| Iran's president: "Zionist entity is the enemy of humanity." (Yawn) They really need better insults.noreply@blogger.com (Unknown), 28 Jan 05:45 AM F | | From Syria's news agency, SANA: Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi affirmed that the Zionist entity is an enemy of humanity, denouncing its violations in the occupied Palestinian territories. During his meeting today with Azerbaijani Defense Minister Zakir Hasanov in Tehran, Raisi said: "The Zionist entity can never be a friend of the Islamic peoples," adding that "the occupation's practices and aggressions in the region and against the Palestinian people are a witness to this fact." The Iranian president pointed out that the presence of terrorist organizations does not serve the interests of the peoples of the region, indicating that these organizations are the creation of the Americans and Zionists, and wherever they are located, they commit criminal acts. Once you accuse your enemies of being enemies of humanity, where else can you go from there? Zionists are already accused of racism, colonialism, apartheid, warmongering, killing children, genocide, slavery, land theft, indiscriminate bombings, killing prophets, ethnic cleansing, Nazi collaboration, organ trading, global warming, and stealing falafel. What more is there? * * * * * *
...Read More |
UPDATE: I was mistaken, there was another tennis tournament in Dubai at the same time, not under ITF. See update below.)
On Sunday, I wrote that Arabic media was praising 14-year old Muhammad al-Awadi for withdrawing from a tennis tournament in Dubai because his semi-final match would have been against an Israeli.
Times Kuwait wrote called it "Heroic decision by Kuwaiti 14 year-old! " Al Jazeera on Thursday picked up the story, showing that there were billboards celebrating Al Awadi in Kuwait, saying, "Thank you, hero!" When I wrote the story, I tried to find the name of the Israeli player he was slated to play against, but I couldn't find anything. I couldn't find Al-Awadi either reaching the semi-finals of the J4 Junior Championships in Dubai.
Now that there are billboards celebrating him as a hero, I decided to look again.
I found that Al Awadi did play in the J4 in Dubai. That is the only truthful thing about this story. He wasn't going to go to the semifinals. He didn't even make it to the main draw. He won one match in Round 1 of the knockout...Read More |
From Ian: Jonathan Tobin: Holocaust Remembrance Day proves everyone loves dead Jews Despite Erdan's triumph, the United Nations has not really undergone any sort of transformation when it comes to antisemitism. As Professor Anne Bayefsky has written in a series of columns published in JNS in the last month, the world body has just embarked on an open-ended inquiry aimed at demonizing the Jewish state. While others have celebrated symbolic resolutions about Holocaust denial, the UN bureaucracy has set in motion a program that is building on the legacy of the 2001 Durban conference, where antisemitism was allowed to run riot. Indeed, the widespread acceptance of the same "apartheid state" lie about Israel that was popularized by the forces that staged Durban is stunning proof that a generation of Holocaust education has done little to deter or prevent contemporary antisemitism when it operates under the guise of anti-Zionism. Just as important, the proliferation of Holocaust education that seeks to universalize its lessons has had the opposite effect that one might have hoped. Rather than teaching people to respect Jewish rights or to understand how antisemitism has always been an essentially political form of hatred, this universalizing has both drained the Holocaust of its specific content and made it a metaphor for anything people consider awful. It's not an accident...Read More |
Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory. Check out their Facebook page. Tel Aviv, January 27 - Senior military officials and officers congratulated one another today on a successful demonstration of an innovative, airborne threat-neutralization system that today downed an incoming law aimed at curtailing the cushy retirement packages that those senior officers enjoy for life at taxpayer expense. An Arrow Interceptor hit the target before it could reenter the atmosphere, a spokesman for the Ministry of Defense told reporters today at a press conference. "We are pleased to announce that the Arrow-3 has progressed more quickly, and more efficiently, than even our ambitious timeline," stated ministry representative Pensia Taktzivit. "This contribution to Israel's emerging 'layered defense' umbrella will both protect our interests and deter those who might otherwise attempt to harm those interests." According to Taktzivit's description, the Arrow interceptor used both ground-based and its own internal guidance system to locate, track, and intercept the threat to generals' and colonels' pensions, which, unlike most retirement programs, allocate a guaranteed amount of taxpayer-provided government funds to those retired senior officers, instead of the investment-based programs on which the bulk of Israel's population must rely to...Read More |
