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The Kohelet Policy Forum, a right-wing think tank, responded with disappointment to the ruling issued by the Supreme Court during wartime today (Monday) striking down the Reasonableness Standard.
“Israel is united,” said Prof. Moshe Koppel, Chairman of the Kohelet Policy Forum. “Israelis from across political, ideological and religious divides are united like never before. Our families are grieving together, our sons and daughters are fighting for Israel together, and even most politicians have put their differences aside.”
“It is unfortunate that the Supreme Court chose Israel’s moment of unity to bring back division,” he said.
“Now is not the time for division,” added Koppel. “Now is the time to put Israel’s national interest first. Now is the time for Israel to stay united and strong.”
The Kohelet Policy Forum stated that "In what may be remembered as one of the most unfortunate actions in the Court’s history, the Supreme Court has rushed a divisive decision, in the midst of a war – simply for the benefit of two retired Supreme Court Justices who wish to leave their personal stamps on Israeli jurisprudence. "
The court's 8-7 decision is the first time in Israeli history in which the Supreme Court has struck down one of Israel's Basic Laws, taking upon itself the authority to strike down laws that have quasi-constitutional status.
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Wise, learned Op Ed.
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Dear World, pardon us for busting your myths about the Jews and Israel, Part II.
A reality check for the world about Israel and the Jews.
By Rabbi Yitschak Rudomin
Click here for Part One of this article.
See: "War is not new to Israel" (Oct 16, 2023); "Jewish wisdom during war" (Oct 23, 2023); "Abraham's principles in war and peace" (Oct 31, 2023); "Facts and truths amid the fog of war" (Nov 13, 2023); "Samson in war and peace" (Nov 26, 2023), "The indestructible Jews in peace and war" (Dec 5, 2023), "Jewish victory depends on Jewish unity" (Dec 14, 2023), "Dear World, Part One" (Dec 25, 2023).
One would think that with the advent of modern times people became smarter but often the opposite seems to be true. In past centuries, when religion was dominant in people's lives, it was religious dogma and slogans that influenced the masses. With the rise of secularization in recent years, great gaping holes and vacuums have been created in people's minds as they occupy themselves with popular culture, a shallow substitute for the profundity of the religious thinking of previous times.
Modernity has seen the advent of mass propaganda and brainwashing by modern states through the use of mass communications mediums such as newspapers, trash pop literature, radio, television, the internet and its social media. Powerful modern totalitarian states such as Nazi Germany, Once, Soviet Russia and Communist China indoctrinated their citizens and allies with outright lies and irrational ideas by using the mass communication tools at their disposal. China's ownership and use of TikTok to mass market brainlessness as well as outright lies and plain old evil is a good current example.
The Nazis in particular mastered the art of what is known as the BIG LIE with devastating consequences for the German people and a horrible aftermath for the world as it was soon engulfed by the flames of the Second World War 1939–1945. Frighteningly, this is what Wikipedia says about the impacts of the Nazis deploying more than one BIG LIE against the Jews: "According to historian Jeffrey Herf, the Nazis used the idea of the original big lie to turn sentiment against Jews and justify the Holocaust. Herf maintains that [Nazi propaganda minister] Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi Party actually used the big lie technique that they described – and that they used it to turn long-standing antisemitism in Europe into mass murder. Herf further argues that the Nazis' big lie was their depiction of Germany as an innocent, besieged nation striking back at 'international Jewry', which the Nazis blamed for starting World War I. Nazi propaganda repeatedly claimed that Jews held outsized and secret power in Britain, Russia, and the United States. It further spread claims that the Jews had begun a war of extermination against Germany, and used these to assert that Germany had a right to annihilate the Jews in self-defense."
