The blood libel is alive and well and living at the LA Times

The New Neo Posted on by

Actually, even the general MSM reportage on the Gazan war is often a form of blood libel against the Jews: that is, a promotion of the idea that the IDF either deliberately targets children or doesn’t take care not to target them, when in reality the IDF probably tries to prevent such a thing more than any other military would if placed in a similar position against a similar enemy.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term “blood libel,” you can look up the history here. In the past it had to do with falsely accusing Jews of purposely killing Christian children for ritual purposes. But in recent years it’s been employed to claim that Israelis have it in for Palestinian children in particular.

The Mohammed al Durah incident was a particularly egregious – and effective – example of such a claim; I’ve written extensively about that here, and you can also go to this site for more detailed information.

What tale is the LA Times pushing now? You can read about it at CAMERA in an article entitled: “LA Times Refuses to Substantiate, Retract Toxic Charge That IDF Snipers Targeted Kids”:

As of this writing, The Los Angeles Times continues to refuse to either substantiate or retract a spurious charge that Israeli snipers in the Gaza Strip targeted several young Palestinian children, shooting them in the head.

In his Feb. 16 Op-Ed, “I’m an American doctor who went to Gaza. What I saw wasn’t war – it was annihilation,” Irfan Galaria made the very alarming accusation that Israel Defence Forces snipers targeted multiple small children in Khan Younis, fatally shooting them in the head. Galaria, an American doctor who volunteered in the European Hospital in Khan Yunis, alleged:

“On one occasion, a handful of children, all about ages 5 to 8, were carried to the emergency room by their parents. All had single sniper shots to the head. These families were returning to their homes in Khan Yunis, about 2.5 miles away from the hospital, after Israeli tanks had withdrawn. But the snipers apparently stayed behind. None of these children survived.”

Given that this is such an egregious, serious charge which has not been independently confirmed, CAMERA turned to the Spokesmen Unit of the Israel Defense Forces for a response, a routine step which The Los Angeles Times did not take before publishing the Op-Ed, with its vitriolic charges of “annihilation.”

“Too good to fact-check” by the LA Times. CAMERA wrote to the IDF, which said that “the claims have no factual basis.” Nor does the author provide any. But as anti-Israel and anti-Semitic propaganda, it’s great.

Who is Irfan Galaria? All I could discover is that he was born in Michigan, and he and his wife (also a doctor) appear to be Muslims from the photos of her head covering. Michigan is of course one of the US states with the largest Muslim population. “Irfan” is a first name that is popular in Turkey and Pakistan, and with a different spelling in Iran. Hard to say about the last name, which is not common.

That doesn’t mean that Galaria is lying, of course. But it certainly means he might have a motive to do so, or at least to be susceptible to the lies of others in the area, such as Hamas “health authorities.” More importantly, the absence of any corroborative evidence is telling and should mean that the paper either should not be publishing the piece, or it should contain a disclaimer pointing out the lack of any evidence.

The assertion by Galaria reminds me strongly of an article that once appeared in Harper’s and was a very deft example of the blood libel. I discuss the author, Chris Hedges, in this post; he is a liar about a lot of things in addition to the IDF (see the post for many details).

Here’s the part of my 2014 piece on Hedges’ lies that’s relevant to the blood libel:

Harper’s no longer publishes Hedges since the 2010 incident. However, he had already served the left’s purpose many times over by that time. One of the ways in which Hedges had done that was in this Harper’s article published in October of 2001, in which he wrote of IDF soldiers vis a vis Palestinian children in Gaza:

“Children have been shot in other countries I have covered – death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo – but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.”

That gives you an idea of the flavor of Hedges’ writing. I read the piece at the time it appeared, long before my political change experience but during what in retrospect must have been the very early stages of it. His assertions had shocked and saddened me back then, but it hadn’t occurred to me when I first read them that Hedges might just be flat-out lying.

