Judith Bergman

Amnesty’s true mission

Amnesty International’s conclusions on the situation here in Israel are always bizarrely perverse. The latest is no different: “Israeli forces have carried out a series of unlawful killings of Palestinians using intentional lethal force without justification … based on the findings of an ongoing research trip to the West Bank, including east Jerusalem. … The organization has documented in depth at least four incidents in which Palestinians were deliberately shot dead by Israeli forces when they posed no imminent threat to life, in what appear to have been extrajudicial executions. … Since Oct. 1, Israeli forces have killed more than 30 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Israel either after stabbings were carried out or the Israeli authorities allege stabbing attacks were intended.

“There is mounting evidence that, as tensions have risen dramatically, in some cases Israeli forces appear to have ripped up the rule book and resorted to extreme and unlawful measures. They seem increasingly prone to using lethal force against anyone they perceive as posing a threat, without ensuring that the threat is real,” Amnesty International wrote in a press release on Oct. 27.

As blogger Elder of Ziyon has already exposed, Amnesty’s “in-depth documentation” is based on lies. This is the most egregious element of Amnesty’s attempt to insert itself into the situation.

Another, no less infuriating element is the phrasing. The so-called researchers on behalf of Amnesty take great care not to mention explicitly, even once, against whom or why Israel is defending itself. Stabbings were “carried out” and “the Israeli authorities allege stabbing attacks were intended.” So according to this kind of jargon, also popular with mainstream media outlets like the BBC (“Jerusalem attack kills two”), the stabbings more or less carry themselves out with no one really at fault.

Indeed, the phrase “Israeli authorities allege” is used precisely to plant doubt in the reader’s mind as to whether the stabbings and all the other recent terrorist attacks are in fact a figment of the Israelis’ paranoid imagination. Indeed, Amnesty describes Arab terror sweeping across Israel with a typical misnomer — “mounting tensions.”

Astoundingly, Amnesty does not mention a single Jewish terror victim in its report; it’s not even trying to conceal its heavy bias. Instead, Philip Luther, director of the Middle East and North Africa Program at Amnesty International, says, “Israeli forces and civilians have faced genuine attacks and threats to their lives over the past weeks.”

That is probably the understatement of the year. Here are the cold and heartbreaking facts according to the IDF and Magen David Adom emergency medical service: As of Nov. 2, there have been 58 stabbings, five shootings and six car rammings, in which 11 people have been killed and 153 wounded, 18 of them seriously. Magen David Adom also treated 72 people for shock. Let us not forget — many of the terror victims who suffered shock or physical injuries will live with the effects for years to come. Many will suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, of which nightmares, constant anxiety and fear of leaving the house are just a few of the symptoms. The families and friends of the dead will live with the sorrow forever. These are real people, but Amnesty International does not even consider it worth mentioning them as a statistic.

Amnesty’s true mission

Amnesty International’s conclusions on the situation here in Israel are always bizarrely perverse. The latest is no different: “Israeli forces have carried out a series of unlawful killings of Palestinians using intentional lethal force without justification … based on the findings of an ongoing research trip to the West Bank, including east Jerusalem. … The organization has documented in depth at least four incidents in which Palestinians were deliberately shot dead by Israeli forces when they posed no imminent threat to life, in what appear to have been extrajudicial executions. … Since Oct. 1, Israeli forces have killed more than 30 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Israel either after stabbings were carried out or the Israeli authorities allege stabbing attacks were intended.

“There is mounting evidence that, as tensions have risen dramatically, in some cases Israeli forces appear to have ripped up the rule book and resorted to extreme and unlawful measures. They seem increasingly prone to using lethal force against anyone they perceive as posing a threat, without ensuring that the threat is real,” Amnesty International wrote in a press release on Oct. 27.

As blogger Elder of Ziyon has already exposed, Amnesty’s “in-depth documentation” is based on lies. This is the most egregious element of Amnesty’s attempt to insert itself into the situation.

