Midnight Cafe

Artist: Jeff Simpson Title: Assassin’s Creed: Origins Kensa Concepts Second illustration reminds me of the “Hyena Man” I’ll post that video later Cool stuff…

lol this.

Вместо звезды…

IG: @metamorphosia_fx

WHY SUCH A SURGE OF WORLDWIDE ANTI-SEMITISM

by ALAN DERSHOWITZ

Why are so many of the grandchildren of Nazis and Nazi collaborators who brought us the Holocaust once again declaring war on the Jews?

Why have we seen such an increase in anti-Semitism and irrationally virulent anti-Zionism in Western Europe?

To answer these questions, a myth must first be exposed. That myth is the one perpetrated by the French, the Dutch, the Norwegians, the Swiss, the Belgians, the Austrians, and many other western Europeans: namely that the Holocaust was solely the work of German Nazis aided perhaps by some Polish, Ukrainian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian collaborators.

False.

The Holocaust was perpetrated by Europeans: by Nazi sympathizers and collaborators among the French, Dutch, Norwegians, Swiss, Belgians, Austrians and other Europeans, both Western and Eastern.

If the French government had not deported to the death camps more Jews than their German occupiers asked for; if so many Dutch and Belgian citizens and government officials had not cooperated in the roundup of Jews; if so many Norwegians had not supported Quisling; if Swiss government officials and bankers had not exploited Jews; if Austria had not been more Nazi than the Nazis, the Holocaust would not have had so many Jewish victims.

In light of the widespread European complicity in the destruction of European Jewry, the pervasive anti-Semitism and irrationally hateful anti-Zionism that has recently surfaced throughout Western Europe toward Israel should surprise no one.

"Oh no," we hear from European apologists. "This is different. We don't hate the Jews. We only hate their nation-state. Moreover, the Nazis were right-wing. We are left-wing, so we can't be anti-Semites."

Nonsense.

The hard left has a history of anti-Semitism as deep and enduring as the hard right. The line from Voltaire to Karl Marx, to Levrenti Beria, to Robert Faurisson, to today's hard-left Israel bashers is as straight as the line from Wilhelm Mars to the persecutors of Alfred Dreyfus to Hitler.

The Jews of Europe have always been crushed between the Black and the Red - victims of extremism whether it be the ultra-nationalism of Khmelnitsky to the ultra-anti-Semitism of Stalin.

"But some of the most strident anti-Zionists are Jews, such as Norman Finkelstein and even Israelis such as Gilad Atzmon. Surely they can't be anti-Semites?"

Why not? Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas collaborated with the Gestapo. Atzmon, a hard leftist, describes himself as a proud self-hating Jew and admits that his ideas derive from a notorious anti-Semite.

He denies that the Holocaust is historically proved but he believes that Jews may well have killed Christian children to use their blood to bake Passover matzah. And he thinks it's "rational" to burn down synagogues.

Finkelstein believes in an international Jewish conspiracy that includes Steven Spielberg, Leon Uris, Eli Wiesel, and Andrew Lloyd Webber!

"But Israel is doing bad things to the Palestinians," the European apologists insist, "and we are sensitive to the plight of the underdog."

No, you're not! Where are your demonstrations on behalf of the oppressed Tibetans, Georgians, Syrians, Armenians, Kurds, or even Ukrainians? Where are your BDS movements against the Chinese, the Russians, the Cubans, the Turks, or the Assad regime?

Only the Palestinians, only Israel? Why? Not because the Palestinians are more oppressed than these and other groups.

Only because their alleged oppressors are Jews and the nation-state of the Jews. Would there be demonstrations and BDS campaigns on behalf of the Palestinians if they were oppressed by Jordan or Egypt?

Oh, wait! The Palestinians were oppressed by Egypt and Jordan... Gaza was an open-air prison between 1948 and 1967, when Egypt was the occupying power. And remember Black September, when Jordan killed more Palestinians than Israel did in a century? I don't remember any demonstration or BDS campaigns -- because there weren't any.

When Arabs occupy or kill Arabs, Europeans go ho-hum. But when Israel opens a soda factory in Maale Adumim, which even the Palestinian leadership acknowledges will remain part of Israel in any peace deal, Oxfam parts ways with Scarlett Johansson for advertising a soda company that employs hundreds of Palestinians

Keep in mind that Oxfam has provided "aid and material support" to two anti-Israel terrorist groups, according to the Tel Aviv-based Israeli Law Group.

