Because, Israel

[Ivanhoe]

13 hours ago, sunday said:

I think there could be a discussion on how much "Judeo" is in the so-called "Judeo-Christian values". For instance, perhaps "Greek-Roman-Christian values" would be more proper.

What is it about Jews that offends you so?

[Ivanhoe]

 

[Ivanhoe]

https://ujcvp.org/ujc-chai-lights/f/statement-on-second-sunday’s-cancellation-of-hanukkah-celebration
 

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The Jewish Community of the Virginia Peninsula is shocked and alarmed at LoveLight Placemaking’s decision to cancel a menorah lighting scheduled for the Second Sundays Art and Music Festival on Dec 10 in Williamsburg – claiming it did not want to appear to choose sides in the Israel-Hamas conflict. To be clear, the menorah lighting, which was to be led by a local community rabbi, had nothing to do with Israel or the conflict. 

Yet, appallingly, the event organizer claimed that a Chanukah celebration would send a message that the festival was "supporting the killing/bombing of thousands of men, women, and children," -- and even went a step further, by offering to reinstate the event if it was done under a banner calling for a ceasefire. 

We should be very clear: it is antisemitic to hold Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s policies and actions, and to require a political litmus test for Jews’ participation in community events that have nothing to do with Israel. Those standards would never be applied to another community. 

 

 

[sunday]

19 minutes ago, Ivanhoe said:

What is it about Jews that offends you so?

Nothing. Why?

If you think there are questions that should not be asked, then please state so.

Edited December 4, 2023 by sunday

[Ivanhoe]

On 12/4/2023 at 8:21 AM, sunday said:

Nothing. Why?

If you think there are questions that should not be asked, then please state so.

You apparently don't believe there was any Jewish contribution to Judeo-Christian culture. You have stated that the Inquisition saved souls (by torturing confessions out of them, obviously). And you've posted dishonest stuff about Israel in this very thread (links to the claim that Israel committed ethnic cleansing in 1948).

The dots all fall on the same line.

[futon]

 

[sunday]

7 hours ago, Ivanhoe said:

You apparently don't believe there was any Jewish contribution to Judeo-Christian culture. You have stated that the Inquisition saved souls (by torturing confessions out of them, obviously). And you've posted dishonest stuff about Israel in this very thread (links to the claim that Israel committed ethnic cleansing in 1948).

The dots all fall on the same line.

I could not find anything exclusively Judeo in the Judeo-Christian culture until the 19-20th century, and that is mostly yiddish words imported into American English or foodstuffs. Legal systems come from Roman Law, or lately, from Napoleonic Law. Democracy comes from Greece. Human rights are clearly Christian things. Modern science is based on medieval science, made possible by the acknowledging of the existence of natural order, as found by Greek philosophers, and refined through Christian Scholastic. All that despite the figures of Maimonides, and Baruch Spinoza. So I asked. Not going to apologize for the act of looking for information, thank you.

The Inquisition prevented wars of religion inside Spain, at a relatively small cost in lives, about 3,000 death sentences, not always executed, in three centuries. That is less that the number of Huguenots killed during St. Bartholomew Night, or a business-as-usual week in the Soviet Gulag. Also, an insignificant number compared with the number of people dead in Germany during the Thirty Year Wars or, even, the German Peasant's War before. Plus, there were strict restrictions on the use of torture during Inquisition inquiries.

Actions of Israel in 1948 are what they are.

If you think Israel can not do anything wrong, then please state so. I do think all human beings are fallible.

Edited December 6, 2023 by sunday

[BansheeOne]

Leaks, bombshells, the Kraken can't be far behind!

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Bombshell leaked draft ruling shows High Court set to nix key judicial overhaul law

Historic 15-justice panel reportedly split 8-7 in favor of nullifying reasonableness law; judiciary slams leak, says ruling still being written; coalition MKs pan brewing decision

By Jeremy Sharon and Michael Bachner

Today, 12:35 am | Updated at 11:05 am

The High Court of Justice is likely to strike down the highly controversial reasonableness law passed by the government this summer as part of its judicial overhaul program, according to a draft decision leaked to the media on Wednesday evening, in what would be a bombshell ruling marking the first time Israel’s top court nullifies a quasi-constitutional Basic Law.

In a potentially landmark, polarizing decision, the unprecedented 15-justice panel comprising all members of the court is split eight in favor and seven against annulling the law, Channel 12 news reported Wednesday, citing a leaked document containing the non-final stance of each justice.

The report drew immediate, heated reactions, with coalition members chastising the expected decision and casting it as undermining the national unity being displayed during the ongoing war against Hamas. The group that petitioned for the law to be nullified claimed the leak was an attempt to intimidate the justices and push them to change their ruling and not void the legislation.

