The letter, addressed to President Joe Biden, references reporting from the New York Times, The Guardian, and Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which, in separate investigations, uncovered an Israeli influence campaign that used fake accounts to pose as Americans in order to disparage pro-Palestinian groups with “deeply Islamophobic and anti-immigrant content,” target student groups and human rights organizations who were critical of Israel, and post pro-Israel content online. The campaign was designed to persuade lawmakers to continue providing military aid to Israel for its war on Gaza, and focused on Black Democratic members of Congress.

“What this letter asks for is very simple: that President Biden and his administration treat reports of inappropriate Israeli influence operations with the same seriousness that it has allegations of Russian and Iranian influence campaigns.” said Jamal Abdi, head of the National Iranian American Council, referring to separate efforts to interrupt American democracy by Iran and Russia ahead of the 2016 and 2020 elections and earlier this year. “Unfortunately, what has been reported thus far could just be the tip of the iceberg.”

The letter, also addressed to the departments of Justice, State and Homeland Security, arrived hours before Netanyahu is expected to address Congress in a joint session, which has drawn a wave of criticism. Signatories include the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, the Sikh Coalition, and a number of American Quaker groups.

Raed Jarrar — advocacy director at Democracy for the Arab World Now, a letter signee and human rights group founded by slain journalist Jamal Khashoggi — called on the Biden administration to protect democracy and to “end its policy of exceptionalism towards Israel and hold all nations to the same standards.”

Vice President Kamala Harris has said she will not preside over the address but will meet with Netanyahu at a later time during his visit to Washington, which began Monday. Hundreds of demonstrators with Jewish Voice for Peace filled the Capitol rotunda on Tuesday, in protest of Netanyahu’s visit, chanting “Let Gaza Live!” until Capitol police arrested the crowd.

A growing number of lawmakers are boycotting the far-right prime minster’s address, including senior Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin, Patty Murray, Bernie Sanders, and Chris Van Hollen, along with progressive members of the House of Representatives. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, has been the most pointed in her attacks on the address, referring to Netanyahu as “a war criminal committing genocide against the Palestinian people,” in a statement Tuesday, in which she called for his arrest and deportation to the International Criminal Court. She also referred to the event as “a celebration of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians” and criticized continued U.S. military aid to Israel.

Last week, a separate letter signed by 230 Senate and House staffers from 122 Democratic and Republican congressional offices called on lawmakers to boycott the address, referring to the ICC war crimes case against Netanyahu. “This is not an issue of politics, but an issue of morality,” the staffers’ letter read.  

The ICC’s prosecutor requested arrest warrants in May for Netanyahu and his cabinet member and Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant on a series of war crimes, including starvation of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the targeting of civilians in its military attacks. The ICC has yet to approve the warrants. Last Friday, the International Court of Justice, the United Nations’ top court, ruled that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem is illegal, rife with war crime violations, and amounts to apartheid. A separate ICJ case is considering whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

Since the start of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, the Biden administration has been criticized for its handling of the conflict and its deference toward Israel, which many critics and international law observers see as a double standard in foreign policy. Despite Biden’s public denunciations of civilian deaths, Israel has killed more than 39,000 Palestinians, many of them women and children. Bombardments have intensified in recent weeks with civilian death tolls mounting, even as Israel is engaged in ceasefire talks. The U.S. has continued to send billions in military aid throughout the conflict, with a few temporary exceptions, and has repeatedly upheld Israel’s right to defend itself from Hamas.

Letter signers pointed to recent sanctions by the Treasury Department earlier this year against Russian hackers over a similar campaign influence scheme, and asked Biden for Israel’s program to be treated the same. 

Israel’s influence campaign received $2 million in government funding and was commissioned by its Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, which fosters relationships between Jews across the globe with Israel, according to the New York Times. Both their report and Haaretz’s reporting linked the campaign to Stoic, a Tel-Aviv-based political marketing firm. Stoic created and ran various social media accounts that spread Islamophobic material. One posted that Muslim immigrants posed a threat to Canada and were calling for a Sharia state. Another account highlighted the history of Arab slave traders in Africa, in an effort to sway Black American lawmakers, Haaretz reported.

“As an Administration that has defined itself as defenders of American democracy against threats from both domestic and foreign state actors, the news of the Israeli government’s attacks on our democracy must be addressed,” the letter urged.

Wednesday’s letter also outlined previous communications between signatories and State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller. Miller declined to comment on the facts around Israel’s social media scheme highlighted in media reports, and instead stated that “we have very clear laws on the books in the United States about foreign influence campaigns. We enforce those laws vigorously and we expect everyone to comply with them.” He did not give any indication that the State Department would investigate the allegations further. 

The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The post Rights Groups Demand Biden Give Answers on Israel’s Secret Influence Campaign on Congress appeared first on The Intercept.

Now, a centrist Democratic pro-Israel group is running an ad campaign in the state to persuade Michiganders to be vocal in their support of Biden — and tick the box next to his name on the primary ballot.

The ad campaign is the latest effort in the primaries mounted by Democratic Majority for Israel, which is closely aligned with the right-leaning American Israel Public Affairs Committee and fellow centrists of the Mainstream Democrats PAC.

“Voting uncommitted hurts Biden, which helps Donald Trump and his hateful agenda,” says the DMFI ad, which ran on YouTube.

DMFI’s attempt to bolster support for Biden’s campaign comes as the group and its allies are also spending millions of dollars to attack members of Biden’s party. The group’s political action committee, DMFI PAC, has also run ads attacking progressives in the 2024 primary races and spent millions against progressive candidates in recent years.

The moves are a Democrat-focused version of the wider pro-Israel push to unseat members of Congress who criticize Israel’s rights abuses against Palestinians, call for a ceasefire in the war on Gaza, and move to limit or restrict arms sales to Israel. The attacks have targeted progressives, particularly members of the Squad.

AIPAC, which shares donors and other connections to DMFI, plans to spend at least $100 million this cycle, making it one of the largest players in Democratic primaries. The group has also run an intensive effort to recruit challengers to run against several Squad members. 

The DMFI ad comes just days before Michigan’s Democratic primaries, set to take place next Tuesday. DMFI, whose disclosures about the campaign have not yet been filed, did not immediately respond to a request for comment about how much it spent on the ads.

Organizers of the campaign to select “uncommitted” say they intend the protest vote as a vote of no confidence on Biden’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza — and a warning that having voters dissatisfied with his position could come back to bite the president in the general election.

“We are sending the warning sign to President Biden and the Democratic Party now in February, before it’s too late in November.”

“This is not an endorsement of Trump or a desire to see him return to power,” they wrote on their website. “We are sending the warning sign to President Biden and the Democratic Party now in February, before it’s too late in November.”

The state boasts more than a quarter million Middle Eastern and North African residents, according to the latest census estimates, a community that includes many Palestinians and is in general more critical of blind support for Israel. 

Michigan’s 15 electoral votes are key to Biden’s reelection chances. In 2016, Trump won the state by 10,000 votes, while in 2020 Biden took the state by around 150,000 votes. Moreover, Michigan had the highest young voter turnout in the 2022 midterm election, a benchmark that could be undercut this year as young voters overwhelmingly disapprove of Biden’s handling of Israel’s war on Gaza. 

Polls conducted since October 7 indicate a tight race in the state, with Trump winning in several tests. A poll conducted this week that had Biden trailing by 4 percentage points to Trump also showed 74 percent percent of Democrats and 64 percent of independents in favor of a ceasefire accompanied by the release of hostages and provision of aid to Gaza.

The “vote uncommitted” push has the backing of an array of state officials, including Mayor Abdullah Hammoud of Dearborn, Michigan, which has the largest per capita Muslim population in the country, and state House Majority Leader Rep. Abraham Aiyash, among numerous other state and local officials throughout Michigan. (The Biden campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

“I’m trying to scream from the rooftops,” said former Rep. Andy Levin, D-Mich., who was previously targeted by DMFI and supports the uncommitted effort. “You’re not going to win unless you change course.”

In October, DMFI PAC ran ads attacking Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., for calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and voting against a congressional resolution in support of Israel that did not mention Palestinians killed. Mainstream Democrats PAC, run by billionaire Democratic donor Reid Hoffman, also considered funding primary challenges against squad members including Tlaib and Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo.

The post AIPAC Ally Slams “Uncommitted” Voters Warning Biden to Change Course on Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.

“Dear Mr. President,” the family’s letter, sent to Biden on Friday morning, began, “We, the family of Shireen Abu Akleh, write to express our grief, outrage and sense of betrayal concerning your administration’s abject response to the extrajudicial killing of our sister and aunt by Israeli forces on May 11, 2022, while on assignment in the occupied Palestinian city of Jenin in the West Bank.”

The letter, which was provided to The Intercept by the family, reminded the American president that Abu Akleh was not just “a prominent, beloved Palestinian journalist” and “a role model and a mentor” to women in her community. “She was also a United States citizen.”

The family, including Abu Akleh’s brother Anton and his children, demanded that Biden make time during his visit to the Middle East next week to meet with them, “and hear directly from us about our concerns and demands for justice.”

The U.S. “has been skulking toward the erasure of any wrongdoing by Israeli forces.”

They also described their anger and disappointment at a lack of support from the Biden administration, and suggested that instead of using its leverage over Israel to demand a credible investigation of the fatal shot that witnesses said was fired from an Israeli military convoy, “the United States has been skulking toward the erasure of any wrongdoing by Israeli forces.”

“In the days and weeks since an Israeli soldier killed Shireen, not only have we not been adequately consulted, informed, and supported by U.S. government officials, but your administration’s actions exhibit an apparent intent to undermine our efforts toward justice and accountability for Shireen’s death,” the renowned Al Jazeera correspondent’s relatives wrote.

The family provided links to a half-dozen painstaking examinations of the video and audio evidence of the killing — conducted by the Washington Post, CNN, The Associated Press, the New York Times, Bellingcat, and the United Nations Human Rights Office — which all concluded that the fatal shot had likely been fired from the Israeli Defense Forces, or IDF, raiding party.

“All available evidence suggests that Shireen, a U.S. citizen, was the subject of an extrajudicial killing,” the Abu Akleh family told Biden, “yet your administration has thoroughly failed to meet the bare minimum expectation held by a grieving family — to ensure a prompt, thorough, credible, impartial, independent, effective and transparent investigation that leads to true justice and accountability for Shireen’s killing.”

The family urged Biden to direct the Department of Justice to use the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Bureau and the FBI to investigate the killing of Abu Akleh.

The letter was sent days after the State Department released an oddly vague statement, on the Fourth of July holiday, reporting that “an extremely detailed forensic analysis” of the bullet that killed the journalist, carried out in Israel by unnamed “independent, third-party examiners,” overseen by the regional U.S. security coordinator, Lt. Gen. Michael Fenzel, was unable to determine if the shot had been fired from an Israeli rifle.

According to the State Department, the American general’s review of other information gathered by Israeli and Palestinian officials led him to the conclusion “that gunfire from IDF positions was likely responsible for the death of Shireen Abu Akleh.” Fenzel, however, “found no reason to believe that this was intentional but rather the result of tragic circumstances,” the statement added.

As the Abu Aklehs noted in their letter to Biden, the U.S. has offered no explanation of how the American general determined that no Israeli soldier intended to fire at the journalist, who was wearing a blue vest marked “PRESS,” but the statement seemed to exactly echo a claim the Israeli military has made repeatedly. “The IDF investigation conclusively determined that no IDF soldier deliberately fired at Ms. Abu Akleh,” Israel’s military said in a statement released the same day.