Another, no less infuriating element is the phrasing. The so-called researchers on behalf of Amnesty take great care not to mention explicitly, even once, against whom or why Israel is defending itself. Stabbings were “carried out” and “the Israeli authorities allege stabbing attacks were intended.” So according to this kind of jargon, also popular with mainstream media outlets like the BBC (“Jerusalem attack kills two”), the stabbings more or less carry themselves out with no one really at fault.

Indeed, the phrase “Israeli authorities allege” is used precisely to plant doubt in the reader’s mind as to whether the stabbings and all the other recent terrorist attacks are in fact a figment of the Israelis’ paranoid imagination. Indeed, Amnesty describes Arab terror sweeping across Israel with a typical misnomer — “mounting tensions.”

Astoundingly, Amnesty does not mention a single Jewish terror victim in its report; it’s not even trying to conceal its heavy bias. Instead, Philip Luther, director of the Middle East and North Africa Program at Amnesty International, says, “Israeli forces and civilians have faced genuine attacks and threats to their lives over the past weeks.”

That is probably the understatement of the year. Here are the cold and heartbreaking facts according to the IDF and Magen David Adom emergency medical service: As of Nov. 2, there have been 58 stabbings, five shootings and six car rammings, in which 11 people have been killed and 153 wounded, 18 of them seriously. Magen David Adom also treated 72 people for shock. Let us not forget — many of the terror victims who suffered shock or physical injuries will live with the effects for years to come. Many will suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, of which nightmares, constant anxiety and fear of leaving the house are just a few of the symptoms. The families and friends of the dead will live with the sorrow forever. These are real people, but Amnesty International does not even consider it worth mentioning them as a statistic.

This kind of manipulation of facts through false accusations, omission and insinuation provides implicit justification for the Arab terror spree, while at the same time it displays a warped disregard for the obligation of any state to defend its citizens. Amnesty is in no position to dictate to Israel, especially in light of the fact that Israel takes every measure imaginable to avoid senseless death and indeed gives terrorists hospital care courtesy of the same taxpaying Jews that the terrorists so desperately want to kill.

Already, the untruths that Amnesty publishes (if it were not known that the report had been published by Amnesty, it could arguably have been penned by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas himself) are emboldening those who suffer from anti-Israel delusions. On the very same day that Amnesty published its “findings,” British MP Sir Gerald Kaufman claimed that Israel “fabricates stabbings” as a “ruse to execute Palestinians” and that “Jewish money” has influenced the Conservative Party. Clearly, one hardly needs to scratch the surface in order for all the old blood libels to come out, happy to greet the new ones.

Amnesty International crossed every red line long ago, but this latest report manages to up the slander of Israel one more notch. That is saying quite a lot for an organization that has been in libeling business for a long time.

Amnesty is on a mission and it is not a fact-finding one. The organization relies on donations. It would be interesting to uncover, in detail, the amount of funding Amnesty receives for the express purpose of blackening Israel’s name. There are a few obvious suspects as to the identity of the donors. Whoever they are, there can be no doubt that Amnesty makes a travesty of what it purports to support: human rights

An Idiot’s Guide for the Media on How to Do Your Job Properly

Noah Beck

An imaginary newspaper report about 9/11. Photo: Screenshot.

A new instructive video shows what news reports would look like if they applied their outrageous Israel-reporting techniques to terrorist attacks in the rest of the world. In the hope of lessening the egregious anti-Israel bias, here are some pointers to members of the media:

1) Your job is to report facts, not reinforce a narrative. Really. The facts matter – they form the basis for judgments. So here are some facts for you, meticulously documented and updated (with details and graphs worthy of a data scientist) in a shared Google spreadsheet by Nehemia Gershuni-Aylho. According to his data, in the fifty days from September 11 through October 31, there have been 1,315 Arab Muslim attacks on Jews, including stabbings, bombings, rock-throwing, etc. That’s about 26 attacks per day resulting in the murder of 11 innocent Jews. Adjusted for the US population, that’s over 1,000 knife, bomb and other attacks per day that kill 440 people during fifty days of terror. How would the US react to that?

