March 1, 2024: The Hamas Propaganda Machine

Ted Cruz: White House hides Iranian plots; Nonprofit scam in San Fran; University of Florida eliminates DEI

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The Big Story

More than 24 hours after the deadly stampede at an aid convoy in Gaza City, Hamas’ Western propaganda machine is in full gear. We thought, especially given the experience of the Al-Ahli Hospital “bombing,” that the IDF’s aerial reconnaissance footage of the incident, and announcement of the results of its internal probe yesterday, might at least inspire some caution on the media’s part. Hope springs eternal, to quote our president, but in this case, it appears to have been misplaced. 

The New York Times, fresh off a series of “exposés” in The Intercept attempting to preempt the publication of a podcast on Hamas’ Oct. 7 sexual assaults, placed a video headlined “I.D.F. Videos Add to Confusion Over Gazans Killed at Aid Site” at the top of its home page on Friday. The video’s narration chides the IDF for refusing to release “unedited footage” (a familiar refrain from Al-Ahli and hospital-tunnel truthers) and complains that the “fragments of drone footage” only “add to the confusion.” Their “quality and short length,” moreover, make it “difficult” to confirm Israeli claims.

On the other hand, the Times video praises footage from an Al Jazeera camera crew on the ground for helping to “fill in some of the gaps about what unfolded on the ground.” How so? Well, the video shows a chaotic, predawn crowd scene, eerily illuminated by fires (no word on who set those), in which tracer bullets are seen being fired into the air “from the direction where Israeli military vehicles are positioned.” This is presented as some sort of gotcha, with the narrator explaining that tracers are a “specialized type of projectile” that “helps troops fine-tune their targeting.” The unstated implication is that IDF troops were “fine-tuning their targeting” into the crowd. That the Al Jazeera footage is entirely consistent with the IDF’s statement that it fired warning shots into the air is, apparently, context not worth mentioning. Similarly, a Friday morning CBS article downplayed the IDF footage as a “heavily edited clip of grainy drone video.” 

As we’ve written several times before, the information provided by the IDF may be wrong or incomplete, and one should not automatically trust information coming from the Israeli government or any other government. Whatever happened on Thursday was a chaotic event in an active war zone, and confusion, misstatements, and bad or incomplete information are to be expected. But that makes it all the more remarkable when a terrorist group with a long-established record of faking Israeli atrocities for propaganda purposes rushes out with a story of an IDF “massacre,” complete with implausibly specific claims about exactly how many people died and how (and supported by zero independently verifiable evidence), only for the media to place that narrative on equal footing with Israel’s while criticizing Israel for its “grainy” videos—as if the IDF is supposed to have IMAX footage of what it no doubt assumed would be an uneventful aid delivery.

As we said yesterday, Hamas knows its audience. Amid a wave of international outrage directed at Israel, U.S. President Joe Biden said Thursday that Washington was investigating “competing versions” of the incident, although he has so far resisted pressure from his party to place additional conditions on aid to Israel. In a separate statement on Thursday, a spokesman for the National Security Council said the United States mourns “the loss of innocent life and recognizes the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza, where innocent Palestinians are just trying to feed their families.” Indeed, the focus on innocent Palestinians trying to feed their families became something of a mantra:

• “That cannot happen. Desperate civilians trying to feed their starving families should not be shot at.” —Samantha Power, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Aid and Development

• “There is nothing that can justify the killing of civilians desperate to receive lifesaving relief for their families” —advocacy group Refugees International, in a statement calling for the United States to suspend aid to Israel

• “This morning, Americans woke up to the news that Israeli troops had opened fire on Palestinians desperate for humanitarian aid” —Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)

• “People wanted aid for themselves and their families and found themselves dead. The reports from Gaza shock me” —German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock

• “Deaths of Gazans Desperate for Food Prompt Fresh Calls for Cease-Fire” —headline in The New York Times

And so on. We agree, of course, that the incident is tragic, and it may point to larger issues with the IDF’s current system for delivering and distributing aid. But to gloss over what happened yesterday as “desperate civilians” being “shot at” is nearly as obtuse as simply running with Hamas’ blood libel. 

