Lessons of the Gaza War - Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen

 

by Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen

[F]or all its operational superiority, it will have a hard time defending Israel within the 1967 borders, especially in the event of a multi-arena conflict.

Magen David Adom emergency teams at the scene of a Hamas rocket attack in Israel during Operation Guardian of the Walls, image by Magen David Adom via Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs

BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 2,059, May 31, 2021

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The IDF’s defensive achievements against Hamas in the most recent war were groundbreaking. Yet for all its operational superiority, it will have a hard time defending Israel within the 1967 borders, especially in the event of a multi-arena conflict.

During the recent war in Gaza, Israel was exposed for the first time to the strategy of Qassem Soleimani: encirclement in a ring of fire on all fronts, including the domestic one. This time the Gaza arena, which erupts into war from time to time, turned the al-Aqsa Mosque and Jerusalem into a new focal point, thereby igniting nationwide riots by Israeli Arabs.

In his speech after the war, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said, “The campaign opened a door to new horizons.” Fortunately, these new horizons—and the full threat they represent—are yet to become a reality. Now that there is a ceasefire, Israel has the opportunity to assess them.

What was surprising in this war? In terms of operational preparedness, the IDF was ready to fight. At the same time, IDF intelligence admits there was a measure of surprise in the fact that Hamas initiated this round. The surprise lay in the new geopolitical framework, with Hamas centering the campaign on the issue of Jerusalem.

In the battles of the previous century, including the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War, the launching of a war required a prior deployment by the enemy with the attendant warning signs of the enemy’s intent. When Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser decided in May 1967 to move his forces into Sinai, the entry to Sinai and the process of deploying the Egyptian forces provided Israel with a warning period. Likewise, in the lead-up to the Yom Kippur War, there were overt signs of preparation for war—though in that case, unfortunately, IDF intelligence chose to ignore them. Since that time, intelligence assessment has relied on close and systematic monitoring of telltale signs. It is here that Hamas’s potential to achieve surprise—and, even more so, Hezbollah’s—has brought about an essential change.

Unlike traditional military organizations, Hamas and Hezbollah employ a logic that limits preparation time for a campaign. Most of their rockets and missiles are already routinely deployed at their launching pads. The same is true for a considerable part of their forces, who are primarily locals. The Shuja’iya and Jebaliya battalions, for example, are manned by residents of those neighborhoods, from fighters all the way up to battalion commanders. This makes the transition from routine to emergency conditions very rapid and allows IDF intelligence only a brief warning.

Even under routine conditions, substantial parts of enemy combat forces are deployed at all times in a state of constant preparedness for action. The short time needed by the enemy to initiate hostilities, from the moment the leadership makes the decision to the operation itself, means surprise salvos of fire are always a possibility. This change challenges the basic assumptions of Ben-Gurion’s security concept, a cornerstone of which was dependence on a warning period.

The shortening of warning time requires Israel to revise its security concept. Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi, in the new plan he formulated for the IDF’s operational approach, has indeed made changes to the traditional approach to defense. Also, under previous Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot, resources were invested in upgrading defense, including the underground concrete wall around the Gaza Strip.

The IDF’s defensive achievements against Hamas in the latest round were ground-breaking and should by no means be taken lightly. Also of note were the Israeli navy’s achievements in thwarting every offensive move by Hamas’s navy, the air force’s achievements in shooting down Hamas drones—including an explosive drone that was directed at the Tamar gas rig, and defensive achievements at the Gaza border that blocked the infiltration of Hamas commando teams. Also laudable were the efforts to counteract rocket fire and the performance of the Iron Dome batteries, which can be added to the achievements in the defensive domain.

More broadly, the threat Hamas posed through the rocket firepower it directed at Israeli cities should set off warning bells about a possible Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. A Palestinian state on the 1967 borders will not be demilitarized and will have the capacity to become a far greater threat than the Gaza Strip. The magnitude of the self-production of weapons under Hamas and Islamic Jihad reveals the hollowness of the demilitarization delusion. Most of that self- production was carried out with civilian machinery and raw materials. There is no way to prevent a state from possessing computerized lathe machines, iron pipes, or phosphates. The fact that, at present, there is no rocket production in the Palestinian cities and refugee camps of the West Bank stems entirely from the monitoring and prevention made possible by the IDF forces and the presence of Israeli civilian communities deep inside the territory.

Central Command’s success during this round in containing popular terror activity and violence in the West Bank areas under its aegis demonstrates that the demand for a continued Israeli presence in those areas is justified, both tactically and generally. When one compares the resources and efforts required to secure Israel’s coastal plain, which are built around IDF activity in the West Bank and the support of the Israeli communities there, to what the defense establishment has to invest in the Gaza Strip, it becomes clear that the existing situation in the West Bank is more effective, economical, and suitable.

Those calling for further withdrawals, entailing the uprooting of communities and a retreat to the separation-fence line, base themselves on two premises:

• A withdrawal to the 1967 lines with minor adjustments will bring an end to the “occupation” and afford Israel international legitimacy and support for a military operation if its security is undermined by the Palestinian state.
• The IDF, with its perpetual superiority, can remove any security threat in a short time and at a reasonable price.

The magnitude of the threat facing Israel from Gaza, alongside hostile public opinion in Western countries (recall that Israeli proponents of the 2005 unilateral disengagement from Gaza promised that the international community would back any Israeli military response to terror attacks from the Strip, a result that never materialized), casts great doubt on the validity of those premises.

For that matter, President Biden’s support for Israel’s right to defend itself could not be taken for granted, and it is likely that a price will have to be paid for the US backing PM Netanyahu received for 10 days of warfare. The US administration, which is committed to promoting the two-state solution, was well aware that failing to support Israel while it was under a terror onslaught from Gaza would make it difficult to demand Israel’s agreement to a future West Bank withdrawal. Still, Israel was prevented by the administration from sustaining its offensive so as to bring Hamas to its knees.

The events of the past weeks, which showed the limitations of the IDF’s power in the event of a multi-arena war (including the domestic one), a prospect for which the potential is growing, indicate that additional withdrawals would pose an existential danger to Israel. With all the IDF’s operational superiority, if it has to fight in the northern arena as well, it will be unable to defend the narrow coastal strip from the pre-1967 border.

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This is an edited version of an article published in Israel Hayom on May 28, 2021.

 

Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen is a senior research fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. He served in the IDF for 42 years. He commanded troops in battles with Egypt and Syria. He was formerly a corps commander and commander of the IDF Military Colleges.

Source: https://besacenter.org/lessons-of-the-gaza-war/

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Rashida Tlaib’s Finance Director Says ‘No Room’ for Anti-Semitism, Then Posts Video of Anti-Semite - Joe Kaufman

 

by Joe Kaufman

The Jew hatred of Rasha Mubarak -- and the Democrats who ignore it.

