April 4, 2024: Team Biden Gets the Knives Out

Queers for Palestine vs. queers in Palestine; The shadow party; The CCP runs influence ops in Canada

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The Big Story

As we’ve said for the past two days, the Israeli strike on the World Central Kitchen convoy on Monday appears to have been a tragic mistake. So it’s not to make excuses for that mistake when we say that the WCK incident has become the pretext for a renewed White House information operation designed to smear Israel and bring its Gaza campaign to a halt. 

Indeed, shortly before we closed today, The Wall Street Journal reported that Joe Biden called for an “immediate cease-fire” during his Thursday call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. According to a White House readout of the call, the president told Netanyahu that Israel must “announce and implement a series of specific, concrete and measurable steps to address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering, and the safety of aid workers,” and that “U.S. policy will be determined … by our assessment of Israel’s immediate action on these steps.” Answers on what these steps are, and what consequences the White House is threatening for an Israeli failure to comply, will have to wait for further reporting. Given the White House’s track record, we expect various Biden minions to announce that there’s been “no change in policy” and that their support for Israel is as strong as ever. But we’ll see. 

Still, it’s worth reviewing how we got here. Over the past few days, the messaging from the administration has followed a familiar pattern. Officially, the White House has mixed condemnation of the WCK convoy strike with expressions of support for Israel and trust in the IDF’s professionalism (e.g., White House national security spokesman John Kirby’s remarks from Tuesday that there is no evidence the IDF has violated the laws of war). Unofficially, it has tarred the Israelis as psychopathic warmongers through anonymous leaks and public statements from Obama officials who are—on paper, at least—outside of government. 

A Wednesday story in Politico, for instance, noted that Biden was “privately enraged” by the WCK strike and had demanded “accountability” for those responsible—but that that was “as far as he and the White House will go for now.” Cue the professions of outrage from Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau and former Obama speechwriter-cum-lead Iran deal salesman Ben Rhodes—he of Obama “mind meld” fame—stating that this is not enough:

In what was no doubt a total coincidence, former Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass then went on Morning Joe on Thursday and asked, “Why does Israel need 2,000-pound bombs to be used in high-density populated areas?” Good question. As the WSJ reported in a December article on the arms transfers, the 2,000-pound BLU-109 bunker buster is designed to “penetrate a concrete shelter,” and Israel presumably needs them for the same reasons U.S. forces needed them to drop on ISIS targets in Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria. Thankfully, a 2019 article in The War Zone explained those reasons (emphasis ours):

After the [U.S.] aerial campaign [against ISIS] started in 2014, GBU-31/Bs with both standard 2,000-pound warheads and the BLU-109/B penetrators quickly became essential as the U.S. military as a whole began targeting terrorist-controlled tunnel networks and other infrastructure, including command centers inside of large buildings and oil extraction and processing facilities.

Not that there weren’t critics at the time. Indeed, you can still visit Amnesty International’s page documenting the U.S.-led coalition bombing of civilians in Raqqa, which ridicules American rhetoric about the supposed “precision” of the air campaign. But that, apparently, didn’t count to members of the echo chamber as “killing innocent people.” Haass went on in the segment to propose that the United States place conditions on arms transfers to Israel and impose trade sanctions. 

In what was no doubt another total coincidence, the Obama all-star team’s public claims that a “weak” Biden was allowing “Bibi” to continue “killing and starving innocent people” happened to match up almost perfectly with leaks from “anonymous U.S. officials” to the effect that a weak Biden was allowing Bibi to continue killing and starving innocent people. What are the odds! As one “senior U.S. official” told Politico, “It’s just rinse and repeat with the Israelis. The American political system can’t or won’t draw a red line with them and that is regrettable.” But that insinuation paled in comparison to the Biden official who told Politico on Tuesday that Israel had probably deliberately murdered the aid workers. “Three hits on three cars in a row is not an accident. We aren’t stupid,” the official said. 

With respect to the official, they may in fact be stupid. Or rather, he may be stupid, but his bosses are being deliberately obtuse. Again, not to pick on the U.S. military, but in the 2015 Kunduz, Afghanistan, hospital attack we mentioned yesterday, a U.S. AC-130 fired 211 105 mm howitzer shells into a Doctors Without Borders hospital over a period of about an hour. Not only was the hospital on the U.S. “no-strike” list and clearly marked as a hospital, but Doctors Without Border managed to contact the U.S. military 12 minutes into the strike to attempt to call it off—to no effect. An internal U.S. military investigation later concluded that the attack was “the direct result of avoidable human error, compounded by process and equipment failures.” So either this official thinks the U.S. military was deliberately murdering doctors in Afghanistan and then lying about it, or he’s bullshitting. 