The U.S. has offered no explanation of how the American general determined that no Israeli soldier intended to fire at the journalist.

The journalist’s family also pointed out that just one day after State Department spokesperson Ned Price “announced that Shireen’s killing was likely unintentional,” he admitted, during questioning by reporters, that the U.S. security coordinator’s review of the evidence was “not a law enforcement investigation” and his conclusion about intent was simply “a judgment.”

“Nonetheless,” the family wrote to Biden, “your administration deemed it necessary to include and perpetuate the baseless and damaging conclusion that the killing was not intentional, seemingly choosing political expedience over actual accountability for a foreign government’s killing of a U.S. citizen.”

The Abu Aklehs went on to demand that the State Department retract the July 4 press statement and turn over to them any forensic report prepared by the ballistic experts, and reveal their identities. Price, the State Department spokesperson, told reporters that the forensic experts were not Americans but came from one of the seven other NATO countries that help train Palestinian Authority security forces.

While Price declined to say what country the experts came from, Israel’s military insisted in its own statement that “Israeli experts examined the bullet” in the presence of representatives of the U.S. security coordinator. The Israelis added that their ballistic examination was looking for evidence that the bullet had been fired from a specific weapon which was examined in the lab. That statement appears to indicate that Israel has identified the soldier from the Duvdevan commando unit who fired in Abu Akleh’s direction from the convoy during the raid.

The family also reminded Biden that 57 members of Congress and 24 senators had signed letters asking for the U.S. to be directly involved in investigating the killing of Abu Akleh, given that Palestinians and Israelis do not trust each other to conduct a credible and independent investigation.

“We reaffirm these demands on behalf of our beloved Shireen as your administration’s actions to date have not only fallen woefully short of ‘full accountability’ but they amount to express acceptance for Shireen’s killing,” the family wrote. “Your administration’s actions can only be seen as an attempt to erase the extrajudicial killing of Shireen and further entrench the systemic impunity enjoyed by Israeli forces and officials for unlawfully killing Palestinians.”

The post In Letter to Biden, Shireen Abu Akleh’s Family Demands a Meeting and an End to Israeli Impunity appeared first on The Intercept.

At least 74 Palestinians were detained by Monday afternoon, in the first hours of what Israel’s police force is calling “Operation Law and Order.” Palestinian rights groups called the planned arrest of up to 500 protesters — on charges ranging from attacks on the police to vandalism to online incitement — a blatant crackdown on dissent, timed to coincide with the dimming of the global spotlight on the conflict.

A mass campaign of arrests is happening in 48/ Israel. Israeli occupation forces are arresting Palestinian citizens involved in the uprising. #palestinerises pic.twitter.com/lwt2nntWwJ

— Dr. Yara Hawari ?. ???? ????? (@yarahawari) May 23, 2021

“Israeli forces and police are going on a mass arresting rampage in Lydd, and other Palestinian cities in an attempt to ‘even the score’ with Palestinians that spoke up against their ethnic cleansing,” the Palestinian writer Mariam Barghouti observed on Twitter, as video of two men being detained and blindfolded in the city Israelis call Lod circulated online. “This is what we warned about. Israel will target us all when you stop looking.”

“The world tends to look away as soon as Israeli lives are no longer threatened by rockets but it is stuff like this, that Israel does to Palestinians every day, that guarantees future rounds,” the writer and political analyst Yousef Munayyer commented on the same images.

Thread 1/2: The Occupation forces are carrying a violent mass arrests campaign, against Jerusalemites and Palestinians living in the lands occupied in 1948. Since this morning at least 15 Jerusalemites were arrested. pic.twitter.com/eKE1Jn7g9H

— Grassroots Al-Quds (@grassroots_quds) May 24, 2021

“Don’t look away from the purge,” Jalal Abukhater, a Jerusalem-based Palestinian writer and civil servant, urged his international Twitter followers early Monday morning. “Don’t look away from the terror Israeli forces are planning to put in hundreds of Palestinian homes over next 48 hrs.”

“The massive arrest campaign announced by Israeli police last night is a militarized war against Palestinian citizens of Israel,” Hassan Jabareen, the general director of Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, said in a statement. “This is a war against Palestinian demonstrators, political activists, and minors, employing massive Israeli police forces to raid the homes of Palestinian citizens.”

Another brief video clip that sowed outrage showed a young Palestinian boy being arrested in the Beit Hanina neighborhood of East Jerusalem.

Israeli police arrest a 10 year old Palestinian boy in Jerualem and his sister is crying pleading for his release. pic.twitter.com/5Fk6NcFLMq

— Salem Barahmeh (@Barahmeh) May 24, 2021

A researcher for the rights group Defense for Children International-Palestine reported that the boy, who is 11, was arrested because Israeli settlers accused him of throwing stones. He was later released.

Palestinian citizens of Israel had started their protests before the fighting in Gaza, in solidarity with Palestinian families threatened with eviction from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah, in occupied East Jerusalem, to make way for Israeli settlers. Israeli police used force and mass arrests to try to stifle those protests, detaining more than 1,500 people this month, and Palestinians also faced violence from Jewish supremacist mobs, including racist soccer hooligans and far-right settlers.

“Reminding us that [Palestinians] inside Israel are also fighting a military system bent on oppressing them, Israel has launched a mass arrest campaign to pick up those who took to the street the past 2 weeks,” Tareq Baconi, an analyst at the International Crisis Group commented. There were, he added, “no similar arrests for Jewish mobs – their violence was state sanctioned.”

Micky Rosenfeld, an Israeli police spokesman, told The New York Times that about 70 percent of those arrested this month were Palestinian citizens of Israel, but a Palestinian lawmaker in the Israeli Knesset, Aida Touma-Sliman, estimated that the true share was closer to 90 percent.

As of last week, according to Nimer Sultany, the editor-in-chief of The Palestine Yearbook of International Law, 85 percent of those arrested were Palestinian, and many of the rest were left-wing Israeli Jews protesting alongside them. The first 116 indictments were all against Palestinians.

Israel arrested 1000 protesters – citizens

850 Palestinians (20% minors)
150 are mostly left wing Jews

116 indictments:
100% Palestinians; 0 Jews.
@arab48website https://t.co/2NA03sDako

— Nimer Sultany (@NimerSultany) May 17, 2021

Three Jewish extremists who took part in a brutal mob attack on a Palestinian man in the Tel Aviv suburb of Bat Yam this month were charged on Monday with attempted murder and aggravated assault, Haaretz reported. As the newspaper also reported in its main, Hebrew-language edition, more than 20 attackers were seen on video beating the victim, but only four have been arrested so far, and just three charged.

Later in the day, a 17-year-old Palestinian accused of injuring an Israeli soldier and a civilian with a knife was shot and killed by a border police officer in Jerusalem. Pointing to video of the incident released by the police, and additional footage recorded by a witness, Defense for Children International-Palestine called the incident an apparent extrajudicial killing, since Israeli forces apparently fired at least three shots after the suspected attacker, Zuhdi Muhannad Zuhdi al-Tawil, “was incapacitated and on the ground.”

The wave of arrests of Palestinian citizens of Israel has been accompanied by evidence of casual brutality and racism from Israeli police officers. In one incident, captured on a surveillance camera in Umm el-Fahm — a majority Palestinian town in northern Israel where protesters marched last week — a food delivery driver who stepped aside as Israeli police officers were leading an arrested man away was first shoved off the sidewalk by one officer and then hurled to the ground by another.

1/3 ???? ?????:???? ????? ????, ??? ??? ???? ????? ??? ???? ?? ????? ????? ??????, ????? ?? ????? ????? ????? ??? 7 ????,????? ???? ????? ?? ?????? ??????? ?? ??? ???? ????? ???? ??? ?????,?????? ?????? ??????? ???? ???? ????? ????? ????? ?? ??? ????? ??? ?????.@Haaretz #????21 pic.twitter.com/QxmUzm4WT2

— Yanal Jabarin | ???? ?????? (@JbareenYanal) May 24, 2021

Yanal Jbareen, a Palestinian citizen of Israel who reports for Haaretz 21, the Israeli newspaper’s journalistic incubator, posted the video on Twitter along with an interview of the driver, summarized in Hebrew. According to Jbareen, the driver said that while he was lying on the ground, one of the officers told him that he should be more respectful of the police in future, worshipping them instead of god.

The post Israeli Police Round Up Palestinian Protesters Out of Global Spotlight appeared first on The Intercept.

The rockets fired from Gaza, seven of which reportedly reached the outskirts of Jerusalem but caused no serious casualties, came hours after Israeli police had entered the Aqsa mosque compound on Monday morning, firing stun grenades and rubber bullets at Palestinian protesters defending the site with rocks and fireworks.

At one point during the daylong battle inside the compound, a large tree caught fire near the mosque, with conflicting reports as to which side was to blame.

One of the beautiful cypress trees outside al-Aqsa mosque caught fire. Police say it's from from fireworks https://t.co/VzWHmkIc5w

— Yair Wallach (@YairWallach) May 10, 2021

https://twitter.com/ORHamilton/status/1391835281930735631

No damage was caused to the mosque, but before the fire was extinguished, Israeli television broadcast what Daniel Seidemann, the director of Terrestrial Jerusalem, called the “apocalyptic” image of “flames rising high above” the compound known as Haram al-Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary, to Muslims and the Temple Mount to Jews.

The conservative Jerusalem Post journalist Lahav Harkov shared an image of the broadcast on Twitter.

One reporter from KAN says the fire is from a tree hit by a stun grenade, but that it’s not confirmed. Another reporter pointed out that Palestinians have been throwing explosives, firecrackers. Either way the fire is already out.

— Lahav Harkov (@LahavHarkov) May 10, 2021

Akiva Weisz, a reporter for Israel’s public broadcaster, Kan, posted video on Twitter of the flames burning near the mosque as a group of Israeli flag-waving, far-right religious extremists celebrated Jerusalem Day, an annual commemoration of Israel seizing full control of the city in 1967.

?? ??? ???? pic.twitter.com/PR069O7UzF

— ????? ????? Akiva Weisz (@AkivaWeisz) May 10, 2021

Palestinian Italian journalist Rula Jebreal shared another, closer angle on the scene from Israeli TV, which showed some of the religious Zionists on the plaza recording the fire on their phones.

A large fire in al-Aqsa’s courtyard as settlers celebrate.
Every year, Jewish extremists rip thru Jerusalem to terrorize Palestinians. Since Ramadan started, this racist hate parade intensified: fanatics inciting violence/chanting: “Death to Palestinians.”pic.twitter.com/y28jJfniOT

— Rula Jebreal (@rulajebreal) May 10, 2021

Another video clip of ultranationalist Israelis in ecstatic celebration in front of the Western Wall, as flames near the Aqsa mosque leapt into the night sky above, unsettled and appalled many Palestinian and Jewish critics of the 54-year-old Israeli occupation of the city.

Ayman Odeh, the leader of the Joint List of predominantly Arab parties in Israel’s parliament, called the images he posted on Twitter, of the party atmosphere on the plaza below the fire, shocking.

