12/29 Links Pt2: The Eternal Life of Blood Libels Against the Jews; In practice, ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ boils down to leftist dogma, including hatred of Israel

From Ian:

Phyllis Chesler: The Eternal Life of Blood Libels Against the Jews

Men fought and, for a variety of reasons, the Jews won. The numbers involved were small. There were, according to Tauber, "about 120 (Jewish) attackers and 70-80 (Arab) defenders. Arabs were "killed, not massacred." But they lost. The Arab village fought alone with no reinforcements and no support from neighboring Arab villages. Most of the Arabs who were killed in Deir Yassin were combatants, men of fighting age, not women, children, or the elderly as has been alleged.

However, the shame of losing was impossible for the Arabs to bear. What drove the Arabs out of Deir Yassin and almost everywhere else, was eerily similar to what many Arab/Palestinians do today. They embed themselves and their weapons among their women, children, and elderly. They surround themselves with vulnerable human shields, and then when Israel targets terrorist launching sites and infrastructure, claim that it viciously sought out women and children.

Such deceptiveness is true in Gaza in the 21st century.

But in April 1948, the Arab/Palestinians spread rumors of a terrible, truly ghastly massacre in Deir Yassin, one that never took place—and, they alleged, wildly, and falsely, that rapes had also taken place which, in Tauber's view is what led to the mass Arab exodus. Tauber writes:

"The impact of Deir Yassin went far beyond Jerusalem and the surrounding villages and spread all over Palestine, causing fear and driving people to leave. A woman from Safad related hearing of the rapes and killings in Deir Yassin. Another refugee woman attributed the flight from Haifa to the fear of what the Jews were going to do to women, as they heard that women and girls were raped in Deir Yassin and the bellies of pregnant women and girls were slashed."

Slashing pregnant bellies characterizes Christian pogroms and Muslim farhuds against Jews; it is not something that Jews have done.

However, in 1948, according to Tauber, Husayn Fakhri al-Khalidi, secretary of the Arab Higher Committee, insisted that "25 pregnant women, 50 breast feeding mothers and 60 other girls and women were slaughtered like sheep" in Deir Yassin. A native of the city "wrote to an acquaintance in Egypt that the Jews used axes in Tiberias and Deir Yassin to chop off hands and legs of men and children and did 'awful things' to women."

Once again, Arabs, Muslims, Christians, and Cossacks do this to Jews in pogroms and farhuds. Jews have not been known to do so.

In 1948, Israeli intelligence analyzed the causes for Palestinian flight and found that such false rumors and exaggerated beliefs were a "decisive accelerating factor" in the Arab exodus.

Israel did not exile the Arabs. Only Arab rumors, Big Lies, did. They provoked shame in a shame-and-honor culture and it worked.

Tauber's work has yet to be reviewed in all the venues that have welcomed the belief in this alleged massacre. Either his work on Deir Yassin will not be widely reviewed or it will be savaged. I hope that I'm wrong.

I am hardly a scholar in this area, but it seems to me that the myth of this alleged massacre may have functioned just as the 20th century Al-Dura myth has in our current century. The entire world wanted to believe that Israelis would purposely, wantonly, and viciously kill an Arab child, sheltering in his father's arms. It did not happen.

And yet, blood libels against the Jews never quit, they seem to live on forever.

Melanie Phillips: The airbrushed feet of clay Desmond Tutu did some great things. But he had a monstrous side too

All this is terrible and depressing. More terrible still, though, is the silence with which Tutu’s bigotry against the Jewish people has been received.

Despite its scale, it has simply been ignored by all who have continued to lionise Tutu as a moral beacon for the world. Dershowitz first assembled his forensic charge sheet against Tutu almost eleven years ago.

And yet, after his death CNN called him “the voice of justice;” the Associated Press said he was a “moral conscience;” the UN Secretary-General António Guterres said he was “a towering global figure for peace and inspiration to generations across the world;” the Economist said he was “the best kind of troublemaker;” and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, called him “a healer and apostle of peace”.

Not one of these or any of the innumerable others whose similar tributes have poured forth in an unstoppable geyser of hero-worship uttered a single word about his antisemitism.

