Aug. 2, 2024: White House Says Haniyeh Killing “Has Not Helped”

“Massive fraud” in migrant program; U.S. enters “Sahm recession”; Israel courts the populist right

Aug 02, 2024

The Big Story

In a world in which the United States remained a staunch ally of Israel with an “ironclad” commitment to its security against the depredations of the Iranian empire, you might expect the Americans to welcome the news this week that Israel had dispatched three terrorist warlords—including one with a $5 million American bounty on his head for slaughtering more than 200 U.S. Marines—to their resting place in the great beyond. After all, it was the United States that vaporized the capo di tutti capi of Iran’s terror army, Qassem Soleimani, on a Baghdad airstrip four years ago, only for the U.S. president who ordered the strike to later grouse that he was “disappointed” in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for not doing more to help.

In our world, however, the Israelis’ tactical coup was simply another irritating obstacle on the road to “regional integration”—i.e., the Obama-Biden plan to establish Lebanon and a “Palestinian state” as U.S. protectorates governed in partnership with Iran via its local terror proxies, to be inaugurated with the achievement of a cease-fire in Gaza that will set the ball rolling on the American blueprint for “the day after.” The problem, for the Israelis, is that the American blueprint is also a blueprint for the end of Israeli sovereignty. Tony Badran explained that blueprint in Tablet yesterday:

It starts with U.S. investment and government grants to [Lebanon and Palestine] that dwarf anything that the United States put into Gaza before the war. For Tehran, such investment is a subsidy; for the United States, it is a way of “containing the fallout” from any pesky rocket attacks, since Israel will be naturally constrained from bombing anything built with U.S. money or housing U.S. personnel. Then, there is active U.S. training and equipment for Lebanese and Palestinian armed forces, which in turn serve as shields and auxiliaries for much larger and more powerful terrorist armies that dominate both societies. Funding these (fictional) entities is like creating a large, heavily armed version of UNRWA, the supposed U.N. “relief agency” that funded Hamas and its tunnels before Oct. 7. Except the human shields these entities deploy will now be American military trainers. (Read it here.)

And so, in response to Israel’s killing of Ismail Haniyeh, Joe Biden, who is technically still the U.S. president, was dragged before the cameras on Thursday night to proclaim that he was “very concerned” about Haniyeh’s assassination, which “has not helped” the cease-fire talks. He then confusedly climbed aboard a plane he wasn’t flying on, while Vice President Kamala Harris looked on in amusement.

But don’t worry. Even though the Israelis are insisting on ruining the good deal that the White House has put in front of them, and ungratefully attempting to spark a “regional war” with Iran that would see American troops killed on behalf of Jews, the United States still has Israel’s back. On Thursday, Biden spoke with Netanyahu to discuss “new [U.S.] military deployments” to help “defend Israel against all threats from Iran,” according to a White House readout of the call. On Friday, The New York Times reported that the United States was sending “additional combat aircraft” to the Middle East in response to the threats from Tehran.

Amidst all the theater, however, was an unmistakable threat. In April, when the United States forced the Israelis to absorb a direct hit from the Iranians and then pressured them to “take the win” by declining to retaliate, much hay was made of the unprecedented defense cooperation that enabled the Israelis to down the vast majority of Iran’s drones and missiles. A Thursday report in Axios, however, cited U.S. officials to the effect that the same protection might not be forthcoming this time. Per the report:

The Biden administration is concerned it may be more difficult to mobilize the same international and regional coalition of countries that defended Israel from the previous Iranian attack because Haniyeh’s assassination is in the context of the Israel-Hamas war, which has drawn sharp anti-Israel sentiments across the region.

Nice country you’ve got there—it would be a shame if your ability to defend yourself was constrained by Arab public opinion!

Separately, on Friday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights published a report on what it claimed were Iranian plans to attack Israel, involving drones launched from Syria by Iran’s proxies. “The Iranian proxy groups,” The Times of Israel notes in its write-up of the report, “have also ordered operatives not to target American military bases if the United States does not participate in defending Israel during the attack.”

IN THE BACK PAGES: Yaniv Voller explains how Palestine activists erased ISIS’s sexual crimes in order to deny Hamas’s rape

The Rest

→A controversial humanitarian parole program for migrants is marred by “massive fraud,” according to an internal U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) report obtained by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a pro-enforcement watchdog. The report concerns the program Processes for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV), which, beginning in January 2023, allowed for the entry into the United States, under “humanitarian parole,” of up to 30,000 nationals from each of those four countries per month. As of April 2024, according to Andrew Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies, roughly 386,000 people had “legally” entered the country under CHNV, with the only requirement being that they identify a “sponsor” in the United States.