????? pic.twitter.com/7JM5ADoPJf

— ????? ???? ???? ???? Ayman Odeh (@AyOdeh) May 10, 2021

Odeh, a Palestinian citizen of Israel and an uncompromising critic of Israel’s attempt to make its occupation of East Jerusalem permanent, tweeted his one-word comment in Hebrew, but the frightening image of the region teetering on the edge of the abyss seemed to need no translation, as religious extremists — many of whom would like nothing better than to see the mosque destroyed — continued their celebration, at least untroubled by the flames.

Nathan Thrall, a Jerusalem-based expert on the conflict and the author of “The Only Language They Understand,” noted that the celebration of conquest was also taking place on a plaza that was constructed by demolishing a Palestinian neighborhood.

Days after conquering the Old City of Jerusalem in 1967, Israel razed one of its Palestinian neighborhoods and transformed it into the Western Wall plaza. On Jerusalem Day in 2021, Israelis celebrated in that occupied plaza as a fire blazed in the al-Aqsa mosque compound above. https://t.co/DXKgyKaHcc

— Nathan Thrall (@NathanThrall) May 10, 2021

The video shared by the Palestinian legislator reached millions of viewers on Twitter, in part because of a claim he did not make, that it showed the Israeli extremists celebrating what Turkey’s state-owned channel TRT World called “a blaze at Al Aqsa Mosque.”

The viral spread of the video, and false rumors that the mosque was on fire, prompted journalists to clarify that the fire had not spread from the tree, while defenders of Israel tried to contain the damage to the country’s image by insisting that Palestinians were to blame for starting it and noting, correctly, that the nationalistic celebrations on the plaza below were already well underway before it began.

Jewish celebrating Jerusalem day by western wall, while you can see Palestinians and Arabs shooting fireworks on the Temple Mount causing a fire near El Aqsa. After this people now saying Israelis are celebrating burning the of al aqsa. Pure blood label.https://t.co/fPEYV9A447

— Jonathan Elkhoury- ??????? ?????? (@Jonathan_Elk) May 10, 2021

Israeli nationalists and reporters shared a distant video clip of the confusing battle between the protesters and the police around the mosque, which they presented as proof that the fire had been started by Palestinians. Judah Ari Gross, a military correspondent for the Times of Israel, suggested on Twitter that fireworks that started the blaze were fired toward the plaza “where thousands of Jews were gathered for Jerusalem Day celebrations.”

Correction: Additional footage of the incident appears to show that the fireworks were fired from the Temple Mount toward the Western Wall below (where thousands of Jews were gathered for Jerusalem Day celebrations).

The trees were just in the way. pic.twitter.com/NOw9Y1sdda

— Judah Ari Gross (@JudahAriGross) May 10, 2021

While the video evidence is far from clear, it seems possible that Palestinian protesters did accidentally start the fire. But this focus on who started the fire, and whether the Israeli extremists were celebrating the blaze, is a distraction from what is most disturbing about the video shared by Odeh.

That’s because, as several Israeli journalists, as well as activists and scholars who speak Hebrew, pointed out, what was most horrifying about the scene was the song the ultranationalists were singing along to as a fire raged in front of them near Islam’s third holiest site.

It was, as Yair Wallach, a senior lecturer in Israeli Studies at SOAS University of London, explained, a 1990s Hassidic rock tune associated with the far-right Jewish supremacist movement of Rabbi Meir Kahane.

I am sharing this, reluctantly, to point to the song they're singing. It's a Kahanist revenge song, words from the biblical story of Samson:
"O God, that I may be at once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes"
(Yimach Shemam, may their name be effaced, the youths chant) https://t.co/OZCYNpdjUF

— Yair Wallach (@YairWallach) May 10, 2021

Kahane was the virulently anti-Arab founder of the Jewish Defense League, whose extremist Kach party was designated a terrorist organization and banned in 1994 after one of its members, Baruch Goldstein, killed 29 Muslims praying at the Tomb of the Patriarchs shrine in the West Bank city of Hebron.

Before he was assassinated in 1990, Kahane served in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, where he introduced legislation to strip non-Jews of citizenship and called for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the occupied territories.

In March, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the former head of Kahane’s youth movement and the current head of the far-right Jewish Power party, was elected to the Knesset. Ben-Gvir, who has called for the destruction of Al Aqsa Mosque, made a provocative visit on Monday to the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, to advocate for the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes, and then went to the Temple Mount, Haaretz reported.

Activists from the Kahanist youth organization Lehava, which is dedicated to preventing romantic relationships between Jews and Arabs, were in the city to take part in the annual Jerusalem Day flag march, in which religious Zionists usually parade through Palestinian neighborhoods in the Old City.

Video from a friend on the ground in the Jerusalem: right-wing Israeli settlers flying the Kahanist Lehava flag at the "March of Flags" pic.twitter.com/RR8BHi14Xk

— Joshua Leifer (@joshualeifer) May 10, 2021

That parade was halted on Monday, but the activists were at the heart of the musical celebration on the plaza as the fire burned above them.

“Hard to capture how deeply horrifying this video is,” Simone Zimmerman, the U.S. director of the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, wrote on Twitter of the clip Odeh shared. “Thousands of Israeli Jews singing about revenge, chanting ‘Yimach shemam (may their names be erased),’ dancing as a fire burns on the Temple Mount. This is genocidal animus towards Palestinians — emboldened and unfiltered.”

“The song is not only genocidal, it’s also suicidal — from the story of Samson, who kills himself while getting revenge on the Philistines,” she added.

“These teens are student of pre-military yeshivas (the flag being waved is for the Tzvia Yeshiva in Dimona),” Elizabeth Tsurkov, a research fellow at the Forum for Regional Thinking, pointing out some of the young Israelis gleefully singing about taking revenge on the biblical enemies of the Jews. “Imagine what these boys will do once they are given guns and authority over millions of Palestinians, while they enjoy near-total impunity.”

“As a Jew, it hurts me to see this disgusting show of hatred at the holiest site for the Jews, the Western Wall,” she continued. “Young boys celebrating as east Jerusalem burns. Zionism is infecting Jewish identity in Israel with ethno-nationalism, militarism and glorification of violence.”

While several Jewish observers who understand the meaning of the song the young extremists were singing echoed Tsurkov’s comments, Yair Wallach pointed out earlier in the day that the Palestinian struggle to keep Israel from asserting control over their access to the Aqsa mosque compound is not entirely, or exclusively, about religion.

“The thing about al-Aqsa/Temple Mount is that it’s the most important place in Palestine/Israel, and its in Palestinian hands,” Wallach wrote in an incisive Twitter thread. “Israeli police can storm it, take the keys, lock the doors, beat up or shoot people. All this doesn’t change the fact that it’s in Palestinian hands.”

“Palestinian effective sovereignty in al-Aqsa is not due to diplomatic negotiations, or international law, or armed struggle (although all these played a role in defending it). It’s about moral authority. Israeli policies in the last decade threaten the status quo by effectively allowing ritual Jewish visits to the site (although nominally banned). But Israel has not dared to take over the site, and it remains in Palestinian hands, at least for now,” he continued.

“So lots of people will emphasise the religious dimension, which is clearly there and is important, but it’s not just about that. It’s also about basic freedom,” Wallach observed. “And this effective and symbolic sovereignty, despite its clear limitations, is deeper than the limited self-rule of Ramallah or Gaza and ultimately provides a far greater challenge to Israel.”

The post This Is Not Fine: Why Video of an Ultranationalist Frenzy in Jerusalem Is So Unsettling appeared first on The Intercept.

“I support military assistance to Israel,” said Warren’s planned remarks, referring to the aid as “the elephant in the room.” 

“But if we’re serious about arresting settlement expansion and helping move the parties toward a two-state solution, then it would be irresponsible not to consider all of the tools we have at our disposal,” her speech went on. “One of those is restricting military aid from being used in the occupied territories. By continuing to provide military aid without restriction, we provide no incentive for Israel to adjust course.”

Warren’s position is consistent with the more progressive stance on Israel policy the senator has taken in recent years. Before the 2020 election cycle, Warren had come under fire for her vote on U.S. aid to Israel during the 2014 Gaza war. At the time, she defended the vote, saying, “America has a very special relationship with Israel.” 

But Warren went out of her way during her presidential campaign to position herself among the new class of Democrats not afraid to question that special relationship. In October 2019, she said “everything is on the table” should Israel move away from a two-state solution, and in May 2020, she signed a letter with 18 Senate Democrats opposing Israel’s unilateral annexation of territories in the West Bank. On the campaign trail, the senator said she would push Israel to end its ongoing occupation of Palestine and denounced the country’s decision to bar Reps. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich, and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., from entering the West Bank and East Jerusalem. 

Those decisions came with a price. After Warren told activists from the Jewish anti-occupation group IfNotNow that she would push Israel to end the occupation, Republicans blasted her as anti-Israel, and some even labeled her an anti-Semite. Criticisms flowed from within her own party as well. Democratic Majority for Israel, a centrist Democratic PAC working to elect pro-Israel candidates, sent a memo warning other Democratic presidential candidates about IfNotNow, advising them to stick to a script saying they supported a two-state solution.

“Warren’s support of the common-sense idea that US military funding to the Israeli government should never go toward the occupation is a huge sign of the growing support among Democratic voters to take on the foreign policy hawks who no longer have complete control over the debate,” said Morriah Kaplan, spokesperson for IfNotNow.

Mark Mellman, a longtime strategist for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, launched Democratic Majority for Israel with several other Democratic strategists in 2019, aiming to curb the growing willingness among the party’s left wing to criticize the U.S. relationship with Israel and human rights abuses in the occupied territories. DMFI was the first Democratic group to run ads — with help from AIPAC — attacking Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., by name in either of his presidential campaigns. Most recently, DMFI came under criticism after a 2018 social media post surfaced from a board member who wrote, “Gaza is full of monsters. Time to burn the whole place.”

After news that Warren’s presidential campaign had hired an IfNotNow co-founder, Mellman made a personal call to her campaign manager. He wanted to make sure the staffer wasn’t working on Israel policy or Jewish outreach; Warren’s campaign assured him the staffer was not.

During the J Street speech, Warren also reiterated support for a two-state solution, condemned the continued expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and called on Israel to help Palestinians access Covid-19 vaccines. She called on the Biden administration to restore access to the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem to Palestinians, to reopen the Palestine Liberation Organization delegation office in Washington, D.C., and to take steps to end the ongoing blockade and ensuing humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip.

The post Elizabeth Warren Suggests U.S. Explore Conditional Aid to Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

Israel’s military typically arrests and prosecutes 500 to 700 Palestinian children between the ages of 12 and 17 each year, subjecting them to coercive interrogation, physical violence, and trials in military courts that lack basic guarantees of due process.

'You threw a stone.' Video shows armed Israeli soldiers forcibly seizing 9-year-old Palestinian boy in his school https://t.co/kMeYmEmHm9 pic.twitter.com/SWy5y5Vlsz

— CNN (@CNN) April 1, 2019

McCollum’s bill, HR 2407, would amend the Foreign Assistance Act to prohibit funding for the military detention of children in any country, including Israel. The proposed law would also provide $19 million a year to American, Israeli, and Palestinian nongovernmental organizations to monitor the treatment of children detained by Israel’s army and offer physical and psychological treatment.

“Israel’s system of military juvenile detention is state-sponsored child abuse designed to intimidate and terrorize Palestinian children and their families,” McCollum said in a statement on Wednesday. “It must be condemned, but it is equally outrageous that U.S. tax dollars in the form of military aid to Israel are permitted to sustain what is clearly a gross human rights violation against children.”