Maybe they just didn’t know? Maybe they did know but allowed his South African legacy to erase it from their minds as just too complicated and contradictory to process? Or maybe they think that Israel deserves what Tutu said about it and that the Jews really aren’t worth bothering about? That antisemitism is so marginal it just doesn’t matter — and the Jews should simply shut up about it?

Whatever the reason, this near-universal airbrushing of Tutu’s bigotry as he is all but canonised as a modern saint throws into the sharpest relief the devastating moral confusion of our era.

New York Times Seizes on Tutu Death to Push Israel-Apartheid Narrative

It’s not just the “critics” increasingly describing Israel as an apartheid state; it’s the Times itself. Back in 2020, when the paper started in with it, I wrote, “It’s unusual to see the “apartheidlike” accusation in the Times’ own voice in a news article.” I wrote then, “It shows how far the Times has traveled on the issue: Back in 2007, when former President Jimmy Carter published his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, a Times review justifiably faulted Carter for ‘the word ‘apartheid’ in the title, with its false echo of the racist policies of the old South Africa.’”

I wrote then that the Times’ own op-ed columnist, Bret Stephens, had written, “the comparison of Israel to apartheid South Africa is unfair to the former and an insult to the victims of the latter.” Even the Times’ Nicholas Kristof, who has been sharply critical of Israel, wrote in May 2021, “Personally, I’m wary of the term apartheid because there are significant differences from ancien régime South Africa.”

But as the latest examples show, plenty of Times editors aren’t as wary as Kristof is about tossing the term about. In October 2021, a Times book review “in brief” column covering three books about Israel mentioned apartheid twice. And Peter Beinart pushed the Israel apartheid parallel in a July 2020 New York Times podcast and in a Times opinion article published that same month.

I can understand the temptation by Israel’s critics to argue the South African case rather than the Israeli case. South Africa was a clear-cut example of settler colonialist racism. Israel is different in many ways. While Israel could do better at integrating Arab citizens, there’s no legal discrimination of the sort there was in South Africa. Arabs serve in the Israeli parliament, attend Israeli universities, and are doctors in Israeli hospitals. West Bank Arabs are a different story — some of them aspire to their own Palestinian state and in some cases have pursued it violently, so differential treatment of them is based on security considerations and in some cases is aimed at preserving an option of a two-state solution or at least limited self-rule. Also, Jews have lived in the land of Israel for thousands of years, considerably longer than Afrikaners lived in South Africa.

David Singer: Christian leaders in Jerusalem playing anti-Semitic political games

The Patriarchs and Heads of Churches in Jerusalem (Christian Leaders) request (read the letter by clicking the link) for an urgent dialogue with “Israel, Palestine and Jordan” on protecting the Christian community in Jerusalem and the integrity of the Christian Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem – is an anti-Israel political ploy that should be rejected by Israel.

The requested dialogue is clearly against Israel’s national interest for the following reasons:
- The Christian Leaders acknowledged that threats to Christians were not limited to Jerusalem only - but extended to Christians throughout the Holy Land without mentioning that most of this is in the Palestinian Authority areas:

“Throughout the Holy Land Christians have become the target of frequent and sustained attacks by fringe radical groups. Since 2012 there have been countless incidents of physical and verbal assaults against priests and other clergy, attacks on Christian churches, with holy sites regularly vandalized and desecrated, and ongoing intimidation of local Christians who simply seek to worship freely and go about their daily lives. These tactics are being used by such radical groups in a systematic attempt to drive the Christian community out of Jerusalem and other parts of the Holy Land.”

- Inviting “Palestine and Jordan” to participate in a dialogue solely on Jerusalem was a blatant attempt by these Christian Leaders to undermine Israel’s sovereignty in Jerusalem by replacing Israel as the sole Authority responsible for ensuring the security and safety of the Christian community in Jerusalem.

- Israel’s Christian community actually grew by 1.4 percent in 2020 and now numbers some 182,000 people

Certainly Israel should meet with these Christian Leaders to address and allay their concerns in relation to threats to the Christian community in Jerusalem.