Here’s CAMERA’s treatment of that Hedges article. Pay particular attention from points 4 to the end. If you read it, you will see why it is almost certain that Hedges was lying in that article, and not just once but many many times. However, the article was very influential as part of the left’s campaign against Israel. By 2010 the magazine’s fact-checker may have become interested in making sure Hedges didn’t plagiarize in his articles, but it appears there was never an interest at Harper’s in making sure he didn’t lie in them, as long as those lies fit nicely into the preferred leftist narrative.

Lies work. That’s why people tell them. It’s the task of reporters not to publish unsubstantiated “facts” of such a potentially damaging nature. But if they fit “nicely into the preferred leftist narrative” they often are not questioned or fact-checked. And the blood libel fits very very nicely.

[NOTE: Hedges is still going strong with his anti-Israel propaganda and has a large YouTube following.]

McConnell stepping down from post in November but not quitting the Senate

The New Neo Posted on by

McConnell is 82 years old and a great many people on the right think he should have done this a long time ago. But here’s the announcement:

“One of life’s most underappreciated talents is to know when it’s time to move on to life’s next chapter,” he said in his floor speech. “So I stand before you today… to say that this will be my last term as Republican leader of the Senate.”

The dramatic decision, which will set up a leadership election in the GOP conference with several likely candidates, comes as Republicans have expressed increasing discontent with McConnell’s handling of the bipartisan border bill and national security supplemental package that included aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.

I would have thought it was long past time to move on. At any rate, he’s doing so now. McConnell is the longest-serving party leader the Senate has ever had.

Apparently he is planning to stay as one of Kentucky’s senators to serve out his term, which expires January of 2027.

I’m not going to recap my views on McConnell; here are my many posts about him, although I will mention that he did a good job holding the line on SCOTUS. My questions at this point are: (a) who will replace him?; and (b) will it be as majority or minority leader?

I don’t know the answers. But the idea that change is afoot may energize more voters on the right to vote for Republicans for the Senate. So many conservative have been fed up with the GOP in the Senate for a long time.

The anti-Israel CIA

The New Neo Posted on by

There was quite a bit of discussion of this Tablet article (author Justine El-Khazen) yesterday in the comments here. So I decided to take a look at it. It begins this way:

My mother died on Dec. 4 of last year. On her deathbed, she begged me not to raise my children Jewish. In life, she worked for the CIA, in the Near East Southern Asia Division, for six years as head of the Arab-Israeli Division. She was an expert on Syria and political Islam.

I found it to be an oddly disjointed article. It took me a little while to understand – and the author never made it 100% clear – who in the author’s family was Jewish and what religion the other parent was. It seems to have been her father and not her mother who was Jewish, but the author never says whether her mother was Christian, or atheist, or what (other than a CIA analyst).

Much of the latter part of the article is a discussion of the current Middle East situation, but it says nothing particularly unique. On the CIA, however, the author seems to have been strangely naive, and seems to still be naive about John Brennan, whom she seems to trust. But I see no reason that anyone would trust Brennan (do a search on this blog for “Brennan” and you’ll see why I say that).

Why would the author be surprised at the anti-Israel bent of anyone connected with our foreign policy or intelligence community these days? The State Department, the CIA, all of it? When this stance started I don’t know (I think it got worse during the Obama administration but I think the trend predated that). The only person I personally knew who went into the diplomatic corps was definitely a leftist, and I knew him in the 70s when he was in grad school shortly before he entered that profession.

She writes this about her father, who was Jewish (at least ethnically):

Never mind that my father hated visiting Israel. The story he told me was that he’d talked to a woman in a bar when he was there in his 20s, a “working girl.” When he found out she was Jewish, that was it. The dream of a Jewish homeland was done. He never wanted to go back …

This doesn’t make much sense to me, unless her father was extremely strange. In Israel there are Jewish plumbers, Jewish police, Jewish thieves, Jewish prostitutes, Jewish whatever. It’s a society. Did he, a Jew, think Jews had to be perfectly pure?

