Israel's Keyboard Champions

He kids us he looks like this:

(Actually, I've a hunch he looks more like the handsome one in this detail from a famous painting by the British Gentile Zionist Holman Hunt):

 He's a master poster-maker, with offerings such as this:

And this:

And this:

So it's not surprising that the mega-star of the pro-Israel blogosphere features prominently in an article by Tibor Krausz on blogging in defence of the Zionist Entity, and has some interesting things to say about the role and status of those of his ilk:

'Much of political blogging,' observes Krausz,

 'is the online equivalent of pamphleteering, an unabashed form of partisanship masquerading as informed commentary. The blogosphere is home to a ceaseless cacophony of invective and hyperbole; and a myriad of virulently anti-Israel bloggers — white supremacists, conspiracy nuts, self-styled “friends of Palestine” — find common cause in demonizing the “racist,” “Nazi,” “apartheid” state of “Israhell.”

On mainstream media sites, meanwhile, the comments sections under even the most innocuous news items about the Jewish State invariably become hotbeds of vicious rants against the country, drowning out the rare dispassionate voices....

A cartoon by US blogger Elder of Ziyon illustrates the hypocrisies inherent in some popular views about Israel (courtesy: Elder of Ziyon)

 Pro-Israel bloggers clearly have their work cut out for them, but that doesn’t faze perhaps the most influential one of them. “We definitely make a difference,” insists the New York-based IT professional who goes by the cyberspace nom de guerre of Elder of Ziyon and enjoys regular attention from mainstream media outlets for his investigative scoops.

Elder, who chose his pseudonym to poke fun at cockamamie conspiracy theories about Jewish power, began frequenting Yahoo message boards a decade ago to challenge the views and logic of Israel’s garrulous detractors. “Arguing one-on-one with people emotionally invested in hating Israel was a big waste of time,” the blogger, who prefers to remain anonymous and describes himself as a “fairly ordinary middle-aged Jewish guy,” tells The Report. “I looked for alternatives where I could write more freely and expansively for a larger audience.”

So in August 2004, he started his own blog. After a first few tentative steps of simply reposting items from the mainstream media, he soon came into his own as a seemingly indefatigable one-man operation, armed only with a computer, chutzpa and stamina. In several new posts daily, except on Shabbat, the blogger — who reaches some 10,000 readers a day and has many fans far and wide, Israel included — links to the latest articles of interest on the Middle East, parses media reports for inaccuracies and overt biases, provides satirical rebuttals to Israel’s fiercest critics, and highlights the Jewish State’s little-publicized achievements. “It takes up a few hours a day; but then again, that’s less time than most people spend watching TV,” he says.

He spends some of that time digging up archival records about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and perusing damning reports by NGOs and the UN on Israeli policy to verify the credibility of their sources and double-check their conclusions. Recently, after delving into a UN document and poring over photographs of damaged buildings in Gaza, he discovered that two Palestinian children whose deaths had been blamed on Israel during its week-long Operation Pillar of Defense offensive against Hamas militants last November, including the much-publicized death of a local BBC correspondent’s young son, had in fact been killed by Hamas rockets. His findings made the headlines.

“Pro-Israel bloggers have served as a sort of ‘information Iron Dome,’” says Dovid Efune, a British Jew who edits the New York-based weekly The Algemeiner Journal, whose website hosts some 500 Jewish bloggers. “During Israel’s Pillar of Defense, they were at the forefront of exposing and intercepting routine bits of misinformation by Hamas before they could land. Hamas and other anti-Israel actors were routinely releasing pictures of bloodied, maimed or dead children with the aim of whipping up anti-Israel sentiments. In many cases, the pictures [some of which were picked up by the mainstream media] were false, taken from different conflicts or scenarios. Larger news organizations [rarely bother combing through] Twitter feeds or translating Arabic Facebook pages.”

But Elder of Ziyon does. Running regular Google News searches on keywords in Arabic, then turning to his trusted aide, the Google Translate tool, the blogger scours the Arab-language news media for reports and op-eds about Israel, mocking, exploring and deconstructing the foibles of anti-Israel firebrands from Iran’s Press TV to Al Jazeera to the Palestinian news agency, Ma’an.