This did not stop with the eradication of Nazism, but has continued to be deployed in our own times by Israel's enemies and antis-Semites all over the world, particularly by fundamentalist Islamic radicals. Millions of gullible people fall into the trap of believing all the big lies conjured up and levelled at Israel and the Jews. Here, continued from part one, are some of the major myths they peddle:
Chanting the slogans "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" and "free, free Palestine:":
The current modern country of Germany, based on its own dark history, knows first-hand that under Nazism it propagated the genocide of the Jewish People of Europe, has made the slogan of "from the river to the see..." "a form of incitement to hate and subject to criminal penalties" ("Berlin Criminlazis Slogan 'From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free'").
Slogans can be very useful if they have positive purposes and promote peace and harmony but in this case, perhaps unbeknownst to the mobs that run around chanting these "free Palestine" slogans they promote a direct and blunt euphemism for the genocide of Israel's Jews and are also a distortion of reality because in any case, historically and politically the Jews were granted a "charter" to the right to have their own Jewish state in Palestine by the official 1917 Balfour Declaration from the British government that ruled all of Palestine in the Land of Israel in the areas of the British Mandate of Palestine (1920–1948). It was the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine (Resolution 181 II) that the world's nations officially accepted and agreed to create a Jewish state in Palestine, but was of course, a "two state solution", rejected by the Arabs who were not happy with the large portion of Palestine for a new Arab state that the UN handed them.
These chants are detached from reality and may as well say that "from the Earth to the Moon, the man on the moon will be free" or "free the man on the moon"! Only Zombies and foolish empty heads ignorant of history would say such things because the Jewish People have the longest connection to the Land of Israel and are here to stay in Israel forever and nothing will change that. Besides, the Arabs have lost all the wars they fought against Israel and each time, thank G-d, Israel emerges stronger and more powerful than ever.
The Jewish People have their own slogans that they have chanted during their religious holidays and during all their prayers about "Next Year in Jerusalem," praying to God to return the remnants of the Jewish People in exile to their homeland in Zion, the Land of Israel now miraculously reincarnated in the modern state of Israel with the help of God.
Refusing to call Israel by its rightful name and instead resorting to miscast terms such as "Zionist entity" and "little Satan":
In the Bible, check it out, Israel was a name given to the patriarch Jacob who is subsequently known by both names. Jacob's children are known in the Bible and in Jewish History as the Children of Israel meaning Jacob's children. Historically, according to the Hebrew Bible, there was a united Kingdom of Israel mainly under the Jewish kings Saul, David, Solomon roughly between 1047–930 BCE, and a later northern Kingdom of Israel (930–720 BCE) that was destroyed by the Assyrians, while the southern Kingdom of Judah existed from 930 to 587 BCE. The people of Judah or Judea were known as Judeans or Jews and Jews have been known as both Hebrews and Israelites. In 1948 the leadership of Jewish Palestine debated whether the new Jewish country should be known as Israel or Judah and they decided that it would be called Israel while its Jewish inhabitants were of course Jews.
During the course of the Jewish exile Jews have been called and depicted by all sorts of pejoratives such as "parasites", "bloodsuckers", "christ-killers", "userers", "shylocks", "kikes", "rootless cosmopolitans", as each place that didn't like them made it up its own favorite slurs to lob at the Jews.
Now that Jews have had a country of their own since 1948 that they call Israel, let's not kid ourselves that Arab and Iranian antisemites that hate the Jews spitefully and hatefully call the Jews' country a "Zionist entity" or a "little Satan" with America being the "big Satan" in their distorted eyes. In the Hebrew Bible, the Children of Israel are called a "Light to the Nations" and God's First Born, a Chosen Nation, putting them at the peak of mankind's nobility, something radical Muslims cannot get their overheated heads around.
Come along the antisemites, like the Nazis, and call the Jews subhumans and vermin and their ilk in the Arab and Iranian world who reduce Israel and the Jews to a subhuman "entity" and a "satan" that is not much different to the Nazi way of "thinking" about the Jews that they hate.