Rabbis Abraham Cooper and Yitzchok Adlerstein: Canterbury tall tales: Blaming Israel for dwindling Christian population

Several years ago, Senator Ted Cruz was invited to speak to a gathering of Christian religious leaders from the Middle East. They met to call attention to the true plight of disappearing Christians – from the rest of the Middle East. They were talking about the genuine ethnic cleansing of Christians from the Assyrian Triangle and other areas, where the world’s oldest Christian communities were being actively extinguished.

Senator Cruz made the mistake of saying something positive about Israel, for which he was roundly booed. Cruz said that if they were that blind to reality, he wasn’t waiting for more – and walked off. How did it come to pass that these church leaders hated Jews more than their own oppressors?

The answer is fairly simple. At the end of the 19th century, Christians in the Middle East felt the winds of change at their backs. They had to choose between radical Islam (which gave them no chance at all for survival) or a new Arab pan-nationalism. They chose the latter. In time, they became more Arab than Christian. Along the way, many also embraced the new Arab anti-Semitism.

Welby’s understandable desire to stand up for Christian unity allowed him is no excuse for a man of his rank and influence to swallow whole the recent statement critical of Israel by a group of Christian leaders. In some cases, they are tragic pawns, unable to criticize their true oppressors. But others follow in the footsteps of the infamous Archbishop Atallah Hanna, who wrote, “We say to the enemy: 'Leave our land, our Jerusalem, and our holy places. This is Arab Palestinian land, that has no connection whatsoever to the Jews and the Zionists.’…Martyrdom operations are an excellent and good way to resist the Zionist invasion of the Palestinian land.”

Or the Rev. Naim Ateek, himself an Anglican like Welby, who criticizes Judaism as a form of “tribalism,” a “racist theology” practiced by people who worship “a god who has been created in the image of those who are thirsty for revenge,” based on “exclusive biblical texts that are being used to justify the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.” Their agenda is not the preservation of Christian communities, but hatred of Jews.

Don’t worry Archbishop, Israel will continue to protect the rights of Christians and Muslim faithful because it is the Jewish way.

We respectfully suggest that the Archbishop convert his considerable influence to awaken Christian conscience to intervene for truly endangered Christians across Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

Danny Danon: We must crack down on antisemitism - opinion

In Europe, there is legislation against the BDS movement. The laws themselves are good, but unfortunately they are no longer adequate. As in the case of Ben & Jerry’s, the State of Israel must involve government officials and bring the matter to public awareness so that the countries that are affected can act quickly and effectively. Freedom of expression is a principal value but freedom of incitement and the encouragement of violence on social networks cannot be allowed.

Similar to a newspaper that is responsible for the content it publishes on its pages, so must social media platforms be responsible for their posts. Equivalent laws should be applied in both scenarios when it comes to promoting offensive or racist content.

The situation where antisemites are creating false and harmful propaganda and using social networks to reach ever-growing audiences without the social networks themselves being responsible and accountable for removing this damaging content is very concerning.

In the United States, there is a consensus, both among the Republican and the Democratic parties, that the social networks should no longer be granted immunity from the content published on their platforms and changes must be made to the law.

I believe that, following the US legislation, more countries in Europe will summon their courage and enact laws that will hold social media platforms accountable and thus allow citizens to complain when there is insightful or antisemitic content and if necessary enable them to file a lawsuit against the social network if it does not remove the offensive post.

Perhaps antisemitism will never be eliminated from our world, but these actions can certainly reduce the level of damage and evil it sows.

NYPost Editorial: In practice, ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ boils down to leftist dogma, including hatred of Israel

DEI staffers’ supposed purpose is to combat bias and create campus safe spaces for students. In reality, they obsessively push (and impose) progressive dogma: not just critical-race-theory nonsense but all leftist orthodoxy, including hostility toward Israel.

Per one tweet from an assistant director of an Office for Institutional Equity and Diversity: “No apology for a pro-apartheid Zionist organization holding a reception? I guess there’s no justice for Queer Palestinians here.” (The left loves to pretend Israel is just like the old South Africa and that Zionism is racism.) No concern for being “inclusive” of the school’s Jewish students there. An Israeli flag waves at the embassy in Moscow on September 18, 2018 The 2020-2021 school year, for example, saw at least 244 reported anti-Semitic attacks.