The USCIS report obtained by FAIR reveals “massive fraud” in the CHNV application process, specifically regarding Form I-134A, which is the paperwork filed by the parolee’s “sponsor.” Per FAIR:

According to the internal agency review, evidence of fraud includes the use of fake Social Security Numbers (SSNs), including SSNs of deceased individuals, and the use of false phone numbers. Many applications listed the same physical address. In fact, 100 addresses were listed on over 19,000 forms, and many parole applicants applied from a single property (including a mobile park home, warehouse, and storage unit). In addition, many applications were submitted by the same IP address. If this weren’t bad enough, the same exact answers to Form I-134A questions were provided on hundreds of applications—in some instances, the same answer was used by over 10,000 applicants.

The Washington Times had previously reported in March that smugglers were charging applicants $5,000 or more to serve as their CHNV sponsors. According to FAIR, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol has suspended entry via the CHNV program in response to the findings of the report.

→Job growth slowed in July, while the unemployment rate rose to its highest level since October 2021, according to Friday jobs data from the Department of Labor. The U.S. economy created only 114,000 jobs in July, well below projections of 175,000, while the unemployment rate inched up to 4.3%, from 4.1% in June and a low of 3.4% in April 2021. Wages were up 3.6% since July 2023 but were only moderately higher than inflation, which sat at 3% over the same time period. The unemployment figures mean that the U.S. economy is now officially in a recession according to the so-called Sahm rule, which defines a recession as when the unemployment rate “rises by half a percentage point from its low of the past year” (per ZeroHedge). And, as ZeroHedge notes, the real picture may be worse. Initial Labor Department jobs prints have been revised downward for five of the past six months. Friday’s report, in addition to including the lackluster numbers for July, revised the June jobs figures downward by 27,000, from 206,000 to 179,000.

→Quote of the Day:

“Let’s talk about reality,” Chikli said. “Trump is a colorful character and there are different opinions about him, but when it comes to U.S.-Israel relations, he gave us recognition of the Golan Heights, moving the embassy to Jerusalem—which is of unmatched symbolic importance—and peace agreements with Morocco, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, and eliminated the commander of the Quds Force and placed crippling sanctions on the Iranian evil regime. Those are the cold facts.”

That’s from a profile of Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli by Jewish Insider’s Lahav Harkov. Chikli, Harkov notes, has broken with the practice of his predecessors by cultivating ties with nationalist parties and politicians in the West, seeing them as allies in a “civilizational struggle” between the “red-green alliance”—Islamists and progressives—and “the Judeo-Christian world.” “As a minister,” Chikli tells Harkov, “when I want to fight for Israel’s legitimacy against those trying to destroy it, we work with [Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor] Orbán, [Dutch Freedom Party leader Geert] Wilders, [Argentine President Javier] Milei.”

→Speaking of Orbán, the Hungarian leader delivered a speech on July 27 on the changing “world system” revealed by the Russo-Ukrainian war. The speech is too wide-ranging to summarize in a paragraph, but we’d encourage you to read it in full, even if you disagree with Orbán’s relatively pro-Russian and pro-Chinese prescriptions for Hungary. Crucially, in a passage that applies as much to Israel as to Hungary, Orbán argues that Western Europe has accepted its status as a non-sovereign province, not of the United States, but of the “U.S. Democrats”—thereby forfeiting its ability to pursue its own rational interests and tying it to a “post-national” conception of politics. This is leading, in Orbán’s telling, to a world in which the “disintegration and weakness” of the West, driven in part by internal political fractures, is the primary geopolitical fact that small countries like his must deal with. The prime minister also offered some interesting words on Trump:

President Trump is working on finding the American response to this situation. In fact, Donald Trump’s attempt is probably the last chance for the U.S. to retain its world supremacy. … The priority will be to rebuild and strengthen North America. This means not only the U.S., but also Canada and Mexico, because together they form an economic area. … They will make us Europeans, NATO and China pay the price of security; and they will also achieve a trade balance with China through negotiations, and change it in favor of the U.S. They will trigger massive U.S. infrastructure development, military research, and innovation. They will achieve—or perhaps have already achieved —energy self-sufficiency and raw material self-sufficiency; and finally they will improve ideologically, giving up on the export of democracy. America First. The export of democracy is at an end. This is the essence of the experiment America is conducting in response to the situation described here.

A guide to the future? Probably not, but it’s certainly pretty to think so.

Read the full speech here.

→Trump appears to be polling historically well among Jews, at least according to one recent poll. A new survey by pollster Richard Baris, the director of Big Data Poll, found Trump with 45.9% of the Jewish vote—still behind Harris’ 52.7%, but nearly 16 points better than the 30% of the Jewish vote he received in 2020. If the poll is accurate, the result would be historic—no Republican has earned more than 40% of the Jewish vote since Dwight Eisenhower did it in 1956. But Baris also has Trump receiving about one-third of the Black male vote, so treat this result as you would any single poll snapshot—with a healthy degree of skepticism.