Urging that Israel's Jews should go back to where they came from, such as Poland and Germany:
If there is one thing that Jewish History teaches it is that the Jewish People basically never return to former host nations in any significant way. This argument that the Jews of Israel must go back to Poland or Germany ignores the fact that at least half of Israeli Jews, if not more, are not White Europeans and have roots in North Africa and the Middle East and not in Europe!
To have an intelligent discussion about Israel's Jews one must learn the basic facts about its mixed population of Jewish Israelis. About half, if not more, of Israel's Jews are known as Sephardic Jews and also as Mizrahi Jews or Oriental Jews or Mashriqi Jews and include many other groups such as the Maghrebi Jews, Berber Jews, Yemenite Jews, and even Palestinian Jews some with roots that go back to Spain under Islamic rule, North Africa and the wider Middle East. These people have ZERO connection with "Poland" or "Germany" and as far as Spain goes the Jews were booted out of Spain by the Alhambra Decree of 1492 once the Catholics took over from the Muslims with the Catholics happy to get rid of its religious Jews, while plenty of Jews apostatized and stayed on after being forced to convert to Christianity.
Therefore anyone calling for Jews who have no connection with Poland or Germany to "go back" there is an ignoramus and an idiot. Now as for the Jews of Europe who were basically wiped out by the Holocaust, many of those refugees from countries in Europe who somehow miraculously survived the Holocaust became stateless refugees after the Second World War 1939–1945 because they were survivors of Nazi concentration and death camps that after the war found themselves far away from their countries of birth and origin.
Many of these refugees had nowhere to go and many were trapped under Soviet Communist rule behind the Iron curtain after the Second World War. Nevertheless, they tried to move to the Land of Israel still under the control of the British, who stopped ships with Jewish refugees from reaching the shores of Palestine. In 1948 independent Israel opened its doors to hundreds of thousands of stateless European Jewish refugees who had nowhere to go.
Much like in modern times the United States, Western European and other countries took in MILLIONS of Arab and Muslim refugees of the Syrian civil war (2011–present) as well as the refugees of Iraq (1980–2017) causing among other things the 2015 European migrant crisis . So Western countries, including Israel, have a record of taking in stateless migrant refugees. Unlike the Arab countries of today who refuse to take in the Arab refugees from Gaza who have been displaced from their homes by wars that they started themselves against the Jews of Israel!
That Arabs exiled from the original British Mandate of Palestine during 1948 have a "right of return" to modern day Israel:
This is utter balderdash because in 1948 and onwards the Arab countries themselves expelled about one million Jewish citizens of their own countries who then were taken in by Israel during what Wikipedia calls the "Jewish exodus from the Muslim world" with the word "exodus" hiding what was in truth a cruel dictatorial expulsion of the Jews from Arab countries after they had lived there for as long as, if not longer, than the Arabs themselves.
That would seem a fair exchange of populations that Israel took in the Jews from Arab lands and that the Arabs take in the Arabs from places they had formerly resided in in the new state of Israel. That would require logical and rational people to expect such a reasonable quid pro quo reciprocity, but no, the Arabs and enemies of Israel like to stick to their stupid arguments that they have "eternal right" to return to Jewish neighborhoods in Israel. They confiscated and looted all the old neighbourhoods and possessions of Jews who used to live in Arab and Muslim countries, but were expelled with little more than the shirts on their backs and sent scurrying to Israel or to any country that would have them, like France and the United States where they rebuilt their lives from scratch, founding thriving and bustling new Jewish communities, but never forgetting what the Muslims robbed them of.
Thus, as examples, tragedy and loss surrounds the migration of Moroccan Jews to Israel, migration of Algerian Jews to France, migration of Tunisian Jews to Israel, migration of Iraqi Jews to Israel, exodus of Iranian Jews and many more similar cases in Arab and Muslim countries.
That Jihad, or "Holy War" in Arabic, will free Palestine from the Jews:
While Islamic "Jihad" or "holy war" may have worked in the past in favor of Islam and the Arabs it ultimately fails miserably against the Jews and Israel because in the long and short run, as well as in fact, truth and reality, God is on the side of the Jewish People and Israel.