 

Rasha Mubarak is an anti-Israel activist, who works hard at getting her bigoted views about Israel and Jews adopted by the Democratic Party. And while she has been shunned by part of the party – likely due to her extreme rhetoric and support for terrorists – in other parts she has been embraced. She has served as a national committeewoman for the party, and she is US Representative Rashida Tlaib’s Finance Director. This month, she made the fantastic claim on Twitter that anti-Semitism plays no role in her activism. That was right before she posted a video of rabid anti-Semite Kwame Ture. When will Democrats call out Mubarak’s bigotry and lies?

For years, Mubarak has been arguing that Israel has no right to self-defense. In November 2012, she tweeted, “#LiesImTiredOfHearing Israel has the right to defend herself.” In February 2013, she flippantly posted on Facebook that, when it comes to Israel, US diplomats mouth the words “‘right to defend itself’… when they snore.” And in May 2019, when Hamas launched more than 600 rockets into Israel leading to the deaths of four civilians, Mubarak tweeted against anyone who would dare defend Israeli retaliation, including former US Ambassador Nikki Haley, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, and The Ellen Show producer Andy Lassner.

On numerous occasions, Mubarak has shown support for Palestinian terrorists. At the end of the 2014 Israel-Gaza Conflict, along with photos of a jubilant Hamas, Mubarak tweeted, “Thousands of people celebrating in the streets of Gaza for the victory. Alhamdulillah. #VictoryForGaza.” In June and July 2020, Mubarak posted memorials onto her social media for car-ramming terrorist Ahmed Erekat, who was shot and killed after attempting to run over a female Israeli border officer, at a checkpoint. And this past November, Mubarak promoted then-jailed Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) leader Maher al-Akhras with a message to free all like him.

Mubarak pushes the disingenuous notion that this – belittling Israel’s sovereignty and supporting Israel’s enemies – is all merely criticism of Israel and that it has nothing to do with Jew hatred. She did just this, when, on May 22nd, she wrote on Twitter and Facebook the following: “There has never been nor will there ever be room for antisemitism in our movement.” It was a total lie, as Mubarak, herself, has organized anti-Israel rallies featuring the worst of anti-Semitism, and she has personally derided Orthodox Jews, when they asked the Israeli government for beard-friendly gas masks for protection, mockingly commenting, “Seriously? No seriously! Ufff… Lol…”

And yet further perpetuating this lie, directly after Mubarak made the “anti-Semitism” statement, she retweeted a video of a speech given by fervent anti-Semite Kwame Ture (a.k.a. Stokely Carmichael). In the speech, Ture questions Israel’s legitimacy, saying that “Palestine didn’t belong to the British” to promise it to the Jews. Ture, in February 1990, was notorious for stating, “The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist” and “Zionism must be destroyed.” Ture has also made the outrageous claim that Israel’s European-born leaders were not Semitic (i.e. Jews), Ture labeling them, instead, with the dehumanizing term “Cossacoids.”

This was not the first time Mubarak promoted Ture on social media. She did so as well, this past July, when she retweeted a photo of Ture along with the quote from him, “In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.” The quote was a denunciation of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., who Ture believed was wrong to have rejected violence in favor of peaceful protest. Ture, a former Prime Minister of the Black Panther Party, favored violent resistance.

Mubarak’s statement on anti-Semitism was in response to a similar message posted in social media by Nooran Alhamdan, an Islamist research fellow at the Middle East Institute (MEI). Alhamdan is upset that singer Dua Lipa and models Gigi and Bella Hadid received criticism from a rabbi for singling out Israel for condemnation, while ignoring the deadly actions of Hamas. And both Alhamdan and Mubarak are distraught over the fact that actor Mark Ruffalo, a strong advocate for Palestinians, apologized for falsely claiming that Israel is committing “genocide,” Ruffalo admitting that the term “is being used to justify antisemitism.”

The reality is that both Alhamdan and Mubarak do exactly what Ruffalo apologized for; they use abhorrent rhetoric and exaggerated lies to foster and drive anti-Semitism. They, more so, refuse to condemn Palestinian terrorist groups, who are the real threat to Palestinian society, as these groups care little about life and focus only on murder and chaos using bombs, rockets and tunnels. The goal of Alhamdan, Mubarak and the terrorist groups is the same: destruction of the one-and-only Jewish state, ‘from the river to the sea.’ Their words distancing themselves from anti-Semitism are empty and solely an attempt to provide cover for their own bigotry.

Rasha Mubarak is a rising star in the Muslim community and a politically influential Democratic operative. This speaks volumes about the anti-Jewish ideology being propagated within her party. The Democrats who embrace Mubarak should understand that, when they do so, they as well stand in support of her hate-filled statements and activities. Shame on the Florida Young Democrats, who elected Mubarak to be their National Committeewoman; shame on Rashida Tlaib, whose re-election campaign paid $73,000 to Mubarak’s ‘Unbought Power’ for fundraising and consulting; and shame on anyone who encourages such hatred as Mubarak exemplifies.

Beila Rabinowitz, Director of Militant Islam Monitor, contributed to this report.

 

Joe Kaufman is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the Chairman of the Joe Kaufman Security Initiative. He was the 2014, 2016 and 2018 Republican Nominee for U.S. House of Representatives (Florida-CD23).

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/rashida-tlaibs-finance-dir-says-no-room-anti-joe-kaufman/

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To form government, Yamina is breaking campaign promises - Amichai Chikli

 

by Amichai Chikli

I did everything I could to ensure Naftali Bennett would be Israel's prime minister. I believed in him, his integrity, and his love for Israel, and I supported him with all my might. While his intentions are clearly good, this is not the path.

I did everything I could in recent months so that the Yamina Knesset list would garner a significant number of votes in the elections and Naftali Bennett would be Israel's prime minister. I believed in him, his integrity, and his love for Israel and Zionism, and I supported him with all my might. Even at this time, it is completely clear to me that his intentions are good. Yet this is not the path.

You said loudly and clearly: "I won't be prime minister with 10 mandates. That not moral, and it's not democratic." To my mind, you are right. The premiership should express massive public support, public support we didn't earn.

Every decision you make as prime minister will require the de facto approval of the Yesh Atid party, a party that is three times as large as Yamina but shares none of its founding principles - not on questions of the relationship between the legislative and judicial authorities or questions of policy or public security.