→We know that everyone would like to forget the COVID-19 pandemic, but Paul Thacker has an excellent essay in UnHerd today on the strange case of New York Times writer Zeynep Tufekci and the January 2023 Cochrane Library review on masking, which doubles as an illustration of the way that media narratives distort “the science”—even among the “trust-the-science crowd.” In brief, Cochrane, a medical nonprofit, regularly conducts scientific literature reviews that are widely considered to be the “gold standard” in the field due to their multiple rounds of internal checking and peer review. In January 2023, Cochrane published a review on the efficacy of masks in stopping or slowing the spread of respiratory viruses, concluding—in line with all public health guidance and literature reviews prior to the pandemic—that it was “uncertain” whether they had any effect. However, three days later, Tufekci, a sociologist by training, with no background in public health, published an article confidently proclaiming “the science is clear that masks work”—citing statements from Cochrane’s editor in chief, Karla Soares-Weiser, that the review was “unclear and imprecise” and that at least one of the study’s authors had misrepresented its findings to the public. Then CDC Director Rochelle Walensky later testified to Congress, falsely, that the Cochrane study had been “retracted.”

It turns out, according to internal correspondence and Thacker’s interviews with the principals, that there were never any problems with the review whatsoever; Tufekci simply went straight to the editor in chief, who panicked and issued a “clarification” to ward off media criticism (Tufekci also misrepresented statements by one of the review’s co-authors to support her own conclusion). Earlier this year, Soares-Weiser issued a new statement explaining that, in fact, there was nothing wrong with the review and no changes would be made. But a Google search for “Cochrane mask review” still brings up several articles claiming that the review “went wrong” or “misrepresented” its findings—as well as Tufekci’s Times article blithely asserting that Cochrane was wrong and that “masks work.”

Read the essay here.

TODAY IN TABLET:

The Simple Pleasures of Bananas and Cream, by Jamie Betesh Carter

How American Jews came to love a treat that even a kid can make

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.

The Sabaya

How the advocates of Palestine erased the sexual enslavement of the Yazidis in order to deny the rape of Jewish women

by Yaniv Voller

This week marks a decade since one of the greatest crimes of the 21st century: the Yazidi genocide and the sexual enslavement of thousands of Yazidi women and girls by the Islamic State terrorist organization. A direct line connects this onslaught on Yazidi women and the Oct. 7 attack against Israel. In both events, the captors of Yazidi and Israeli women were documented referring to their captives as sabaya, an Arabic term that dates back to medieval times to describe the taking of occupied populations as spoils of war or, in a more contemporary context, slavery, including sexual slavery.

In one of the blood-chilling Islamic State videos from Iraq in 2014, cheerful commanders discussed the prices of Yazidi female captives, explicitly referring to them as sabaya. Similarly, on Oct. 7, an armed Hamas militant was documented sitting in the occupied Nahal Oz military base, referring, in the same gleeful manner, to captured female Israeli soldiers as sabaya. As the captives were sitting bleeding, beaten, and surrounded by the bodies of their dead colleagues, a Hamas gunman was recorded telling his comrades: “These are the sabaya (which the IDF, when circulating the video, translated as “women who can get pregnant”), these are the Zionists,” before telling one of the captives in English “you are beautiful.”

Although the use of the term sabaya in both contexts sheds light on the prevalence of sexual violence during conflict, the international attitude toward the term, and toward the use of sexual violence, was entirely different.

In the case of the Yazidi genocide, there was broad agreement about the relation between the term sabaya and the Islamic State’s weaponization and use of sexual violence. Freed Yazidi women and girls have recounted the constant use of the term as part of their abuse by their Islamic State captors. The activist Nadia Murad, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for her fight to liberate Yazidi women, similarly told of how an Islamic State commander referred to her using the term during her captivity. In 2021, a Swedish documentary titled Sabaya premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, telling the story of a Kurdish group striving to release abducted Yazidi sex slaves, winning universal acclaim.

Between 2014 and 2017, the international community documented IS atrocities, and as early as October 2014, the United Nations published a report based on interviews with hundreds of eyewitnesses and victims of the genocide. Another March 2015 report by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR) described IS’ sexual and gender-based violence, and referenced the group’s pamphlets that documented its rulings on sexual enslavement (sabiy). The following year, the UNHCR issued another report on ISIS crimes against Yazidis which chronicled how “captured Yazidi women and girls are deemed property of ISIS and are openly termed sabaya or slaves.” The European Parliament's Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights followed with another report in 2017 which also referenced how the Islamic State would “select, purchase and remove Yazidi women, whom they refer to as sabaya (slaves) and consider as chattels,” and whom they “systematically subjected to rape.” Briefly put, there was no debate about the meaning of sabaya in the Yazidi context. In fact, as recently as December 2023, a report by the U.N. Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by Da’esh/ISIL (UNITAD) mentioned the term 30 times and included a section titled “Sexual slavery—the sabaya system.”