In order to avoid the first mistake the enemies of the Jews make, and in this case it includes Jews who are ignorant of the Torah or Hebrew or Jewish Bible, is that they should all buy and then seriously read and understand that the Torah, Hebrew Bible, states emphatically that God is on the side of the Children of Israel who are the Jewish People.
The Christian New Testament and the Muslim Koran are books that were written a long time after the Torah yet while they are inferior theological texts compared to the original Torah, they claim to displace their own source book which is the Torah itself. Without the Torah there is no New Testament and no Koran and without Judaism there cannot be Christianity or Islam. The Jews are the only upholders of the original Torah, and for good reason, it is because God favors the Jews, or as that old saying says amusingly: "How odd of God to choose the Jews"! And the equally famous answers, one of which is: "It wasn't odd, the Jews chose God."
Any honest person and seeker of the truth will want to know what the Torah is and says as the foundational and fundamental source book for both Christianity and the New Testament and Islam and the Koran. Without that both Christians and Muslims are flying blind missing most of their foundational axioms and raison d'etre and the reason they came to be and exist in the first place.
As far as Judaism is concerned, Christians and Muslims and not to mention Hindus and other religions miss the mark and are basically all out in left field and in the dark when it comes to knowing and believing in the true God and what His plans are for the world and Israel and the Jewish People. as central players in God's ultimate plans for the world and humanity.
Study the Torah and its commentaries and you will see that starting a long time ago, it too teaches the Jews about holy wars to conquer the corrupt Land of Canaan inhabitat by pagans and turn it into the holy Land of Israel, something they successfully did. They lived on the land for well over one thousand years until exiled by the Romans roughly two thousand years ago. Even then, some remained.
The problem is that for two thousand years since the destruction of the Second Jewish Temple in 70 CE and the exile of almost all of the Jewish People from Judea by the Romans resulted in a two thousand year exile wherein Jews had to rely on their own wits, the grace of foreign rulers and the protection of God to survive.
With the return of the Jewish People to the Land of Israel in modern times they have once again had to learn the art of war and defending their own land by themselves. And they have! That is why Israeli Jews fight well and determinately to defend and protect the Land of Israel and Jewish people of Israel today and why any form of gentile "Jihad" against the Jewish People will fall flat on its face and fail miserably!
To be continued.
Rabbi Yitschak Rudomin is an alumnus of Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin and of Teachers College–Columbia University. He heads the Jewish Professionals Institute dedicated to Jewish Adult Education and Outreach – Kiruv Rechokim. He is the author of The Second World War and Jewish Education in America: The Fall and Rise of Orthodoxy. Contact Rabbi Yitschak Rudomin atizakrudomin@gmail.com
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Ackman persists in is attack on Harvard's Governing Board.
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By Bill Ackman
We now know that the
Corporation Board sought to quash a legitimate whistleblower inquiry into President Gay’s work by threatening the media with litigation if they published the whistleblower’s allegations, which the Board said were demonstrably false, but in fact were entirely true.
It also appears that the Board’s ‘investigation’ of Gay’s plagiarism was pretextual, and Harvard’s mandated procedures were not followed in conducting the investigation.
Further, the Board allegedly sought to out the whistleblower and pursue damages against him or her in direct violation of Harvard’s own policies against retribution.
I am sorry to say this, but in the event that any of the above is true, which looks increasingly likely, this is a scandal and a stain on the reputation of Harvard that goes far beyond President Gay.
An immediate investigation must be launched of the Corporation Board by unimpeachable members of the Harvard Board of Overseers, with the assistance of independent counsel who are unaffiliated with the University and the Corporation Board members to determine if, in fact, Harvard’s own whistleblower protection policies have been violated, and the other alleged governance and investigative failures are true.