There is no real agreement on issues concerning the State of Israel's DNA either. Yesh Atid is identified with President Reuven Rivlin's talk of a "collection of tribes" and opposes the nation-state law. Yamina, on the other hand, has no qualms about the State of Israel's definition as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

One week before the election, you explicitly wrote: "Share so we can fight the fake news. Bibi's spin is an absolute lie." You said: "These are my principles for the next government: 1. Lapid will not be prime minister. I am a man of the Right, as are a majority of voters. 2. The next government that will be established will be a right-wing government. 3. We will establish a right-wing government that cares."

In retrospect, it turns out the spin was Yamina's: Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid will be prime minister, and although a majority of Yamina's voters are members of the Right, the government that will be established tomorrow is a government of the center-left, with the addition of a few fig leaves from the Right. Yamina broke a majority of its promises to voters, through the gross violation of the most basic of democratic codes: Tell the truth to voters and make an honest effort to meet your commitments to them.

Now for the significance of the decision to establish a left-wing government: From a societal standpoint, this is in no way a "unity" government, but rather an elitist government that excludes over a million right-wing voters while offering a stinging slap in the face to the lower classes and the traditional Jewish sector, portions of which supported us forcefully and now find themselves in a state of shock.

When it comes to the balance of power between the legislative and judicial branches, we are handing the State Attorney's Office and the judicial branch a victory. They have proven that through the use of show trials, an elected prime minister can be taken out of office, with no conviction necessary.

I would gladly be less suspicious of the judicial system, but remarks by its leaders, such as Deputy Attorney General Dina Zilber and former State Attorney Shai Nitzan, don't leave much room for doubt as to their political motivations. In conclusion, with the forming of this government, we should expect to see the establishment of an incomparably strong judicial system.

In the international arena, let us not be mistaken: The establishment of a left-wing government that includes those who side with the International Criminal Court will be yet another blow to the nationalist-conservative axis. We should expect to see victory parties in Washington, Ramallah, the Gaza Strip, and above all else, Iran.

In the Talmud, there is an ancient commentary on the difference between a path that short and long and a path that is long and short. Unfortunately, Bennett has chosen the short path, and for that, we will all pay a price.

 

Amichai Chikli 

Source: https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/yamina-is-breaking-its-campaign-promise-to-form-a-government/

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Marxist Lives Matter - Daniel Greenfield

 

​ by Daniel Greenfield

In a free society, the ‘Oppressed’ are the Oppressors.

 

The Left organizes around oppression. Oppression is a negative and the movement is defined around defining negative phenomena and organizing against them. It’s an outrage machine that depends on finding enough of those negatives to justify its own rise to political power.

But as it gains power, the amount of oppression ought to decrease. And accordingly the Left’s power also ought to decrease in proportion since it has no positive vision only a negative one. Instead, paradoxically, the more power the Left gains, the worse the oppression becomes.

Not only does the general state of things get worse, but every specific area where it claims to be making progress somehow becomes much worse than it was before. After Obama took office, race relations took a dive as the country somehow became more racist during a black president. Last year, every Democrat city was denounced as an outpost of systemic racism where black people were being hunted by the police for sport. That’s when women aren’t being hunted down on some of the most progressive and diverse college campuses and industries in the country.

The nation’s woke corporations are oppressing workers and destroying the planet. The woke governments are imposing systemic racism in between critical race theory struggle sessions. American foreign policy, under one of the most leftist administrations in history, is an imperialist war machine when it isn’t flying BLM flags and advertising for transgender Antifa recruits.

Everything is somehow worse than ever. Maybe the Left ought to give up and go home because it’s just making everything worse. But it must get worse because failure is the only option.

In an un-free society, oppression is easy to organize against. You don’t need books to understand oppression in China and North Korea. Black people and white people didn’t need to have the wrongs of slavery or segregation explained to them at corporate diversity sessions.

Real oppression is tangible. No one needs 40 hours of programming to explain how gulags or gas chambers oppress people. If you need 40 hours of lectures and a 400 page book to explain oppression, you’re not oppressed.

A theory of intangible oppression is exactly the thing that a system of actual oppression needs.

The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany terrorized their own populaces, killed millions of people, and invaded other countries based on conspiracy theories about intangible oppression. Both socialist terror states justified massive military build ups by falsely claiming that they were about to be invaded when they were the ones doing any preemptive invading. They backed up these conspiracy theories with purges and show trials. Stalin’s Great Terror purged rivals while forcing them to confess to doing the bidding of every foreign country around. Hitler’s Holocaust was based around a massive Jewish conspiracy with other countries around the world.

The best evidence of the growing political power of the American Left and the irrelevance of its political theories is the nationwide deployment of an anti-racism which claims that racism is invisible and yet is everywhere. Its books and curriculums lay out a conspiratorial theory of intangible racism that can only be approached through the lived experience of oppressed people, but which cannot be described meaningfully in any factual and objective fashion.

Real oppression, like slave chains, is tangible. Critical race theory depends on sensitizing everyone to claims of oppression that are either blatantly false, e.g. the police committing genocide against black people, or can’t be objectively defined, e.g. systemic racism.

The more critical race theorists talk about ‘whiteness’, the less they’re able to define it except in the ways that religious people define a deity or the devil: as an intangible force pervading everything, only manifest to those who understand the hidden meanings of everyday events.

Religion, unlike critical race theory, is a private matter. And few religions are as racist as CRT which insists on the unalterable evil of white people and the helpless victimhood of minorities.

But, like the USSR’s insistence that the old Bolsheviks were really working for the Brits, or the new Democrat insistence that all the Republicans work for Russia, state conspiracy theories shouldn’t be taken literally, but they should be taken seriously.

What does oppression look like in a country where the Democrats control the White House, the Senate, and the House, and every major corporation advocates for their agendas? What does it sound like when the educational system and the media are controlled by the Left, censoring and suppressing dissenting points of view? Oppression can no longer be about fighting power.

Not when the power is in the hands of the oppressers who claim to be oppressed.

America has reached the tipping point where all the power is in the hands of the Left, but we haven’t comprehensively lost our freedoms yet. In an un-free society, the oppressed are the people with no rights. But in a free society, the oppressed are most often the oppressors.

Oppression in an un-free society is characterized by a lack of rights, but in a free society, it’s defined by a lack of power. And power in a free society is a means of depriving others of rights.

Critical race theory, for all its posturing about the police, is concerned with power, not rights.

Systemic racism is not a construct of rights, but of power. It’s not challenged with the equalization of rights, but with the assumption of power. The whole premise of lived experience is that objective metrics of civil rights can’t appease the emotional suffering of the oppressed. The nature of their oppression is so incomprehensible to anyone outside their lived experience that only those who claim to be oppressed can remedy their oppression by taking power.

This isn’t civil rights: it’s an uncivil cultural coup.

The idea that only a select elite should be allowed to wield power because only they understand what must be done has been the central premise of every totalitarian theory and system.