And of course anti-Israel attitudes regularly go with outright hatred of Jews. Notably, anti-Semitic attacks have skyrocketed on many campuses. The 2020-2021 school year, for example, saw at least 244 reported anti-Semitic attacks, up from 181 the year before. But that’s irrelevant to the DEI worldview.

Diversity, equity and inclusion are all fine things, but DEI officialdom is typically about a very different agenda. The consultants and bureaucrats paid to push DEI across America — and in plenty of K-12 schools, not only on campuses — are far worse than just a waste of money.

Erased: How Maps Are Used to Undermine the Existence of Israel

The book “Amazing Women of the Middle East” profiles 25 famous women, including historical figures such as Cleopatra and Nefertiti.

What it doesn’t include, however, is the State of Israel. The book’s colorful map of the Middle East removed any mention of the Jewish homeland, instead labeling the entire country as “Palestine.”

This month, Canada’s biggest bookseller Chapters Indigo pulled copies of the children’s book from its shelves after Daniel Koren, Canadian director of Hasbara Fellowships, spotted it and contacted Indigo directly.

The response from Indigo Chapters was a commendable one: the business acknowledged that the sale of the book had breached its own policy and thus rectified the problem.

Yet, this is not the first time that Israel has been expunged from maps of the Middle East.

It is a problem that has cropped up repeatedly, and while sometimes these instances are genuine mistakes, on other occasions, they represent an insidious attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the State of Israel.

Maps are a historical record and, therefore, the removal of Israel is a denial of reality — that of Jewish people living in their ancient homeland.

In May, a member of the New York State Assembly sparked condemnation, including from her own colleagues, when she shared an image that labeled the entirety of the Jewish state as “Palestine.”

‘It’s not about peace’: The endgame behind the boycott of the Sydney Festival

By the time the Sydney Festival concludes and the famed Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin and the Sydney Dance Company ensemble take their last bows, the anti-Israel activists will have claimed their victory. Peace between Israelis and Palestinians will be no closer. Palestinian statehood will remain a mirage owing as much to the civil unrest between the main Palestinian factions, Fatah and Hamas, as to the conflict with Israel. But peace has always meant something different to the anti-Israel activist. Yasser Arafat spoke of a “peace through Israel’s destruction”. And state-building and the sorts of sacrifices and painstaking technocratic exertions through which every modern state has come into being are nowhere to be found in the manifestos of the Palestine solidarity movement. The slogan, “from the river to the sea”, will do. Its meaning being a Palestine in place of Israel not alongside it, says it all.

Nonetheless, through promoting a boycott of the festival, anti-Israel activists in this country will have again gotten their column inches and online chatter devoted to the bloodlust and greed of Israelis and the quiet dignity of the Palestinian resistance. The stabbing of an Israeli mother walking with her kids in Jerusalem earlier this month generated no such verbiage. The image of a Hamas operative toting a sub-machine after slaying a young Israeli tour guide on the cobblestones of the Old City, a mere triviality compared with the question of who sponsors an interpretative dance routine. And while the leadership of the Sydney Festival has politely (perhaps too politely) notified the activists that the festival program will proceed as planned, they will already be looking to other literary, artistic and film festivals hoping their organisers will have seen what they can do and will simply say, “I don’t need the aggravation” of threats and boycott calls and will quietly, politely, decline to work with Israelis.

Herein we see the strategy of anti-Israel activism. It is to take the stage, co-opt every movement, every forum of prestige and saturate it with stories of Israeli evil to the extent that the hand of Israel is placed on every gun in every police shooting in the United States and protesters in London claim that Palestine is a climate issue. Incredibly, Palestine activists still maintain they are being silenced by all-powerful, shadowy lobbyists.

a sort of Leftist prerogative was once made by both Marx and Hitler. The Jewish selfishness, their unkind insistence on being Jewish, was what is preventing the world from being a harmonious place. This idea was so powerful and central all in all 19th and 2oth century major /2

— Hussein Aboubakr Mansour (@HusseinAboubak) December 28, 2021

Israel is replacing Judaism the tradition, but is becoming the epitome of Jews as a people. Today, whether Jew or gentile, one's relationship to Israel is what defines one's relationship to Jews as a people and what also explains both gentile and Jewish anti-Zionism. /9

— Hussein Aboubakr Mansour (@HusseinAboubak) December 28, 2021

And what is truly and devastatingly heartbreaking in the most agonizing way, is that Palestinian national identity is nothing but an epiphenomenon of all the former. Not that many Palestinians know, but they are just unwitting, yet sadly willing, conduits of the war on the Jews.