This is conduct unbecoming any board of directors, let alone Harvard’s.
Only sunlight will remove the stain on the University’s reputation.
It is time for the sun to shine.
And:
Wait, There's More: Harvard's Claudine Gay Hit With New Plagiarism Allegations
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Biden continues to avoid a widening war which will only increase the chances he is mistaken, He never has learned to make the right decision because he is lacking in intelligent decision making and has been since birth.
Fight Iran now or later. It is inevitable because Iran will never back down until it feels power.
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Report: Iranian-backed terror at unprecedented level
A new report claims that terror groups backed by Iran have been working together.ore than ever since the October 7th massacre.
The Washington Post has reported on the IRGC’s cooperation with various terrorist organizations in the Middle East that operate on orders from Tehran.
Since the October 7th massacre, terrorist organizations in the Middle East have been working against American and Israeli targets.
The Houthis in Yemen have been attacking ships in the Red Sea, and Kataib Hezbollah has been involved in daily exchanges of fire in Lebanon to keep Israeli troops engaged on the northern border.
“The attacks can seem random, but they are the fruit of a carefully calibrated strategy forged in the wake of the 2020 killing of Qasem Soleimani, leader of Iran’s elite Quds Force, to bring cohesion to the loosely formed alliance of militias — designated by Tehran as the ‘axis of resistance.’ Although the groups seem unrelated — a rebel organization in Yemen; a guerrilla movement in Lebanon; and militias formed to fight U.S. troops in Iraq — they all have one thing in common: their loyalty to Iran, which arms, finances and inspires them,” the report writes.
Among the report’s sources is Joseph Votel, the CENTCOM officer who commanded US forces during the drone strike that killed Soleimani in Iran.
According to all analysts cited in the report, there is an unprecedented degree of coordination between Iran and the terrorist organizations it directs. A command center has been established for meetings between the heads of organizations, usually in Beirut, where decisions are made as to how to divide operations between them.
Iran supervises all such meetings and has a representative involved in them, and the Iranian regime works to prevent a wider regional war from developing, but still tries to exact casualties from Israel and the USA.
The heads of these organizations retain autonomy to decide which terrorist activities they will undertake, and when they will occur. The head of the ‘axis’ is Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
“We see Hassan Nasrallah as the official spokesperson for the resistance, one of its most important pillars and symbols. He enjoys great honor and esteem, from all parties, and we see him as an umbrella for us,” Hezbollah stated.
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Iranian warship enters the Red Sea amid tensions with Houthis
An Iranian warship, the Alborz, has entered the Red Sea through the strategic Bab al-Mandeb strait, AFP reported on Monday citing Iran’s Tasnim news agency.
The agency did not give specific reasons for its deployment, but noted that Iranian military vessels had operated in the area since 2009.
"The Alborz destroyer entered the Red Sea... by passing through the Bab al-Mandeb," waterway at the southern tip of the Red Sea, connecting with the Gulf of Aden in the Indian Ocean, the agency said.
It added that Iran's naval fleet has been operating in the area "to secure shipping lanes, repel pirates, among other purposes since 2009".
The entry of the Iranian warship comes amid tensions in the Red Sea as the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels have upped their attacks in recent months, since the start of the Israel-Hamas war on October 7.
On Sunday, US helicopters sank three Houthi boats in the Red Sea. According to US Central Command (CENTCOM), the container ship Maersk Hangzhou issued a second distress call in less than 24 hours reporting being under attack by four Iranian-backed Houthi small boats.
The incident came hours the USS Gravely missile destroyer shot down two anti-ship ballistic missiles while responding to a Houthi attack on a merchant vessel.
The Houthi rebels have threatened to attack any vessels heading to Israeli ports unless food and medicine were allowed into the Gaza Strip.
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin last week officially announced the creation of Operation Prosperity Guardian, a maritime task force set up by the US and allies to respond to the Houthi provocations.