2) Remember that the weaker party can be wrong. Actually, when a Palestinian man stabs a 70-year old woman, he’s not even the weaker party. Sometimes Palestinians do indefensible things. Sometimes Israel is guilty of only trying to protect its citizens from insanely hateful violence. And as an honest reporter, you should try to show this.

3) Properly identify the terrorist and the victim when reporting on casualties, and describe the main causal sequence of events with relevant context. That’s how you avoid headlines like “Jewish man uses his neck to attack the blade of Palestinian’s knife.” The BBC’s distortions were actually not far from that when they effectively turned terrorists into victims. The BBC’s bias is so egregious that even its former chief complained.

4) Do your homework on this region. Learn its basic history so that you don’t moronically suggest (as the NY Times did) that Jews have no historical connection to the Temple Mount. Otherwise it looks like you’re trying to support Palestinian revisionism against basic facts and endless archaeological evidence (including what a 10-year old recently discovered).

5) Learn the history of this conflict enough to know that Pallywood has been actively deceiving journalists for at least 15 years now, in an effort to delegitimize Israel. Before publishing “information” fed to you by fixers and “eyewitnesses,” realize that even Amnesty International has admitted the unreliability of “eyewitnesses” in this conflict. The most galling Pallywood example from this latest round of Arab terrorism is the inflammatory lie – by “moderate” Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas – that Israeli forces had “executed” a 13-year old. The truth: he was treated in the same Israeli hospital caring for the boy he tried to murder.

Such lies can kill. Because when it comes to this conflict, Arab leaders know that violence replaces reason at the slightest provocation – like hooligans at a football game incited to attack the opponents of their beloved team. So inciting lies are very much a weapon. The media should know this and expose the falsehoods, rather than blindly proliferate them. Journalists should know that “reporting” inflammatory claims can produce mob violence, and should therefore be doubly careful about checking facts, unless of course their goal is to trigger riots (which do produce more sensational news stories).

6) Learn the history of this conflict enough to know that Arab Muslims have been killing Jews in this area for over a century, with shifting excuses over time.

7) Stop trying to use the latest of those shifting excuses to justify the unjustifiable (here, too, the BBC is an offender). No alleged grievance warrants randomly stabbing people in the street. The average Syrian is infinitely worse off than anyone in Gaza or the West Bank, but Syrian teens aren’t randomly stabbing civilians. Countless refugees from Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere have risked their lives for the hope of a better future in Europe. And yet there are virtually no Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza among the millions desperate to reach Europe. So random stabbings don’t reflect some miserably unfair existence – they are the product of raw hatred and incitement.

8) Take note of nuances. Ninety-two Israeli Arab Muslims have committed terrorist attacks. They are not under occupation (and have better freedoms and living standards than most of the Arab world has). So clearly these attacks are not about any political dispute; they are driven by the same hateful incitement that rejects any state for the Jews.

9) Show cause and effect (ideally one before the other), and not just effect. When you show only Israeli responses to attacks, it makes Israelis look as if they wake up every morning asking how they can hurt Arabs. Israelis actually have better things to do with their mornings. Like cure cancer and stuff. But when people are trying to kill them, they understandably get a bit distracted. If the world could keep Israelis safer, cancer might get cured faster.

10) Articles should contain a logical subject and verb, preferably in a way that indicates who did what. According to CNN, Joseph’s Tomb spontaneously “catches fire.” CNN would rather change the laws of physics than blame Muslims for trying to burn a Jewish holy site. But there is a long list of non-Muslim sites that have been desecrated or destroyed by Muslims – from the Buddhas of Bamiyan razed by the Taliban to the countless monuments and churches destroyed by the Islamic State. History is also littered with Islamic conquests that converted non-Muslim holy sites into mosques.