In dry legislative language, the factual findings section of the bill paints a devastating picture of injustice sponsored by American taxpayers:

In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, there are two separate legal systems, with Israeli military law imposed on Palestinians and Israeli civilian law applied to Israeli settlers. Approximately 2,900,000 Palestinians live in the West Bank, of which around 45 percent are children under the age of 18, who have lived their entire lives under Israeli military occupation.

Since 2000, more than 10,000 Palestinian children have been subject to the Israeli military court system. Israeli security forces detain children under the age of 12 for interrogation for extended periods of time even though prosecution of children under 12 is prohibited by Israeli military law.

The bill notes that Human Rights Watch reported in 2018 that Israel’s security forces detained Palestinian children “often using unnecessary force, questioned them without a family member present, and made them sign confessions in Hebrew, which most did not understand.” Such detentions, the same group discovered in 2015, “included the use of chokeholds, beatings, and coercive interrogation on children between the ages of 11 and 15 years.”

“Obaida,” a video report by Matthew Cassel for Defense for Children International Palestine, explores a 15-year-old Palestinian boy’s experience of Israeli military detention. Three days after the film was posted on YouTube last week, the boy was arrested again.

McCollum’s bill also cites a 2018 report from B’Tselem, a leading Israeli human rights organization, which described the bleak reality in detail. “Every year, hundreds of Palestinian minors undergo the same scenario,” B’Tselem reported. “Israeli security forces pick them up on the street or at home in the middle of the night, then handcuff and blindfold them and transport them to interrogation, often subjecting them to violence en route. Exhausted and scared – some having spent a long time in transit, some having been roused from sleep, some having had nothing to eat or drink for hours – the minors are then interrogated. They are completely alone in there, cut off from the world, without any adult they know and trust by their side, and without having been given a chance to consult with a lawyer before the interrogation. The interrogation itself often involves threats, yelling, verbal abuse and sometimes physical violence. Its sole purpose is to get the minors to confess or provide information about others.”

As the text of McCollum’s bill explains, these abuses are well-known to the United States government. The findings section of the bill notes that the State Department’s 2013 human rights report pointed to evidence “that Israeli security services continued to abuse, and in some cases torture minors, frequently arrested on suspicion of stone-throwing, in order to coerce confessions. The torture tactics used included threats, intimidation, long-term handcuffing, beatings, and solitary confinement.”

Researchers working for another NGO, Defense for Children International Palestine, collected affidavits from 739 Palestinian children who were detained in the West Bank between 2013 and 2018. DCIP found that 73 percent of the children had endured physical violence, 86 percent were blindfolded, 96 percent were interrogated without having a parent or family member present, 20 percent were subjected to stress positions by interrogators, and 49 percent were detained from their homes in the middle of the night. More than 120 of the children had been held in isolation for interrogation purposes for an average of 13 days before any charges were filed.

This is heart-wrenching. 15 year old Mohammad Tamimi – brother of Ahed Tamimi – was arrested by the IDF during a night raid at their home.

15 year old kid. He joins hundreds of other Palestinian children sitting in Israeli prisons. https://t.co/5FzlfJcECq

— Sana Saeed (@SanaSaeed) April 8, 2019

“As Israel’s military occupation becomes more entrenched with no end in sight and the human impact of occupation is more and more visible, lawmakers are increasingly willing to challenge U.S. policy toward Israel,” Brad Parker, a senior adviser for policy and advocacy at DCIP, told The Intercept. “By prohibiting U.S. financial support of abuses against Palestinian children in the Israeli military detention system, this bill aligns U.S. policy toward Israel with existing U.S. law and international law, sending a clear message to Israeli authorities that the systemic impunity enjoyed for so long concerning widespread ill-treatment of Palestinian child detainees must end.”

In 2017, McCollum, with 30 Democratic co-sponsors from what was then the House minority, introduced similar legislation to prohibit “U.S. assistance to Israel from being used to support the military detention, interrogation, or ill-treatment of Palestinian children.”

WATCH: @BettyMcCollum04 urges colleagues to co-sponsor H.R. 4391, a bill that would prohibit U.S. taxpayer funds from supporting grave human rights violations against Palestinian children in the Israeli military detention system. #nowaytotreatachild pic.twitter.com/8nodpMmOba

— #nowaytotreatachild (@nwttac) July 25, 2018

With Democrats now in the majority, her revised bill was referred to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on Tuesday.

“Peace can only be achieved by respecting human rights, especially the rights of children,” McCollum said on Wednesday. “Congress must not turn a blind eye to the unjust and ongoing mistreatment of Palestinian children living under Israeli occupation.”

Update: Thursday, May 2, 7:34 a.m.

McCollum’s bill was welcomed by Human Rights Watch, as well as Palestinian-Americans and American Jews who oppose Israel’s ongoing occupation of the West Bank, which denies basic civil rights to nearly 3 million people living under Israeli military rule.

"Every year, Israeli forces physically abuse scores scores of Palestinians in custody with impunity.. it's not just a few bad apples, its a rotten tree." @hrw on US Congressional bill to prohibit funding grave violations of children's rights. Our take https://t.co/voLr72Wbz7 pic.twitter.com/SWbrm4dyny

— Omar Shakir (@OmarSShakir) May 1, 2019

“Progressive values demand freedom, justice, and equality for all people and across all issues, and we commend Rep. McCollum for putting hers into practice,” Yousef Munayyer, director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, said in a statement. “For too long, Congress has given Israel a blank check even as it has entrenched its brutal military occupation and escalated human rights abuses against the Palestinian people. H.R. 2407 is an important step toward demanding accountability and sending a stern message that the American people do not want their tax dollars being used to deprive Palestinian children of their rights and childhoods.”

“Palestinian children – like all children – should be protected and treasured,” Rabbi Alissa Wise, deputy director of Jewish Voice for Peace said. “It is unconscionable that U.S. military aid to Israel is enabling the Israeli military’s systematic abuse of Palestinian children; beatings, solitary confinement, and arbitrary detention are no way to treat a child. By prohibiting U.S. aid from funding these human rights violations, Rep. McCollum’s legislation recognizes that change will only happen when Congress demands real accountability.”

The post New House Bill Would Bar Israel From Using U.S. Military Aid to Detain Palestinian Children appeared first on The Intercept.

The contours of the campaign, in which spies posed as representatives of fictional firms and requested meetings to discuss financial opportunities, appeared to closely match those of a similar effort carried out by operatives of an Israeli firm this year to smear critics of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the far-right populist who is an ally of both President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

The private intelligence firm involved in the anti-Obama effort was identified as Black Cube by New Yorker contributing writer Ronan Farrow, citing two unnamed sources familiar with the operation. Farrow previously revealed the firm’s role in spying on women who had accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on Monday that an unnamed source close to Black Cube admitted the firm did spy on the Obama aides, but denied that the operation was related to the Iran deal.

According to Farrow, the documents outlined Black Cube’s assignment: to hunt for damaging information on former officials involved in negotiating the deal with Iran, including Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser to President Barack Obama, and Colin Kahl, former national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden.

“Black Cube agents were instructed to try to find damaging information about them,” Farrow wrote, “including unsubstantiated claims that Rhodes and Kahl had worked closely with Iran lobbyists and were personally enriched through their policy work on Iran (they denied those claims); rumors that Rhodes was one of the Obama staffers responsible for ‘unmasking’ Trump transition officials who were named in intelligence documents (Rhodes denied the claim); and an allegation that one of the individuals targeted by the campaign had an affair.”

While The Observer reported on Saturday that the private spies, including former Mossad agents, had been hired by aides to Trump, Farrow said that an unnamed source familiar with the operation told him on Sunday that Black Cube had been retained by “a private-sector client pursuing commercial interests related to sanctions on Iran.”

“Black Cube has no relation whatsoever to the Trump administration, to Trump aides, to anyone close to the administration, or to the Iran Nuclear deal,” the firm said in a statement. “Luckily,” it added in an aside, “the Mossad and the CIA are capable to deal with the Iran Nuclear Deal.”

Unless Farrow’s Pulitzer-winning reporting on Black Cube’s work for Weinstein is incorrect, however, the firm’s denial that it spied on the former Obama aides rings hollow. That’s because, as the national security reporter Laura Rozen first reported, the same front company, Reuben Capital Partners, a fictional London-based wealth-management firm, was used as a cover by both an operative who spied on one of Weinstein’s accusers and an operative who tried to set up a meeting with Rebecca Vanasek Kahl, who is married to the former Biden adviser.

The female spy who befriended actress Rose McGowan claimed to be Diana Filip, a Reuben Capital Partners employee looking for ways to empower women. She was later identified as Stella Penn Pechanac, a former Israeli Air Force officer and actress whose non-Jewish family was rescued from Sarajevo in 1994 by Israel because her Muslim grandparents had saved Jews during the Nazi occupation of Bosnia in the 1940s. The female operative who contacted Kahl’s wife, seeking a meeting with her, and promising a donation to her children’s school, posed as Adriana Gavrilo, a “Corporate Social Responsibility Associate” at the nonexistent Reuben Capital Partners.

According to her LinkedIn profile, Gavrilo — whose pseudonym evokes Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian Serb who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, sparking the First World War — appears to be older than Pechanac, but is also fluent in Serbian.

A screenshot from LinkedIn.

Farrow’s report notes that an intelligence operative using another name — whose now-deleted LinkedIn profile included a photo of a thin blonde woman who looks like Gavrilo — also sought a meeting with Ann Norris, a former State Department official who is married to Ben Rhodes, to discuss hiring her as a consultant on a film. Like Rebecca Kahl, Norris suspected that the approach might be from intelligence agents and did not agree to meet.

This is not behavior that should be acceptable in a democracy. It is thuggish, mean-spirited, and casts a chilling and threatening cloud over public service that risks extending far beyond me and @ColinKahl https://t.co/tQY1wOO7Yy

— Ben Rhodes (@brhodes) May 6, 2018

The identity of the client who paid the former spies to conduct the failed smear campaign remains a mystery. But looking for a way to destroy the international arms control agreement the Obama administration and five other countries struck with Iran is a key foreign policy aim of two world leaders: Trump and Netanyahu.

Last month, Black Cube vehemently denied that it was the Israeli private intelligence firm Hungarian intelligence sources blamed for an elaborate smear campaign targeting Hungarian rights activists and groups that receive funding from George Soros. However, there was little doubt that at least some of the operatives who carried out that attack on critics of Hungary’s prime minister were Israelis, since both of the men whose voices were recorded spoke English with Israeli accents.

Between December and March, as The Intercept previously reported on that effort, at least 10 people who either run Hungarian nongovernmental organizations or have worked with or been supported by Soros were approached by intelligence operatives posing as representatives of nonexistent businesses who requested meetings. Those who agreed to meet were then secretly recorded — in Vienna, Amsterdam, and New York — by intelligence operatives using fake names who probed their subjects for dirt on Soros or suggested unethical or illegal behavior.

As part of the operation, the operatives created fake websites for the companies they said they represented, all of which were taken down after the meetings. Heavily edited portions of those mostly uneventful conversations were then provided to far-right Israeli and Hungarian newspapers, which falsely presented them in the run-up to last month’s election, as incriminating evidence that the rights activists were plotting against Hungary.

Soros, as a supporter of Israeli and Palestinian rights groups, has also become a hate figure to ultranationalist Israelis — including Netanyahu’s son — who have recently bonded with ultranationalist Europeans around a shared hatred of Muslims.