Later, the Pentagon said a total of more than 20 countries have agreed to participate in the new US-led coalition.
On Sunday, White House national security council spokesperson John Kirby said the US is not seeking a wider conflict in the Middle East but will continue acting in its own self-defense
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The brainless hatful Muslim Brotherhood and supposed learned ones gather on university campuses to continue proving their anti-Semitism still controls them.
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JIHAD ON CMPUS How the Muslim Brotherhood has subverted the universities
By MELANIE PHILLIPS
Anti-Israel demonstrators' "die-in" at Harvard Business School
Decent people throughout the west have been astounded and appalled at how the universities have become the stamping ground of the new equivalent of the Hitler youth: tens of thousands of young people baying for the extermination of Israel and the blood of Jews as their response to the Hamas pogrom of October 7 and subsequent war in Gaza.
There’s been much handwringing about the fact that the universities, which should be the crucible of reason, have spawned such ignorance, bigotry and murderous rage. Anyone who’s been paying attention to what’s been happening in higher education over the past few decades — the universities’ takeover by Marxist ideologues and their bullying, intimidation and censorship of anyone who challenges totalitarian, barking mad, left-wing nostrums — cannot be entirely surprised by the vicious onslaught against Jews on campus. Yet even given the support for the ineradicably ant-Semitic Palestinian cause which is now the default in progressive circles, the violent intimidation and moral bankruptcy that have been on display since October 7 have been shocking and terrifying.
The astonishing situation at Harvard, whose president, Claudine Gay, was one of the trio of Ivy League heads who notoriously refused to acknowledge to a congressional committee that calls on campus for genocide against the Jews violated their codes of conduct — and who is now under pressure to resign amidst turmoil on campus — shone a spotlight onto the civilizational corruption at the heart of the universities.
This sewer has been fed over the years by various channels of western thinking. Much of it is due to the left-wing doctrine of “intersectionality,” which ordains that the world is divided between the oppressed who can do no wrong and oppressors who can do no right — and which holds grotesquely that Jews are oppressors and can never be victims.
Into this moral and intellectual vacuum have paraglided the jihadis of the Muslim Brotherhood, understanding correctly that this cultural demoralization gives them the opportunity to strike a mortal blow against the Jews and the west in order to fulfil their aim of destroying the former and conquering the latter.
A report by the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs, Jihad on Campus Unmasked, details how American universities have been hijacked by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). The JCPA says its role is far more sinister than other anti-Israel organizations pushing propaganda narratives onto impressionable college students because it may be an active facilitator of Hamas’s strategy.
According to Adela Cojab Moadeb, a law student, former campus activist and the complainant in a Department of Education action pushing for equal protections for Jewish students at New York University in 2019, SJP was ready with relevant material for dissemination immediately after October 7, which was only possible for a student organization with some advance warning.
Think about that.
The report says:
In other words, from the level of action readiness by SJP campus groups, SJP chapters were made ready for a rapid propaganda response to any anticipated Hamas action. If any of the SJP chapters or the national center had an advance warning of an impending attack and had agreed to facilitate the consequent information campaign, they could be considered accessories after the fact or co-conspirators in planning the attack. This means that the organization and any of its constituent members who were privy to that information and took any part in relevant, coordinated activities could be subject to a criminal investigation.
SJP, Cojab contends, should be recognized as closely affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, which is believed by many to be a grassroots revolutionary movement engaged in Muslim advocacy. In contrast to its reputation of being democratic, progressive, and revolutionary, the Muslim Brotherhood — the source from which Hamas and most jihadist groups emerged —is a tribal/familial, rigidly hierarchical, and tightly controlled movement that began in Egypt under the ideological influence of the Bolsheviks and Nazis.