To complete the circus act, The New York Times reported Wednesday that “Dr.” Jill Biden had become “one of the strongest voices inside the White House urging an end to civilian casualties in Gaza.” At a Tuesday night meeting with “Muslim community members,” the president told attendees that the First Lady had been urging him to “stop it, stop it now.” Touching. We suppose that the half million Syrians who died during her husband’s vice presidency, with an assist from Iran and Russia acting with the United States’ blessing, were just not as photogenic as the Gazans. Or perhaps Muslim civilians who die at the hands of Jews occupy some superior moral category to those who merely die at the hands of other Muslims (for those, presumably, we need to address “root causes,” like Western imperialism). After all, as Obama mused to The New Republic in 2013, “How do I weigh tens of thousands who’ve been killed in Syria versus tens of thousands who are currently being killed in the Congo?” The world is a complicated place, man. Just not with Israel.

Of course, the incoherence is no mistake. As Tony Badran wrote for Tablet in 2022: 

It was in Syria that the Obama-Biden team honed the cynical duplicity we’re witnessing today. At the heart of Obama’s maneuvering in and around Syria was the practice of strategic messaging, which allowed Obama to hold both ends of the stick while speaking out of both sides of his mouth—or rather, letting cynical or clueless members of his administration strike seemingly contradictory poses, each of which allowed him to advance toward his goal. He could be simultaneously moralizing and a cold realist—whatever it took not to be distracted from his main objective of a deal with Iran.

The moralizing is a tool to browbeat American allies, such as Israel and Saudi Arabia, when they act against Iran’s proxies. The cold realism is for when the Iranians and their proxies do things that outrage American sensibilities. The “hypocrisy” is the entire point, insofar as it prevents American tilting toward Iran from being held up by anything as old-fashioned as a consistent moral principle. 

If you’ve made it this far, no prizes for guessing what the point of all the outrage was. On Wednesday, in a virtual meeting with Netanyahu’s top advisers, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan expressed their “deep skepticism” about the Israelis’ plans to evacuate civilians from Rafah, warned them they would be responsible for “the third famine crisis of the 21st century,” and told them that a proper evacuation of Rafah would take four months. To add insult to injury, the U.S. side of the conversation then leaked to NBC News that one of the Israelis, Ron Dermer, “began yelling and waving his arms around” while Sullivan and Blinken “kept calm and did not respond in kind.” Nice touch.

X user @Jewtastic, meanwhile, gives a rough sense of the American demands:  

In other words, set impossible conditions and then delay, delay, delay, until Bibi falls or the administration consolidates a domestic constituency for finally giving Israel the knife. Depending what comes out about Biden’s cease-fire demand in the next 24 hours, the knife might have already been delivered. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: How much is a dead Jew worth? The PA has a sliding scale, a new book explains

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The Rest

→Israeli soldiers recently discovered a trove of documents related to Hamas’ 2016 torture and execution of Mahmoud Ishtiwi, a Hamas military commander whom the group accused of having sex with another man, among other “un-Islamic” offenses, Haaretz reports. The documents, which include notes and diaries kept by Ishtiwi during his imprisonment and interrogation, reveal in stark detail the treatment meted out to suspected gay men, even among the terror group’s senior leadership. In Ishtiwi’s case, this included what he claimed were 1,200 hours of torture, including whippings, beatings, and being hung from the roof of a cell. Ishtiwi was arrested after Hamas internal security claimed it found evidence that he was having sex with his male neighbor, prostituting one of his wives, embezzling Hamas funds, and collaborating with Israel—a charge the group levels at all gay men. Under torture, Ishtiwi confessed to all of those charges except for collaboration and was sentenced to death by an Islamic court, though he later told family members the confessions were false and had been produced under duress. In what seems to have been an expression of “mercy” from Hamas’ Gaza leader, Yahya Sinwar, or at least a diplomatic concession to Ishtiwi’s prominent family, Ishtiwi was not convicted of collaboration, which would have prevented him from receiving an Islamic burial. 