In a free society, power is a tangible means shared through open elections for recognized goals, while in an un-free society, power is a mystical means employed by an elite toward a redemptive end. America is becoming an un-free society in which power is not the means by which taxpayers and citizens define how their money and their government is used to achieve their goals, but a redemptive force for escaping global environmental apocalypses and ushering in a progressive new utopia whose moral arc bends toward the right side of history.

This utopia, like all utopias, is short on details. It’s defined not by what it has, but by what it doesn’t. Leftism exists in a negative space and its brave new worlds are inversions of that negativity, offering not a positive vision, but the erasure of human individuality and free will. The people in these fictional utopias are happy not because of what they have, but what they don’t.

“You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.” Unlike the Left’s actual utopias, everyone is happy in the fictional utopias to have lost their free agency. As in the conclusion of George Orwell’s 1984, joy in the dystopian utopia comes from a cultish surrender of the self to the system and the recognition that it is our flawed human natures that keep us from living in a socialist utopia.

Since few people are enthused about losing the freedom to live their own lives, totalitarian leftist systems invert the duality of oppressors and oppressed. They redefine their oppression as liberation, the oppressors as the oppressed, and the oppressed as the oppressors. The best way to convince people to give up their freedom is to convince them that they’re oppressors.

Critical race theory racializes the familiar totalitarian paradigm behind the Soviet Union. But it’s no more about race than Communist regimes were about the working class. The markers are just temporary counters opportunistically established based on local circumstances. If the revolutionary candidate of Hope and Change hadn’t been half-black, and if the George Floyd video hadn’t gone viral, we would be living through a different cultural revolution right now.

But we would still be living through a cultural revolution.

The Left is on the verge of taking power and we are about to lose our rights. Our rights are becoming intangible just as their power is becoming tangible. And so they have come up with a theory of intangible oppression to explain why our rights should give way to their power.

The tyranny is in the theory.

 

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/marxist-lives-matter-daniel-greenfield/

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The PA met 80 times with the ICC – mocking and violating conditions for US funding - Itamar Marcus

 

by Itamar Marcus

US law prohibits economic support to the PA if the PA “initiate an International Criminal Court judicially authorized investigation, or actively support such an investigation, that subjects Israeli nationals to an investigation for alleged crimes against Palestinians.”

Whereas the United States has made statements promising renewed financial support to the Palestinian Authority, the PA is ineligible for US funding. According to US law to be eligible for funding from the Economic Support Fund (ESF), the PA must not “initiate” or “actively support” any International Criminal Court investigation “that subjects Israeli nationals to an investigation for alleged crimes against Palestinians.”

Palestinian Media Watch can now report that this week, the Head of the PA Attorney’s Office for International Legal Cooperation Jamil Sajadiyeh admitted that the PA, ignoring the above US condition, is very actively supporting investigations against Israelis at the ICC:

“Around 80 meetings have been held between Palestine and the ICC, of course with the office of [ICC] General Prosecutor [Fatou Bensouda]. There are nearly 60 cases and letters that have been submitted, all of them telling about the Israeli violations. Monthly reports are being submitted to the ICC via the general prosecutor through the [PA] Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”  

[Official PA TV, Palestine This Morning, May 25, 2021]

Sajadiyeh also revealed that the PA is doing this under the instructions of PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas himself:

“Palestine has submitted all it can [to the ICC] in order to carry out these investigations. We are [working] according to the instructions of His Honor [PA] President [Mahmoud Abbas] and all the relevant parties.”

[Official PA TV, Palestine This Morning, May 25, 2021]

PA Prime Minister Muhammad Shtayyeh also openly confirmed this week in an English language interview that the PA has been in contact with the ICC and “submitted files”:

Shtayyeh: “The ICC is a peaceful international court for criminals… and we decided to join… The issue of ICC is something that’s now totally out of our hands, it’s just in the hands of the ICC. Of course, we did join it and we did submit files. The Israelis should know and they should take us serious.”

[Facebook page of PA Prime Minister Muhammad Shtayyeh, May 29, 2021]

United States law is very clear. The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2014 passed in January 2014 under the Obama administration prohibited Economic Support Fund (ESF) aid if the PA “initiate an International Criminal Court judicially authorized investigation, or actively support such an investigation, that subjects Israeli nationals to an investigation for alleged crimes against Palestinians.” The same provision has been adopted every year since, most recently as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021, passed in December 2020.

PMW has already exposed previous contacts and cooperation between the PA and the ICC. PA officials have been open about the active Palestinian support for an ICC investigation into Israel. In 2020, ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda met with PA Prime Minister Muhammad Shtayyeh:

 
[Wafa, official PA News Agency, Feb. 15, 2020]

On March 3, 2021, Bensouda announced the official opening of the ICC investigation into the “Situation in Palestine.”

Responding to the ICC’s decision, senior Palestinian official and Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub said that the PA deserves the credit for the ICC decision: ‎

‎“[The ICC’s decision to investigate ‎Israel] is the climax of the efforts that the Palestinian National Authority, ‎the [PA] Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the mechanisms of the state, and ‎the [PA] presidential institutions have invested over the years that have ‎passed, and now we are picking the fruits of this effort that has ‎meanings and messages.”‎

[Official PA TV, Topic of the Day, March 3, 2021]‎

Responding to a question as to whether the PA was in contact with ICC prosecutor Bensouda, PA Minister of Foreign Affairs Riyad Al-Malki replied:

“Yes, we are in ‎constant contact with her… and her office from the first moment ‎when we set foot in the ICC in 2014… [We’re in touch] directly or ‎indirectly, through the visits we are making, through the contact via our ‎delegation at The Hague, or through the periodical reports we are ‎submitting to the general prosecutor’s office.”

[Official PA TV, Topic of the Day, March 6, 2021]‎

Upon return from a meeting with Bensouda, Al-Malki added:

“The contacts will continue with International Criminal Court (ICC) Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda, despite all the obstacles being placed by the occupation authorities… In the meeting with Bensouda it was emphasized that the launch of the investigation [of Israel] must be expedited and the cases must be transferred in the transitional period of the new president (sic., apparently refers to the new ICC chief prosecutor who will replace Bensouda), and that there need to be practical steps on the ground to advance them instead of reexamining the cases with the ICC’s new team.’”

[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, March 23, 2021]

The latest statement by Head of the PA Attorney’s Office for International Legal Cooperation Jamil Sajadiyeh shows not only that the PA is cooperating with the ICC about an investigation of Israelis, but also the extent of that cooperation – so far at least 80 meetings have been held!