— Hussein Aboubakr Mansour (@HusseinAboubak) December 28, 2021

JVP joins CAIR on Wiesenthal Center's Global Anti-Semites List

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is among 10 of the world's worst anti-Semitic organizations, the Simon Wiesenthal Center said Tuesday while unveiling a new report.

The list, which Wiesenthal Center founder and Dean Marvin Hier said "includes institutions that we never thought we would have to put on our top 10," also singles out a purportedly Jewish organization. Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) opposes Israel's existence. And it took advantage of the recent Hanukah holiday to solicit donations to build "a radical, loving, anti-Zionist Jewish movement for liberation."

JVP members "unequivocally oppose Zionism" and have pushed conspiracy theories about police exchange programs in Israel that it now acknowledges are anti-Semitic.

"JVP is a group that believes it is immune from being labeled and treated as anti-Semites," said Wiesenthal Center Associate Dean Abraham Cooper. "They are wrong. Anyone seeking or enabling the destruction of Israel, home to the world's largest Jewish community — over 6 million Jews — is an anti-Semite, whatever their religion or creed."

Previous lists would have focused on the individuals who uttered anti-Semitic speech. But this year, the center targeted the "gatekeepers," Cooper said: the organizations which fail to take appropriate action when confronted by blatant anti-Semitism in its ranks.

"When we see trends where the gatekeepers fail their responsibilities," Cooper said, "we're escalating it to the next level."

That's why CAIR made the list.

Simon Wiesenthal Center Releases its Global Anti-Semitism 2021 Top Ten List #topten2021 #AntiSemitic #antisemitism https://t.co/fQVfAX1gEu pic.twitter.com/31egZLKWKd

— SimonWiesenthalCntr (@simonwiesenthal) December 28, 2021

5. SWC #TopTenAntiSemitic2021 - @jvplive Finally, a “Jewish” group #Hamas can love. https://t.co/fPiz891zMr pic.twitter.com/TXgAevMfcX

— SimonWiesenthalCntr (@simonwiesenthal) December 28, 2021

9. SWC #TopTenAntiSemitic2021 - @USC President gets an “F” for failing to hold vile Jew-hater accountable.
"I want to kill every motherf***ing Zionist...curse the Jews." #YasmeenMashayekh https://t.co/fPiz891zMr pic.twitter.com/c2QN93M9cM

— SimonWiesenthalCntr (@simonwiesenthal) December 29, 2021

The Nation’s Mohammed El-Kurd Whitewashes Allegations His Jerusalem-based Neighbor Conspired With US-Designated Terror Groups

Charges: Conspiring With Hamas, PFLP, DFLP & Islamic Jihad
Murad Attieh is alleged to be a member of a “neighborhood committee” that organizes violent riots with a view to thwarting legitimate and peaceful efforts by Jewish Israelis seeking to reclaim ownership of properties that were confiscated from them or their families between 1948 and 1967 when Jordan occupied the West Bank, including Jerusalem. The violence targets Jewish civilians living in Shimon HaTzadik, as well as police forces.

According to an August 10 criminal indictment, “a meeting took place in the month of May 2021, at the house of the defendant [Murad Attieh], in his presence together with five others identified [as being affiliated with] several terror groups including Hamas, the Popular Front [for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)], the Democratic Front and Islamic Jihad.” During the gathering, which occurred on the backdrop of the 11-day conflict between the Israel Defense Forces and Gaza-based terror groups led by Hamas, the participants purportedly agreed to increase violent confrontations with Israeli security forces in Sheikh Jarrah.

As part of the alleged plan, Attieh was tasked with patrolling the neighborhood’s rooftops, identifying police positions and helping assailants escape after prospective assaults with stones and Molotov cocktails. He moreover stands accused of buying four liters of gasoline to be used against police and financing the purchase of fireworks. On July 30, Sheikh Jarrah resident Suhaib Siam approached Attieh with a request for NIS 360 ($115). According to prosecutors, Attieh knowingly transferred NIS 500 ($160) to buy fireworks used the next day to attack security services.