11) Israeli lives matter. Getting both sides of the story means including photos and profiles of Israeli victims of Arab terrorism at least as often as you include photos and profiles of Arab attackers who were killed while trying to murder innocent Israelis. In case you’re not sure what it’s actually like to survive a stabbing attack, Kay Wilson’s TED Talk is a must-watch for some valuable context (and a reminder of what a life-affirming culture looks like, as opposed to the death cult trying to stamp it out).

12) Don’t be afraid to present Gazans as they present themselves (brandishing butcher knives and calling for Jewish blood). Show this Palestinian mother who celebrates that her child was killed trying to murder Israelis and who hopes that she and her other children all die for the same “cause.” Showing the Palestinian death cult of Jew-hatred that runs from crib to coffin might help observers understand why there’s still no peace.

Just for some context, when was the last time that you saw a video of a Jewish mother hoping that she and her children can all die for the sake of murdering some Germans to avenge the German Nazi murder of six million Jews (which seems a bit worse than praying on a contested holy site)?

Read more: An Idiot’s Guide ….

Killers Of Jews Or Saviors of Jews?

Steve Lipman

New study by YU history professor sheds fresh light on Poland’s wartime anti-Nazi Resistance movement.
YU professor Joshua Zimmerman’s book on Poland’s underground fighters during World War II. Steve Lipman/JW

A third-generation American Jew who grew up in California, Joshua Zimmerman was raised with an atypical perspective about Poland. Most Jews in this country whose parents or grandparents immigrated from Poland as survivors or refugees of the Holocaust heard mostly horror stories about anti-Semitic Poles.

Zimmerman didn’t.

His great-grandparents came from the area of Poland-Russia where most of the world’s Jews had lived for centuries, in the decades before the Shoah. But they didn’t experience the type of vicious anti-Semitism that most Jews in that part of Europe did.

And when they spoke about World War II and the Holocaust, they would concentrate instead on the German role in atrocities. “Ethnic Poles did not appear in the narrative,” said Zimmerman, 48, a professor of Eastern European Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Yeshiva University.

Then, during a college course on the Shoah, a Jewish student whose grandparents were from Poland declared that the Poles were as bad “as the Germans.” During a later trip to Poland, Zimmerman met citizens who had lived through the war and told him about the heroic Resistance movement there and its Armia Krajowa (Home Army). And then he read a New York Times obituary of the wife of Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal, which described how she survived in Nazi-occupied Poland “with the help of the Polish underground.”

“A book was born that day,” said Zimmerman, sitting in his Yeshiva University office, surrounded by books about the Jewish experience in Poland. He would, he says, investigate the truth about the relationship between the country’s Resistance movement and the country’s Jews during World War II. Were the members of Armia Krajowa — AK, as it is popularly known in Poland — saints or sinners?

The result is the recently published “The Polish Underground and the Jews, 1939-1945” (Cambridge University Press), a study that raises fresh questions on the eve of the commemoration of Kristallnacht. “I have to see it from both sides,” Zimmerman said.

For most Jews, this is not an arcane historical question. Poland was the pre-war home of 3.5 million Jews and the site of the greatest number of Nazi death camps. The behavior of the underground and the AK epitomizes what happened to Polish Jews under German occupation, and it has become an article of faith of most Jews outside of Poland that the Poles abetted or supported the Nazi effort to annihilate the Jewish population.

Zimmerman spent nine years researching the book, which clocks in at nearly 500 pages. He lived in Poland for a year, studied its language and culture, interviewed aging AK members and Jews who owe their lives to the underground, combing through archives that had become open to historians after Communism fell a quarter-century ago. He also did research in Israel and England.

Zimmerman’s book on some pages challenges and contradicts, and on other pages reinforces, the often prevailing belief about the Polish Resistance’s relationship with Polish Jewry during the war.