More from the article:

My mother and I had dinner one night in April 1996 at the CIA station chief’s house in Israel, north of Tel Aviv. There was some kind of minor war underway. Fighter jets kept skidding above us as we ate. The IDF and Hezbollah were trading fire again, which was not that remarkable in itself. This time, the IDF bombed a U.N. compound, killing 106 civilians.

This event might not have made news here, but it rocked the Arab world. Mohamed Atta committed his life to jihad that very day. Osama bin Laden was none too pleased, either. “You supported the Jewish aggression against us in Lebanon,” he explained in his “letter to America,” which, since Oct. 7, has gone viral in the TikTok feeds of America’s youth. Anti-Westernism has always been closely entwined with antisemitism in the Arab world; these days it’s closely entwined here too.

But she’s talking about this event and leaves out some very important (and relevant) facts (emphasis mine):

Israeli artillery fire strikes a U.N. compound where at least 800 Lebanese civilians are sheltering in the village of Qana in southern Lebanon. At least 13 shells hit the compound, killing 106 civilians and wounding more than 100 other people, including four Fijian U.N. peacekeepers.

The artillery attack comes during Operation Grapes of Wrath, an Israeli response to the collapse of a cease-fire with Hezbollah that had lasted nearly three years. The Israel Defense Forces issued a warning April 11 for civilians to evacuate from towns and villages to avoid the fighting. As a result, the roads are crowded with refugees fleeing northward, and civilians crowd into the U.N. compound in Qana.

Hezbollah uses several positions within 700 yards of the U.N. base to launch mortar and rocket attacks on IDF positions and northern Israel on the afternoon of April 18. An IDF commando unit commanded by Naftali Bennett calls in an artillery strike on one Hezbollah mortar unit firing from a cemetery less than 200 yards from the U.N. base, but none of the 36 shells fired by a four-gun battery of 155mm howitzers hits the mortar site. Instead, carnage within the U.N. compound results.

Israel apologizes for what it says are the accidental civilian deaths and blames Hezbollah for violating international law by using the U.N. compound as civilian shielding for its forces. A U.N. investigation finds that the Israeli attack on the base likely was likely not an accident, and a separate Amnesty International investigation concludes that what comes to be called the “Qana Massacre” was intentional. Israel rejects those reports, which it says are biased.

Recognize the pattern? I certainly do. Hezbollah violates a ceasefire. Hezbollah places munitions near the UN base, purposely putting all the civilian inhabitants at risk. Israel mistakenly hits the base and causes civilian casualties (all the people there may not have been civilians, but I’m going to assume that a great many were). The extremely anti-Israel UN and the extremely anti-Israel Amnesty say Israel did it on purpose, and Israel says it did not.

If Israel wanted to kill civilians it had much better ways to do so than this – to warn civilians to leave, and then to hit some while trying to take out a mortar launch site placed very nearby by Hezbollah. Hezbollah counts on a certain number of such mistakes on which it can capitalize in the propaganda war, after it has purposely put its civilians in harm’s way.

I think the author means well, but I found the piece very confusing and very incomplete, as well as naive.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) Sweden will be joining NATO:

Sweden cleared the final hurdle to become the military alliance’s 32nd member after Hungary — the last holdout among the countries — held a parliamentary vote to approve the move.

In recent years, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pushed Sweden away from its decades of military nonalignment and toward the world’s biggest military alliance. Sweden’s accession comes amid increasing uncertainty over NATO’s future as the Republican front-runner in the United States presidential race, Donald Trump, threatens to abandon security guarantees for at least part of Europe.

Good old Politico just can’t resist a misleading dig at Trump, twisting what he actually said, which was similar to what he has said (and done) as president: put pressure on the NATO nations to do more to pay their own way rather than relying financially so heavily on the US.

(2) Aaron Bushnell committed suicide by setting himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy, having said “Free Palestine!” as his last words. Such gestures in this country are a tragic response, most often by a mentally disturbed individual. RIP. See also this.