The hypocrisy of so many hard-left western Europeans would be staggering if it were not so predictable based on the sordid history of Western Europe's treatment of the Jews.

Even England, which was on the right side of the war against Nazism, has a long history of anti-Semitism, beginning with the expulsion of the Jews in 1290 to the notorious White Paper of 1939, which prevented the Jews of Europe from seeking asylum from the Nazis in British-mandated Palestine... And Ireland, which vacillated in the war against Hitler, boasts some of the most virulent anti-Israel rhetoric.

The simple reality is that one cannot understand the current western European left-wing war against the nation-state of the Jewish people without first acknowledging the long-term European war against the Jewish people themselves.

Theodore Herzl understood the pervasiveness and irrationality of European anti-Semitism, which led him to the conclusion that the only solution to Europe's Jewish problem was for European Jews to leave that bastion of Jew hatred and return to their original homeland, which is now the State of Israel.

None of this is to deny Israel's imperfections or the criticism it justly deserves for some of its policies. But these imperfections and deserved criticism cannot even begin to explain, much less justify, the disproportionate hatred directed against the only nation-state of the Jewish people and the disproportionate silence regarding the far greater imperfections and deserved criticism of other nations and groups including the Palestinians.

Nor is this to deny that many western European individuals and some western European countries have refused to succumb to the hatred against the Jews or their state. The Czech Republic comes to mind. But far too many western Europeans are as irrational in their hatred toward Israel as their for-bearers were in their hatred toward their Jewish neighbors.

As author Amos Oz once aptly observed: the walls of his grandparents' Europe were covered with graffiti saying, "Jews, go to Palestine." Now they say, "Jews, get out of Palestine," by which is meant Israel.

Who do these western European bigots think they're fooling? Only fools who want to be fooled in the interest of denying that they are manifesting new variations on their grandparents' old biases.

Any objective person with an open mind, open eyes, and an open heart must see the double standard being applied to the nation-state of the Jewish people. Many doing so are the grandchildren of those who lethally applied a double standard to the Jews of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.

For shame!

#never forget

#International Holocaust Remembrance Day

the As a Jews of the IRI

NOVEMBER 25, 2024

WHAT IS AN "AS A JEW"?

“As a Jew” is a tongue-in-cheek term Jews use to describe fellow Jews who weaponize their Jewish identities to excuse, minimize, justify, or deny antisemitism.

As in, “As a Jew, this is not antisemitic because so and so…”

WHAT IS THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC?

The Islamic Republic is the fundamentalist Islamist, ultra-conservative, warmongering regime that has been ruling Iran -- and oppressing its population -- with an iron fist since the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Many Iranians call the Islamic Regime an “occupying force” because it is culturally foreign to Iran.

According to Iranian-American policy analyst Karim Sadjapour, the three ideological pillars of the Iranian regime are “compulsory hijab, death to America, and death to Israel.”

After the Islamic Republic came into power, over 80% of Iran’s ancient Jewish population fled the country. Today, the 8,500 Jews still living in Iran are subject to second-class citizenship and are constantly under the suspicion of the regime, for which they must tread carefully, never openly criticizing the regime’s implementation of Sharia Law.

THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC IS A GENOCIDAL THREAT TO JEWS

Given the Islamic Republic’s commitment to the “destruction of Israel” -- where around half of the world’s Jews live -- it has spent decades establishing proxy terrorist militias around the Jewish state. Among the Islamic Republic’s proxies are Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Ansar Allah, and its most important proxy, Hezbollah.

But the Islamic Republic’s targeting of Jews extends far, far beyond the Jewish state. In other words, no, the Islamic Republic isn’t merely “anti-Zionist.”

The Islamic Republic has planned and carried out terrorist attacks and massacres of Jews everywhere from Thailand to Kenya.

The Islamic Republic’s deadliest attack on Jews in the Diaspora was the 1994 bombing of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA), a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which took 85 innocent lives. Before the October 7 Hamas massacre, which killed 1,200 Israelis, predominantly civilians -- another attack that was planned and funded by the Islamic Republic -- the AMIA bombing was the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

The Islamic Republic has repeatedly dabbled with Holocaust denial. The Islamic Republic’s leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has consistently talked about the Holocaust’s “exaggerated numbers.” Most infamously, in 2006, the Islamic Republic hosted an international Holocaust denial conference in Tehran.