There is no doubt that the PA initiated the ICC investigation against Israel. Furthermore, PMW has continuously exposed the active PA support for that ICC investigation. Accordingly, it is clear that the conditions of the 2014 Consolidated Appropriations Act (and the subsequent legislation) have not been met by the PA, and US law prohibits funding the PA from US government ESF aid.

The following is a longer excerpt of the statement by the Head of the PA Attorney’s Office for International Legal Cooperation Jamil Sajadiyeh:

Head of the PA Attorney’s Office for International Legal Cooperation Jamil Sajadiyeh: “There are efforts that have been made with- or planned through joint meetings with the [International] Criminal Court (ICC). Around 80 meetings have been held between Palestine and the ICC, of course with the office of [ICC] General Prosecutor [Fatou Bensouda]. There are nearly 60 cases and letters that have been submitted, all of them telling about the Israeli violations. Monthly reports are being submitted to the ICC via the general prosecutor through the [PA] Ministry of Foreign Affairs…

As far as Palestine is concerned, we in the attorney’s office for International Legal Cooperation and International Crimes are documenting all the violations. All the violations that are being committed against our people are being systematically documented based on proper legal foundations…

Palestine has submitted all it can [to the ICC] in order to carry out these investigations. We are [working] according to the instructions of His Honor [PA] President [Mahmoud Abbas] and all the relevant parties regarding the pursuit of this criminal that is committing despicable crimes every day… Allah willing, we hope that very soon Palestine will be asked to provide the ICC with all that has been documented, and of course we are also prepared to provide the ICC with anything that it will ask to document or clarify in the future.”

[Official PA TV, Palestine This Morning, May 25, 2021]

 

Itamar Marcus

Source: https://palwatch.org/page/23847

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'One of the biggest election thefts we have seen' - Arutz Sheva Staff

 

by Arutz Sheva Staff

Journalist Kalman Liebskind criticizes Yamina's decision to form a government with the left-wing and Arab parties.

 

Kalman Libeskind                                                                                  Yonatan Sindel/Flash 90

Journalist Kalman Liebskind on Sunday criticized the Yamina party’s decision to form a government with the left-wing and Arab parties, contrary to promises made by the party’s leaders before the election.

"Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked repeatedly swore before the election that they would not crown Lapid as Prime Minister, that they would not sit with Meretz, and that they would not be supported by Ra'am. If their voters knew they would do the opposite, would they have given them the seven seats? If the answer is no, and it is clear that it is, then this is one of the biggest election thefts we have seen here," tweeted Liebskind.

Channel 20 presenter Shimon Riklin attacked Bennett on Twitter after he announced the formation of a government with the left.

"Bennett is a big problem. But every mishap is also an opportunity to see who is with us and who is against us. And now it is clear to everyone who Bennett is and who his friends are. And we are the majority, friends. And they're just playing with numbers through lying and deception. And an impossible coalition. It is therefore important to continue to fight for our path vigorously. And I am convinced that we will win in the end," he wrote.

Earlier, Riklin tweeted, "Bennett is a dangerous man who is not interested in anything but himself. It is incumbent upon us, using all the legal and democratic means at our disposal, to send this crook to his place. To the trash bin of history."

 

Arutz Sheva Staff

Source:https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/307176

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Explosive study claims to prove Chinese scientists created COVID - Eileen AJ Connelly

 

​ by Eileen AJ Connelly

British Professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Dr. Birger Sørensen wrote they’ve had primary evidence 'of retro-engineering in China'

A bombshell new study claims to have proof that Chinese scientists created COVID-19 in a lab and then tried to reverse-engineer versions of the virus to make it look like it evolved naturally from bats.

British Professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Dr. Birger Sørensen wrote they’ve had primary evidence "of retro-engineering in China" since last year, but were ignored by academics and major medical journals, The Daily Mail reported Saturday, citing the soon-to-be-published study.

The study concludes: "the likelihood of it being the result of natural processes is very small." The virus is still killing 12,000 people a day around the world.

POMPEO SAYS WUHAN LAB WAS ENGAGED IN MILITARY ACTIVITY ALONGISDE CIVILIAN RESEARCH

Dalgleish is a London oncology professor known for breakthrough work on a vaccine for HIV. Sørensen is a virologist and chair of the pharmaceutical company Immunor, which developed a coronavirus vaccine candidate called Biovacc-19. Dalgleish also has a financial stake in that company.

It was during their COVID-19 vaccine research that the pair came across "unique fingerprints" indicating the virus didn’t come from nature, they said.  The telltale clue: a rare finding in the COVID-carrying virus of a row of four amino acids, which give off a positive charge and bond to negative human cells.

INTEL COMMUNITY ‘AGGRESSIVELY’ INVESTIGATING COVID-19 ORIGIN

"The laws of physics mean that you cannot have four positively charged amino acids in a row," Dalgleish told the Daily Mail. "The only way you can get this is if you artificially manufacture it."

They also tracked published Chinese research, some done working with American universities, to show how the tools to create the virus were allegedly built. A good part of the work reviewed involved "gain of function" research, which involves manipulating natural viruses in a lab to make them more infectious, allowing scientists to study their potential effect on humans.

The U.S. put a moratorium on such research in 2014. But it’s impossible to know if $600,000 funding for medical research in China was used for gain of function research, Dr. Anthony Fauci told Congress last week.

"A natural virus pandemic would be expected to mutate gradually and become more infectious but less pathogenic which is what many expected with the COVID-19 pandemic but which does not appear to have happened," the scientists wrote.

 

Eileen AJ Connelly

Source: https://www.foxnews.com/world/explosive-study-claims-to-prove-chinese-scientists-created-covid

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The Jerusalem Jihad, Same as It Ever Was - G. Murphy Donovan

 

​ by G. Murphy Donovan

Israel finds itself in a cycle of endless small wars due to four political illusions — strategic errors, really.

"If we searched the entire world for a person, more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew.  Notice, I do not say the Israeli." —Hassan Nasrallah

Israel finds itself in a cycle of endless small wars due to four political illusions — strategic errors, really.

THE TEMPLE MOUNT

Starting in 1948, the struggle against Israel was about religion — and imprudent tolerance.  When the IDF recovered Jerusalem, twice, in fact, Israel should have done what any Muslim, Arab, Persian, or Ottoman victor would have done: remove or relocate adversarial symbols of religious submission.  The Al Aqsa Mosque, built over the ruins of the Jewish temple by Umayyad Calif Abd al-Malik, is a permanent beacon, a signature of Islamic privilege.  Yet the Jewish temple on the same spot in Jerusalem has a pedigree that precedes Islam by millennia.

After serial defeats, Islam still has its mosque and its "Dome of the Rock" fictions — centrifugal symbols that motivate local and global jihad terror at the expense, to be sure, of Jewish culture, security, safety, peace, and sovereignty.