An amendment to Basic Law: The Judiciary passed in July, the reasonableness law bars all courts, including the High Court, from deliberating on or ruling against government and ministerial decisions on the basis of the judicial standard of “reasonableness.”

That doctrine allows the High Court to annul government and ministerial decisions if it believes there have been substantive problems with the considerations used in such decisions, or with the weight given to those considerations.

An unprecedented hearing in September, which included all the court’s 15 justices overseeing a 13-hour debate, dug deep into the foundations of Israel’s governing system and the balance of power between its branches of government.

The petitioners against the law, as well as Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, argued that it removed crucial guardrails protecting Israeli democracy, specifically the independence of some senior law enforcement officials, and boosted the government’s power at the expense of the judiciary to such an extent that it undermined Israel as a democracy.

The government and proponents of the law argued that the standard had given the court too broad a scope to intervene in policy decisions, and allowed the court to substitute the will of the majority with its own worldview. Additionally, the right-wing coalition and legal conservatives have strenuously argued that Basic Laws are not subject to judicial review and that the court lacks the power to void them.

[...]

https://www.timesofisrael.com/high-court-said-set-to-nix-key-judicial-overhaul-law-bombshell-leaked-draft-ruling/

[Mighty_Zuk]

 

1 hour ago, BansheeOne said:

Leaks, bombshells, the Kraken can't be far behind!

https://www.timesofisrael.com/high-court-said-set-to-nix-key-judicial-overhaul-law-bombshell-leaked-draft-ruling/

The ruling coalition cannot sell to the public the contradicting ideas that on one hand we are all united and postpone certain things until after the war, and simultaneously continue their divisive and auto-racist policies.

In doing so, they hurt both narratives and driven many people to continue protests during the war. Perhaps in an attempt to divide them into those who are pro-protests now and pro-protests later, but there is a solid anti-Netanyahu core nonetheless.

[JWB]

https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2023-11-10/israels-arab-minority-feels-closer-to-country-in-war-poll-finds

[BansheeOne]

The Kraken is released.

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In historic 1st, High Court strikes down Basic Law amendment, voiding reasonableness law

By JEREMY SHARON 

Today, 6:52 pm

In a monumental, highly controversial decision, the High Court of Justice strikes down legislation passed earlier this year that curtailed judicial oversight of the government, annulling for the first time in Israel’s history an element of one of its quasi-constitutional Basic Laws.

The court split almost down the middle over the highly contentious legislation, which eliminated judicial use of the “reasonableness” standard — the only significant law from the government’s judicial overhaul agenda to have been passed so far. Eight justices vote in favor of striking down the law, while seven vote to uphold it.

The ruling establishes in legal precedent the High Court’s contention that it has, in limited circumstances, the right to annul Basic Laws, despite these being the basis of authority for all state institutions, including the court.

Twelve of the 15 justices agree the court does have the authority to strike down Basic Laws.

[...]

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/in-historic-1st-high-court-strikes-down-basic-law-amendment-voiding-reasonableness-law/

[Mighty_Zuk]

Post I made in another forum:

Since October 7th, there has been a perceived consensus that infighting should be frozen until the end of the war, and that we need to display unity. Despite that, dangerous conspiracy theories and attacks against victims' families have occurred with increasing intensity recently, particularly now as people understand that the war will drag on and we need to return to some routine. The political opposition therefore sees it as a coalition's elections campaign, and now with the growing feeling that the coalition will continue pushing its "legal overhaul", protests may soon erupt.

What this event likely means for the road ahead:

• Some protesters lulled, some reinvigorated. Protest leaders may begin testing the water for resumption of protests. A premature return could hurt the protest movement's legitimacy and push away outside supporters.
• Gov may feel like the can is already open and blame it on the opposition - allowing it to maintain a political campaign to restore some of its lost power. Recent polls gave it 44 seats, a major drop from its current 64 in the Knesset.
• Coupled with politicization of hostages' families and victims as "traitors" by the coalition, this could signal a slowdown in political cooperation with security forces and therefore a slowdown in operational and strategic tempo.
• Significant parts of the legal overhaul are now effectively dead, and it is unlikely that the coalition as a whole would continue voting for additional such measures.
• As the government now sets a narrative of being attacked while "agreeing" to a "freeze", this may delegitimize calls by the opposition to run elections this year.
• Hamas and Hezbollah may feel encouraged, as this tremendous tragedy in 7/10 only gave Israel less than 2 months of unity. It would likely take a full fledged war with Hezbollah to restore some of this unity.