This established consensus, however, did not carry over to Hamas and its Jewish victims. Instead, once the Hamas video from Oct. 7 was made public by the Israeli authorities, it triggered a heated linguistic debate and a semantic relitigation of the term sabaya and even its use. It was not only Iran's and Hamas’ propagandists who fiercely denied the term’s sexual connotation, but also reputable commentators, public intellectuals, and scholars. Heiko Wimmen, project director for Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon at the International Crisis Group, appealed to phonology, pedantically insisting that the Hamas gunman used a different word in Levantine Arabic, with a similar pronunciation but a different sibilant, which simply means “young women.” Meanwhile, Georgetown University professor Jonathan Brown, who characterized the IDF video as an “Islamophobic” mistranslation, denied the sexual connotation of the term, insisting that the word means merely prisoners or captives. Other commentators maintained that associating the term with sexual enslavement meant “regurgitating Israeli propaganda” and constituted “absolutely racist drivel.”

***

There were other examples of these types of claims, some of which Graeme Wood addressed in a column after the video was released in May. Wood debunked the denial of the term’s sexual connotation primarily by pointing out its prevalence in the Islamic State’s lexicon. Yet Wood’s article did not tackle the more acute question: Why, despite the clear evidence of the Islamic State’s use of sabaya to justify sexual slavery, have commentators rushed to deny the term’s sexual connotation in the context of the Palestinian terror group and Israel? And more broadly, why, in the case of Jewish victims, have so many been eager to undermine evidence about the use of sexual violence by Palestinians?

The answer is that the purpose of denying the sexual connotation of the word sabaya is to sanction Oct. 7 as a legitimate military operation under the laws of war, rather than an orgiastic human rights massacre. The assiduous avoidance of referencing the Islamic State and its use of the term sabaya was a tell. It is hard to believe that well-informed commentators are ignorant of the contemporary history of the term, especially given the bulk of evidence about its use. Anyone with an even modest interest in the Middle East in the last decade has been exposed to the sights of the Islamic State’s systemic abuse of the Yazidis and the testimonies, certainly after Murad won the Nobel Prize and the recent premier of the Swedish documentary conspicuously titled Sabaya.

Rather, the petty and willingly ignorant debate about the meaning of a single word was a sleight of hand—a tool to belittle or silence evidence about Palestinian complicity in sexual violence. By hiding behind semantics, these commentators could avoid confronting evidence of sexual violence that had already begun to emerge at the time the video was circulated, including a report about sexual violence issued begrudgingly by the U.N. (which the U.N. special representative on sexual violence in conflict, Pramila Patten, nevertheless insisted was “information” and “not evidence”), and used ornate linguistic exposition to undermine any potential evidence of Palestinian sexual violence.

The dissociation between the use of the word sabaya in both contexts also served a more specific purpose: to distinguish between the “resistance” of Hamas and the “terrorist” Islamic State, and discourage any comparison between the two groups. This trend dates back to the immediate aftermath of 9/11. After the start of the "global war on terror," scholars and commentators were at pains to differentiate between so-called global jihadi groups like al-Qaida (and later the Islamic State) and groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, engaged in war against Israel. Consequently, the latter were deemed legitimate “national liberation” and “resistance” groups whose use of violence is confined to a nationalist framework. Moreover, in contrast with global jihadists, the “resistance” groups were embedded in their societies, where they represented constituents in their respective political systems.

Although the distinction is seemingly about the proper categorization of Islamist groups and the classification of their varying ideologies and objectives, it is also, if not primarily, about something else. Whereas al-Qaida and IS are understood to represent wanton cruelty and inhumanity, in pursuit of a utopian ideology, the violence groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad resort to is deemed understandable—for some, even justifiable—since its context is a struggle for national liberation. Without this fictional distinction, Israel’s war against Palestinian terrorism would have to be regarded as legitimate. Or, to quote Colin Clarke, director of research at The Soufan Group, and Michael Kenney, professor of international affairs at the University of Pittsburgh: “if Hamas is equated with ISIS, as specious analogies suggest, the only available options for dealing with it will be military-oriented.”

But by memory-holing recent history and resorting to linguistic acrobatics, the polemicists revised the record of the Yazidi genocide and the means employed to justify it. In their effort to legitimize sexual violence against Jewish victims, they denied the plain meaning of sabaya and erased the testimonies and experiences of Yazidi victims. All that to defend the honor of Palestinian “resistance.”