Indeed, videos posted on Murad Attieh’s Instagram account on July 31 and August 1 depict violent scenes of Palestinians throwing fireworks at security forces attempting to disperse rioters in Sheikh Jarrah. One of the clips uploaded by Attieh shows a police car that was apparently hit by a firebomb. To put things into perspective, a US court last month sentenced a man who hurled fireworks at police officers to eight years in prison, whereas some European prosecutors treat the act as attempted manslaughter — even when there is no terrorist intent.

Over the summer, El-Kurd’s neighbor also apparently participated in riots near the West Bank town of Beita. As HonestReporting has repeatedly highlighted (see, for example, here and here), the Palestinian Authority-backed violence has included ecoterrorism, the detonation of powerful explosive devices and the burning of swastikas. On social media, Attieh shared sermons by Mahmoud al-Hasanat, an Islamic preacher who is particularly popular among Hamas supporters in the Gaza Strip.

Our 10 most popular posts in 2021

Here are our ten most popular posts in 2021:
1. BBC 4’s ‘Paris Police 1900’ Synopsis on ‘spy Dreyfus’ amended after criticism
2. ‘For no logical reason’, Sky News denies Palestinian violence
3. The Guardian to Israel: We wish you were never born.
4. The Guardian takes COVID-related smears of Israel to the next level
5. The luxury beliefs of Western anti-Zionists
6. BBC Monitoring’s Tala Halawa whitewashes antisemitic chant
7. BBC’s false equivalence tactic migrates to London reporting
8. New BBC documentary on UK antisemitism doesn’t cut the mustard
9. Five questions for Mohammed el-Kurd the UK media won’t ask
10. Review: ‘Jews Don’t Count’, by David Baddiel

The Debate Over Anti-Jewish Boycott

Since his passing on December 26, 2021, Desmond Tutu, the South African Anglican cleric renowned for his fight against South African’s apartheid and racism, has been widely eulogized for his accomplishments. Less mentioned was his call for a global boycott of the Jewish state. Such calls, even under the guise of human rights, hide an underlying anti-Semitism.

The boycott of Jews has a long and sordid history.

History
A classic weapon of anti-Semitism, the boycott ostracizes and disenfranchises Jews by depriving them of education, livelihoods, civil rights and camaraderie. Historic manifestations of the anti-Semitic boycott include barring Jews from practicing certain professions or holding agricultural leases, denying Jews membership in associations, societies and guilds, limiting the numbers of Jews allowed to attend universities, picketing Jewish businesses and pressuring people to reject Jewish services.

Boycotts against Jews have been historically employed to diffuse societal unrest and divert anti-government protests by turning the focus of blame onto the Jew. From the late 19th century onward, “Don’t buy from Jews,” “Buy from Christians only” and “Each to his own” were commonly heard slogans in Europe, as organized boycotts targeted Jews as the scapegoats for rising unemployment and poverty. Boycott organizers justify their anti-Jewish actions as a defensive tactic or as retribution for alleged wrongdoing by Jews.

No sooner had Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party risen to power in Germany in 1933, than they organized a boycott against Jews as retribution for unfavorable press and boycotts of Nazis that were occurring across the world. It marked the beginning of Hitler’s campaign against Jews that resulted in the Nazi’s so-called “Final Solution” – the genocide of European Jews.

Just months after the defeat of the Nazis and Hitler’s suicide, and even before the establishment of the State of Israel, the Arab League launched its own boycott against Jews in Palestine. The December 1945 declaration stated that “Jewish products and manufactured goods shall be considered undesirable to the Arab countries.”

After Arab League attempts to physically annihilate the newly established State of Israel failed, its boycott became an alternate instrument of war to bring about the demise of the state through economic means. The boycott consisted of three levels – a) barring commerce between citizens of Arab League countries and citizens of Israel or the Israeli government; b) barring commercial relations between anyone who does business in Israel; and c) barring commerce between Arab and companies that do business with Israel.

Promoters of anti-Israel boycotts denounce resolutions that consider BDS a form of anti-Jewish bigotry to be penalized.