First, as IDF Lt. Col. Peter Lerner told Channel 4 in the United Kingdom, the IDF troops in the area were providing security for the aid trucks. Anyone who has been in a riot can attest that an agitated crowd of thousands of people is dangerous and a potential threat to the outnumbered contractors and troops, even when they are armed—the shooting of the unarmed Ashli Babbitt during the Jan. 6 riot, for instance, was ruled to be “lawful” and to have “potentially saved Members [of Congress] and staff from serious injury and possible death.” The “grainy” drone video clearly shows the drivers panicking and attempting to escape as they are rushed by the crowd. In these circumstances, warning shots to disperse the crowd, and to protect the lives of the driver, would have been justified. 

Then there is the big picture: Hamas is intentionally exacerbating the humanitarian crisis, which it hopes will create international pressure on Israel, by siphoning off aid intended for the civilian population and using it to feed its own fighters and commanders. Yet the IDF continues to deliver this aid despite knowing that some portion of it will be used to underwrite the Hamas war effort. Hamas then seizes on any ensuing problems, such as yesterday’s tragedy, as part of its propaganda campaign directed at the West. 

We’re beginning to suspect that the game is rigged.

IN THE BACK PAGES: An archive piece from Tony Badran on the White House’s attempts to build a Palestinian Hezbollah in the West Bank

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The Rest

→The Biden administration has abused the classification system to conceal information about Iranian assassination plots against former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and former Trump administration Iran envoy Brian Hook, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said during a Wednesday Senate hearing. As The Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo reports, the administration is legally required to notify Congress about threats to former officials, but last year began classifying these notifications to avoid having to reveal them to the public. An anonymous congressional source told the Free Beacon, “They know that if Americans knew the truth about Iran targeting Americans and American allies, there’d be a backlash to their appeasement.”

→San Francisco has blocked a “community” nonprofit from receiving city funds after an investigation discovered “an egregious and intentional scheme to defraud the City” involving fake invoices, double billing, and reimbursements for bourbon, cigars, and motorcycle rentals in Lake Tahoe, The San Francisco Standard reports. A joint investigation from the San Francisco City Attorney and Controller’s Office discovered the scheme on the part of the J&J Community Resource Center and its founder and operator, Drew Jenkins, who defrauded the city of at least $100,000, including $81,111 through fake invoices submitted to an accomplice at another “child services” nonprofit under a city COVID-19 grant. The city’s announcement of the fraud comes shortly after an investigation found that a different nonprofit contractor, SF SAFE, had misspent at least $79,000 from the city police department (including on staff trips to Lake Tahoe) and more than $1 million from a wealthy donor.

The fraud from these two organizations, however, likely represents a drop in the bucket within the larger San Francisco nonprofit sector. In the Feb. 15 edition of The Scroll, for instance, we linked to Sanjana Friedman’s report at Pirate Wires on the city’s $100-million-a-year DEI industrial complex, involving, among other things, guaranteed income and rent subsidies to a small handful of transgender people and hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to single-person media companies with no audience. As we wrote at the time, summarizing Friedman, city departments “fund ‘make-work and vote-buying schemes’ that directly transfer public money and resources to political clients and professional activists, who in turn disseminate woke propaganda to lobby for the transfer of even more money to themselves.”

Read more here: https://sfstandard.com/2024/02/27/nonprofit-accused-of-swindling-city-in-100k-scheme-involving-cigars-and-liquor/ 

And here: https://www.piratewires.com/p/dei-industrial-complex

 

→The University of Florida has eliminated all DEI positions, effective immediately, according to a Friday memo from Provost J. Scott Angle obtained by The Independent Florida Alligator. The move, from one of the country’s largest and most competitive public universities, was made in order to comply with a 2023 law, approved by the Florida Board of Governors earlier this year, prohibiting the school from spending state or federal funds on DEI initiatives. The move eliminates 13 full-time DEI jobs, freeing up around $5 million, which the school said it would spend on faculty recruitment. 

→Earlier this week, the government of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau introduced an “online harms” bill, C-63. While the bill is mostly focused on child pornography, it also includes provisions to establish civil and criminal penalties for online hate speech, including a potential sentence of life in prison for advocating genocide. That’s the most eye-popping change—but perhaps more dangerous is the power that the bill vests in a “Digital Safety Commission” and in the Canadian Human Rights Commission, which Ezra Levant of Rebel News describes on X as “an activist quasi-judicial tribunal run by non-judges, appointed by Trudeau.” As Levant explains, the bill defines hate speech as any speech “likely to foment detestation of an individual or group,” which is a vague and subjective standard. Worse, any member of the public can lodge an anonymous “hate speech” complaint with the CHRC, which can order the offender to pay up to $20,000 to the complainant and up to $50,000 in fines to the government, per violation. 