We’d make a joke here about “Queers for Palestine,” but the truth is that “Queers for Palestine” has absolutely nothing to do with the reality of Palestine, Hamas, or Israel. It is a slogan in a war over the levers of power in the Democratic Party, between the Obama-Biden people who merely believe Israel should be a loyal satrapy in an Iran-dominated Middle East, and their spiritual children who believe it should be wiped off the map altogether. You think that Hamas’ execution of gay people is going to change our minds about Israel? Okay, Boomer. 

→On that note, Wesley Yang explains in our Post of the Day why the institutional Democratic Party is so committed to bizarre causes that alienate the vast majority of American voters—including the forced adoption of Orwellian neologisms such as “chestfeeding” and “pregnant people”—and in the process helps explain the esoteric logic of “Queers for Palestine”: 

→A 2021 Canadian intelligence report warned that the Chinese Communist Party was running influence campaigns “to discourage voters from voting for the Conservative Party” in the country’s 2021 general elections, according to an ongoing federal inquiry. The influence campaigns, The New York Times reports, featured Chinese agents operating through WeChat and Chinese diaspora community organizations to paint critics of the CCP as racists or traitors to their community—in the case of ethnic Chinese candidates—and denouncing a proposed bill to create a registry of foreign agents as “a racist assault on all people of Chinese descent.” The former leader of the Conservative Party, Erin O’Toole, testified Wednesday that the party believed it had lost five to nine districts due to foreign interference. Given the hysteria about foreign interference that consumed American politics between 2016 and 2020, we’re surprised we haven’t heard more about Chinese interference in U.S. elections. But maybe the Chinese decided that the United States just wasn’t important enough and focused their efforts on Canada instead. 

→One of our running themes here is the White House’s psychopathic Lebanon policy, in which U.S. funds directly subsidize not only the rule but the military operations of Hezbollah, thus neatly providing a proof-of-concept for Team Obama-Biden’s broader policy of “regional integration,” which it is attempting to replicate in the West Bank and Gaza. On Wednesday, the U.S. embassy in Lebanon announced an additional $67 million in humanitarian assistance for those displaced by “insecurity” in southern Lebanon—i.e., Hezbollah-connected Lebanese Shiite families displaced due to Israeli retaliation for Hezbollah attacks on northern Israel. Tablet contributor Michael Doran explains the logic:

→With help from ZeroHedge, we’ve run a few items over the past several months on the persistent gap between the jobs numbers reported in the Bureau of Labor Statistics household survey, which shows anemic job growth and rising unemployment, and the establishment survey, which shows strong job growth and minimal unemployment. We’ve also highlighted numbers showing that all job growth since 2019 has been among the foreign-born. On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal ran an article putting those two puzzle pieces together, arguing that the gap between the two surveys is due to faulty Census population estimates used by the household survey, which don’t account for the millions of illegal immigrants who have entered both the country (and the workforce) since 2021. The Journal, which is generally boosterish on immigration, reports this as good news, noting that it means there is less risk of “wage pressure” overheating the economy. In other words, because the labor supply is growing so fast, an increase in jobs isn’t translating to higher wages. But it also means that the household survey, which has consistently painted a gloomier picture of the post-pandemic economy than the establishment survey, may still offer a more accurate glimpse into economic conditions for native-born workers, aka voters. 

Read it here: https://www.wsj.com/economy/jobs/unemployment-jobs-report-us-immigration-surge-8e260f47 

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Ramping Up Sephardic Education, by Paula Jacobs

New initiatives aim to preserve Sephardic culture and language for Jewish students

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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How Much Is a Dead Jew Worth?

A new book shows that a ‘reformed’ and ‘revitalized’ Palestinian Authority would still teach and pay for the murder of Jews

By Gadi Taub

Lital Shemesh, a TV news anchor on Israel’s Channel 14, knows terror almost first hand. Last August, her life was suddenly transformed. "I was at home when messages about two murder victims began circulating on the WhatsApp groups of media people,” Shemesh recounts in her new book (in Hebrew). “Shockingly, the Palestinians on the ground snapped photos of the ID cards of the victims, and those pictures were also widely circulated. That is how, on the sofa in my living room, I suddenly saw the beloved faces of my uncle, Silas, and his son Aviad. A terrorist arrived at the workshop where they were having their car repaired, shot them at close range and murdered them.” The next day, Shemesh continues, another terrorist murdered her kindergarten teacher.

