lithuania in August 1940, the Jews needed to flee again. They desperately needed transfer visas through the Soviet Union to Japan. From Japan, they had or hoped to obtain visas to travel to Curacao and Surinam. Sugihara’s request to issue visas was denied by his government. But he issued the Jews visas, anyway, preparing by hand some 300 a day in August 1940 and saving well over 2000 lives before his consulate was closed down. His insubordination wrecked his career. In one interview, Chiune Sugihara summed up his work this way: “I didn’t do anything special….I made my own decisions, that’s all. I followed my own conscience and listened to it.” He remains a symbol of righteousness for all times. Please note that the Times of Israel has an article entitled “Happy Birthday Mr Sugihara, followed by other articles on righteous men and women who had the courage to follow their conscience and save Jews during the Holocaust here.
AUTHOR Peter Preskar describes himself as “a history junkie.” He writes for the History of Yesterday website. This article was published June 22, 2020 by History of Yesterday and is archived at https://historyofyesterday.com/chiune-sugihara-947a972be7ac/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/preskar.chiunesugihara.html/

DEIR YASSIN: THERE WAS NO MASSACRE

 https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/deir-yassin-the-end-of-a-myth/ DEIR YASSIN: THERE WAS NO MASSACRE by Eliezer Tauber, May 28, 2018
Eliezer Tauber writes, “Deir Yassin is one of the founding myths of the Palestinian narrative, according to which Israelis murdered 254 people, committed rapes, and other gender-oriented atrocities in a peaceful 1948 Palestinian village.” In reality, as Tauber concludes from the very similar testimonies of those actually there, both Jewish attackers and Arab survivors, there was no massacre. Ironically, the massacre myth, created and promoted by the Arab leadership, boomeranged. Fear of a revengeful Israel helped swell the massive exodus of Arabs from the new state of Israel, thus, as Tauber writes, “creating the refugee crisis and fueling propaganda against Israel, which has shaped the world’s understanding of the affair to this day.” AUTHOR: From Times of Israel, “Professor Eliezer Tauber, a former dean in Bar-Ilan University, Israel, is an expert on the emergence of Arab nationalism, the formation of the Arab states, and the early phases of the Arab-Israeli conflict. He has published extensively on these topics.”
This article was published May 28, 2018 by Times of Israel (TOI) and is archived at https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/deir-yassin-the-end-of-a-myth/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/tauber.deiryassinmassacre.html/

A STORY FOR THE PAGES OF JEWISH HISTORY – THE LAST PASSOVER IN BAGHDAD

by Nurit Greenger, March 18, 2018
This is the story of Joe Samuels, the director of JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa). Joe’s family had lived in Iraq for 2600 years, much longer than had the Arabs, who conquered the area in the 7th Century. Jews were dhimmis under Islam, but despite the multiple limitations, in the 20th Century, there was a thriving community of Jews in Bagdhad, many of them professional. Joe Samuels remembers that when he was a child, Passover as a joyous occasion, with its scrupulous cleaning and boisterous seder. The Passover of 1941 was different. Influenced by Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and Hitler’s friend, with some exceptions, the local Arabs subjected the Jews to rioting, rampages and rape. When Israel became a state in 1948, a Jewish state, a state the Arabs could not subjugate, hostility intensified. Like so many others, voluntarily or under fear of death, Samuels left Iraq and celebrated his first Passover in Jerusalem in 1950. For a more detailed history of the Jewish Iraqui community and its disintegration under the influence of Nazi Germany, read Emmanuel Miller’s article here.
AUTHOR: Nurit Greenger is a writer and journalist. She writes that she is “a passionately committed advocate for Jews, Israel, the United States, and the Free World in general.”
This article was published March 18, 2018 by Nurit Greenger and is archived at https://newsblaze.com/world/israel/a-story-for-the-pages-of-jewish-history-the-last-passover-in-baghdad_129234/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/greenger.baghdadpassover.html/

EARLY JEWISH CONTRIBUTIONS TO AMERICA

by Victor Sharpe, September 29, 2010
It was Catholic Spain’s (and later Portugal’s) forcing Jews to choose conversion to Christianity, flight or death that was a major force in scattering the Spanish Jews to various parts of the Old World and the New. Conversos, Jews who professed conversion but who identified themselves as Jews, were among those that sailed with Columbus in 1492, looking for a new home where they could be proper Jews. One of them, Luis de Torres, was the first Jew to settle in the New World. In fact, as Sharp points out, “much of the discovery and charting of the New World was undertaken by secret Jews who knew each other and maintained strong trading links.” In the 1600’s, Jewish refugees settled in New Amsterdam, now New York City. In time, they moved to other towns in the Colonies. and were joined by other Jews.
AUTHOR: Victor Sharpe writes on Jewish history and the Islamist-Israel conflict. He is also the author of Volumes One and Two of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.
This article was published September 29, 2010 by The Jerusalem Connection and is archived at https://thejerusalemconnection.us/blog/2010/09/29/early-jewish-contributions-to-america/.
It is archived at Think-Israel at https://www.think-israel.org/sharpe.earlyjewishushistory.html/

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