The Brotherhood is engaged in a political form of Islam and views outsiders with suspicion even when they share its ideology and views. The Muslim Brotherhood, which has migrated from Egypt to Turkey and Europe following the counter-coup by now-President Al Sissi, has been generously funded by Qatar, which also reported supporting Hamas and other terrorist organizations. SJP’s sister organization, American Muslims for Palestine, shares a co-founder, Hatem Bazian, a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley and recipient of donations from the AFR Foundation. According to the Middle East Forum, this foundation appears to serve as an umbrella for approximately 50 private Islamist grant-making foundations. Moreover, at least one of these organizations, the Muslim American Youth Association, has, according to the FBI, “played pivotal roles in building [the Palestinian terrorist group] Hamas’s infrastructure in the United States”.
The donation to American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) may seem negligible. Still, under federal law, non-profits in the United States are not required to disclose all their funding sources, even those from abroad (although several states require greater transparency). The financial trail from Hamas-linked and other Islamist entities to SJP and its network could be substantially greater than is currently known. Before creating AMP and SJP, Bazian was a fundraiser for KindHearts. This pro-Palestinian charity had its assets frozen by the 9 federal government for “support for terrorism behind the façade of charitable giving,” specifically for allegedly providing aid to the terrorist organization Hamas,” according to InfluenceWatch. KindHearts denied these allegations, but the pattern of links between Bazian and Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad-linked entities has already been explored extensively by the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs.
It is of course shocking that SJP has been able to make such inroads on campus. Shocking because, while SJP’s jihadi connections may not be widely known, university administrators either chose to ignore or were themselves in full agreement with its virulently anti-Israel, anti-western agenda.
Even more disturbing is that British and US governments have failed to identify the Muslim Brotherhood — the parent of Hamas and the global fount of Sunni jihadi aggression — as a subversive enemy of the west which must be isolated and neutralized. Instead, they have turned a blind eye while the Brotherhood steadily advances its agenda not just on campus but throughout the west.
In 2014, a UK government report by the former British ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Sir John Jenkins, summarized the history of the Brotherhood’s activities in Britain. It said:
In the 1990s the Muslim Brotherhood and their associates established public facing and apparently national organizations in the UK to promote their views. None were openly identified with the Muslim Brotherhood and membership of the Muslim Brotherhood remained (and still remains) a secret. But for some years the Muslim Brotherhood shaped the new Islamic Society of Britain (ISB), dominated the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) and played an important role in establishing and then running the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB).
MAB became politically active, notably in connection with Palestine and Iraq, and promoted candidates in national and local elections. The MCB sought and obtained a dialogue with Government. MAB were active partners in a security dialogue with the police and collaborated with the police in ejecting Abu Hamza, the militant Salafist preacher, from a mosque in north London. The MAB have participated in the governance of this mosque ever since. In 2009 the then government suspended dialogue with the MCB after an office holder signed a public document which appeared to condone violence against any country supporting an arms blockade against Gaza. There has been no substantive dialogue since then between any part of the Brotherhood in the UK and Government.
In 2020, Jenkins wrote in the Spectator that Britain was still failing to deal with the Brotherhood. His analysis of the reasons was as alarming as it was unsparing. On what he had encountered when he conducted his 2014 review, he wrote:
It certainly wasn’t plain sailing. But the problem wasn’t the Islamists, many of whom were only too willing to speak to me (and when they weren’t, it was water off a duck’s back). Instead it was barely disguised hostility to the whole idea of the review from some experts in the field (who seemed to regard it as an impertinence for a mere government to question their research) and, perhaps more surprising, from some colleagues.
They seemed to have a grab-bag of objections, some reasonable, most not. The project, they said, served a hard-right agenda. Or, they said, we were being used by the Emiratis, Egyptians or Saudis to pursue their own vendettas (we weren’t).
Islamists, with whom we had engaged for decades, were simply misunderstood, it was claimed — and I was abetting that misunderstanding. They weren’t anti-democratic. And in any case, governmental responsibility would domesticate them.