The title of the book poses the question: How Much Is a Dead Jew Worth? It is not only a political, but also an accounting question, with an approximate numerical answer: The Palestinian Authority compensates the families of terrorists on a monthly basis, in proportion to the amount of harm they inflict on Jews. As Shemesh explains, the sum is calculated by the intermediary variable—the length of their prison sentence.

The salaries are paid so long as the perpetrator is held in jail, and stop when they’re freed, which is why one terrorist released in last November's round of hostage exchanges with Hamas asked to remain in jail. (Israel refused.) Those who are killed while committing terror attacks gain "shahid" (martyr) status and their families receive stipends for life.

This commitment to terrorists' families conveys a clear message: Killing Jews is not just a religious calling that can grant you the status of "shahid" and guarantee you a place in heaven with 72 virgins; it is not only an ideological and political mission in the war to ethnically cleanse the land of Israel from Jewish presence. It is also a way to make a living, and the basis of the PA's welfare state.

The official minimum wage in the PA is 1,450 shekels (NIS), almost $400, per month. The average wage is 2,987 NIS ($800). As Shemesh lays out, you can get the minimum wage for lesser crimes that could also land you up to three years in prison. But if you're looking for a more comfortable life for your family, you have to do more harm to Jews. If you get 10 years, you make four times the minimum wage, and twice the average wage. If you get upwards of 30 years, it doubles to eight times the minimum and four times the average wage. While Israelis dream of higher salaries in the high-tech sector, Shemesh comments sarcastically, the Palestinians aspire to higher wages in the terrorism sector.

Pay-for-slay is a huge financial burden on the PA, which spends 7% of its budget on the scheme. Nevertheless, according to the PA's own testimony, these payments are also the most important item in the budget, and any attempt by foreign countries and organizations to condition aid on the discontinuation of pay-for-slay, would be futile. As PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas put it in 2018:

By Allah, even if we have only a penny left it will only be spent on the families of the Martyrs and the prisoners, and only afterwards will it be spent on the rest of the people. This is a group that we appreciate and respect, and we consider it the one paving the way to Palestine’s independence for the future generations. … We view the Martyrs and prisoners as stars in the sky of the Palestinian people …

The pay-for-slay program, as Shemesh documents, is just one thread in the whole fabric of Palestinian national culture that has woven the idea of jihad against the Jews into all aspects of life. Terrorists dominate the gallery of national heroes to the exclusion of all others. Streets, squares, schools, institutions, and even sporting events are named after them. They are a ubiquitous presence, and, in truth, they are essentially the only role model for Palestinian youth.

Schools are a critical part of the socialization of Palestinian children into this culture. Not only do Palestinian school books contain direct incitement in the form of explicit murderous antisemitic ideology, but also every subject, including grammar and math, drills the same message into children’s brains. Take the following exam questions that Shemesh cites (p. 20):

"Hamas shoots a rocket which weighs 50 kilos in the direction of occupied Tel Rabia [Tel Aviv], which is 90.25 kilometers away. What speed does it need to fly, what would be the maximum height, and how long will it take it get there?"

Or:

"Two people are carrying on their shoulders a coffin weighing 200 Newton in the funeral of a martyr weighing 800 Newton." The students are asked to calculate the strength the two men would need.

In a grammar exercise, students are asked to apply Arabic diacritics to this sentence: "Don't think of the occupier as human." (p. 26)

In other words, the cult of death reigns everywhere you turn. Regardless of how much well-meaning Israelis tried desperately to imagine otherwise over the years, the Palestinian national ethos is built around a genocidal war to ethnically cleanse Palestine, from the river to the sea, of Jewish presence.

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Our security establishment, Shemesh concludes, clings to the argument that the PA is at least better than any alternative, and so we do not hold it fully accountable. We've become accustomed to the PA's encouragement of terrorism and learned to just bite our lips.