[Ivanhoe]

Followup to the Burlington shooting;

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-greatest-islamophobia-hoax-in-america-exposed/
 

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The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee falsely claimed that “a man shouted and harassed the victims, then proceeded to shoot them. We have reason to believe this shooting occurred because the victims are Arab.”

In reality, they had been shot by a local resident outside his house who did not say a word.

The three Muslim men were returning home from a party on Saturday night when James J. Eaton, a local resident with a history of mental instability, stumbled out of a white clapboard house on the residential street and without a word fired four shots at the three men.

Eaton had been described as “that hippie guy” and “progressive”, an organic farmer who had posted a meme with a definition of “Amerika” that called it “the worst sense of the United States, ie imperialism, corruption and the global exportation of American culture.”

He appeared to be a Biden supporter.

 

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In reality, Eaton supported Hamas.

On December 6, Seven Days, a local news outlet known for breaking stories about local politics, revealed that Eaton had tweeted, “the notion that Hamas is ‘evil’ for defending their state from occupation is absurd. They are owed a state. Pay up.”

Responding to an article about a proposed ceasefire, he wrote, “What if someone occupied your country? Wouldn’t you fight them?”

Local politicians were aware of this which is why in December a Burlington City Council resolution from Councilman Ali Dieng, an African Muslim immigrant currently running for mayor, trying to tie the shootings to an attack on Israel failed, and so did a resolution pushing the false claim that the students had been targeted because of their identity.

 

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The reality that has emerged is that Eaton was mentally unstable, left-leaning, opposed to America and supportive of Islamic terrorists. He was neither Jewish nor pro-Israel.

He had actually publicly stated his support for Hamas.

Eaton could not have known that the three Muslim men were going to walk past the house where he was living and it’s implausible that he would have had the time to plan such an attack.

 

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The Burlington shootings were far from the first Islamophobia hoax to gain a national platform.

The killings of four Muslim men in Albuquerque were initially billed as Islamophobia. Biden even issued a statement declaring that “my administration stands strongly with the Muslim community” and warned that “these hateful attacks have no place in America.” The attacks were Islamophobic, but the perpetrator was a Sunni Muslim Afghan refugee who hated Shiites.

 

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(As in Burlington, leftists and Muslims seem to shoot far more Muslims than conservatives do.)

 

 

 

 

[Angrybk]

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Cohen: In that period of silence, there was a recalibration. And in that recalibration, the left immediately created a contradiction. It had spent a lot of time during the coronavirus pandemic, and the George Floyd protests here, telling everyone that speech was violence, that the way you use words can create violence. And then immediately after October 7, they said, “No, actually violence is speech—what Hamas was doing here was a protest movement. This was a protest of an unjust, illegal occupation.” And so it took those on the left 24 hours to flip the script. And that fits in with the second thing they did, which is they immediately plugged Israelis and Palestinians into their racial binaries of white and Black.

Namdar: That fantasy of Jews as white is so interesting to me. Like, so fascinating. I mean, go walk in the street in Israel and tell us that we’re white—it’s so funny. Put aside even the Yemeni, the Moroccans, the Persian Jews like myself, who never claimed to be white. But even Ashkenazim, the Ashkenazi Jews in Europe, were never considered to be white—they were the untouchables, almost like the Roma. To call someone a Jew was to say the N-word. The whole project of passing as white has actually cost the Jews a dear price. It enabled them to reach certain social heights. But it is now, in my opinion, one of the worst things that happened to the Jewish collective of America, that “whiteness,” because kids who were raised very liberal and then became radical go to schools where whiteness is a slur. Whiteness is a cuss word. Whiteness is demonized. And now they are white, suddenly, the little Yids from the shtetl; now they are white and therefore their existence is not valid. And they cannot support their historic ancestral homeland that their grandparents pined for and used to plant trees in, because it is considered a “white country.” And they are told by their professors that they need to be against white people. The absurdity of it is striking. But it’s also a dangerous fantasy. It is a dangerous fantasy, this whiteness business.

Cohen: I think among a lot of Jews, what you’re calling “this whiteness business”  compels them to take the anti-Zionist position.

Beckerman: They need to reject that part of themselves?

Cohen: They need to make themselves acceptable. “Good whites.”

Namdar: This self-loathing, which a lot of American Jews believe to be an authentic Jewish trait, is actually a modern European Jewish trait. It is not a true Jewish trait. As a Persian Jew, I was not raised with it. It’s a very new thing, and it starts with the emancipation in Europe. The ticket to enter polite society was (a) you stop looking like a Jew and (b) you stop speaking like a Jew. And the most important thing was that they had to internalize the anti-Semitic gaze of their generous hosts. So they had to start loathing all things Jewish. They had to laugh at the anti-Semitic jokes. And this self-loathing has become like a sacrifice, like the famous pound of flesh. It’s like you cut a piece of yourself. “A pound of flesh, to be by him cut off / Nearest the merchant’s heart.” You basically cut out your Jewish heart, present it to your ungracious Gentile hosts and say, “I no longer see myself as beautiful, as chosen. I see myself through your eyes, as an unwelcome guest who is tolerated in the salons as long as he is amusing.”