Netanyahu, who has similarly tried to blunt criticism from rights groups supported by Soros, describing the philanthropist as “hostile to Israel,” has forged a close bond with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. During a visit to Budapest last year, the Israeli prime minister was overheard urging the Hungarian leader to help him undermine a provision of a European Union trade agreement that imposes an obligation on Israel to respect the rights of the millions of Palestinians it rules in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Although the effort to demonize Soros, a Hungarian-born Jewish financier whose philanthropy supports liberal causes, was accompanied by a government-funded advertising campaign that seemed to draw on racist tropes from the 1930s, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s spokesman, Zoltán Kovács, told The Intercept last month that the attacks on Soros, “if he’s a Jew,” could not possibly be anti-Semitic, since they were echoed by Netanyahu.

The target of one part of the Hungarian smear campaign, András Siewert, director of Hungary’s Migration Aid, was so suspicious of the approach from a man with an Israeli accent who called himself Grigori Alexsandrov, that he secretly recorded and photographed their meeting, and later posted the audio and photos on YouTube. Siewert’s recording shows that the operative had tried to aggressively push him in the direction of agreeing that his organization should be involved in politics, which he resisted.

That episode appears to mirror a conversation between an intelligence operative who posed as journalist to interview Trita Parsi, head of the National Iranian American Council and an expert on the Iran deal negotiations. Writing on Twitter, Parsi recalled that “things took a strange turn” at one stage in the interview, “as this pretend journalist tried to goad me into agreeing that the Obama administration had pursued the nuclear deal for economic and financial reasons.” According to a transcript of the call, The Guardian reported on Monday, the operative probed Parsi “for any ways Ben Rhodes and Colin Kahl… might have benefited from the 2015 agreement.”

In a series of tweets, Kahl suggested that the strange focus on him and Rhodes, as opposed to other, more senior figures involved in the Iran negotiations, might point to another Hungarian connection. Pointing to remarks made by the Hungarian-American former Trump aide Sebastian Gorka to Fox News in May, 2017, Kahl noted that “around the same time the Israeli firm was hired, senior White House aides began complaining to Fox News about a ‘Ben Rhodes-Colin Kahl nexus’ that was supposedly organizing opposition to the administration.”

Dr. Gorka criticizes media over White House coverage: "It's no longer fake news. It's now dishonest news." (via #Hannity) pic.twitter.com/K1mpXB6iJK

— FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) May 17, 2017

“About a month after the Israeli firm was allegedly hired,” Kahl added, “anonymous White House officials reached out to the Washington Free Beacon, a right-wing tabloid, to smear Ben and me with baseless and false accusations.”

“As the summer wore on, senior White House aides pushed a narrative that Ben and I were solely responsible for turmoil across the Middle East,” Kahl noted, pointing to a July, 2017 CNN interview in which Gorka said: “policies that were born in the Beltway by people who have never worn a uniform, the people that were in the White House like Ben Rhodes, Colin Kahl, they helped to create the firestorm that is the Middle East, that is ISIS, today.”

https://twitter.com/politicalshort/status/886641298085511168

At the time, Kahl responded on Twitter with sarcasm and a jab at Gorka’s inability to gain a security clearance.

https://twitter.com/ColinKahl/status/885595943818723328

Late Sunday, Kahl also noted that before Gorka was forced out of the White House, he was reportedly tasked by Trump with helping to look for ways to justify withdrawing from the Iran deal.

“Some senior aides to the President were obsessed with Ben and me, and were seeking to smear us, around the same time the Israeli firm was tasked by someone to dig up dirt on us and our families,” Kahl concluded. “Did these same Trump aides—or outside people they contacted—have any connections to Black Cube? It’s unclear. Maybe it is all a coincidence. But it’s a creepy one… and one worth further investigation.”

Gorka does seem to have a strange obsession with trying, unsuccessfully, to bait Rhodes into responding to his insults on Twitter — which continued unabated on Monday following the revelation that he and Kahl had been targeted by foreign intelligence agents.

Update: May 7, 2018, 6:00 p.m. EDT
This article was updated to note Colin Kahl’s observation that the former White House aide Sebastian Gorka had publicly claimed there was “a Ben Rhodes-Colin Kahl nexus” supposedly working to undermine the Trump administration around the time that Israeli operatives were tasked with digging up dirt on the two Obama administration officials.

Top photo: Former President Barack Obama confers with Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, in the Oval Office on Sept. 10, 2014.

The post In Plots to Smear Obama Aides and George Soros, Israeli Spies for Hire Attack Netanyahu’s Enemies appeared first on The Intercept.

Since that article, Weiss has predictably written multiple banal columns for the Times denouncing what she perceives as growing left-wing intolerance for dissent in general, but particularly on college campuses. I’ve watched as Weiss has become celebrated in right-wing circles as some sort of paragon of free expression and academic freedom, and mourned by centrists as the tragic victim of online PC mob silencing campaigns (imagine being a columnist and editor at the New York Times — with full access to the most influential media platform in the world — and seeing yourself as the victim of silencing and censorship), even though her entire career is grounded in precisely the viewpoint suppression, vilification, and censorship campaigns she now depicts herself as loathing.

All of this finally came to a head last night after Weiss published yet another column complaining that she and her ideological comrades are unfairly criticized by left-wing authoritarians who try to silence them by associating them with “fascism.” Weiss’s column was so replete with humiliating factual errors, shoddy argumentation, and glaring holes in reasoning that she ended up trending on Twitter, and her editors had to delete an entire paragraph from her column and then add an editor’s note explaining that she had cited evidence that was an obvious hoax.

In the course of the controversy, Weiss, in a tweet-essay that began here, finally addressed her own history of trying to ruin the careers of Arab and Muslim scholars for the crime of criticizing Israel. Unfortunately, she did so by falsely denying what she actually did, making demonstrably untrue claims about the controversies in which she was involved, and, worst of all, outright ignoring the most egregious example of her viewpoint-suppression campaigns:

I want to address a baseless accusation being peddled by @ggreenwald and others on this platform. When I was an undergraduate student at Columbia, I advocated for the rights of students to express their viewpoints in the classroom.

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) March 8, 2018

The campus controversies in which Weiss was involved for years are well-reported, and I wrote about and documented the facts at length in the profile I wrote of her. I’m not going to recount all of that here — those interested in the long version can read that article — but instead will just note several facts that others raised last night making clear how false Weiss’s attempt is to whitewash her long history of trying to suppress criticisms of Israel from college campuses:

(1) Anyone remotely familiar with the wars over the Middle East Studies Department at Columbia University, in which Weiss played a starring role, knows that her claim here — that the campaign was just a benign attempt to protect students’ rights — is utterly false. The campaign was designed to ruin the careers of Arab professors by equating their criticisms of Israel with racism, anti-Semitism, and bullying, and its central demand was that those professors (some of whom lacked tenure) be disciplined for their transgressions. Here is Megan Greenwell, now the editor-in-chief of Deadspin, who was the editor-in-chief of Columbia’s student newspaper during this controversy, responding last night to Weiss:

bari, i have no desire to be involved here, but your synopsis of the events of 2004/2005 is unfair. you weren't simply "advocating for students' rights," you were calling professors racist. i know because i wrote or edited most of the stories about it. https://t.co/77s7xmvsoG https://t.co/WRs5sfyh8l

— Megan Greenwell (@megreenwell) March 8, 2018

The article Greenwell references quotes Weiss as accusing multiple Arab professors critical of Israel of being racists: “We put the mentions of the publications in the film to expose the racism of these professors,” Weiss said. This is the person now using the New York Times op-ed page to complain that academics and commentators with unpopular views are the targets of unfair character assassination.

(2) That the campaign against these Arab professors was about suppressing criticisms of Israel and intimidating and punishing professors who voiced such criticisms was barely hidden. The New York Civil Liberties Union — historically reluctant to involve itself in disputes involving Israel — strongly condemned the campaign against these Arab professors at Columbia that Weiss helped to lead.

The group “called on Columbia University President Lee Bollinger to resist attacks from within and outside the university that jeopardize academic freedom at Columbia,” and it explicitly made clear that the whole point of the campaign “is whether professors teaching controversial subject matter that offends some students should be disciplined or face recrimination for expressing unpopular views in their classrooms.” (Anthony Weiner, at the time a member of Congress running for mayor of New York, was just one of many politicians who demanded that Professor Joseph Massad be fired for what he called “his displays of anti-Semitism.”) In denouncing the censorship campaign Weiss helped to lead, the NYCLU made clear that the excuse she offered last night is totally false:

It is clear that this controversy would not have acquired the attention it received if it were simply about the rudeness of professors or their intolerance of other points of view. This David Project film would not have provoked controversy had it not arisen out of the divisive political controversy involving Israel and Palestine. The attack on Professor Massad and other in the MEALAC Department is really about their scholarship and political expression.

As Professor Juan Cole wrote at the time: “The lesson for academics, and American society as a whole: McCarthyism is unacceptable except when criticism of Israel is involved.” Indeed, as Ali Abunimah noted last night, just two years ago Weiss wrote a long article accusing Massad of being an anti-Semite and lamenting that he “won tenure in 2009 despite the sustained and strong opposition of student whistleblowers, concerned alumni, and others.”

That’s what makes this whole spectacle so amazing: The New York Times is allowing one of its columnists to masquerade as a stalwart defender of campus free speech and academic pluralism while utterly ignoring, and allowing her to falsely deny, her own long history in trying to stigmatize and punish professors who criticized Israel, to the point where the NYCLU stepped in and denounced her campaign as a dangerous threat to academic freedom.

(3) The campaign against these Arab professors at Columbia generated a massive controversy that ultimately involved some of the school’s largest donors. As a result, an extensive investigation was conducted that ultimately exonerated the accused Arab scholars of anti-Semitism and other offenses. Though the investigative committee found one instance in which it said a professor had become excessively angry at a student’s defense of Israel, it concluded that it found “no evidence of any statements made by the faculty that could reasonably be construed as anti-Semitic.” The report, ironically, did find a campaign of intimidation — aimed at the Arab professors, not from them; it “describe[d] a broader environment of incivility on campus, with pro-Israel students disrupting lectures on Middle Eastern studies and some faculty members feeling that they were being spied on” — the very behavior Weiss now denounces when it comes from her ideological opponents.

As Cole noted, the report found that the kind of systematic harassment Weiss now pretends to find so objectionable was actually directed at these Arab professors by her own ideological comrades:

Although it was little noted in the press, the report did indeed acknowledge that Massad in particular and the department in general had been the target of an ongoing campaign of intimidation. It noted that for several years, after pieces appeared in the tabloid press blasting the department as anti-Israel, many non-students, clearly hostile and with ideological agendas, had been attending classes in the department, interrupting lectures with hostile asides and inhibiting classroom debate.

When the report was issued clearing these professors of virtually all the charges leveled against them and finding instead that they were the victims rather than the perpetrators of harassment campaigns, Weiss was furious and held press conferences and demonstrations to denounce it:

(4) Unfortunately for Weiss, her attempts now to revise her own history are rendered impossible by her own remarks about her activism, filmed years before she knew she would be at the center of this type of attention. As I noted in my original article, Weiss spoke on a panel at the 2012 Conference of the American Zionist Movement in which she explained (in a video on YouTube) that she “got involved in journalism through activism” — specifically, activism against Arab and Muslim professors at Columbia — and that she now devotes herself to the “connection between advocacy journalism and Zionism.” After Weiss gave her false rendition of events last night, Sacha Saeen used clips from this video to make clear that Weiss spent years doing exactly that which she now claims to find so objectionable on campuses:

Really?