The latest iteration of the Arab boycott is the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against the Jewish state, which, like previous boycotts, is recognized as an anti-Semitic tool of discrimination against the Jews. As a result, there has been a global backlash.

Nazi-Looted Art in France Returned to Heirs of Jewish Owner

Four artworks looted by Nazis in France during World War II have been returned to the heirs of their original Jewish owner, France’s ministry of culture recently announced.

The two watercolor paintings and two drawings by 19th-century French artists Georges Michel, Paul Delaroche, Auguste Hesse and Jules-Jacques Veyrassat were stolen from Jewish-Egyptian businessman Moise Levi de Benzion in 1940 along with hundreds of other works from his personal home collection in France. He died in France three years later during World War II.

The Louvre and Musee d’Orsay museums in Paris maintained custody of the works after World War II until their legal owners or heirs could be tracked down, efforts which former French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe spearheaded in 2018 when he organized a special unit to find the rightful owners of the artwork, AFP reported.

Before the four works were returned last week, 169 pieces of art held by France had been restored to their owners since 1951, AFP added.

White Supremacist Behind Gun Attack on California Synagogue Receives Second Life Sentence

The white supremacist who carried out a deadly gun attack on a Southern California synagogue more than two years ago received an additional life sentence in a federal court on Tuesday.

John Earnest, 22, was sentenced to life followed by 30 years of imprisonment just three months after he was handed a life sentence by a state court for the April 27, 2019 attack on the Chabad of Poway Synagogue. Three people, including an eight-year-old child, were wounded and a 60-year-old woman, Lori Gilbert-Kaye, was killed after Earnest entered the building armed with a Smith and Wesson M&P 15 assault rifle that was fully loaded with a 10-round magazine.

Earnest previously pleaded guilty to a 113-count indictment that included 54 counts of violating the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, 55 counts of violating the Church Arson Prevention Act, and four firearms offenses.

Following Earnest’s sentencing, US Attorney General Merrick Garland said that the attack on the Poway synagogue was also an attack on America’s founding values.

“All people in this country should be able to freely exercise their religion without fear of being attacked,” Garland said in a statement. “This defendant’s horrific crime was an assault on fundamental principles of our nation. The Justice Department is steadfast in its commitment to confronting unlawful acts of hate and to holding perpetrators of hate-fueled violence accountable.”

Meet a Jew_ Germany’s scheme to convince the country Jews are people.

Indeed, even though studying the Holocaust is a mandatory part of Germany’s curriculum, and schoolkids regularly go on visits to former concentration camps, most Germans have never personally interacted with Jews. According to one recent study, nearly half of the population has never met a Jewish person.

“When Jews are repeatedly being presented to you as victims, that’s a problem,” Sagan said. “One thing that is appealing about Meet a Jew is that these are encounters between people who are locals and who live in Germany. It provides an interesting basis for commonality and empathy. That kind of work is important.”

Still, questions linger about how much the program can really do to overcome the larger forces in Germany. “A big challenge for a program like this is scale, for it to have a real impact, you need to hold a lot of events,” Sagan said. Meet a Jew can only reach so many.

But Schmerling noted that in 2020, 230 Meet a Jew sessions were held. That figure nearly doubled in 2021, with another 540 completed. Virtual meetups have been held when pandemic-related restrictions have applied to physical gatherings. Next year, Meet a Jew is looking to expand its range of formats to include podcasts, video, “and maybe even TikTok,” Schmerling said. “It’s still a work in progress, but that’s where our target groups are.”

For now, back in the classroom at Sophie Scholl School, after showing initial signs of shyness, the students grew in confidence, and they soon began to come to terms with the idea that Liora, and indeed any other Jew, is pretty much just like them. It helped that she passed around a bag of sugar-coated kosher candy.

“Judaism is not just a pure religion,” Liora told the students. “It is also a nationality. My faith and my love for God is my interpretation. So I do what is important to me. That’s what Jewishness is about. It’s about doing what you believe.”

France Orders Mosque Closed After ‘Unacceptable’ Preaching

France ordered the closure of a mosque in the north of the country because of the radical nature of its imam’s preaching, regional authorities said on Tuesday.

The mosque in Beauvais, a town of 50,000 people some 62 miles north of Paris, will remain shut for six months, according to the prefecture of the Oise region where Beauvais is located.

