In the middle of a multi-front war that Israel was fighting against Iranian proxies, the Jewish State decided to ban Qatar’s Al Jazeera media because of its positive depictions of Hamas and Palestinian terrorists groups, and negative stories about Israel. The New York Times ran many stories about Israel’s ban.
Last week, the Palestinian Authority also acted to ban the Hamas-supporting news company, as the PA began to arrest various terrorist groups in the West Bank in an attempt to show that it can be a trusted party to rule in Gaza. The story was picked up in a few publications, including Reuters, Variety, The Jerusalem Post, JNS and many other organizations such as i24News, Haaretz and the New Arab.
Yet The New York Times has still not covered the story, despite heavily covering Israel’s ban.
Al Jazeera has long tried to inflame a global jihad against Israel and instigate a Shiite-Sunni war in the Middle East, under the veneer of a legitimate news agency. Perhaps the New York Times is trying to both support the anti-Israel propaganda – which the grey lady echoes – by not covering the PA’s ban of Al Jazeera which would further delegitimatize AJ, and to paint Israel as anti-freedom of the press, which no one bothers to consider for the PA.
Columbia University is all about “constructive dialogue.” It believes in a “learning environment” infused with “civility, tolerance and respect.”
The school’s Gay and Lesbian Studies section of the English Department has a professor who has written extensively on the deep mental illness of transgender people, and another who has written several books with heroes who butcher lesbians, despite protests from the LGBTQ+ community.
Columbia’s African American and African Diaspora Studies Department has one professor who denies that there ever were slaves in the United States, another who has given speeches on the valuable lessons learned by African slaves in the South and another who teaches that today’s African Americans who were descended from slaves are incapable of learning or being productive members of society. While Black students were incensed, the school was adamant about showcasing a range of viewpoints.
The wide range of scholarship sought by this Ivy League institution includes tenured professors in Islamic Studies who have written extensively about the barbarism in Islamic culture, including genital mutilation, forced marriages of young girls, honor killings, and the cutting off ears and noses of women who embarrass men. One tenured professor has written many articles on the violent nature of religious imams who teach jihad against infidels. Some authors who are apostates – have left Islam for Christianity – are the most frequent visiting lecturers. The department hopes to host Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Salman Rushdie to teach about the underpinnings of Islam. Elsewhere, the art department is hosting a symposium about the depiction of the Islamic prophet Mohammed in the arts through the centuries, over the objections of the Muslim student body.
When some gay, Black and Muslim students complained about teachers who are openly hostile to their communities, Columbia assured them that all was fine since the courses are not mandated for graduation.
If that sounds too ridiculous or far-fetched to comprehend, I suggest you review the official Columbia University statement about its professor Joseph Massad who referred to the October 7 rape and massacre of 1,200 people and taking of 250 hostages as a moment of “Jubilation and awe.” He’s called the Jews in the Bible “Palestinian Hebrews” denying Jews their history and heritage. He has done this to strip any claims of Jewish indigeneity in the Jewish holy land (35:00).
If Columbia truly believes that denying Jews their history and heritage, as well as celebrating their massacre is a sign of “civility, tolerance, and respect,” one should expect to see Andrew Tate give a class on Women’s and Gender Studies, and David Duke to lecture about the history of Blacks in America.
The United Nations’ operation in Gaza is almost completely staffed by local Arabs. Since Hamas’s takeover of the coastal strip in 2007, UNRWA, the UN agency which runs schools and hospitals in the area, have operated in tandem with Hamas. The school circula is approved by the US-designated terrorist group and its facilities operate with Hamas’s oversight.
After Hamas invaded Israel on October 7, 2023 and butchered 1,200 people, Israel sought to bring the perpetrators to justice, to save the 250 hostages stolen by the Gazans militant groups, and ensure that the terrorist groups could never attack again, as they had promised to do.
As Israel has been decimating Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other terrorist groups and their infrastructure in Gaza, local armed Arab gangs have been stealing aid being delivered into the strip.
The New York Times blames Israel for making Gazans hungry.
December 23, 2024 New York Times article about looting in Gaza
The article squarely put blame on Israel for: 1) its “bombardment and invasion of Gaza”; 2) its limiting flow of goods around Gaza; and 3) not putting a new government in charge of Gaza.
How absurd.
Hamas launched the invasion, not Israel. Hamas took hundreds of captives into Gaza, demanding Israel’s counter-invasion. Hamas’s history of importing and moving vast weapons of war and terrorists around Gaza necessitates Israel’s control of goods and people.