Islamism, it was argued, was an authentic and understandable response to oppression. The Brotherhood, in particular, some suggested, were like Christian Democrats with beards, who acted as an important firewall on the primrose path to radicalization. These people said that the Brotherhood offered the suffering masses of the Islamic world a peaceful political alternative to the otherwise inevitable explosion of righteous anger against Arab dictators and a hostile and Islamophobic west.
Six years on from his review, after the Islamist hijacking of Libya, the incompetent rule of the Brotherhood in Egypt and the horrors of Isis, Jenkins found that, while eyes were being opened in Europe to the realities of Islamic extremism, in Britain heads were still firmly in the sand. He wrote:
The police still seem to believe that ideology (at least on this issue) is a private matter and they should anyway focus strictly on counter-terrorism — which, by the way, is increasingly about far-right movements. Christian and Jewish groups up and down the country seem to think that there is nothing that can’t be resolved by a nice cup of tea and more inter-faith dialogue. [My emphasis] The local government association commissions research on the offensiveness of the word “Islamist”. And underneath it all, one detects the undiminished inclination of the bureaucratic “machine” to pursue what it considers to be the path of least resistance: engagement with Islamists.
In America, the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) is a Muslim Brotherhood advocacy group that was named in a list of co-conspirators and/or joint ventures in the federal terrorism prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. The JCPA has written:
It is headquartered on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C., with regional offices nationwide. Since its founding in 1994, CAIR has grown into a large organization with a budget of over $2 million; it describes itself as “the nation’s leading Muslim organization in the civil rights and advocacy arenas”. CAIR followed a typical Islamist pattern which criticizes governments’ attempts to confront processes of radicalization, maintaining that “Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) programs actively surveil, profile, censor, and divide the American Muslim community.” CAIR members, inter alia, have been involved in the delegitimization campaign against Israel. This includes signing various petitions, publishing anti-Israeli press releases, and more.
The JCPA also says that the Islamic Society of North America is “another US Muslim Brotherhood organization that emerged from the Brotherhood’s early structure in the country”. It states on its website, however, that it has never been subject to Brotherhood control and that it was
“very disturbed”when the Department of Justice named it as another of “unindicted co-conspirators” in the Holy Land case. ISNA has engaged legal counsel to protect its rights and maintain its organizational integrity and credibility by immediate removal of ISNA from this list.
The JCPA goes on:
The organization is probably best known for its annual convention, which in the past hosted speakers who used pro-Islamist, anti-Israeli, and anti-western rhetoric…ISNA addressed senior officials of the Obama administration a number of times to protest against Israel’s policy in Gaza. During Operation Cast Lead in July-August 2014, it protested against the “escalation of violence against the Palestinians” on Israel’s part and against Israeli bombings in Gaza which hurt, it claims, “mainly women and children”.
On National Review, Andrew McCarthy has noted:
I’ve written for decades that the Muslim Brotherhood — the world’s most effective sharia-supremacist organisation — was building an infrastructure in the west, the foundation of which were not notorious jihadists but rather the Muslim Students Associations. Established in the mid-sixties by just a handful of obscure chapters on midwestern campuses, there are now hundreds of MSA chapters in campuses across the United States and Canada. They steep students in the anti-western animus of Islamist scholars; this grooms them to find common cause (or is it “intersectionality”) with the radical students, faculty, and administrators of the campus Left and its DEI indoctrination.
You want to know how Harvard, within days of the October 7 atrocities, could generate a statement in which nearly three dozen student associations effectively champion jihadist terrorism against the only democracy in the Middle East? That’s how.
Despite all the evidence that the Muslim Brotherhood is a transit point for jihadi extremism and for individuals and groups involved in violent and terrorist acts and despite the fact that it is proscribed in numerous Muslim countries, successive British and US governments have refused to ban it.
The result is the brainwashing, jihadi extremism and dehumanization of Jews now at epidemic levels on campus and elsewhere in the west.
Later this week: how schools are indoctrinating children in hatred of Israel.
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By Derek Hunter
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