Wars with, and within, Islam are underwritten by the fusion of realpolitik and toxic religion.  For Islamists, separation of church and state is a sacrilege cultivated by Jews, like-minded infidels, heretics, and apostates.

A case on point might be the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul: originally built as a Christian cathedral by Justinian in 537 A.D.; seized by the Ottomans in 1453 A.D. and converted to a mosque; rebranded as a museum by Atatürk in 1933; and now reopened as a mosque by a modern neo-Ottoman, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Symbol and significance matter.

Over time, the Christian Church in Turkey, once the majority religion, was systematically extinguished by political atrocity and Islamic intolerance.  Today, Sunni and Shia zealots are united in their quest to see that Jews and Judaism suffer a similar fate in the Levant.

THE TROJAN HORSE

From the start, the modern state of Israel has been beset by enemies from without.  Indeed, the Mideast has been a bad neighborhood for non-Muslims since Mohamed's time.  Israel now has to deal with an internal Arab-Muslim citizen demographic that may hold the balance of domestic secular power.

If Al Aqsa is a brick-and-mortar Trojan Horse in the heart of the Jewish state, the real threat is the Jerusalem jihad, those 1.5 million so-called "Palestinian" Arab-Israelis, a Sunni demographic that would never tolerate a like number of Jews in their midst should they have the upper hand. 

Ironically, as Islamofascists like Hezb'allah and Hamas assume more local control, a second Holocaust is as near as any certainty can be.  Talk of wiping Israel and Jews off the face of the map is not empty rhetoric; it is the lynchpin, the objective, for Palestinian, Shia, and Sunni zealots worldwide.

No subject, at home and abroad, unites Muslims so well as Jew-hate.

GAZA GOATS

In spite of formidable military prowess and exceptional national courage, Israel has always tried to temper victory with justice.  Modern Israel, in part a nation of immigrants, is always sensitive to charges of "imperialism," a slander more appropriate for historical and modern Islam than Judaism.  Conquest, proselytizing, forced conversions, and related atrocities are Islamic, not Judaic values.

From 1948 to 1967, the Gaza strip was occupied and administered by Egypt, yet Cairo never granted Palestinians Egyptian citizenship.  After the 1967 Arab attack against Israel, the IDF took the Sinai and Gaza from Egypt.  Under Israeli control, between 1967 and 1982, the Gaza Strip had a growth rate that averaged 10% per annum.

In the interests of peace with Egypt, the Sinai was returned to Egyptian control, but Cairo never had any illusions about the Muslim Brotherhood or the Palestinian tar baby.  After the Oslo accords of 1993, Israel ceded administrative control of the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinian Authority (née PLO), again in the interests of a permanent peace.

In short order, a rift developed between the P.A. on the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza.  The PLO and Hamas are joined only by terror and virulent religious bigotry.  Hamas, now allied with Shia Hezb'allah, is poised to take complete control in Arab Palestine, another certainty if de jure Palestine ever holds another election.

By granting measured political autonomy to Gaza, Israel enabled the "two state" fiction, an Arab fantasy where Israel would be flanked on two sides by fratricidal attack dogs dedicated to the demise of Israel.

Hamas does not recognize Israel's right to exist.

Withal, Arab Palestine has never been able to take yes for an answer, and now politics has been hijacked by religious jihad and political terror – again at Israel's expense.

Palestinian autonomy, once a peace offering, is now the dagger pointed at the heart of Zion.

THE TWO-STATE FICTION

Reality is a bitter pill even on a good day.

Unlike the Arabs, many Israelis could never accept the facts of modern Palestinian culture, a Petri dish of discontent and sedition.  Religious jihad today is as much a threat to Arab tribal totalitarians as it is to the state of Israel.  While keeping Palestinians at arm's length, Arab neighbors use the West Bank and Gaza Arabs as confrontation proxies.  Palestinians are in every sense sacrificial goats — permanent Muslim patsies at best, front-line cannon fodder at worst.  

Every janissary, dictator, or Muslim autocrat is, alas, hostage to a persistent mujahedeen threat.  Keeping the Israeli-Palestinian conflict alive serves several Muslim interests, inclinations, and prejudices — and policy worldwide.  Israel was always naïve to think that it could cut a deal with local jihad proxies while the Jerusalem trophy and the Temple Mount were in play.

Any thought of legitimizing a nation, like Palestine, on two Israeli borders is a triumph of hope over experience.  "Two states" has never been the solution — only a toxic problem.  A Palestinian state is a recipe for national suicide and another Jewish holocaust.

GRIM HORIZONS

Over time, there are few silver linings in the clouds over Israel.  Today is no exception.  Clearly, Muslim zealots see the 2021 sea change in Washington politics as a golden opportunity to roll back the Abraham Accords and related progress in Arab-Israeli relations.  The Biden/Harris administration is likely to minimize or ignore the Trump initiatives and return to the recidivist apologetics of the Obama era.  The smoke hardly cleared from the latest Jerusalem jihad when the Biden White House assured Palestinians, and Hamas, that America would rebuild anything that Israel's Defense Force had destroyed.  Thus, Muslim attacks from without and within Israel are now motivated or incentivized, in part, by post-conflict American support and largesse.  Any idea that humanitarian aid can go to Palestinians without Hamas taking a butcher's cut is just another fantasy.

In the West Bank and Gaza, we now have a perfect storm where terror, corruption, and jihad meet at the merge.  Islamic terror and Palestinian corruption are subsidized by the United States again — self-fulfilling prophecies underwritten by American tax monies.

Over time, the Palestinian question was so central to Arab politics that the P.A. or Hamas had the power to kill any initiative that improved relations with Israel.  The Abraham Accords were a benchmark of sorts to the extent that they canceled the Palestinian "veto."

Feckless, if not reckless, American policy now gives veto power back to Hamas, a neo-national terror state.  The Jerusalem jihad has new life in 2021, again at Israel's expense. 

G. Murphy Donovan writes about the politics of national security.

Image: Walkerssk via Pixabay, Pixabay License.

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.

 

G. Murphy Donovan

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/05/the_jerusalem_jihad_same_as_it_ever_was.html

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French Judiciary Frees Extremist Antisemitic Murderer - Guy Millière

 

​ by Guy Millière

France's disgrace

• The murderer, under the influence of an illicit substance, was immediately sent to a mental institution, not to prison. Who decided that? Usually, a person arrested after a crime and found to be "under the influence" is arrested, placed in a cell to sober up, then charged by a judge. Why was this case not treated the same way?

• Judge Ihouelou repeatedly violated the most basic rules of her profession by behaving in a strikingly biased way. First, she refused to allow any reconstruction of the crime. She ruled that reconstructing the crime would be "traumatic" for the criminal. She also refused to meet the lawyers of the victim's sister and children to hear what they had to say.