It said the sermons there incite hatred, violence and “defend jihad.”

The move on the mosque, which has a congregation of about 400, comes two weeks after Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said he triggered the procedure to close the site because the imam there “is targeting Christians, homosexuals and Jews” in his sermons. This, the minister said, was “unacceptable.”

Local authorities were legally bound to observe a 10-day period of information-gathering before taking action, but said on Tuesday that the mosque would now be shut within two days.

Local daily Courrier Picard reported this month that the mosque’s imam was a recent convert to Islam.

Solidarity from David Draiman to the two Jews who were attacked for wearing IDF T-shirts. pic.twitter.com/Ic0Bphc8ku

— Elder of Ziyon 🇮🇱 (@elderofziyon) December 29, 2021

Intel appoints 10 Israeli executives to senior global positions

Semiconductor giant Intel Corporation has appointed 10 Israeli executives to senior international positions within the multinational, the company said on Wednesday, including a second Israeli woman as global corporate vice president.

Karin Eibschitz-Segal has been leading Intel’s development centers in Israel as well as the Intel Validation Engineering branch in the Design Engineering Group worldwide for the past four years, overseeing the work of about 10,000 people globally. She has been second-in-command to Intel Israel CEO Yaniv Garty since 2017, and will now take on the role of global corporate VC at Intel Corp.

Intel has three major development centers in Israel — in Haifa, Petah Tikva and Jerusalem — tasked with some of the company’s major processor operations, and an advanced chip manufacturing plant in Kiryat Gat, which is expanding. The company is also building a second $200 million campus in Haifa to develop the “chips of the future.”

This summer, Intel appointed Shlomit Weiss as senior vice president at the global company, making her co-general manager of the US tech giant’s design engineering group. Weiss rejoined Intel from Mellanox Technologies (acquired by Nvidia). She’d previously worked at Intel for 28 years, winning the company’s top award, the “Intel Achievement Award,” for developing the firm’s dual-core processor architecture in Israel.

Weiss has registered several patents on microprocessor development.

Pontius Pilate and the Jerusalem Aqueduct

Recent archaeological work, published in the journal Geoarchaeology, has shed light on the history of a large segment of Jerusalem’s ancient aqueduct. The section, known as the Bier Aqueduct, is a roughly 3-mile-long underground segment of the ancient water system. Carbon-14 dating led the team from Hebrew University to suggest that the Bier Aqueduct was likely constructed during the reign of the Roman governor Pontius Pilate (c. 26–36 C.E.), who infamously oversaw Jesus’s execution. Pontius Pilate and the Jerusalem Aqueduct examining the aquaduct

The archaeological survey was conducted by spelunking into the dark and murky waters of the Bier Aqueduct to map as much of its course as possible. During the survey, the team documented the various methods used in its construction and took several radiocarbon samples from the plastered walls. Analysis of the samples indicates the aqueduct was likely built in the early first century C.E. and was refurbished in the second century after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. As such, the team suggests that the Bier Aqueduct could be the same aqueduct attributed to Pontius Pilate by the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. According to Josephus, Pilate used money from the Temple’s treasury to build the aqueduct, which led to riots in the city (Antiquities 18.60–62). Despite several aqueducts feeding into the Temple area, the Bier fed into the upper city where the governor’s palace would have been located, thus perhaps explaining Josephus’s reference to the riots that broke out across the city.

The aqueduct, which begins at the Bier spring, includes five different sections, each playing a role in collecting, channeling, and controlling water. The aqueduct’s architecture is unique within the land of Israel and would have been one of the most technologically advanced water systems of the Roman world. Although the aqueduct took water directly from the Bier spring, its design also allowed for the capture and diversion of ground and surface water, thereby providing Jerusalem with more than seven times the annual discharge of the Bier spring alone.

Today my incredible great grandma Lily Ebert, a Holocaust survivor, turns 98!!

“I never expected to survive Auschwitz. Now, at 98, I celebrate surrounded by my family - the Nazis did not win!”

To the thousands of people who sent birthday cards & messages to Lily, THANK YOU ???? pic.twitter.com/TT7PQ6ikrv

— Dov Forman (@DovForman) December 29, 2021

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