And it is the Palestinian Authority that is supposed to govern Gaza, not Israel. The world demands that Israel leave the strip so how does it simultaneously demand that its should put in place a new government?
The Times shared that UNRWA decided that it would no longer deliver aid through one of the major entry points into Gaza, and that relief is piling up at the crossings. It acknowledged that the Gaza police force is an arm of Hamas but they are rarely seen in Gaza these days.
The Times inadvertently highlighted the farce of the entire situation stating that “The United Nations does not allow Israeli soldiers to protect aid convoys, fearing that would compromise its [the UN’s] neutrality.” Unsaid, is that only under the protection of Hamas and other Gazan terrorist groups can UNRWA operate freely, showing that the UN group has always been extremely biased.
The article moved beyond the lawless areas without Hamas or Hamas’s police ruling the area to sectors “fully controlled by the Israeli military. UN agencies have been able to avoid looters and deliver some relief.” However, not enough according to the UN: “‘There is continued tolerance by the Israel Defense Forces of unacceptable amounts of looting.”
According to the article, Israel is responsible for the entire situation in Gaza. Not the Gazans who are doing the actual looting. Not Hamas which refuses every ceasefire and to return all the hostages. Not UNRWA, the joint venture between the United Nations and Hamas, which teaches Gazans that Israel is an illegal entity which should be destroyed and replaced with a purely Arab Palestine.
UNRWA collapsed because Hamas is defeated. Local Arab gangs steal humanitarian relief because Iran, Turkey and others have been smuggling in vast amount of weaponry into the region, despite the official Israeli and Egyptian blockade of the terrorist enclave.
Gazans are hungry today DESPITE the efforts of Israel, and because of the toxic policies of the United Nations and local Arab warlords for the past decades.
The United Nations has long shown its anti-Israel bias in its various agencies. The global leader of the UN has also shows his disregard for civilians around the Middle East, preferring to coddle vile dictators as his clients.
In the aftermath of unveiling of the brutal torture regime of Bashar al-Assad’s prison system which killed over 100,000 people, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres chose to highlight the historic opportunity for the Syrian people as the country was taken over by a hybrid of jihadi terrorist groups of ISIS and Al Qaeda.
While he was making his absurd comments, a young US Congressman named Ritchie Torres was rebuking Syria and its sponsor of Iran’s “machinery of death,” and also called out the “international community” which ignored and continues to ignore the axis’ crimes against humanity, preferring to expend its energy on Israel’s defensive battles.
We know that Iran, Syria and the “axis of resistance” is evil. We must also acknowledge that the United Nations is an enabler of their atrocities and consider how to shrink the global body’s menacing actions.
Some groups like Amnesty International and countries like South Africa have drummed up the idea that Israel is committing a ‘genocide’ against the people of Gaza, or Palestinian Arabs, or the Arab or Muslim world, depending on how narrow or broad the defaming party chose to go. They have ignored the lowest civilian-to-militant death ratio in any urban war, the declining number of women and children killed as the war moved on to a ground invasion, and many other statistics in Israel’s defensive war in making the accusation.
It is curious that people have also not considered the basic fact that Israel has offered many ceasefires to Hamas since the war started in October 2023. No target of a genocide has ever been offered a ceasefire.
Let alone reject it.
Yet Hamas has rejected one ceasefire after another since the war started.
If an army was intent on slaughtering a group of people, would it offer a ceasefire every month?
If a persecuted population felt like it was desperate for the killing to stop, would it reject offers to stop the fighting?
Jews in the Holocaust were not offered a ceasefire. They were defenseless. They had no army. They had no government advocating on their behalf to stop the slaughter.
The heavy loss of life among Gazans is because of a war they started and refuse to cease. It is the deep-seated antisemitic genocidal intent of Gazans to destroy Israel that has perpetuated the war, not Israel’s desire to eliminate Gazans as declared by know-nothings under heavily tarnished brands.
After fourteen months of refusing ceasefires, it is time for the Arab and Muslim world to force Hamas to admit defeat and surrender so that the killing can stop and the day after can begin.
The United Nations has long come together to fight only two terrorist groups, ISIS (Da-esh) and Al Qaeda. The UN tracked and sanctioned individuals and groups associated with the terrorist groups for decades.
ISIS continues to be very active, with 153 attacks in the first six months of 2024 between Syria and Iraq. It is projected that the group may have double the number of attacks in 2024 as 2023.
