RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/the-destruction-of-history-for-a-lie-that-no-one-believes/

“Israel is the only trustworthy steward of the region’s history. Those dark ages the academic world is working so hard to bring about? The state of Israel is what stands in their way, and it isn’t going anywhere.”

There is a war on history so ruthless and pervasive that I should say up front that there is, believe it or not, a silver lining. Two, actually.

But first, the bleak part.

When it comes to Jewish historical sites in the holy land, even your most “moderate” academic seems to turn into ISIS—a destructive force seeking a new and permanent dark age.

But because academic archaeological journals aren’t exactly the stuff of ratings, we don’t hear about it very much unless we go looking for it. So credit to journalist Amelie Botbol, who has been following an important story playing out in obscure places.

At Fox News, the Tel Aviv-based Botbol highlights recent stories from an Israeli news service that deserve attention.

In late April, the Press Service of Israel (TPS) covered the blacklisting of researchers who study ancient sites in Judea and Samaria, because the area is over the “green line” and thus considered occupied territory by the UN. Now, one might suggest that, occupied or not, the preservation and exploration of history is pretty important.

And it is—which is why those who undertake it get blacklisted if their areas of study encompass Jewish historical sites.

“This boycott is very clever,” Moshe Gutman, head of a preservation nonprofit, told the news service. “After having publications rejected repeatedly, archaeologists learn to avoid Judea and Samaria entirely. The scientific community is effectively driven away from the area.”

Indeed, the story is full of examples of academics and researchers losing their standing, access, and career paths for the crime of even participating in studies of ancient Israel. The idea is simple, if diabolical: Even if a few archaeologists defy the ban, they’ll have nowhere to publish their findings.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21492/europe-illegal-land-grab-part-iii

The international community continues to conspire against the reality of Israel’s existence by testing the limits of its sovereignty and threatening the Jewish right to self-determination and self-defense.

The EU would never allow an external entity to abridge the sovereignty of one of its own member states in this way, nor would it endorse such behavior anywhere else.

“To think that the Palestinians are only enraged about settlements is also fatuous nonsense. Talk to the 15-year-olds. Their grievance is not just with Israeli settlements, but with Israel. Most Palestinians simply do not accept that the Jews have any authentic right to be here.” —Thomas Friedman, New York Times, October 31, 2000.

The progressive international public has fervently bought into the red herring of Jewish settlements while hypocritically remaining silent regarding settlement activity in Western Sahara, northern Cyprus, Ceuta and Melilla, Tibet, Kashmir and the Falkland Islands.

The mainstream media and cultural apparatus conveniently ignore the history of these Jewish “settlers,” many of whom are indigenous to the region but whose parents or grandparents were forcibly expelled from the West Bank or parts of Jerusalem in 1948 when Jordan seized and occupied territory. Instead of acknowledging them as descendants of refugees merely returning home…

Those who understand the scope of this have witnessed how the plan of former Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad is part of a much bigger strategy of illegal land use that extends to the Negev Desert in the south and to the Galilee in the north, all driven by a European-supported narrative that replaces Jewish history with the 20th-century fiction of Palestinian-Arab nationalism.

The international community continues to conspire against the reality of Israel’s existence by testing the limits of its sovereignty and threatening the Jewish right to self-determination and self-defense. Palestinian-Arab society, among the most antisemitic in the world (long before Jewish communities in the West Bank were part of the picture), in which Palestinian Authority government-controlled television, media, textbooks and mosques encourage violence against Jews, praise Adolf Hitler, characterize Jews as “apes and pigs,” and deny the Holocaust, use Jewish “settlements” as a smokescreen to distract from their real agenda based on a single belief held for centuries: Jews do not belong.

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/

Yet again, the myth has been revived that there is a famine in the Gaza Strip.

This claim, which has done so much to incite attacks on Jews, has been promulgated repeatedly by mainstream western media during the past 18 months of war. It is a lie that distorts yet another lie.

Time and again, UN agencies and NGOs have warned that famine and starvation are imminent. But this has never happened. More food has been admitted to Gaza than people need.

The problem has been that Hamas took much of it to feed themselves and to sell it on the black market to finance their infrastructure of war.

Nevertheless, the Gazans have overwhelmingly remained conspicuously well-fed, while the people who really have been starved are the Israeli hostages they hold captive. Yet the media has continued to insist that civilians in Gaza are being starved to death.

Two months ago, with an estimated four months’ worth of food supplies remaining in Gaza, Israel instituted a blockade on further aid transports to force Hamas to release the remaining hostages.

The Israel Defence Forces will now oversee food distribution in southern Gaza in order to stop Hamas stealing it and to funnel civilians into those areas, isolating and weakening Hamas to enable the IDF finally to destroy it. The United Nations has refused to accept this plan, demonstrating that its aim is not to alleviate Gazan suffering but to aid Hamas in its war against Israel.

Stupefyingly, it is simply impossible to change the wicked media narrative that Israel is starving Gazan civilians to death. Facts and evidence get absolutely nowhere. Many believe that this is because of the false and obsessive belief that Israel is a colonial oppressor. But this embrace of revolutionary Marxist ideology is only part of the reason.

These lies have penetrated far beyond the keffiyeh-clad hordes of demonstrators. In Britain and elsewhere, it’s now the accepted unwisdom across great swathes of the professions, administrative class and business world that Israel is starving children and committing war crimes in Gaza.

When confronted with facts contradicting every one of these claims, such people ask incredulously: “Are you really saying that you are right while everyone else — the UN, the international legal tribunals, the entire humanitarian establishment — is wrong?”