“Such a book plays a major role” in understanding Poles’ attitudes towards Jews under Nazi occupation, said Holocaust expert and author Michael Berenbaum. “The more information we get, the more we can get to a [balanced] judgment.”

Most Poles, in the view of most Jews, behaved in ways that largely ranged between cold indifference and fiery hatred. Saul Friedlander’s 2007 epic study of the Holocaust, “The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939-1945” (Harper Perennial),” typified this Jewish perspective, that Poles were antagonistic towards Jews, that Polish patriotism and nationalism were equal to anti-Semitism.

“The anti-Semitic National Democratic Party was represented both in the [exiled] Polish government in London and in the structures of the underground within Poland,” Friedlander writes. “Precisely because Polish anti-Semitism was not tainted by any trace of collaboration with the Germans, it could prosper — not only in the street but also in the underground press, in political parties, and in the armed forces.”

While non-Jewish Poles who were hostile to Jews frequently turned Jews over to the Nazis because of monetary reward or fear of collective punishment for their families, Friedlander’s use of the term “collaboration” refers to people in other lands, like Ukraine or Croatia, who worked with the German Army in a military capacity.

Poland’s liberal-minded socialist and democratic organizations “represented a minority in relation to the anti-Semitic camp,” Friedlander writes. “German anti-Jewish propaganda was manifestly well accepted and internalized by many Poles … German anti-Jewish posters adorned the walls of the smallest villages and the populace enjoyed it.” Armia Krajowa was at first reluctant to aid Jewish partisans because holding a view that tended to dominate Polish thought, it was “suspicious of the leftist and pro-Soviet leanings of part of the ZOB,” a reference to the Jewish Combat Organization, the main underground Jewish partisan group.

Zimmerman paints a more nuanced picture. He purposefully “presented evidence,” he said, without “giving a verdict.”

He writes of Armia Krajowa units welcoming Jews into their ranks, supplying arms and money and training to Jewish partisan units, organizing an ultimately unsuccessful effort to breach the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto at the start of the 1943 Uprising, condemning Poles who blackmailed Jews and looted Jewish property, rescuing Jews at the risk of AK members’ lives, helping to found the Committee to Aid the Jews (Zegota), maintaining a sometimes-on/sometimes-off relationship with the ZOB, sending members clandestinely into ghettoes and concentration camps to ascertain the life-threatening situations, and publicizing the Jewish plight through its underground press of the government-in-exile. But he also writes of AK units that excluded Jews that killed Jews, that refused to offer aid because isolated, small-scale attacks on the German military were regarded as a “futile” waste of limited arms; he writes of right-wing parties that continued to harbor anti-Semitic views and spread anti-Semitic calumnies.

Zimmerman’s book offers a balanced perspective, personalizing the topic by presenting profiles of several righteous individuals as well as unrepentant anti-Semites.

Zimmerman is treading on perilous — for many Poles — territory. The AK, and the wider underground Resistance movement, has within most Polish circles assumed a post-war iconic position, like that of the Resistance in France.

He describes the ebbs and flows of Polish support for the country’s endangered Jews during the war — it increased when Jews stood up to the German army in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising – and he documents how some earlier acts of Jewish armed resistance in occupied Poland also drew the admiration of Polish Resistance. Zimmerman also cites many Poles’ disgust at Nazi brutality.

Popular support for Poland’s Jews decreased after liberation when the Soviet army seemed likely to occupy the country; there was widespread fear the Soviets would impose hated communist rule, which many Poles associated with Jews.

Poland and Russia were enemies during many years of their history as neighbors; Poland, a majority Catholic society, hated atheistic Communism; Poland’s Jews, who had initially welcomed the Red Army in 1939 as a release from anti-Semitic rule and as bulwark against the Third Reich, were viewed by many non-Jews as a disloyal fifth column.