→Iran is sending attack drones to the Sudanese military, Semafor’s Jay Solomon reports. Under the Trump administration, Sudan agreed to normalize relations with Israel in exchange for being removed from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terror, but since the country’s civil war, which began last April and led to the evacuation of the U.S. embassy in Khartoum that same month, the country has been falling back into Iran’s orbit. Tehran reestablished diplomatic relations with Sudan in October 2023; now it appears to be stepping up its relations with the Sudanese military, raising fears that it could “morph into a [Tehran-backed] militia group similar to Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces, ultimately exerting Iran’s will in exchange for funding and military support,” according to one Sudanese analyst quoted in Semafor. By folding Sudan into its “Axis of Resistance,” Iran would be able to exert even more pressure over Red Sea shipping lanes and surround Saudi Arabia on three sides, as can be seen from consulting a map: 

→At a meeting in Moscow on Thursday, Hamas and Fatah, the ruling party of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority, said they will seek “unity of action” in confronting Israel. In a joint statement, the Palestinian factions, including not only Fatah and Hamas but also Islamic Jihad, promised “upcoming dialogue” to bring them together under the banner of the PLO, while stressing their agreement on the need for a withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza and the creation of a Palestinian state. 

→Quote of the Day: 

We must focus on … intentional inclusivity. For all of you out there, I ask you to set out your symbols of pride, share your pronouns in your email, particularly if you’re a person who doesn’t think they need to, initiate difficult conversations about racial and gender barriers, and share a bit of your vulnerability in a way that draws others in.

That was U.S. Air Force Col. Bree Fram, speaking at the Air Force Academy’s National Character and Leadership Symposium earlier this week. Fram, who is openly transgender and formerly led a nonprofit lobbying for a “transgender day of visibility” in the military, also asked attendees to remember that “we mark Pride not beginning with a celebration, but with a riot.” In subsequent emails with Spencer Lindquist of The Daily Wire, who first broke the story, an Air Force spokesman wrote that it was the official position of the service that “individuals assigned male at birth may transition to female” and vice-versa. “Female,” of course, is not a “gender” but a sex, referring to the production of gametes, and cannot be altered through hormones and surgery. “Assigned male at birth” is activist language suggesting that an infant’s sex is “assigned” by doctors rather than observed or recorded by them. 

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

For the Love of Leeks, by Paola Gavin

These tasty vegetables have been part of Jewish cooking since the time of Moses

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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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Apropos of our recent focus on the misdeeds of the Palestinian Authority security forces and their U.S. overseer, Lt. Gen. Michael Fenzel, we’re sharing Tony Badran’s article from last March on the Biden administration’s longstanding effort to ‘Lebanonize’ the West Bank.

Blinken Builds a Palestinian Hezbollah in the West Bank

Not content with fueling street demonstrations against Bibi in Tel Aviv, the Biden administration looks to ‘Lebanonize’ Israel with a new, U.S.-funded terror army

By Tony Badran

While the Biden administration has been busy encouraging and funding the Israeli protest movement against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposed judicial reforms, it has also launched a far more potentially dangerous and lethal attempt to destabilize the leading military power in the Middle East. The wave of domestic protests in Israel comes on the heels of the most deadly series of Palestinian terror attacks since the end of the Second Intifada. Incredibly, the U.S. is now proposing to take advantage of its ally’s political weakness by standing up a potential 5,000-man Palestinian terror army that would ostensibly fight terrorism in the West Bank in place of the IDF.

Washington, D.C.’s latest bout of Mideast pyromania began with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Ramallah at the end of January, right after a Palestinian terrorist shot dead seven Israelis outside a synagogue in Neve Yaakov. Naturally, the secretary of state came bearing condolence gifts: a lot more money for the Palestinian Authority, an agreement to provide 4G communications in the West Bank—an initiative from U.S. Ambassador Tom Nides, which he “pounded the table” in order to get rolling, even as there are concerns that advanced ICT infrastructure might complicate efforts by Israeli security to monitor terrorist communications—and a commitment to reopen the U.S. Consulate in East Jerusalem.