(3) This online March 5 event (at noon) by Legal Insurrection sounds interesting: a discussion of the Communist origins of anti-Zionist anti-Semitism. I wrote this fairly lengthy post on the subject as well as this one.

(4) Was there a Biden operative in Fani Willis’ office? Perhaps. Certainly possible, but it’s a good idea to take it with a grain of salt at the moment.

(5) This is about an interesting article by an ex-NYT opinions editor who described the leftist atmosphere at the Times when he worked there. It doesn’t say anything we don’t already know, but I think it’s interesting that the editor’s original article appeared in The Atlantic. His name is Adam Rubenstein, and he quit his post at the Times after the furor over the publication of the Tom Cotton opinion piece.

Part of the PA government resigns

The New Neo Posted on by

My guess is that this is some sort of meaningless theater, a pretense of change for the better. But that’s just a guess. It would be nice if it actually were a sign of the beginning of some improvement in a part of the world that leaves plenty of room for improvement.

Here’s what I’m talking about:

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh said on Monday he was resigning to allow for the formation of a broad consensus among Palestinians about political arrangements after the conclusion of Israel’s war against terror group Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

The move comes amid growing US pressure on PA President Mahmoud Abbas to shake up the Authority, which would allow it to take a greater role in ruling postwar Gaza.

In other words, shuffle the deck chairs and get more power. At least, that’s the way I see it. I’d love to have my mind changed, and if events transpire to warrant that I’ll be happy to say so.

More:

The move signals a willingness by the Western-backed Palestinian leadership to accept changes that might usher in reforms seen as necessary to revitalize the PA.

The US wants a reformed PA to govern Gaza once the war is over and has ruled out Hamas playing any such role in the Strip in the future. But many obstacles remain to make that vision a reality.

“Many obstacles remain” is understating it.

More:

Netanyahu himself has sufficed with saying that he will not allow the Palestinian Authority to return to govern Gaza. He has sometimes qualified this assertion by saying that Israel won’t allow the PA in its current form to return to the Palestinian enclave, indicating that Israel could live with a reformed PA of the kind that the Biden administration has been pushing. Other times, though, Netanyahu has given a more blanket rejection of allowing Gaza to become “Fatahstan” — referring to the political party headed by Abbas.

I don’t think anyone knows what will happen if and when this particular phase of the war ends. It may also depend, at least to a certain extent, on whether Biden is still the American president or whether he has been defeated. But at any rate, he – or some Democrat replacement dictated to by the same people who advise Biden – will be in charge for the next year.

The siege of London: inside the gates

The New Neo Posted on by

Islam has long been a religion determined to expand to encompass the world. Initially that was done mostly by the sword, and Muslims had their sights on Europe. Spain was an early target and a successful one, and they controlled that area for many hundreds of years, whereas the later Muslim expansion from the east was only stopped at Vienna in 1683.

In recent years the conquest of Europe has been “soft.” No Muslim country could conquer Europe through regulation warfare. Some of the Muslim arrivals in recent years are just people looking for a better way of life. But some – and the numbers are not small – are determined to bring their former way of life to their new home.

Right now England seems to be losing and even seems to have lost the battle. I recommend two articles about that. The first appears in Commentary and is written by Seth Mandel; the second is by Melanie Phillips and is at her Substack.

The occasion was a vote on whether to call for a ceasefire in the war in Gaza. Some parliamentary rules were abandoned in order to protect members from the jihadi mob. From Mandel’s article:

Members of the Tories and SNP walked out. The speaker found himself fighting to keep his job, offering emotional apologies. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak scolded the cowards of the Commons: “I think the important point here is that we should never let extremists intimidate us into changing the way in which Parliament works. Parliament is an important place for us to have these debates. And just because some people may want to stifle that with intimidation or aggressive behavior, we should not bend to that and change how Parliament works. That’s a very slippery slope.”