So it is no surprise that Israel is worried about the Islamist militant group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), taking over Syria, to Israel’s immediate northeast. According to the BBC, “HTS was set up under a different name, Jabhat al-Nusra, in 2011 as a direct affiliate of al-Qaeda. The leader of the self-styled Islamic State (IS) group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was also involved in its formation.”
The United States is playing close attention.
On December 9, shortly after HTS took over Syria, the U.S. Department of Defense issued a release that “Centcom, together with allies and partners in the region, will continue to carry out operations to degrade ISIS capabilities, even during this dynamic period in Syria.” U.S. Air Force fighter and bomber aircraft struck more than 75 targets on December 7 as part of the effort to denigrate ISIS.
The United Nations Secretary General suddenly was worried about foreign involvement in Syria. Despite the UN stating clearly that ISIS and Al Qaeda are a global threat, UNSG Guterres tweeted that he was deeply concerned about the “recent and extensive violations of Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
The U.S. has been operating in Syria for years, so it would be strange for Guterres to suddenly admonish the U.S.’s efforts to destroy ISIS. Turkey has conducted many raids inside Syria since 2016 and controls large swaths of northern Syria directly and through proxies.
Turkey-controlled areas in northern Syria
One must therefore assume that Guterres sudden interest was in regards to Israel’s attack on Syria’s air force, navy and chemical weapons stockpiles, as the Jewish State does not want the new Al Qaeda-linked regime to have such destructive capabilities next door.
Even though the UN labeled ISIS and Al Qaeda dangerous terrorist groups for years and said nothing about the United States and Turkey fighting in Syria for a long time, the head of the UN suddenly became concerned about Israel removing weapons from Al Qaeda-linked jihadi groups.
It is another sign of the depravity at the United Nations, and why it should be neutered in terms of funding and voice in international law.
The media has begun paying more attention to Syria as the country’s 54-year old regime has fallen to insurgents tied to ISIS and Turkey. As part of its coverage, it has marked the Golan Heights on its maps. It makes this an opportune time to review the very different coverage of two contested areas – Golan Heights and West Bank – between Israel and its neighbors.
In the Media
The Guardian’s map of the Golan Heights in December 2024
The Guardian presented a map of the Golan Heights calling the separation between Israel and Syria as the “1949 Armistice line.” It also noted that the Heights were “captured by Israel from Syria during the 1967 Six-day war.” Both of these statements are factually correct.
And completely divorced from how the media describes the “West Bank.”
Rather than use the term “1949 Armistice line”, the press calls it the “1967 border” even though it was never a border nor meant to be a border. As described in the 1949 Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement in Article VI, “The Armistice Demarcation Lines defined in articles V and VI of this Agreement are agreed upon by the Parties without prejudice to future territorial settlements or boundary lines or to claims of either Party relating thereto.” In other words, the lines were simply set to separate the warring parties but political negotiations would craft the contours of the land in the future.
In regards to the phrase “from Syria,” the media never notes that Israel didn’t capture the “West Bank” land from Palestine but from Jordan, as Palestine did not exist.
The media – and the United Nations – mislead people that Israel took the West Bank from Palestine in an aggressive war. That is completely untrue, and obfuscated by terminology.
Geography
The Golan Heights are an actual topographical piece of earth. The large hills and mountains shoot up from the Sea of Galilee and beyond from volcanic activity.
Not so for the “West Bank.” It has no geographical or historical significance, other than being east of the 1949 Armistice line. It wasn’t even called the “West Bank” until after the 1967 Six-day war, as Jordan had illegally annexed it in 1950 and the UN just called it part of Jordan.
Arab States Breaking the Armistice Agreements
The Israel-Syria and Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreements specifically called on all parties to not take military action against the other. Both Arab states violated those agreements.
Syria shelled the farmlands of Israel’s Galilee for years, forcing Israel to defend itself and take the Golan Heights to keep Syria from repeating the attacks. Similarly, Jordan attacked Israel in June 1967 and Israel captured the region in a defensive action during the Six-day war.
Internationally Defined Borders
International powers created the various lines for Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Palestine after World War I. Each region slowly declared independence but not without difficulties. Each has gone through several wars, including civil wars. A populace more comfortable with tribes and clans operating under the umbrella of the Ottoman Empire for centuries were thrust into statehood. While modern academics blame the regional powers for “colonialization” and “imperialism” which left the locals bereft of natural resources, it was actually the imposition of statehood that has confounded much of the Middle East. Syria, Iraq and Lebanon are perfect examples of the internal strife which has killed millions over the decades.