THE TRIED AND TRUE PROPAGANDA PLAYBOOK

Though the Islamic Republic government is deeply conservative, it started exploiting the well-intentioned progressive types to accomplish its nefarious goals before it even came into power.

The rule of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, was characterized by the most horrific human rights violations. He was no liberal and no progressive. He was not anti-imperialist either, hoping to establish an empire of his own. In fact, he believed that “establishing the Islamic state world-wide belong(s) to the great goals of the revolution.” He spoke of conquering the whole world under the banner of Islam: “Islam makes it incumbent on all adult males, provided they are not disabled and incapacitated, to prepare themselves for the conquest of [other] countries so that the writ of Islam is obeyed in every country in the world.”

In 1964, the then Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, exiled Khomeini and banned his books. As such, the vast majority of the Iranian population was unfamiliar with his more extremist beliefs. While in exile in France, Khomeini downplayed his fundamentalism, presenting himself to the west merely as a fierce opponent of American neo-imperialism and influence in Iran. It was in this manner, for example, that he was able to manipulate Iranian leftists to join him under his banner. In reality, Khomeini despised leftism, and soon after he came to power, many left-wing organizations had to flee Iran. Others were executed.

Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the saga of the mandatory hijab. During the Iranian Revolution, many Iranian women wore the hijab as a symbol of opposition to the Shah’s policies of westernization. Soon after Khomeini came to power, the hijab was made mandatory. Shocked, liberal and leftist women took to the streets; they had not expected the hijab to become mandatory. In response, Khomeini quickly began suppressing and eliminating all leftist and liberal political groups, figures, and parties, and to this day, hijab remains mandatory in Iran, and women who refuse to wear it face arrest, torture, and even death.

WHAT IS NIAC?

The National Iranian American Council, or NIAC, is the de-facto lobby of the Islamic Republic in the United States. In other words, they lobby on behalf of the Islamic Republic, its policies, and its interests.  

Just as Ruhollah Khomeini did in days past, NIAC has spent years latching onto “progressive” Jewish groups to pursue their nefarious interests...and shield the Islamic Republic from accusations of antisemitism.

Of course the Islamic Republic wants to disarm Israel...because their open goal is to destroy the Jewish state. They couldn’t care less about the suffering of anyone in Gaza.

To the left is Rabbi Abby Chava Stein, who is a member of the “Jewish” Voice for “Peace” rabbinical council. Here she is meeting with the current president of the Islamic Republic.

Press TV is a propaganda arm of the Islamic Republic.

THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC AND THE NETUREI KARTA

You probably recognize these guys, present at pretty much every pro-Palestine protest in New York City. They are the Neturei Karta. The Neturei Karta is a Hasidic Jewish sect with about 1,000-5,000 members. They are religious anti-Zionists, rejecting political Zionism on the religious basis that they believe no Jewish state should be founded prior to the arrival of the Messiah. While some other Jewish branches, such as the Satmar, hold this position, only the Neturei Karta have gone so far as to establish close relationships with those who wish Israeli Jews dead...particularly with the Islamic Republic.

In 2005, after then-Islamic Republic president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for the ethnic cleansing of Israeli Jews to Germany or Austria, the Neturei Karta issued a statement defending Ahmadinejad.  

In 2006, the Neturei Karta attended a Holocaust denial conference in Tehran. For this, the Satmar, who are also religious anti-Zionists, condemned the Neturei Karta, calling on Jews worldwide to “to keep away from [the Neturei Karta] and condemn their actions.” The Satmar (along with Chabad, who are not anti-Zionist) also issued a cherem (i.e. censure; almost like the Jewish version of excommunication) against the Neturei Karta.

THE OLDEST TRICK IN THE BOOK

How do you deflect legitimate accusations of genocidal antisemitism? You “befriend” Jews, of course. As in: “how could I be antisemitic?! Look at all these Jews who support me!” Three historical examples:

(1) Leading up to the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the United States Olympic Committee was under tremendous pressure to boycott the Games, given Nazi Germany’s horrific treatment of Jews. The head of the US Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage, was a Nazi sympathizer, who convinced Germany to allow one German Jewish athlete to compete to give the impression that Jews in Germany were being treated fairly. In other words, the Nazis needed a token Jew. They proceeded to select a Jewish fencer, Helene Mayer, to the German Olympic team. Mayer placed second and gave the Nazi salute on the podium.