In addition to those goodies, which in no way constituted a reward for terror, or an incentive for PA-rewarded terrorists to commit further acts of terror targeting Jewish worshippers and other innocent civilians, Blinken also carried with him a new security plan for the West Bank, which the Biden administration has spent the past month putting in play.

The U.S. plan, said to have been drafted by the U.S. security coordinator Lt. Gen. Michael Fenzel, was reportedly presented to the Israeli government and the PA in weeks prior. It envisions the creation of a special Palestinian force that would supposedly go after militias in Jenin and Nablus. Unnamed U.S. officials told Israeli media surrogates that during his visit the secretary of state pressed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to accept the U.S. plan. He then did the same to Israel, which has been repeatedly victimized by mounting waves of Palestinian terror, incentivized by the PA’s “pay for slay” policy.

At his press briefing in Jerusalem, Blinken relayed the administration’s demand that the Israelis stop “any unilateral actions” that “would add fuel to a fire,” echoing a Palestinian condition that Abbas delivered in his joint presser with Blinken—the message being that Team Biden disapproves of Israeli counterterrorism operations. Blinken implicitly blamed Palestinian terrorism on Israel’s actions, painting the Palestinians themselves as an equally injured party in the recent wave of Palestinian attacks.

A Channel 14 news story, cited by Israeli commentator Caroline Glick, provided additional details of the American plan, which were reportedly raised at the Aqaba summit in February:

1. The administration plans “to provide 5,000 Palestinians with commando training in Jordan and then deploy them to northern Samaria, and perhaps the South Hebron Hills.”

2. As noted earlier, Israel would be required “to sharply curtail IDF counterterror operations.”

3. The plan "foresees the deployment of foreign forces, including U.S. military forces, on the ground.”

The U.S. plan, which is being pushed by Blinken, does several things, none of which seems likely to have a positive impact on the physical security of Israelis, whether living inside or outside the West Bank—which is known to Israelis as Judea and Samaria. First, by standing up a 5,000-strong militia, training it specifically in counterterrorism and commando tactics, and (one must assume) arming and equipping it, the U.S. will be giving the Palestinians military capacities far in excess of anything they can organically create or currently possess. The U.S. plan will create a working military command structure for a faction (the recruitment pool is likely to be controlled by Fatah) likely to be armed with advanced weapons.

While at first glance the new proposals might recall prior U.S. equip-and-train programs in the West Bank, the administration's plan is in fact shockingly at variance with previous such efforts. Functionally, this small army, as evident from the type of training it will reportedly receive, would not be a gendarmerie or border guard; rather, it would be an organized and well-equipped 5,000-man army with specific expertise in terror tactics.

How such training will be used by the ostensibly “pro-Western” Fatah faction in the event of Palestinian terror attacks on Israelis, let alone any wider conflict, should not be a mystery. First, the idea of a Palestinian force actually “countering” Palestinian terror is without precedent during the 30-plus years of the Oslo process, meaning it has never happened. Second, there are the words of the Fatah leadership itself. As Tawfiq Tirawi, Yasser Arafat’s former intelligence chief and perhaps the single most capable and best-informed member of Fatah’s senior leadership, put it in a speech posted to his personal Facebook page in 2020, the terrorists themselves are part of the Palestinian Authority's security establishment and should therefore be left alone by PA security officers. “These fighters are your brothers, so be on their side,” Tirawi urged.

A previous U.S. plan, supervised by U.S. Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton and long ago consigned to the ash heaps, was explicitly designed to train Palestinian troops in riot control and other police methods to control civilians—not counterterrorism. As Dayton put it, “we don't give out any guns or bullets.” Even the riot control equipment such as body armor, shields, billy clubs, and water cannons was carefully inventoried and supervised by the U.S. military and its contractors in concert with Israeli authorities. “We don't provide anything to the Palestinians unless it has been thoroughly coordinated with the State of Israel and they agree to it,” Dayton said at the time of his mission. “Sometimes this process drives me crazy—I had a lot more hair when I started—but nevertheless, we make it work.”