After Oct. 7, this is no longer a viable position. I recently interviewed Itamar Marcus, founder of Palestinian Media Watch, the NGO that has exposed the pay-for-slay program. He said Oct. 7 was not the result of Hamas indoctrination, but the product of PA indoctrination. For one, Hamas hasn't been at it for very long. Its rule in Gaza is only 17 years old. The PA on the other hand has been around for three decades, and to this day, both in Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinian children are still being instructed in books produced by the PA. These PA-produced and regulated books ceaselessly pump into young minds the poison of the same death cult—of suicide and genocide—that animates the pay-for-slay program. These books planted the ideological seeds, Marcus said, which bore the poisoned fruits that Hamas reaped on Oct. 7. They provided the breeding ground that produced the hate that fuels support for Hamas.

Shemesh also cites sources, such as Lt. Col. (res.) Maurice Hirsch of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, who concur that PA indoctrination is a greater source than Hamas of this genocidal hate. The idea that the way forward in Gaza is for Hamas to be replaced by the supposedly moderate Palestinian Authority—which would somehow be “revitalized," and then sign a peace deal with Israel—is therefore a risible exercise in wishful thinking.

The Oslo process, and the so-called two-state solution which it was supposed to produce, was always premised on the idea that Israel would arm a Palestinian police force under the PA, and then outsource Israel's security to it. The test of its success was supposed to be the suppression of terrorism. The result was simply more terrorism.

Regardless of this bloody track record, the White House and the State Department, along with pro-Democratic Party Israeli think tanks, former IDF generals nurtured on a woke ideological diet in American universities, and the Israeli press, are careful to maintain a conceptual barrier between Hamas as a terror organization, and the PA. The latter, they maintain, is a crucial partner in the fight against terrorism—the same PA that, in reality, glorifies and incentivizes terrorism.

By now, moreover, we know that PA security forces personnel are directly involved in terror attacks. In fact, even as the press in Israel and in the West tries to ignore it, PA officials brag about their complicity in terrorism in Arabic to their own people. They cannot stand to lose their competition with Hamas in the national Jew-killing contest.

A Palestinian Media Watch report published in February, titled "Terrorists in Uniform," quoted a PA spokesperson bragging that "roughly 63-65% of the number of Martyrs in the West Bank … are members of the Fatah Movement. And most of them are members of the [PA] Security Forces or their sons.” The police forces Israel armed and the U.S. military trains are active participants in the terror they were supposed to stop. Using the guns we gave them to stop terror, they instead kill Jews—in the process securing the livelihoods of their families.

According to another report released by the Israeli NGO Regavim Movement titled "Officers by Day Terrorists by Night," a spokesman for the PA security apparatus says there are more than 300 security servicemen in Israeli prisons, and that in the last three decades 2,000 additional members of these forces fell as "martyrs" in the struggle against Israel—that is, died while committing terrorism. The report itself, which is limited to the period from 2020 through 2024, was able to identify positively, using open sources, only 78 PA security servicemen, 46 of whom died while committing terror attacks and are therefore considered martyrs. The full data is difficult to collect. The IDF refuses to release numbers because it is invested in its traditional pro-PA stance, while the PA likely inflates the numbers. But this in itself should tell us all we need to know: While its defenders in the West bend over backward to describe the PA as a partner against terrorism and a force of peace and moderation, the PA itself showcases and even aggrandizes its own complicity in terrorism, because this is how it expects to secure its legitimacy in the eyes of its own people. And if Palestinian polls are to be believed—that more than 70% of Palestinians in Judea and Samaria support the Oct. 7 massacre—then, by showboating, the PA is acting in accordance to its own interests. Killing Jews has more than a pecuniary reward. It carries with it prestige, legitimacy, popularity, and acclaim.

Less than two weeks after the Oct. 7 attack, the PA's Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs included an infamous Hadith—a saying attributed in the tradition to the messenger of Islam—in its official guidelines that provided imams with talking points to use in their Oct. 20 Friday sermon in Palestinian mosques. The Hadith says that judgment day will only come after the believers have exterminated the Jews. On that day, it says, even rocks and trees will help in the cause of jihad. They will say, “Oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew hiding behind me; come and kill him."

This horrific image, nature itself partaking in ridding the world of the unnatural Jewish scourge, is even more jarring against the backdrop of the Oct. 7 attack on the Nova nature festival, where partygoers attempted to hide behind rocks and bushes in the Negev desert to escape the slaughter.

The PA, the U.S. partner that Washington wants to put in charge of Gaza, has since added the families of the “martyrs,” the terrorists who were killed while committing the horrors of that terrible Shabbat morning, to the list of pay-for-slay beneficiaries.