(2) In the 1920s, the Soviet Union shut down virtually all Jewish cultural, social, and religious institutions using a Jewish group, the Yevsektsiya, as a cover. According to historian of Soviet history Richard Pipes, “In time, every Jewish cultural and social organization came under assault.” The fact that the Yevsektsiya was “Jewish” was central to its purpose. After all, the Soviet regime couldn’t be accused of antisemitism when those shutting down all Jewish cultural and spiritual life were Jews themselves.

(3) Likewise, in the early 1950s, notorious Soviet dictator Josef Stalin conceived a plan for the mass deportation of Soviet Jewry to prison camps, all under the guise of “anti-Zionism.” Though the plan never ultimately came to pass, given Stalin’s sudden death, Stalin had made preparations to publish a letter to be signed by Soviet Jews “denouncing” Zionism and Zionist Jews. In the letter, Stalin’s “anti-Zionist Jews” would then urge the Soviet state to “take action” against the traitorous Zionist Jews. Jews would be deported en masse to the Ural Mountains, where MGB would instigate discord between Jewish leaders. Later, they would kill the “elites” in the camps, and maybe even follow with the rest of the Jewish population.

For a full bibliography of my sources, please head over to my Instagram and  Patreon. 

rootsmetals

I’ve had my differences with J Street over the years but seeing them shill for the Islamic Republic was disappointing tbh…I expect nothing less of JVP and IfNotNow, but I (stupidly?) thought J Street was better than that 🤷🏻‍♀️

The right of return

I was privately asked about a post implying that Israel is refusing to allow the right to return to Palestinians that have been displaced even though Jews have had the right of return for a while now. I thought I’d answer in a post.

Let me address this by first of all pointing out that Palestinians currently do have the right to return… to the Palestinian-controlled territories. If an American Palestinian wants to move to Ramallah, Israel has no say in the matter, meaning in effect the Palestinians have the right of return to those parts of the historical Land of Israel.

Which means that when Palestinians keep talking about the right of return, they’re not talking about the right to return to their own self-governed territories, they’re talking about the right to return to the territories which make up the State of Israel. The Jewish Virtual Library has a good summary on how in international law, the right of return only applies to individual nationals, it’s not an obligatory right that has to be granted to entire groups of people. That means that every country which does grant a right of return to an entire group of people does so because it chooses to, not because it is compelled by international law. In other words, it does grant this right when it believes it’s in the best interest of the country or of the population the country is meant to serve. When Palestinians demand the right of return not to the parts of the land that they govern, but to the parts which make up the State of Israel, it’s equivalent to country X demanding that country Y will grant automatic citizenship to descendants of country X instead of country X giving those people a right of return to its own borders. That’s something that doesn’t exist anywhere in the world. And, in fact, if country X did try to make such a demand, country Y would likely see this as a threat, because of the way that a big concentration of nationals loyal to another country had been used along history. This is how Hitler used the people of German descent who were living in Czechoslovakia to take over Sudetenland (and later using this initial split of the country to take over all of Czechoslovakia), or how Russia has used the substantial population of Russian descent living in the eastern parts of Ukraine to demand those territories.

To make the current situation clearer, I’ll add that many Jews were originally from territories that are now under Palestinian control (meaning they were displaced from those places, not from the parts of the Land of Israel which today make up the Jewish state). Those Jews don’t have a right of return to those parts of the Land of Israel either, they can’t return to Gaza, they can’t return to areas A and B of Judea and Samaria, they can’t return to Jewish communities that existed on the eastern side of the Jordan river and which were ethnically cleansed by the Jordanians as a part of Jordan’s actions against Israel during the latter’s War of Independence (despite reaching a peace agreement between Israel and Jordan, signed in 1994). To be accurate, even within the State of Israel, Jews don’t have a free right of return to every place they used to inhabit. In antiquity, all of Israel used to be Jewish. Even in later times, there still were Jewish communities in places like ShefarAm, Nazareth, Pekiin and Huseifa, all places that were originally Jewish towns. They are today all under Israeli rule, but the Jews don’t get to return there. The demographics of these places had been irreversibly changed.