Because here you are complaining about the very sort of issues which you now criticise student activists at college campuses today for. pic.twitter.com/WvHqCPGEkf

— saeen (@SaeenDiddyCombs) March 8, 2018

And while you rail against student activists at college campuses today, here you are explaining that you got involved in student activism because they weren't pro-Israel enough. pic.twitter.com/mF0y84NYcT

— saeen (@SaeenDiddyCombs) March 8, 2018

See the rest of that thread for other clips giving the lie to Weiss’s revisionism.

(5) Most egregious to me was the case that Weiss last night so notably decided to ignore: her involvement in the attempt to smear and ruin the academic career of a rising Palestinian-American professor, Nadia Abu El-Haj, for the crime of writing a book questioning the archeological claims of the Israeli government. I won’t go into all the details of this case — I wrote about it at length in that original article and it was also the subject of very lengthy reporting in the New Yorker and the New York Times — but the gist of it is crucial for understanding who Weiss really is and how false are her denials from last night.

In sum, Abu El-Haj was a rising academic star at the University of Chicago who was on a fast track toward tenure. Her 2002 book anthropologically examining Jewish claims to a biblical entitlement of Israel won numerous awards and praise from scholars across many disciplines. In 2006, she moved to New York and applied for a tenured position at Barnard; it was widely assumed, given her sterling reputation, that her acceptance would be automatic — until an Israeli settler in the West Bank started an online petition demanding that she be denied tenure due to her 2002 book about Israel.

That online petition led to an incredibly ugly attempt to smear her as an anti-Semite who used shoddy scholarship to question Israeli claims, and — needless to say — Weiss was a vocal supporter of this effort. Pretending that she was concerned about Abu El-Haj’s academic abilities rather than her views on Israel — as though Weiss were even remotely capable of assessing Abu El-Haj’s anthropological and archeological methods — Weiss wrote an article in Haaretz arguing that the fight over Abu El-Haj’s tenure “is not just another round between the Zionists and the anti-Zionists,” but instead, “is about the nature of truth, and the possibility of, well, facts themselves.”

For someone who purports to be such a devoted adherent to pluralism and free expression on college campuses, Weiss sure does have a tendency to find a large number of Arab and Muslim scholars who are critical of Israel who she believes deserve sanction, vilification, punishment, and denial of career advancement.

I’m someone who strongly believes in the right of people to change their views and to evolve. My first book, which began by describing my own political and intellectual journey, started with this quote from Abraham Lincoln: “I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.” And I find some of the concerns about prevailing viewpoint intolerance on college campuses to be valid, or at least reasonable.

If Weiss would acknowledge that she spent years engaged in the precise types of censorship and vilification campaigns that she has now come to regard as so menacing, I would find that admission admirable, not objectionable. But she’s doing the opposite: She’s denying that her activities were geared toward exactly the climate of intimidation and censorship against which she now crusades. Perhaps it’s possible that she’s just in a state of denial, incapable of admitting that she built her career based on exactly the types of activities that she now so vocally denounces.

But what seems far more likely is that, like so many people, Weiss finds censorship and vilification objectionable only when it’s directed at her, her friends, and the viewpoints she supports. In particular, it is this mentality that explains why left-wing attacks on racism, fascism, and other authoritarian views on campus receive so much attention from America’s pundit class, while the most pervasive form of campus censorship — directed at Israel critics and pro-Palestinian activists — is so often ignored. In Bari Weiss, the New York Times seems to have found the perfect embodiment of this free speech double standard. But none of that should justify allowing a New York Times columnist and editor to offer such blatantly inaccurate claims about ugly controversies in which they played a leading role.

Top photo: Bari Weiss, left, a sophomore at Columbia Univerity, speaks at a press conference organized by Columbians for Academic Freedom as a crowd listens outside the gates to Columbia University in New York, Thursday, March 31, 2005.

The post NYT’s Bari Weiss Falsely Denies Her Years of Attacks on the Academic Freedom of Arab Scholars Who Criticize Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

The enjoined law, enacted last year by the Kansas legislature, requires all state contractors — as a prerequisite to receiving any paid work from the state — “to certify that they are not engaged in a boycott of Israel.” The month before the law was implemented, Esther Koontz, a Mennonite who works as a curriculum teacher for the Kansas public school system, decided that she would boycott goods made in Israel, motivated in part by a film she had seen detailing the abuse of Palestinians by the occupying Israeli government, and in part by a resolution enacted by the national Mennonite Church. The resolution acknowledged “the cry for justice of Palestinians, especially those living under oppressive military occupation for fifty years”; vowed to “oppose military occupation and seek a just peace in Israel and Palestine”; and urged “individuals and congregations to avoid the purchase of products associated with acts of violence or policies of military occupation, including items produced in [Israeli] settlements.”

A month after this law became effective, Koontz, having just completed a training program to teach new courses, was offered a position at a new Kansas school. But, as the court recounts, “the program director asked Ms. Koontz to sign a certification confirming that she was not participating in a boycott of Israel, as the Kansas Law requires.” Koontz ultimately replied that she was unable and unwilling to sign such an oath because she is, in fact, participating in a boycott of Israel. As a result, she was told that no contract could be signed with her.

In response to being denied this job due to her political views, Koontz retained the American Civil Liberties Union, which sued the commissioner of education, asking a federal court to enjoin enforcement of the law on the grounds that denying Koontz a job due to her boycotting of Israel violates her First Amendment rights. The court on Tuesday agreed and preliminarily enjoined enforcement of the law.

The ruling is significant for two independent reasons. The first is the definitive and emphatic nature of the ruling. The court dispensed with an oft-repeated but mythical belief about free speech rights: namely, that they only bar the government from imprisoning or otherwise actively punishing someone for their views, but do not bar them from withholding optional benefits (such as an employment contract) as retaliation for those views. Very little effort is required to see why such a proposition is wrong: Just imagine a law which provided that only people who believe in liberalism (or conservatism) will be eligible for unemployment benefits or college loans. Few would have trouble understanding the direct assault on free speech guarantees posed by such a law; the same is true of a law that denies any other benefits (including employment contracts) based on the state’s disapproval of one’s political views, as the court explained in its ruling (emphasis added):

Even more important is the court’s categorical decree that participating in boycotts is absolutely protected by the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech and petition rights. Citing the 1982 U.S. Supreme Court case that invoked free speech rights to protect members of the NAACP from punishment by the state of Mississippi for boycotting white-owned stores, the court in the Kansas case pointedly ruled that “the First Amendment protects the right to participate in a boycott.” In doing so, it explained that the core purpose of the Kansas law is to punish those who are critical of Israeli occupation and are working to end it: “The Kansas Law’s legislative history reveals that its goal is to undermine the message of those participating in a boycott of Israel. This is either viewpoint discrimination against the opinion that Israel mistreats Palestinians or subject matter discrimination on the topic of Israel.”

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a law that more directly violates the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech than one that seeks to deny people benefits for which everyone else is eligible due solely to the state’s disapproval of their political views and activism. Since that’s exactly what this Kansas law did, the court concluded that it was unconstitutional.

Beyond the court’s emphatic rationale, the decision is significant because repressive measures like this have spread, and continue to spread, far beyond Kansas. Indeed, as we have repeatedly reported and documented, the single greatest threat to free speech in the West — and in the U.S. — is the coordinated, growing campaign to outlaw and punish those who advocate for or participate in activism to end the Israeli occupation.

Numerous other U.S. states have implemented similar measures as the one in Kansas — including New York, where, as we previously reported, Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order directing all agencies “to terminate any and all business with companies or organizations that support a boycott of Israel” and “requiring that one of his commissioners compile ‘a list of institutions and companies’ that — ‘either directly or through a parent or subsidiary’ — support a boycott.” As the New York Civil Liberties Union told The Intercept at the time about Cuomo’s order: “Whenever the government creates a blacklist based on political views it raises serious First Amendment concerns and this is no exception.”

Last year, a measure sponsored by Benjamin Cardin, a Democratic senator from Maryland and an AIPAC loyalist, joined by 43 other senators, went even further, purporting to impose prison sentences and large fines for anyone working with international organizations to boycott Israel. Only after the ACLU vehemently denounced the bill as a grave First Amendment attack that “would punish individuals for no reason other than their political beliefs” did several senators say they were re-considering their support.

Indeed, it’s hard to overstate how pervasive and mainstream these attempts to legally suppress criticisms of Israel have become, including in the U.S. As the legal advocacy organization Palestine Legal told The Intercept yesterday, “Since 2014, over 100 anti-boycott measures (similar to the one blocked in Kansas) have been introduced in the U.S., at least 24 of them enacted. Palestine Legal responded to 308 suppression incidents in 2017 and nearly 1,000 in the last four years.” The report issued by the group this week details just some of those efforts:

• Hurricane Harvey victims were required to pledge not to boycott Israel to receive relief aid;
• An NYC bookstore hid a children’s book about Palestine after calls for censorship;
• A Palestinian American professor at San Francisco State was sued for researching and teaching about Palestine;
• A Black student leader at the University of Wisconsin was condemned for speaking out against the connections between white supremacy and Zionism by Trump’s nominee to head the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

So widespread are attempts to punish and repress speech and activism aimed at ending the Israeli occupation that the Center for Constitutional Rights has dubbed this movement “the Palestine Exception” to free speech rights in the U.S.

The federal court ruling from yesterday is a ringing endorsement of the vital constitutional principle that people cannot be punished by the U.S. government or state governments due to disapproval of their political activism and viewpoints — even if the goal is to protect the Israeli government and its decadeslong illegal occupation from criticism and activism. The direct result of this ruling is that the Kansas state government is barred from continuing to force teachers and other state residents to take an oath to refrain from boycotting Israel upon pain of being denied contracts, but the broader and more enduring effect may be to emphasize just how authoritarian, repressive, and contrary to core civil liberties the global attempt to abuse the power of law to criminalize or suppress this free expression in the name of protecting Israeli occupation is.

Top photo: Israeli security forces and Palestinian protesters confront each other in Jerusalem’s Old City on Dec. 15, 2017.

The post In a Major Free Speech Victory, a Federal Court Strikes Down a Law that Punishes Supporters of Israel Boycott appeared first on The Intercept.

The predictable results of those meetings are now clear and well-documented. Ever since, Facebook has been on a censorship rampage against Palestinian activists who protest the decades-long, illegal Israeli occupation, all directed and determined by Israeli officials. Indeed, Israeli officials have been publicly boasting about how obedient Facebook is when it comes to Israeli censorship orders:

Shortly after news broke earlier this month of the agreement between the Israeli government and Facebook, Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked said Tel Aviv had submitted 158 requests to the social media giant over the previous four months asking it to remove content it deemed “incitement.” She said Facebook had granted 95 percent of the requests.

She’s right. The submission to Israeli dictates is hard to overstate: As the New York Times put it in December of last year, “Israeli security agencies monitor Facebook and send the company posts they consider incitement. Facebook has responded by removing most of them.”

What makes this censorship particularly consequential is that “96 percent of Palestinians said their primary use of Facebook was for following news.” That means that Israeli officials have virtually unfettered control over a key communications forum of Palestinians.