“At this very moment, I did an Arabic news search for ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’” he explains. “It came up with five articles. One was from a Baathist website saying the US involvement in Syria is just like the Jewish/Freemason methods detailed in the ‘Protocols’ for taking over the world. The second was from a Jordanian columnist who sees the ‘Protocols’ behind Turkey’s current troubles. The third came from Egypt’s Al Wafd [a supposedly liberal daily], which claims to have uncovered a nefarious plot by the singer Madonna to convert the world to Judaism through [her study of] Kabbala. She’s also of course using the ‘Protocols’ as her playbook. There’s always some good material there!”

In March, the blogger revealed that the Arabic version of the website of MIFTAH, an EU-funded “moderate” NGO headed by prominent Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi, ran an article promoting the old libel that Jews used the blood of Christians and Muslims for their matza at Passover. Cue an international hue and cry. MIFTAH lashed out at the “obscure pro-Israeli” blogger over his “smear campaign” before issuing an apology, in English, a few days later.

“Many pro-Israel bloggers are doing cutting-edge work,” stresses Benjamin Weinthal, a veteran American journalist who is The Jerusalem Post’s correspondent in Berlin. “They’re breaking stories either on their blogs or on social media sites like Twitter.” Weinthal first took notice of Elder’s work in September 2009, when the blogger revealed that Marc Garlasco, an American official for Human Rights Watch and a fierce critic of Israel, turned out, under closer inspection, to be an avid collector of Nazi memorabilia.

“I’ve written several articles based on [revelations by] pro-Israel blogs,” Weinthal says. One of those articles revolved around findings that Vittorio Arrigoni, an Italian activist for the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement who was murdered by Islamists in Gaza in 2011, called Jews “rats” and posted anti-Semitic cartoons on his Facebook page.” He adds: “Bloggers have carved out new territory for themselves by zooming in on stories that remain in the cracks or on the edges of mainstream news coverage. They bring these stories front and center into the mainstream.”

 Elder himself downplays his influence. “I’ve been fortunate that some of my posts do bubble up to [the mainstream media] but too much of the stuff we bloggers do stays stuck in our little world,” he remarks. But there’s plenty of eye-opening stuff, almost daily, in that “little world” of pro-Israel bloggers.... 

As with journalists, so with bloggers, credibility is an important issue. Operating without any editorial control in the Internet’s raucous free-for-all, freelance bloggers can blow hot and cold as they please. “Any way you slice it, a regular person will instinctively trust Reuters as being less biased than someone called ‘Elder of Ziyon,’” the eponymous blogger says. “I try to substitute transparency for my anonymity, so I back up my arguments with references to original sources.”

In the end, whether they are toiling away in relative obscurity or breaking out into the mainstream, pro-Israeli bloggers will keep chugging along, doing what they do best — standing up for the Jewish State in a largely hostile world. “These bloggers can serve as our eyes and ears on the ground throughout the world,” Efune says. “We need more of them to break the mainstream media’s monopoly on reporting.”

Read the entire article here
Hat tip: one of my favourite British pro-Israel bloggers, the cerebral, always-good-value Edgar Davidson

"The Apartheid Smear": Sound Sense From Professor Alan Johnson (videos)

Professor Alan Johnson is a Senior Research Fellow at the British Israel Research & Communications Centre (BICOM); see his biography here

In a panel discussion at the University of Leicester earlier this year, hosted by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and chaired by Ismail Patel of Friends of Al Aqsa, on the topic "Is Israel an apartheid state?", Professor Johnson spoke spiritedly in support of Israel, demolishing the canard that Israeli policies resemble those of Apartheid-era South Africa:

John Bolton On The Dos & Don'ts Of An American Strike Against Syria (video)

Here's the former US ambassador to the UN, warning that Syria is a side issue compared to the threat to world peace and security posed by Iran., and cautioning that "A light strike will not create a deterrent effect".