In presenting a balanced picture about the Jewish relationship with the Polish underground, Zimmerman follows in the intellectual footsteps of “some historians [who] began to challenge the prevailing assumptions in Jewish historiography in the late 1980s,” he writes.

“This study revisits the historical evidence and changes our understanding … by presenting a comprehensive treatment of different patterns of behavior toward the Jews at different times during the war and in various regions of occupied Poland,” Zimmerman writes. “I agree that because the Home Army was an umbrella organization of disparate Polish organizations numbering more than 300,000, from all regions ranging from socialists to nationalists, its attitude and behavior towards the Jews varied widely.”

“That the AK freed 398 Jews from German captivity is pretty much unknown.” Zimmerman says, as is the Jewish role as fighters in the ill-fated 1944 Warsaw Uprising — the nearby Red Army remained uninvolved while the outnumbered Poles were decimated by the Germans and the capital was flattened.

Zimmerman, who has taught at YU since 1998, said historians in Poland are now more willing to concede the underground’s wartime misdeeds, and the country’s presidents have apologized for the Poles who turned against the country’s Jews. And the stories of such heroic Poles as Jan Karski and Irena Sendler are earning greater respect in parts of the wider Jewish community.

Zimmerman says his book, by presenting both sides of the wartime picture, “has the potential of contributing to the Polish-Jewish reconciliation.”

He says his own young children, when they come of age, will also hear both sides. He will tell them of “the legacy of anti-Semitism” in Poland. And they will learn “that there were very good people in Poland … extraordinary Poles who risked their lives to save Jews.”

Joshua Zimmerman will discuss his book on Monday, Dec. 21, 3 p.m., at YIVO, 15 W. 16th St., Manhattan.

Joshua Zimmerman steve@jewishweek.org

Szejk Muhammad Ajed do „uchodźców”: „ZDEPCZEMY EUROPĘ”

Fronda.pl

W jerozolimskim meczecie Al-Aksa imam Szejk Muhammad Ajed wygłosił mowę skierowaną do tzw. uchodźców, twierdząc, że “zdepczą” oni i “podbiją” państwa Europy.

Przemówienie zostało wygłoszone 11 września 2015 r., w rocznicę terrorystycznych zamachów na World Trade Center w Nowym Jorku.

Szejk Muhammad Ajed powiedział:

Niewierni chcą nas dręczyć. Chcą nas upokorzyć. Koran mówi: “Żydzi i chrześcijanie nigdy nie będą z was zadowoleni”. Ale my nigdy nie podążymy za ich religią. Ta ciemna noc się skończy i wkrótce ich zdepczemy, zgodnie z wolą Allaha. Niemcy nie są krajem pełnym współczucia, chcącym przyjmować uchodźców z Syrii i Iraku, czy palestyńskich uchodźców z Lewantu lub innych miejsc. Europa stała się stara i niedołężna, potrzebuje nowych zasobów ludzkich. A żadna siła nie jest tak potężna jak ludzka siła nas, muzułmanów. Muzułmanie, mówią Niemcy w swoich gospodarczych raportach, potrzebują 50 tys. młodych robotników. Teraz mają 20 tys. i chcą kolejnych 30 tys. i więcej, by pracowali w ich fabrykach. Niemcy nie są powodowani współczuciem dla Lewantu, jego ludzi i uchodźców.W całej Europie serca natchnięte są nienawiścią wobec muzułmanów. Chcieliby, abyśmy byli martwi. Ale stracili płodność, więc szukają jej wśród nas. Damy im płodność! Rozmnożymy z nimi nasze potomstwo, ponieważ podbijemy ich kraje – czy chcecie tego, czy nie, Niemcy, Amerykanie, Francuzi, Włosi i wszyscy wam podobni. Przyjmijcie uchodźców! Wkrótce zgromadzimy ich w imię nadchodzącego Kalifatu. Powiemy wam: “To nasi synowie”.