But a Jewish member of parliament delivered some harsh truths on Thursday. “If we have a rerun of the debate we had yesterday, we will have exactly the same thing happen again, which is that members will not vote with their hearts because they are frightened and they are scared,” Tory MP Andrew Percy said on the House floor. “And what do we expect? For months I’ve been standing up here talking about the people on our streets demanding death to Jews, demanding jihad, demanding intifadas as the police stand by and allow that to happen.”

Percy then called attention to something that had happened the night before, an episode both deeply shameful to Britain and chillingly dystopian. Pro-Hamas protesters projected the genocidal slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” onto parliament’s Elizabeth Tower, better known as Big Ben.

“This is going to continue happening, because we’re not dealing with it,” Percy admonished.

And Melanie Phillips writes:

Parliamentary rules were torn up and democratic debate scrapped under the pressure of threats to murder British members of parliament in connection with a foreign war, as I commented here.

While the mob in Parliament Square waved a phalanx of Palestinian flags and bayed abuse of Israel, the words “from river to sea” were projected onto parliament’s Elizabeth Tower, or “Big Ben”.

The symbolism was devastating and appalling. The slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is the infamous cry, by those waging Islamic holy war and their western supporters, for the destruction of Israel and the Jews within it. Yet it was being projected onto the structure that symbolises democracy and the nation. No less terrible than using parliament to stage a call for the genocide of the Jews, this was also a gloating statement that the Islamists were now in control of Britain. …

On Saturday, the police closed Tower Bridge for an hour as the “ceasefire now” mob blocked traffic and let off flares.

And the police stood back and let this happen — even though they have legal powers to prevent such “disruption to the life of the community”, just as they have powers to prevent demonstrators from screaming “death to the Jews” or “globalise the intifada” as they have done every week since the October 7 Hamas pogrom in Israel.

Criticised for standing by while “from river to sea” was projected onto parliament, the police responded:

“This is a chant that has been frequently heard at pro-Palestinian demonstrations or many years and we are aware of the strength of feeling in relation to it. While there are scenarios where chanting or using these words could be unlawful depending on the specific location for context, its use in a wider public protest setting such as [Wednesday] might is not a criminal offence.”

Does that last bit sound familiar? Does it not greatly resemble what the infamous three US elite college presidents said in our own Congress?

The British stood up to the Nazis with great courage. But those days are gone – and besides, this group advocating death to the Jews are not in a distant country dropping bombs on Britain; they are residents of Britain and very numerous. Britain has less robust laws than ours protecting free speech, but it nevertheless has them and the jihadi supporters are counting on those laws to protect them – plus of course fear. They mean to intimidate and they have succeeded in doing so.

The threats are also reminiscent of Nazis prior to World War II in Germany itself during the early 1930s, when the Reichstag still existed as a somewhat-functioning legislative body. They created a violent and intimidating atmosphere for members of the Reichstag. Now, in Britain, according to Mandel’s piece:

“I will defend every member in this House. Every member matters to me in this House,” Speaker Lindsay Hoyle explained. “And it has been said, both sides, I never, ever want to go through a situation where I pick up a phone to find a friend of whatever side has been murdered by a terrorist.” Then he referenced a 2017 terror attack on parliament and said: “I also don’t want another attack on this House. I was in the chair on that day. I have seen, I have witnessed.”

But the choice is to either risk that by taking a stand and stopping this behavior, or surrendering to it. At the moment, Britain has chosen the path of surrender. But as Winston Churchill said to Neville Chamberlain long ago:

You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war.

Perhaps this time a war won’t even be necessary to conquer Britain; dishonor and cowardice will be enough.

Another ballet palate cleanser

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve recently discovered a YouTube channel featuring two sisters, dancers who speak about ballet. They are delightful as well as knowledgeable, in their very early twenties, and I’ve been having a good time watching their videos.

I was going to embed one or two of the video but discovered that embedding is blocked for this particular channel. Drat! So I’ll just post a link to one typical video of theirs; it’s about the ballet Giselle, and the two women explain it in a way that even those unfamiliar with ballet can understand and – I think – appreciate.

I recommend their whole channel, actually. But here’s the one about Giselle. Enjoy!