Cohen: I’m reminded of Elias Canetti’s line where he says the Jews will never get over the shame of the Shoah. Because they had to deal with this propaganda everywhere that they ran the world, they owned everything, they were all-powerful. And in a way, when that’s all you hear, you can begin to believe it, but the question is, how do you go from this position of being part of an all-powerful people who control everything to being rounded up and exterminated? That fall is shaming—it’s shaming because you realize you had false self-knowledge; you were laboring under a delusion.

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2024/01/joshua-cohen-ruby-namdar-israel-october-7/677126/

[Ssnake]

I'd have put it under Culture Wars, but I guess it fits here too.

[Ivanhoe]

 

[Ivanhoe]

https://www.dailywire.com/news/we-must-normalize-massacres-anti-israel-activist-earns-cheers-from-london-crowd-critics-blast-police-response

 

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Activist Mohammed El-Kurd earned cheers and applause from a crowd of thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters in London on Saturday, when he called to “normalize massacres as the status quo” during a speech condemning Israel and Zionism.

Though London police have acted aggressively against so-called “hate speech” that falls outside the Left’s ideology, the late response from the U.K.’s Metropolitan Police, which included a plan to “speak” to El-Kurd, earned much criticism.

 

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“We must dezionize. Zionism is a death cult,” El-Kurd said, adding that they must “engage in tangible actions” since “language alone no longer suffices,” according to The Jerusalem Post.

Conservative parliament member and former home secretary Suella Braverman responded to El-Kurd’s comments, writing: “Over the last 99 days we’ve seen unprecedented levels of anti-semitism. Extremism & hatred normalised on our streets. And central London turned into a no-go zone for Jewish people about once a week. The plan isn’t working if this is where we are now.” 

 

Maybe the plan is working exactly as intended. Seems like the left wants much of Europe and the US to be no-go zones for Jews.

 

[Ivanhoe]

https://www.campusreform.org/article/uc-davis-brags-about-advancing-mlks-legacy-through-dei-programs-still-employs-prof-after-homicidal-anti-semitic-rant/24647
 

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The University of California, Davis chose to frame a Martin Luther King Jr. Day communication as a celebration of both Dr. King and the university’s own DEI work.

A Tuesday message from the university’s Human Resources department boasted that the school is “consistently ranked by Forbes as a great employer for diversity,” adding that the ranking “is a result of the hard work Dr. King started and our workforce advances day in, day out.”

 

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As recently as Dec. 22, UCSD confirmed to Campus Reform that assistant professor of American Studies Jemma Decristo was still employed at the university after threatening Jewish journalists with death, home invasion, and kidnapping via a social media post following the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack on Israel.

 

[Murph]

Awesome!  It should happen regularly.  FAFO!

 

 

[Murph]

The Hamas starter kit.  Free to all terrorists.

 

[rmgill]

What, no UNRWA jacket? 

[BansheeOne]

Police horses with light bars? Now I've seen it all.

ETA link to better video, because the tweet is slow to load.

 

Edited February 25 by BansheeOne

[Mighty_Zuk]

I hate Netanyahu and 90% of what he says are slogans, but he's spittin' fax here:

I think it's shameful that Kamala Harris chose to not attend the speech. We Israelis may hate Netanyahu, and 72% of us want him gone, but that's our issue - not an American issue. She should have been there to welcome him and watch his speech. 

If an American president is overwhelmingly hated by Americans, I hope they're still welcomed into Israel and treated with respect. Because they represent a people, not themselves.

This takes greater importance when on the other side are not Netanyahu's opposition - but vile antisemites and anti-humanists who would gladly burn the American, British, Fr*nch, and German flags as well as the Israeli one. These are not the people Kamala should side with, especially when she has on her team people who are registered agents of hostile nations.

 

EDIT:
With the revival of this thread, I also hope much of the low-IQ talk regarding Israel-Palestine in the Current Military Events section can be moved here.

Edited July 24 by Mighty_Zuk

[rmgill]

How about we not have the low IQ talk at all and keep it high-IQ? 

[Mighty_Zuk]

1 minute ago, rmgill said:

How about we not have the low IQ talk at all and keep it high-IQ? 

I'm in favor. But I really just referred to political rants with that, which I'm also guilty of. 

Edited July 24 by Mighty_Zuk