Certainly when we look at borders between countries, two states for two people where each gets to self-govern means the right of return is and will remain limited geographically for both groups.

If the right of return won’t be limited, it’s clear which of the two groups will become the minority, losing in practice the right to self-determination. Because it has to be emphasized that the right to self-determination is not considered a right that is fulfilled when a group of people is a minority. As long as a group is a minority, its power to determine its own fate is dependent, either (in a democracy) on the good will of the majority (for example, in the 1920′s and early 1930′s in Germany, Jews who made up 0.8% of the German population didn’t get to decide who will lead their country, they were dependent on the majority of Germans voting against the Nazis… and we all know how that turned out) or it’s dependent on the minority’s use of force to override the majority (which is the case in Syria, for example, where the Alawi minority reigns over the Sunni majority through the use of force. We all saw how bloody that got during Syria’s civil war, and nobody wants that for Israel). If the Palestinian right of return were to be applied without limitation to the entire Land of Israel, it would be the Jews who would become a minority and lose the right to self-determination.

This is why the push for the right of return of Palestinians to all of Israel is considered such a red flag by a majority of Jews. Because it’s understood to be a tool in destroying the State of Israel serving as the one place where Jews get to have self-determination, and to deny Jews this universal right is discriminatory in nature, and therefore considered by many to be antisemitic. This is one of the reasons why so many, including actual governments, have declared the BDS movement (which calls for the boycott of Israelis and Jews) antisemitic, because one of its three stated goals is a return of Palestinian refugees to all of Israel. Note here that the one of the founders of BDS is Omar Barghouti, a Palestinian man living in Israel thanks to his marriage to an Israeli Arab. He states he wants a right of return of Palestinian refugees, while ignoring the right of Jews to return to Israel. He knows exactly what this means for Jews.

More than that, most conflicts around the world aren’t resolved through a mutual and unlimited right of return. When two countries were in a conflict and many people were displaced on both sides, conflicts were usually resolved through eventually agreeing that there was a population exchange, and whatever harm befell one country and its population, it was more or less balanced off by whatever harm befell the other country and its population. A population exchange is a bad thing, since it points to many people being displaced, but once it has occurred, recognizing it can allow both sides to move on. The Israeli-Arab conflict could have been resolved like that long ago. About 800,000 Arabs were displaced in Israel during its War of Independence (most of them because they fled the war that their own side started), about 850,000 Jews from Arab countries were expelled from those countries following Israel’s victory in that war, and most of the Jews displaced from Arab countries ended up in Israel. Agreeing that this was an exchange of populations, that Israel would take care of the displaced Jews, and the Arab countries would take care of the displaced Arabs (presumably by creating a new Arab state on the parts of the Land of Israel that Egypt and Jordan had occupied during Israel’s War of Independence) could have been a resolution for this conflict over 70 years ago. In fact, Israel agreed to this when it told the UNWRA in 1952 it assumes all responsibility for the Jewish refugees expelled from Arab countries. Here’s a mention of Israel taking that responsibility in an excerpt from an essay looking into how UNWRA today discriminates in favor of the Palestinian refugees in comparison with how all other refugees worldwide are treated by UNHCR (for example, mentioning that refugees treated by UNHCR have no right of return):

If this conflict wasn’t resolved through accepting the mutual population exchange, if the Arab countries didn’t create a Palestinian state on the lands occupied by Jordan and Egypt, if the Palestinians today continue to insist on the right of return even as they gain citizenship in other countries, and they insist on a right of return specifically to the territories that now make up the State of Israel, it’s because they’re not interested in a resolution. They know that applying the Palestinian right of return to all of the land will effectively wipe out Israel as the one Jewish state, and that’s what those who are advocating for it are really interested in.

Here’s a statement by a UN official from 1952, convinced that the Arab states are purposely using the Arab refugees as a political weapon against Israel:

Here’s what a leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization said in a 1977 interview he had with a Dutch newspaper:

“There are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. We are part of one people, the Arab nation. Look, I have family members with Palestinian, Lebanese, Jordanian and Syrian citizenship. We are one people.

Only for political reasons we do carefully maintain our Palestinian identity. Indeed, it is of national importance for the Arabs to insist on the existence of a Palestinian people to oppose Zionism.

Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity is only there for tactical reasons.” - Zuheir Mohsen, PLO, March 31, 1977