“Palestine” was similarly crafted by world powers, and then quickly divided further by chopping off the region east of the Jordan River for the Hashemite Kingdom to rule. The balance of the land (which most people think of as pre-1948 Palestine) was designed to be “a national home for the Jewish people,” in the Palestine Mandate as adopted by the League of Nations. While the Golan Heights was marked by the powers to be part of Syria, those same powers marked the “West Bank” to be part of the Jewish homeland.
On one hand, Israel captured the Golan Heights after Syria broke the Armistice Agreement, and on the other, Israel RECAPTURED the West Bank/ area east of the 1949 Armistice Lines, in 1967 after Jordan broke its Armistice Agreement.
Names
Republicans in the United States are putting forward resolutions to stop calling the land “West Bank” and instead refer to it as “Judea and Samaria.” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) said in introducing the resolution that “The Jewish people’s legal and historic rights to Judea and Samaria goes back thousands of years. The U.S. should stop using the politically charged term West Bank to refer to the biblical heartland of Israel.” That is partially true.
Judea and Samaria have historical context and are much bigger contours than the “West Bank.” The West Bank is an artifice of war; it is just the land the the Jordanians took in the 1948-9 war in which they attempted to destroy the nascent Jewish State. The more accurate term for political purposes would be to call it E49JAL, for the area east of the 1949 Jordanian Armistice Lines.
Conclusion
The media is correctly referring to the Golan Heights, an actual region with topographical significance, as having an Israeli side captured FROM SYRIA, across the “1949 Armistice line.” It should similarly stop using the terms “borders,” “West Bank” and “from Palestine” which are all factually incorrect and attempt to frame the conflict with the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) in a duplicitous manner that portrays Israel as the aggressor.
The most famous Ugandan has long been Idi Amin (1928-2003) who served as president of Uganda from 1971 to 1979. He was known for his ‘reign of terror’ which systematically attacked minority groups including Christians, with over 100,000 people likely killed during his tenure.
A new Ugandan has emerged on the world stage, a 70-year old judge by the name Julia Sebutinde (1954-).
Julia Sebutinde, serving on the International Court of Justice
Sebutinde was the lone judge on the International Court of Justice who did not vote in favor of admonishing Israel regarding its war with the Palestinian terrorist-political party Hamas in several decisions, including on January 26, May 24 and July 19.
On May 24, she issued a lengthy dissenting opinion in which she argued that “I firmly believe that Israel has the right to defend itself against its enemies, including Hamas, and to continue efforts to rescue its missing hostages.” She believes that the ICJ overreached in essentially denying Israel such basic right, even as she agreed that Israel’s defensive actions need to be proportionate, adding “neither international law in general nor the Genocide Convention in particular deprive Israel of the right to take necessary and proportionate actions to defend its citizens and territory against such armed attacks on multiple fronts.”
The opinion was not appreciated by the government of Uganda which distanced itself from Sebutinde, stating her “ruling at the ICJ does not represent the Government of Uganda’s position on the situation in Palestine.” [Uganda recognizes Palestine as a country.]
Uganda took its sharp turn against Israel and sided up with jihadists early in Amin’s reign.
Uganda aligned with Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in February 1972 declaring that their regimes would be based on Islam and stand against “Zionism and imperialism.” A few months later, Amin sent a telegram to the United Nations Secretary General applauding Palestinian Arab terrorists murdering Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in Munich, Germany. The telegram added that the locale was appropriate because “It happened because Hitler and all of the German people knew that the Israelis are not a people who work for humanity and because of that they burned them alive and killed them with gas on the soil of Germany.” He repeated the comments that Hitler was right to kill Jews the following year.
Amin continued to align with “the plight of the Palestinian people” by expelling all Israelis and shutting the Israeli embassy in Uganda in 1973. He declared that the Abayudya native Ugandan Jewish community was illegal and granted the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) permission to operate training facilities in Uganda.
That set the stage for Amin to allow Palestinian Arab terrorists to land a hijacked civilian airplane at its capital city airport of Entebbe in 1976. He watched as the Palestinian terrorists separated Jews and non-Jews, allowing the non-Jewish hostages to fly to France while the 94 Israelis and non-Israeli Jews plus 12 Air France crew remained hostages.
Julia Sebutinde was 22 years old when she watched her country platform Palestinian terrorists and hold 106 Jewish civilians as hostages. She must have marvelled at Israel’s ability to come to their rescue on July 4, 1976 in Operation Thunderbolt.