In the weeks following those Facebook-Israel meetings, reported The Independent, “the activist collective Palestinian Information Center reported that at least 10 of their administrators’ accounts for their Arabic and English Facebook pages — followed by more than 2 million people — have been suspended, seven of them permanently, which they say is a result of new measures put in place in the wake of Facebook’s meeting with Israel.” Last March, Facebook briefly shut down the Facebook page of the political party, Fatah, followed by millions, “because of an old photo posted of former leader Yasser Arafat holding a rifle.”

A 2016 report from the Palestinian Center for Development and Media Freedoms detailed how extensive the Facebook censorship was:

Pages and personal accounts that were filtered and blocked: Palestinian Dialogue Network (PALDF.net) Gaza now, Jerusalem News Network, Shihab agency, Radio Bethlehem 2000, Orient Radio Network, page Mesh Heck, Ramallah news, journalist Huzaifa Jamous from Abu Dis, activist Qassam Bedier, activist Mohammed Ghannam, journalist Kamel Jbeil, administrative accounts for Al Quds Page, administrative accounts Shihab agency, activist Abdel-Qader al-Titi, youth activist Hussein Shajaeih, Ramah Mubarak (account is activated), Ahmed Abdel Aal (account is activated), Mohammad Za’anin (still deleted), Amer Abu Arafa (still deleted), Abdulrahman al-Kahlout (still deleted).

Needless to say, Israelis have virtually free rein to post whatever they want about Palestinians. Calls by Israelis for the killing of Palestinians are commonplace on Facebook, and largely remain undisturbed.

As Al Jazeera reported last year, “Inflammatory speech posted in the Hebrew language … has attracted much less attention from the Israeli authorities and Facebook.” One study found that “122,000 users directly called for violence with words like ‘murder,’ ‘kill,’ or ‘burn.’ Arabs were the No. 1 recipients of hateful comments.” Yet there appears to be little effort by Facebook to censor any of that.

Though some of the most inflammatory and explicit calls for murder are sometimes removed, Facebook continues to allow the most extremist calls for incitement against Palestinians to flourish. Indeed, Israel’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, has often used social media to post what is clearly incitement to violence against Palestinians generally. In contrast to Facebook’s active suppression against Palestinians, the very idea that Facebook would ever use its censorship power against Netanyahu or other prominent Israelis calling for violence and inciting attacks is unthinkable. Indeed, as Al Jazeera concisely put it, “Facebook hasn’t met Palestinian leaders to discuss their concern.”

Facebook now seems to be explicitly admitting that it also intends to follow the censorship orders of the U.S. government. Earlier this week, the company deleted the Facebook and Instagram accounts of Ramzan Kadyrov, the repressive, brutal, and authoritarian leader of the Chechen Republic, who had a combined 4 million followers on those accounts. To put it mildly, Kadyrov — who is given free rein to rule the province in exchange for ultimate loyalty to Moscow — is the opposite of a sympathetic figure: He has been credibly accused of a wide range of horrific human rights violations, from the imprisonment and torture of LGBTs to the kidnapping and killing of dissidents.

But none of that dilutes how disturbing and dangerous Facebook’s rationale for its deletion of his accounts is. A Facebook spokesperson told the New York Times that the company deleted these accounts not because Kadyrov is a mass murderer and tyrant, but that “Mr. Kadyrov’s accounts were deactivated because he had just been added to a United States sanctions list and that the company was legally obligated to act.”

As the Times notes, this rationale appears dubious or at least inconsistently applied: Others who are on the same sanctions list, such as Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, remain active on both Facebook and Instagram. But just consider the incredibly menacing implications of Facebook’s claims.

What this means is obvious: that the U.S. government — meaning, at the moment, the Trump administration — has the unilateral and unchecked power to force the removal of anyone it wants from Facebook and Instagram by simply including them on a sanctions list. Does anyone think this is a good outcome? Does anyone trust the Trump administration — or any other government — to compel social media platforms to delete and block anyone it wants to be silenced? As the ACLU’s Jennifer Granick told the Times:

It’s not a law that appears to be written or designed to deal with the special situations where it’s lawful or appropriate to repress speech. … This sanctions law is being used to suppress speech with little consideration of the free expression values and the special risks of blocking speech, as opposed to blocking commerce or funds as the sanctions was designed to do. That’s really problematic.

Does Facebook’s policy of blocking people from its platform who are sanctioned apply to all governments? Obviously not. It goes without saying that if, say, Iran decided to impose sanctions on Chuck Schumer for his support of Trump’s policy of recognizing Jerusalem as the Israeli capital, Facebook would never delete the accounts of the Democratic Party Senate minority leader — just as Facebook would never delete the accounts of Israeli officials who incite violence against Palestinians or who are sanctioned by Palestinian officials. Just last month, Russia announced retaliatory sanctions against various Canadian officials and executives, but needless to say, Facebook took no action to censor them or block their accounts.

Similarly, would Facebook ever dare censor American politicians or journalists who use social media to call for violence against America’s enemies? To ask the question is to answer it.

As is always true of censorship, there is one, and only one, principle driving all of this: power. Facebook will submit to and obey the censorship demands of governments and officials who actually wield power over it, while ignoring those who do not. That’s why declared enemies of the U.S. and Israeli governments are vulnerable to censorship measures by Facebook, whereas U.S and Israeli officials (and their most tyrannical and repressive allies) are not:

All of this illustrates that the same severe dangers from state censorship are raised at least as much by the pleas for Silicon Valley giants to more actively censor “bad speech.” Calls for state censorship may often be well-intentioned — a desire to protect marginalized groups from damaging “hate speech” — yet, predictably, they are far more often used against marginalized groups: to censor them rather than protect them. One need merely look at how hate speech laws are used in Europe, or on U.S. college campuses, to see that the censorship victims are often critics of European wars, or activists against Israeli occupation, or advocates for minority rights.

One can create a fantasy world in one’s head, if one wishes, in which Silicon Valley executives use their power to protect marginalized peoples around the world by censoring those who wish to harm them. But in the real world, that is nothing but a sad pipe dream. Just as governments will, these companies will use their censorship power to serve, not to undermine, the world’s most powerful factions.

Just as one might cheer the censorship of someone one dislikes without contemplating the long-term consequences of the principle being validated, one can cheer the disappearance from Facebook and Instagram of a Chechen monster. But Facebook is explicitly telling you that the reason for its actions is that it was obeying the decrees of the U.S. government about who must be shunned.

It’s hard to believe that anyone’s ideal view of the internet entails vesting power in the U.S. government, the Israeli government, and other world powers to decide who may be heard on it and who must be suppressed. But increasingly, in the name of pleading with internet companies to protect us, that’s exactly what is happening.

The post Facebook Says It Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the U.S. and Israeli Governments appeared first on The Intercept.

But now, a group of 43 senators — 29 Republicans and 14 Democrats — wants to implement a law that would make it a felony for Americans to support the international boycott against Israel, which was launched in protest of that country’s decades-old occupation of Palestine. The two primary sponsors of the bill are Democrat Ben Cardin of Maryland and Republican Rob Portman of Ohio. Perhaps the most shocking aspect is the punishment: Anyone guilty of violating the prohibitions will face a minimum civil penalty of $250,000 and a maximum criminal penalty of $1 million and 20 years in prison.

The proposed measure, called the Israel Anti-Boycott Act (S. 720), was introduced by Cardin on March 23. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports that the bill “was drafted with the assistance of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.” Indeed, AIPAC, in its 2017 lobbying agenda, identified passage of this bill as one of its top lobbying priorities for the year:

The bill’s co-sponsors include the senior Democrat in Washington, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, his New York colleague Kirsten Gillibrand, and several of the Senate’s more liberal members, such as Ron Wyden of Oregon, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, and Maria Cantwell of Washington. Illustrating the bipartisanship that AIPAC typically summons, it also includes several of the most right-wing senators such as Ted Cruz of Texas, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, and Marco Rubio of Florida.

[Update – July 20, 2017: Glen Caplin, senior advisor to Gillibrand, sends along the following statement: “We have a different read of the specific bill language, however, due to the ACLU’s concerns, the Senator has extended an invitation to them to meet with her and discuss their concerns.”]

A similar measure was introduced in the House on the same date by two Republicans and one Democrat. It has already amassed 234 co-sponsors: 63 Democrats and 174 Republicans. As in the Senate, AIPAC has assembled an impressive ideological diversity among supporters, predictably including many of the most right-wing House members — Jason Chaffetz, Liz Cheney, Peter King — along with the second-ranking Democrat in the House, Steny Hoyer.

Among the co-sponsors of the bill are several of the politicians who have become political celebrities by positioning themselves as media leaders of the anti-Trump #Resistance, including three California House members who have become heroes to Democrats and staples of the cable news circuit: Ted Lieu, Adam Schiff, and Eric Swalwell. These politicians, who have built a wide public following by posturing as opponents of authoritarianism, are sponsoring one of the most oppressive and authoritarian bills that has pended before Congress in quite some time.

Last night, the ACLU posted a letter it sent to all members of the Senate urging them to oppose this bill. Warning that “proponents of the bill are seeking additional co-sponsors,” the civil liberties group explained that “it would punish individuals for no reason other than their political beliefs.” The letter detailed what makes this bill so particularly threatening to basic civic freedoms:

It is no small thing for the ACLU to insert itself into this controversy. One of the most traumatic events in the organization’s history was when it lost large numbers of donors and supporters in the late 1970s after it defended the free speech rights of neo-Nazis to march through Skokie, Illinois, a town with a large community of Holocaust survivors.

Even the bravest of organizations often steadfastly avoid any controversies relating to Israel. Yet here, while appropriately pointing out that the ACLU “takes no position for or against the effort to boycott Israel or any foreign country,” the group categorically denounces this AIPAC-sponsored proposal for what it is: a bill that “seeks only to punish the exercise of constitutional rights.”

The ACLU has similarly opposed bipartisan efforts at the state level to punish businesses that participate in the boycott, pointing out that “boycotts to achieve political goals are a form of expression that the Supreme Court has ruled are protected by the First Amendment’s protections of freedom of speech, assembly, and petition,” and that such bills “place unconstitutional conditions on the exercise of constitutional rights.” The bill now co-sponsored in Congress by more than half of the House and close to half of the Senate is far more extreme than those.

Thus far, not a single member of Congress has joined the ACLU in denouncing this bill. The Intercept this morning sent inquiries to numerous non-committed members of the Senate and House who have yet to speak on this bill. We also sent inquiries to several co-sponsors of the bill — such as Rep. Lieu — who have positioned themselves as civil liberties champions and opponents of authoritarianism, asking:

Congressman Lieu: Last night, the ACLU vehemently denounced a bill that you are co-sponsoring — to criminalize support for a boycott of Israel — as a grave attack on free speech. Do you have any comment on the ACLU’s denunciation? You’ve been an outspoken champion for civil liberties; how can you reconcile that record with an effort to make it a felony for Americans to engage in activism that protests a foreign government’s actions? We’re writing about this today; any statement would be appreciated.

This morning, Lieu responded: “Thank you for sharing the letter. The bill has been around since March and this is the first time I have seen this issue raised. We will look into it.” (The Intercept will post any response from Rep. Lieu, or any late responses from others, as soon as they are received.)

Sen. Cantwell told The Intercept she is “a strong supporter of free speech rights” and will be reviewing the bill for First Amendment concerns in light of the ACLU statement.

Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, when asked by The Intercept about the ACLU’s warning that the bill he is co-sponsoring criminalizes free speech, affirmed his support for the bill by responding: “I continue to support a strong U.S./Israel relationship.”

Meanwhile, some co-sponsors seemed not to have any idea what they co-sponsored — almost as though they reflexively sign whatever comes from AIPAC without having any idea what’s in it. Democratic Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan, for instance, seemed genuinely bewildered when told of the ACLU’s letter, saying, “What’s the Act? You’ll have to get back to me on that.”

A similar exchange took place with another co-sponsor, one of AIPAC’s most reliable allies, Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, who said: “I’d want to read it. … I’d really have to look at it.”

Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., a co-sponsor, said she hadn’t seen the ACLU letter but would give it a look. “I certainly will take their position into consideration, just like I take everybody’s position into consideration,” she said.

Gillibrand, the only senator in the 2020 presidential mix to co-sponsor the bill, told The Intercept she would have a statement to provide, which we’ll add as soon as it’s provided.

Perhaps most stunning is our interview with the primary sponsor of the bill, Democratic Sen. Benjamin Cardin, who seemed to have no idea what was in his bill, particularly insisting that it contains no criminal penalties.

But as the ACLU put it, “Violations would be subject to a minimum civil penalty of $250,000 and a maximum criminal penalty of $1 million and 20 years in prison.”

That’s because, as Josh Ruebner expertly detailed when the bill was first unveiled, “the bill seeks to amend two laws — the Export Administration Act of 1979 and the Export-Import Bank Act of 1945,” and “the potential penalties for violating this bill are steep: a minimum $250,000 civil penalty and a maximum criminal penalty of $1 million and 20 years imprisonment, as stipulated in the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.”

Indeed, to see how serious the penalties are, and how clear it is that those penalties are imposed by this bill, one can just compare the bill’s text in Section 8(a), which provides that violators will be “fined in accordance with Section 206 of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1705),” to the penalty provisions of that law, which state:

That the bill refers to the fine, but not the prison sentence, is not enough to prevent a judge from applying the statute’s prison term, because the bill brings the statute into play, said Faiz Shakir, the ACLU’s political director, who authored the letter to the Senate. “The referral to the statute keeps criminal penalties in play, regardless of what their preference for punishment might be,” said Shakir.

The bill also extends the current prohibition on participating in boycotts sponsored by foreign governments to cover boycotts from international organizations such as the U.N. and the European Union. It also explicitly extends the boycott ban from Israel generally to any parts of Israel, including the settlements. For that reason, Ruebner explains, the bill — by design — would outlaw “campaigns by the Palestine solidarity movement to pressure corporations to cut ties to Israel or even with Israeli settlements.”

This pernicious bill highlights many vital yet typically ignored dynamics in Washington. First, journalists love to lament the lack of bipartisanship in Washington, yet the very mention of the word “Israel” causes most members of both parties to quickly snap into line in a show of unanimity that would make the regime of North Korea blush with envy. Even when virtually the entire world condemns Israeli aggression, or declares settlements illegal, the U.S. Congress — across party and ideological lines — finds virtually complete harmony in uniting against the world consensus and in defense of the Israeli government.

Third, AIPAC continues to be one of the most powerful, and pernicious, lobbying forces in the country. In what conceivable sense is it of benefit to Americans to turn them into felons for the crime of engaging in political activism in protest of a foreign nation’s government? And this is hardly the first time they have attempted to do this through their most devoted congressional loyalists; Cardin, for instance, had previously succeeded in inserting into trade bills provisions that would disfavor anyone who supports a boycott of Israel.

Finally, it is hard to put into words the irony of watching many of the most celebrated and beloved congressional leaders of the anti-authoritarian Resistance — Gillibrand, Schiff, Swalwell, and Lieu — sponsor one of the most oppressive and authoritarian bills to appear in Congress in many years. How can one credibly inveigh against “authoritarianism” while sponsoring a bill that dictates to American citizens what political views they are and are not allowed to espouse under threat of criminal prosecution? Whatever labels one might want to apply to the sponsors of this bill, “anti-authoritarianism” should not be among them.

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Top photo: Demonstrators protest outside Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office in New York City on June 9, 2016.

The post U.S. Lawmakers Seek to Criminally Outlaw Support for Boycott Campaign Against Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

Even before Benjamin Netanyahu locked him in a warm embrace, Jared Kushner began his effort to broker peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians by making it clear that he completely accepts Israel’s vision of itself as an innocent victim.

That’s because Kushner started his 15-hour trip to the Middle East on Wednesday by mourning with the family of an Israeli police officer, Hadas Malka, who was killed by a Palestinian assailant in East Jerusalem on Friday.

Jared Kushner lands in Israel, rushes to visit Malka family.https://t.co/qLcsNMstpR pic.twitter.com/V17fFWTS87

— Eli Dror (@edrormba) June 21, 2017

Since her death, Israelis have been outraged over the murder of Malka, who was a member of the border police force charged with maintaining Israeli control in the Old City of Jerusalem, one of the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel since 1967.

Major Hadas Malka passed away after fighting for her life and fighting the evil Palestinian Terrorist who stabbed and murdered her! RIP pic.twitter.com/hfCvWNUTBe

— May Golan ??? ???? (@GolanMay) June 16, 2017

Kushner also expressed the condolences of his father-in-law, President Donald Trump, according to Yedioth Ahronoth, an Israeli newspaper. The father of the murdered woman reportedly tried to draw a contrast between Israelis and Palestinians by telling Kushner that while his wife was weeping and in pain over their daughter’s death, the mother of the Palestinian who killed her, and was shot dead afterward, “is praising and glorifying her son.”

Malka’s killing, as part of a coordinated attack by three Palestinian assailants on officers at the Damascus Gate in the Old City, was described by Israeli officials as a terrorist attack.

Funeral of Border policewoman Hadas Malka last night. She was murdered in terrorist attack at Damascus gate on Friday. May she rest in peace pic.twitter.com/9bZa5Xm4cl

— Micky Rosenfeld (@MickyRosenfeld) June 18, 2017

Ahead of Kushner’s visit, Jason Greenblatt, the Trump administration’s peace envoy for the region, echoed that language by condemning what he called the “savage terrorist attack” on the young officer.

https://twitter.com/jdgreenblatt45/status/876565626994733056

https://twitter.com/jdgreenblatt45/status/876825691211300864

While the young woman’s killing was the latest in a long series of tragedies in nearly a century of conflict, the description of the attack as terrorism overlooks the fact that she was in East Jerusalem as an armed officer responsible for enforcing Israel’s control over the captive population of an occupied territory. The use of that language by American officials also clashes with U.S. law, which clearly defines terrorism as “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.”

President Obama’s last ambassador to Israel, Daniel Shapiro, praised Kushner for mourning Malka’s death, and confirmed to The Intercept that the Obama administration had also described Palestinian attacks on Israeli soldiers as terrorism.

Very decent and very smart of Jared Kushner to begin his visit in Israel with a stop at the shiva house of the family of Hadas Malka z"l. https://t.co/9Ec4sOuWTS

— Dan Shapiro (@DanielBShapiro) June 21, 2017

While Israeli officials and reporters routinely refer to all Palestinian attacks against members of their security forces as terrorism — and Americans have followed suit — the political philosopher Michael Walzer has argued that it is important to distinguish that sort of violence from the attacks on civilians.

“Terrorism is the deliberate killing of innocent people, at random, in order to spread fear through a whole population and force the hand of its political leaders,” Walzer wrote in 2002. “The common element is the targeting of people who are, in both military and political senses, noncombatants: not soldiers, not public officials, just ordinary people. And they aren’t killed incidentally in the course of actions aimed elsewhere; they are killed intentionally.”

“I don’t accept the notion that ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,'” Walzer wrote. “In the 1960s, when someone from the FLN put a bomb in a cafe where French teenagers gathered to flirt and dance and called himself a freedom fighter, only fools were fooled,” he added, in reference to excuses once made for terror attacks aimed at French civilians by Algerian militants.

In an interview in 2006, Walzer was asked if it was ever possible for attacks on soldiers to be acts of terrorism. He answered:

My instinct is to say that attacks on soldiers are not terrorist attacks. That does not make them right, terrorism is not the only negative moral term in our vocabulary. I did not think that the plane that flew into the Pentagon in 2001 was a terrorist attack or, better said, it was a terrorist attack only because the people in the plane were innocent civilians who were being used and murdered. But if you imagine an attack on the Pentagon without those innocent people in the plane, that would not have been a terrorist attack — whereas the attack on the Twin Towers was terroristic.

I feel the same way in the Israeli cases: Whatever you want to say about Palestinian resistance to the occupation, there is a difference between attacking soldiers and killing civilians, and it is an important moral difference.

Of course it is not only in reference to violence against Israelis that American officials now routinely misuse the word “terrorism.” The term has also been incorrectly used to describe actual or planned attacks on U.S. troops fighting the “war on terrorism” in Iraq. That was made clear in 2013, when the Justice Department announced the successful prosecution of two Iraqi citizens living in Bowling Green, Kentucky, on federal terrorism charges, for attempting “to send weapons and money to Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) for the purpose of killing U.S. soldiers.”

The two men, Mohanad Shareef Hammadi and Waad Ramadan Alwan, had “participated in terrorist activities overseas and attempted to continue providing material support to terrorists while they lived here in the United States,” Lisa Monaco, the assistant attorney general for national security, said at the time.

“These are experienced terrorists who willingly and enthusiastically participated in what they believed were insurgent support operations designed to harm American soldiers in Iraq,” David Hale, the U.S. attorney on the case, said after the men were convicted.

“Protecting the United States from terrorist attacks remains the FBI’s top priority,” Perrye Turner, special agent in charge of the FBI Louisville Division, added.

However, a closer look at the charges against the two men reveals that their “terrorist activities overseas” consisted of using explosives and sniper rifles “to target U.S. forces” during the American occupation of their home country between 2003 and 2006. While American officials obviously had the right to prosecute men living in the U.S. who plotted to kill American soldiers, Iraqi insurgents who resisted the U.S. invasion by force were clearly not attacking noncombatants.

Rather than being, as it might seem, a narrow issue of semantics, the description of Hadas Malka’s killer as a terrorist reveals a profound confusion over the question of what role Israeli soldiers and the paramilitary border police play in enforcing the occupation of areas seized by Israel during the 1967 war. Although Israel claims that Jerusalem is not occupied, its annexation of the city’s Palestinian neighborhoods after the war is not recognized by other nations, including the United States.

As an occupying power, Israel is not entitled under international law to colonize the territory it seized in battle — as it has done in the West Bank and East Jerusalem by facilitating Jewish-only settlements, including those Jared Kushner’s family foundation has helped to support financially.

When U.S. officials like Kushner treat violence against Israeli officers maintaining an armed occupation as a terrorist outrage, they surrender entirely to Israel’s view of the conflict as one in which its use of force is legitimate and any attack on its security forces is terrorism. By ignoring the fact that Malka was an armed combatant killed in an occupied territory, Donald Trump’s son-in-law also accepted Israel’s claim that the status of Jerusalem is no longer up for negotiation, just because it was conquered by force of arms five decades ago.

Top photo: Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with Jared Kushner in Jerusalem, Israel on June 21, 2017.

The post Jared Kushner’s Pursuit of Middle East Peace Looks a Lot Like Total Surrender to Israel appeared first on The Intercept.