• How could a Court of Appeal validate an investigation in which a reconstruction of the crime never took place; in which the lawyers for the family were never heard, and at the end of which, the decision was rendered solely on the basis of a psychiatric report written months after the facts; based mainly on the statements of a murderer, and contradicted by another psychiatric report?

• "[T]his affair... is also the illustration for those who might still need it, of the vital utility of Israel so that justice is done to the Jews all over the world.... due to the failure of French justice". — Raphaël Nisand French radio commentator, Tribune Juive, April 25, 2021.

• A verdict based on an "acute delirium" leading to no longer being responsible for one's actions is medically unacceptable, because cannabis does not induce delirium, but only suspends inhibitions. "The murderer," he wrote, "clearly discerned the reference text which could guide his action, and far from creating confusion in him, cannabis only helped to lift ordinary inhibitions. The poison did not alter his behavior and his judgment, it magnified them". — Charles Melman, renowned French psychiatrist and founder of the International Freudian Association, Tribune Juive, May 5, 2021.

On April 4, 2017 in Paris, Kobili Traore, an immigrant from Mali who became a French citizen, tortured and murdered Sarah Halimi, a 65-year-old retired Jewish physician and educator. France's courts cleared the murderer of all charges on the grounds that he acted under the influence of marijuana. Every year in France, dozens of violent physical attacks against Jews take place. Pictured: Thousands of people gather to demand justice for Sarah Halimi, at Trocadero Plaza in Paris on April 25, 2021. (Photo by Geoffroy van der Hasselt/AFP via Getty Images)

Paris, April 4, 2017. 4:00 am. A man breaks into the home of Sarah Halimi, a 65-year-old retired Jewish physician and educator. He beats and tortures her for over an hour while reciting verses from the Quran and repeatedly shouting, "Allahu Akbar!" [Allah is the greatest!"]. He uses anti-Semitic slurs and calls her "Sheitan" (Satan). He throws her from the balcony of her apartment and she falls to the ground, three floors below, dead. The police arrest him.

What happened was an unspeakable antisemitic murder. It was also the start of a process that brought to light once again the many serious and shameful dysfunctions that mark today's France.

The murderer, Kobili Traore, an immigrant from Mali who became a French citizen, is a recidivist criminal who had already been arrested and sentenced by the courts 20 times for violent assaults. He was nonetheless free. His only known professional activity is, in two words: drug dealer. He told the officers who arrested him that he is a drug addict and had smoked marijuana in the hours before the murder.

As a drug dealer, convicted time and again for violent assault, he was free to reoffend. This time, however, he committed murder.

The testimonies of Sarah Halimi's neighbors revealed that the police arrived at the scene of the murder while she was still alive. The police officers apparently went upstairs to her apartment door, heard her screaming and another voice shouting in Arabic. What did they do? They went back downstairs and waited for reinforcements -- until the victim was dead.

They left the murderer alone with his victim. Why is this not a clear case of dereliction of duty? Yet, no investigation has been carried out to determine what, if anything, was the responsibility of the police.

The neighbors' testimonies also revealed that Traore had met Dr. Halimi and her daughter several times in the stairwell of the building where he had threatened them and had called them "dirty Jews". Her neighbors added that Traore had often visited an Islamist mosque. Three days after the murder, on April 7, Paris prosecutor François Mollins nonetheless publicly declared that all the elements at his disposal showed that the murder of Sarah Halimi had "no antisemitic motive".

How could he have said that when so many elements available at the time showed exactly the opposite? The lawyers for Dr. Halimi's sister and children fought for more than six months before, on January 23, 2018, the antisemitic nature of the murder was recognized by French department of justice.

Irregularities took place that were even more scandalous:

• The murderer, under the influence of an illicit substance, was immediately sent to a mental institution, not to prison. Who decided that? Usually, a person arrested after a crime and found to be "under the influence" is arrested, placed in a cell to sober up, then charged by a judge. Why was this case not treated the same way? Who made that decision and why?
• The judge who conducted the investigation, Anne Ihouelou, is a member of the "Syndicat de la magistrature" (Magistrate's Union), a militant left-wing organization with a record of supporting the actions of Islamic organizations, including those of the Collectif contre l'Islamophobie en France (CCIF, Collective against Islamophobia in France), created by members of the Muslim Brotherhood (the leaders of the CCIF decided to dissolve the association in November 2020). Why, in the name of justice, would anyone entrust an investigation into the murder of a Jewish woman by an antisemitic Muslim to a member of an organization like that?

In addition, during the investigation, Judge Ihouelou repeatedly violated the most basic rules of her profession by behaving in a strikingly biased way. First, she refused to allow any reconstruction of the crime. She ruled that reconstructing the crime would be "traumatic" for the criminal. She also refused to meet the lawyers of the victim's sister and children to hear what they had to say. She still has never met them. She has also never responded to letters they sent her presenting their arguments. She did, however, ask a psychiatrist, Daniel Zagury, for his expert opinion. His report stated that even though at the time of the incident the killer was under the influence of marijuana and in a state of "acute delirium", he could nonetheless be held responsible for his actions.

Six months later, in April 2018, Judge Ihouelou requested a second expert opinion. This time, she chose a group headed by another psychiatrist, Paul Bensussan. His report concluded that the "acute delirium" made the murderer not responsible for his actions, implied that Traore was not guilty and therefore could not be tried. Ihouelou requested a third report, from a third psychiatrist, Roland Coutanceau, who did not decide one way or the other. Eventually she selected the conclusions of the Bensussan report, and, on July 12, 2019, in agreement with two other judges, declared the murderer not guilty and cleared of all charges.

The file was immediately sent to the Court of Appeal. On December 19, 2019, its decision stated that the Traore had indeed committed an antisemitic murder, but it validated the decision of Judge Ihouelou, and said that he was not responsible for his actions at the time of the murder and could therefore be granted his freedom.

How could a Court of Appeal validate an investigation in which a reconstruction of the crime never took place; in which the lawyers for the family were never heard, and at the end of which, the decision was rendered solely on the basis of a psychiatric report written months after the facts; based mainly on the statements of a murderer, and contradicted by another psychiatric report?

The Court of Cassation (the highest Court in the French judicial system) was called on to make a final decision. On April 14, 2021, it validated the decision of the Court of Appeal. The murderer will walk free.

The French Jewish community, for four years, was virtually alone in demanding justice for Sarah Halimi.