From Ian: Bret Stephens: Israel Wins the War of Ideas I am often asked, "Why does Israel have such lousy PR?" The problem is that Israel's usual defenders keep trying to win over the wrong kinds of people with the wrong kinds of arguments in the wrong kinds of places. The wrong kinds of people are anti-Zionists who deny Israel's very right to exist as a Jewish state, who belong to the Blame Israel First crowd, who think that the words "apartheid" or "genocide" or "racist" attach to Israel the way that "juice" attaches to "orange," and whose views stem either from ignorance or hostility. Merely to engage with their charges (e.g., "Why does Israel kill so many Palestinian children?") legitimizes bogus assumptions and bigoted arguments. The wrong kinds of arguments include the Israel-as-the-bigger-victim case. A major military power is never going to win an international pity contest, nor should it want to: Israel came into being to end Jewish victimization, not to showcase it. Moreover, such arguments rarely do more than preach to the converted. As for the unconverted, the best argument is that Israel is under no obligation to justify its existence to anybody, least of all those who despise it; that, like any democratic and sovereign nation, it has every right to do what it must to safeguard its vital interests and security; that it isn't interested in winning popularity contests; and that...Read More |
In 2015, The New Republic published an article about the etymology of the word "Holocaust" as it is currently used. There has long been a rigorous debate among etymologists and historians as to when the lowercased "holocaust," generically defined as a large-scale calamity usually involving fire, became the proper noun used specifically to name the period of Nazi genocide against European Jews. Yet there is little debate that that formalization occurred years after the war's end. ...According to a 2005 Jewish Forward piece, a top rabbi in what was then Palestine wrote to a colleague in a telegram about the need for a "day of mourning throughout [the] world for holocaust synagogues [in] Germany" after Kristallnacht, a November 1938 night of terror in which Jewish homes were ransacked and windows broken across Germany. There were smatterings of usage prior to World War II to refer to mass slaughters, too, including with regard to the Armenian Genocide. And a 1943 New York Times piece about talks regarding Palestine references "the hundreds and thousands of European Jews still surviving the Nazi holocaust." Yet for decades after the war, the genocide lacked any formal title in English except, perhaps, "The Final Solution," the term the Nazis used. In Hebrew, the calamity quickly became known as "Shoah," which means "the catastrophe." But it wasn't until the 1960s that scholars and writers began...Read More |
The "Jew as Nazi" meme is common among antisemites. To Jew-haters, the grotesque analogy is delicious: the Jews are just as bad as their oppressors, the Jews are just as guilty of genocide, killing Jews is as moral as the French Resistance, Jews have no right to defend themselves, Jews haven't learned the "lessons" of the Holocaust - as if the Holocaust was merely a university for Jews who keep flunking their classes while the rest of the world who stood by and allowed them to be slaughtered are the professors. Who was the first to make this disgusting claim?
The earliest I can find comes from the British.
Lord Moyne, the British Minister of State in the Middle East, engaged in debate in British Parliament on June 9, 1942 about whether Jews in Palestine should be allowed to fight the Nazis. Lord Moyne opposed the idea, forcefully supported by Lord Wedgwood. His arguments sound a lot like antisemitism: he complained that the Jews wanted to allow their fellow Jews to immigrate to Palestine to save their lives: The Zionist claim has raised two burning issues: firstly, the demand for large-scale immigration into an already overcrowded country, and, secondly, racial domination by these newcomers over the original inhabitants..... The inhabitants of that small country—about the size of Wales, but much less fertile—are already threatened with conditions of grave congestion. At the...Read More |
| | | |