Such precautionary measures, designed to guard against the possibility of the U.S. providing the Palestinians with a large-scale terror army, were once understood as foundational for U.S. equip-and-train schemes. Now such thinking appears to have gone out the window. Indeed, providing the Palestinians with guns and bullets, and the training to use them effectively, appears to be the point of the administration’s plan—which in current U.S. parlance aims at “building state capacity.” In the absence of any kind of even semifunctional Palestinian state, the American goal is therefore to create a U.S.-backed Palestinian Hezbollah minus the theology for the West Bank.

In fact, several aspects of the Biden administration’s plan replicate a variant of the U.S. Lebanon model with the Palestinians. In Lebanon, the administration has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into equipment, arms, training, and programs for the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF). That massive and frankly insane expenditure itself then creates and justifies requirements for continued funding ad infinitum, and not just from the U.S. As a result, U.S. and other international military trainers are constantly in Lebanon in order to shore up their dubious investments. Over the past two years, the administration has picked up the rest of the LAF’s tab, and, in a legally questionable precedent, is now paying their salaries directly, as the economic situation in Lebanon has deteriorated. The logic here, again, is self-sustaining: If we don’t continue to underwrite the LAF, then our entire investment, including all those expensive weapons, will be lost.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see how the Biden administration aims to replay its Lebanese scenario with the Palestinians. In fact, at the time of Blinken's visit, an Israeli official spelled out what is sure to become a U.S. talking point for perpetual future funding to the new Palestinian special regiment: "Some PA security force members have taken to selling ammunition and weapons to fighters throughout the West Bank as a means to make a living amid Ramallah’s dire financial state,” the official said. So, America, if you don’t want to see all that expensive equipment being sold in Jenin and Nablus, you might want to keep the cash flowing.

Of course, not only does the LAF not go after Hezbollah ever, to the contrary, it facilitates, provides support, coordinates, and deploys jointly with Hezbollah, while also interfacing on its behalf with international interlocutors. And if you thought this was in conflict with American and European expectations for the force, you have it exactly backward. No one defends this behavior more than American policymakers, who ridicule the suggestion that the LAF should perhaps behave differently. Do you want civil war in Lebanon? is the prepackaged retort.

This will most likely be the U.S. posture after the creation of the new Palestinian force, whenever the latter opts not to take action against other factions—as has repeatedly already been the case in the West Bank, where Hamas enjoys a sizable share of public support. We can therefore expect to hear plenty more on how “acting as Israel’s police force” erodes the credibility of the force, or how it could trigger a Palestinian civil war in the West Bank, which “wouldn’t be in Israel’s interest,” and so on.

The point is, the administration’s plan, and the U.S. investments it is designed to create and sustain, are meant to be disincentives for Israeli operations in the West Bank. This is the model the U.S. has been implementing in Lebanon, turning that Hezbollah-run territory into an effective American protectorate run by a terror army that directly benefits from increased U.S. and European investments. In the Palestinian case, the potential deployment of U.S. and other foreign servicemen would serve as an added deterrent to Israel acting in its own defense, and putting American investments at risk.

In addition to the umbrella it provides to the PA, the plan similarly gives the Jordanians one more tool with which to poke the Israelis, for free, while currying favor with Washington and pushing its own share of the Palestinian hot potato onto Israel’s lap.

Team Obama-Biden has sought to redefine the Abraham Accords, locking Israel back into Palestinian-centric forums featuring Egypt and Jordan, such as the Negev Forum and more recently the Aqaba summit. The Israelis had to slow down the tempo of raids ahead of the Aqaba summit, which was billed as an attempt to “deescalate” and to “calm” the situation in the West Bank, and where, according to the above-mentioned Channel 14 report, the security plan was discussed. On the same day as the Aqaba summit, Palestinian terrorists shot and killed two Israeli brothers south of Nablus.

Importantly, despite U.S. pressure, especially after acts of revenge for the Yaniv brothers in Huwara, this week Prime Minister Netanyahu authorized a counterterrorism raid in Jenin that eliminated the terrorist, a Hamas operative from Nablus, who murdered the Yaniv brothers.

As he faces a multipronged American campaign to shackle and possibly unseat him, showcasing that he won’t be distracted or constrained by Washington and its plans for American-sponsored security protectorates, neither in the territories nor with Iran, is critical both for Bibi and for the country he leads.