For six weeks after Halimi's murder, the mainstream French media did not even mention it. The French presidential elections were close. "Two weeks before the elections," university professor Sarah Cattan said on the French public radio channel, France Culture, "the government did everything to prevent publicity on an antisemitic murder". So, apparently an antisemitic murder, committed in Paris, was hidden from the French public for political reasons.

After May 7 and the second round of the French presidential elections, France's mainstream media continued to remain silent about the murder. The first article about it, published on May 23, 2017, in the daily Le Monde, asked, "Was Sarah Halimi killed 'because she was Jewish?'" Its answer seemed to be no. On June 1, 2017, a statement signed by 17 intellectuals was published in the daily Le Figaro: "Let the truth be told about the murder of Sarah Halimi". The text spoke of "rare barbarism" and said that the murderer had shouted "Allahu Akbar", but the words "Islamic antisemitism" are nowhere to be found. "Denouncing far-right antisemitism is very easy in France," said geopolitical analyst Alexandre del Valle, "denouncing Islamic antisemitism is almost impossible. Attempting to do so immediately arouses heated reactions from Muslim organizations, and the mainstream media and political leaders prefer to avoid any trouble".

The decision of the Court of Appeal has caused immense outrage in the French Jewish community. "A Sarah Halimi jurisprudence has just been created", said Francis Szpiner, the lawyer for Halimi's children: "any person declared to be suffering from a delusional puff because he took an illicit substance dangerous for his health will be exempt from criminal liability". Gilles-William Goldnadel, lawyer for Sarah Halimi's sister, called the finding an "ideological decision".

The ruling of the Court of Cassation again caused outrage in the French Jewish community. Joel Mergui, president of the Israelite Central Consistory of France, wrote:

"[T]his decision risks significantly eroding the confidence that the Jews of France have in the justice of their country and in its capacity to protect them.... The judiciary considered that the murderer did not have enough discernment to be judged, but, according to the same judiciary, he had enough discernment to choose his victim, remember their religion, and commit a murder recognized as anti-Semitic".

"Deciding to take narcotics and then 'going mad' should, not in my view, remove your criminal responsibility", said French President Emmanuel Macron, adding that the French laws needed to be changed.

Meyer Habib, the Member of Parliament representing the Eighth Constituency for French residents overseas (elected by French citizens residing in Cyprus, Greece, the Vatican, Israel, Italy, Malta, San Marino and Turkey), commented that even if the laws were changed, the murderer of Sarah Halimi would be free anyway.

Demonstrations were organized -- in Paris and other major cities such as Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, London, New York, and Los Angeles -- to demand justice for Sarah Halimi. Sadly, those who demonstrated were almost all Jews. The protests are unlikely to change the situation. Legally, the decision of the Court of Cassation cannot be reversed.

An Algerian author, Boualem Sansal, wrote a courageous article in which he explicitly denounced:

"all those who in one way or another made it possible that one day, in France, in Paris, an Islamist enters the home of a woman, an neighbor in this case, of the Jewish faith, tortures her and throws her out of a window while shouting Allahu Akbar, and is now free, free to continue his miserable existence, honored and congratulated as one would suspect by his own for having fulfilled a founding commandment pronounced by Allah against Jews and Christians, [and] repeatedly recalled in his sacred book, the Koran ... The murderer is officially authorized to continue his work of hatred and death".

Nili Naouri-Kupfer, president of the organization "Israël is Forever" wrote:

"The French government and justice department are afraid of the Muslim voters, afraid of the Muslim street. They think it doesn't matter if a few Jews are killed if peace can exist in their cities. They choose to sacrifice Jews rather than face the Muslim threat, therefore there never again will be peace in France! "

"I no longer trust the justice of my country", wrote a lawyer, Gilles-William Goldnadel. He filed a complaint against the murderer, invoking Article 13 of an Israeli procedural law stating that in the event of an assault on the life of a Jew committed abroad, Israeli law applies. Francis Szpiner, a lawyer currently serving as the mayor of the 16^th arrondissement in Paris, joined in the complaint.

A radio commentator, Raphaël Nisand, on the French station, Radio Judaïca, wrote in the weekly Tribune Juive:

"[T]his affair is... the illustration for those who might still need it, of the vital utility of Israel so that justice is done to the Jews all over the world. This evidence, inaugurated with the Eichmann trial, unfortunately regains all its force due to the failure of French justice".

A renowned French psychiatrist, Charles Melman, founder of the International Freudian Association, observed that a verdict based on an "acute delirium" leading to no longer being responsible for one's actions is medically unacceptable, because cannabis does not induce delirium, but only suspends inhibitions:

"[T]he murderer clearly discerned the reference text which could guide his action, and far from creating confusion in him, cannabis only helped to lift ordinary inhibitions. The poison did not alter his behavior and his judgment, it magnified them."

Sarah Halimi is now part of the long list of Jews murdered in France by people imbued with Islamic antisemitic hatred. Sebastien Sellam, 23, was stabbed to death in November 2003 by his neighbor, Adel Amastaibou, who told police, "I killed a Jew. It was what Allah wanted". He had smoked cannabis. A psychiatrist said that he had committed a "delusional act". He was declared not responsible for his act by the court and quickly released. Ilan Halimi, 23 as well, was kidnapped, tortured and murdered less than three years later by a group led by Youssouf Fofana, who claimed that he had acted in the name of Allah. The atrocious attack on a Jewish school in Toulouse on March 19, 2012 by Mohamed Merah left four dead: three children and the father of two of them. The attack on a kosher supermarket near Paris also left four dead, all Jews. Mireille Knoll, an 85 year-old woman who had survived the Holocaust ,was murdered in Paris by her neighbor, Yacine Mihoub, a few miles from Sarah Halimi's apartment, on March 23, 2018, less than a year after the murder of Sarah Halimi.

Every year in France, dozens of violent physical attacks against Jews take place. The French Service for the Protection of the Jewish Community states that 44 attacks occurred in 2020, some extremely serious. Sammy Ghozlan, president of the National Office for Vigilance Against Antisemitism, remarked that attacks against Jews in France are far more numerous, but that their victims are often afraid to file a complaint.

Commenting on a report on anti-Semitism in eleven European countries, investigative reporter Judith Miller wrote on February 17, 2020: "The most dangerous place to be a Jew in Europe is France".

"Without French Jews", said former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls after the attack on the kosher supermarket, "France is not France".

On April 25 in Paris, Sarah Halimi's brother, William Attal, addressed a crowd. Once again, he explained in detail the atrocities suffered by his sister and added that a country where an antisemitic murderer can be freed by a questionable decision of the judiciary is a fallen country. "Is France," he asked, "still France?'

 

Dr. Guy Millière, a professor at the University of Paris, is the author of 27 books on France and Europe.

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/world-hates-see-jews-defending-themselves-don-feder/

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