Roughly 48 years later in 2024, Sebutinde spoke of Israel’s right to fight for another group of 100-plus Israeli hostages held by Palestinian terrorists, this time, trapped in Gaza:
An Israeli operation in February 2024 resulted in the rescue of two hostages, and more recently, the bodies of three more hostages killed in captivity were recovered from Rafah. It is plausible that additional hostages in captivity remain in the area, which is why Israel has declared its intention to locate and return them, dead or alive, to their families. This is a right that the Court cannot deny Israel or the hostages.
The United States government stands with Israel’s right to self defense while a vocal minority of citizens ignore the hostages and call to “Free Palestine” and “Globalize the Intifada.” In Uganda, the situation is reversed, with a government hitched economically and politically to jihadi regimes, while a 70 year old judge declares the obvious, that Israel must be allowed to defend itself and bring back the hostages.
In May 2021, Israeli courts ruled that Arab squatters would be evicted from homes owned by Israeli Jews in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood north of the Old City of Jerusalem. This action set off a mini war with Hamas in Gaza, and law enforcement never proceeded with the eviction.
There was another property dispute going on at that time in Silwan, just southeast of the Old City, a neighborhood founded by Yemenite Jews in the 1880s. The eviction of the Arabs, the Ghaith family, was similarly postponed and the family appealed the decision in Israeli courts and lost. For the past few weeks they have been advised to vacate the two-story building but refused. December 10 was set as the eviction date, and it happened this morning according to the Palestinian Authority-run media site, Wafa.
Wafa reporting on eviction from Silwan
Wafa reported the story from Gaza, a strange dynamic as the PA has no presence there. Presumably it was done to make the action look like a military takeover by “Israeli colonists, under the protection of the Israeli Occupation Forces.”
The United Nations had weighed in against Israel about the evictions on July 30, 2024 when it said “These [eviction] cases are examples of an ongoing systematic settlers’ campaign and application of a range of laws discriminatorily, to uproot Palestinians from their homes, take over their property and implant Israeli settlers in the heart of Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem.” Israel’s court disagreed and stated it was simply a real estate matter in returning the property to the rightful owners who had been ethnically cleansed from Silwan when Jordan invaded and illegally seized the land in the 1948/9 war.
The May 2021 mini war launched new terrorist groups east of the 1949 Armistice Lines (E49AL, “West Bank”) and set local Arabs on a genocidal path to kill Jewish civilians inside Israel. In March 2021, 18% of West Bank Arabs wanted to kill Jewish civilians; it rose to 57% by March 2023, close to the level of Gazan bloodlust.
The failed eviction of Arab squatters from Sheikh Jarrah in May 2021 initiated the soft launch of the massive war engulfing the region. Perhaps the December 2024 actual eviction of squatters from Silwan will mark the beginning of the end to the war.
Media outlets will discuss the roughly 600,000 people in Syria who were killed in the civil war and the millions of people who were internally displaced. They will recount how Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons on his own civilian population. They may even trot out videos of London-educated Asma al-Assad, Bashar’s wife, on how she stood by her husband.
I would like to share one name: Hamza al-Khateeb, a 13-year old boy taken by Syrian forces in April 2011, whose corpse was returned to his family a month later.
Here is the story as relayed on May 31, 2011 by Al Jazeera:
In the hands of President Bashar al-Assad’s security forces, however, Hamza found no such compassion, his humanity degraded to nothing more than a lump of flesh to beat, burn, torture and defile, until the screaming stopped at last.
Arrested during a protest in Saida, 10km east of Daraa, on April 29, Hamza’s body was returned to his family on Tuesday 24th May, horribly mutilated.
The child had spent nearly a month in the custody of Syrian security, and when they finally returned his corpse it bore the scars of brutal torture: Lacerations, bruises and burns to his feet, elbows, face and knees, consistent with the use of electric shock devices and of being whipped with cable, both techniques of torture documented by Human Rights Watch as being used in Syrian prisons during the bloody three-month crackdown on protestors.
Hamza’s eyes were swollen and black and there were identical bullet wounds where he had apparently been shot through both arms, the bullets tearing a hole in his sides and lodging in his belly.
On Hamza’s chest was a deep, dark burn mark. His neck was broken and his penis cut off.
Hamza al-Khateeb, 13 year old boy in Syria tortured by Syrian forces
The scale and savagery of the attacks in the Middle East are sometimes reduced to numbers such as the million who were killed in the Iran-Iraq war. As Syria falls, it is worth remembering a single soul who was brutally maimed and killed to comprehend the deep moral depravity that permeates – and must be expunged from – the region.
First One Through 