And in the following video he talks about Syria to former Congressman Allen West:

Professor Mordechai Kedar On Why The Middle East Is A Violent Region (video)

Here's the celebrated Israeli Arabic specialist talking to an audience at Congregation Shearith Israel in New York City (Shalom TV video; hat tip Love of the Land blog):

Incidentally, interesting post re Saeb Erekat and Jewish claims to Jerusalem here

Islam's Backward, Barbaric Misogyny, & The "Progressive" Westerners Who Indulge It (video)

With honourable exceptions, Western  feminists are turning a deliberate blind eye to the misogyny of an imported religion that (as repeatedly glimpsed here) demeans women, permits wife-beating, tolerates if not requires female genital mutilation (see two imams arguing on this matter here), promotes forced marriages,  "honour killings," and  "rape jihad,"  and threatens to imperil themselves and their own female offspring, by acquiescing in the servile Western appeasement of Islam that tolerates the infringement of women's hard-won rights.

In thus helping to fashion the tools of their own oppression, Western women (I myself also include leftwing Western men in this indictment) are betraying not only themselves and their female relatives and offspring but they also betray women who suffer under Sharia, whose courts are mushrooming in Britain.

Love him or hate him, in this video Pat Condell is superb, absolutely nailing the issues as he excoriates the supine hypocrisy of the feminists who are quick to condemn the male chauvinism, real and supposed, of their own menfolk, but fail to condemn the brutal and backward attitude to women that characterises Islam.

A good point is his observation that the emancipation of women from Islamic oppression should be seen as urgent a matter as was the abolition of slavery a couple of hundred years ago.

 And as a bonus, that must-see should be followed by these must-read articles here and here

Charlie Is Whose Darling?

On Thursday, the website of Iran's satellite propaganda channel Press TV dwelt upon the apparently sinister fact that Prince Charles attended the installation ceremony of the new Chief Rabbi of Britain's Orthodox Jews, Ephraim Mirvis, and, moreover, wore a kippa, or "a yarmulke," as the report described it.

Press TV is a harbinger of conspiracy theories to do with Jews and Zionists, of course, and the clear inference from the report is that Britain's Royals are in the pocket of Da Joos, even if, as I've lamented previously, the Queen, who succeeded to the throne in 1952 and has visited most major ountries, has, like Charles himself, never set foot in Israel!

Writes a perceptive British non-Jewish pro-Israel blogger:

"But what is most blatant about this article is how it completely ignores Prince Charles’s love for Islam and his close links to many Muslims. Charles has suggested that British kids learn from Islam and praised Islam on many occasions. The fact that Press TV completely ignores all this simply means that there is something deeply pathological and monomaniacal about its views on the Jews. Just take one passage from Prince Charles:

"I start from the belief that Islamic civilisation at its best… I feel that we in the West could be helped to rediscover those roots of our own understanding by an appreciation of the Islamic tradition's deep respect for the timeless traditions of the natural order.”

Again, this Press TV article has little to do with Israel or even ‘Zionists’. It’s mainly about the fact that ‘the British royal family has had a very friendly relationship with the Jewish community’. You see ‘anti-Zionism’ is indeed not synonymous (semantically) with ‘Jew-hatred’. It’s just that they nearly always go together. Or, more correctly, ‘anti-Zionism’ and ‘anti-Semitism’ don’t of course mean the same thing. It’s just that the latter almost invariably leads to the former. There is no need to argue that anti-Zionism actually means anti-Semitism....."

Read the entire blog post here

"We Defy The Laws Of History ... We've Overcome Such Tremendous Odds": Bibi (video)

Here's Bibi Netanyahu in his Rosh Hashanah message to the Diaspora, talking about Israel's numerous and varied achievements, its status as "an oasis of democracy ... a beacon of stability and modernity," and its commitment to "a real, genuine and enduring peace" that must be "anchored in recognition of Israel as a Jewish State and on our security".  He does not overlook the regional challenges and external threats  facing Israel, of course: "No one should doubt our resolve ... Iran's nuclear programme must be stopped ..."

Hat tip: reader Jean