(((gavmor)))

COYS. Cape Town. Proud Jew. Dad. Views are my own. Am Yisroel Chai!

[S Sebag Montefiore @simonmontefiore]

This matters.
An obscure London event on the history of the ancient Jewish kingdoms in Judea and Israel is cancelled because of ‘security concerns’ and it turns out this was a reaction to a campaign to fill and then undermine the event by activist disrupters.
How strange! Why would a posse of aggressive activists be interested in the arcane details of bullae and steles and ostraca and inscriptions and numismatics in some small South Levantine kingdoms in the Iron Age?
Well, it is a little more than that which is why it is both disturbing and important. And it matters because at its least it is a threat to history in Britain’s - but also the world’s - greatest temple of History @britishmuseum - and its scholarly integrity.
The BM and its leadership are decent and well-meaning and have explained that they wished to save an event from disruption by bullying vandals but I am sure the BM realizes it is essential to announce a new event fast lest it give the impression that the permission of tiny cadres of aggressive bullies are required before it hold events. But the significance is wider than an event about the Moab and Tel Dan steles in a great museum.
British cultural life is the right and exercise of civic and cultural freedom – a privilege of our liberal democracy - that does not require the permission of gangs of ideological activists nor can it cancelled or postponed nor endured at their beck and sufferance nor permitted with a bend of the knee to their permissions or veto. But that is what this appears to be.
Across the cultural world in the West, though the bewildered middleaged managers of our institutions that are confronting and often submitting to a wave of self-righteous blackmail and mob threat, there is an increasingly thin – indeed ever more fragile and sometimes nigh invisible – line between ‘security concerns’ – and institutional pusillanimity.
Then there is the history itself.
This event concerns the study of the ancient kingdoms of Judah and Israel that existed between roughly 1100BC and 586BCin the Levant. It is not a coincidence that this was chosen for disruption. The history of the Judean kingdoms and the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem that stood for most of the time between 1000BC and 70ADetc is important and fascinating history in its own right, supported by complex and growing archaeological finds.
These small kingdoms and the subsequent Temple priestly mini-state (restored by the Persian kings Cyrus and Darius 539BC) and then the larger Judean kingdoms of the Hasmoneans and Herodians – between 167BC and 135AD chronicle the long indigenous history of Jews in the region – which the protesters are keen to erase. This is a political project of ideological erasure and malicious incitement of course concerned with the complex, brutal Israel-Palestine conflict that has now gone on for a hundred years and is unlikely to be solved in a small lecture theatre in the British Museum. But it also attempts to deny or erase Jewish history itself – and by implication the heritage of British Jews who live here in Britain, a small community that is now under cultural and sometimes physical threat.
Incidentally - but it is worth saying, this history does not deny anyone else’s history, nor the many other small realms in this region through ancient times nor the many names of the region and its entities and the historical origins of those names (Canaan, or Philistia or Peleset, Phoenicia, Aram Damascus or Moab or later Nabatea and the provinces of Palaestina Prime, Seconda and Tertia and the Ghassanid kingdoms and so on etc etc). The history of one can not be used to erase the history of the other and does not need to do so. The pursuit of knowledge which is one of the delights of human life and is the mission of the BM and indeed anyone who writes, reads or enjoys history, can celebrate and recognize all of these.
Yet this protest and the many like it deployed across Britain nowadays is the opposite of that - an attack on history using the methods of intimidation and vandalism. Much of this involves distorting or dismantling actual history or often lying to replace it with a fabricated ideological structure that nourishes no one and helps no one but degrades our culture and civic life not to speak of history itself. By the way, the frequent claims that these histories or names are ‘denied’ or ‘noone knows them’ is nonsense: anyone and everyone who is interested knows this history. (Much of it appears for example in my book Jerusalem a history of the Holy Land.)
And this is relevant not just to those of us who write study or enjoy the history of the region but also to those who believe that cultural life and civic society is a right that must not be submitted to the aggressions and plots of loud well-organized much-indulged ideologues who take advantage of the freedoms of our society to undermine its principles and the very freedoms they are designed to guard.
Just as vital is a rule of history itself that concerrns the rise and fall of civilizations: the society that ceases to allow to free discussion of ideas and stops respecting and recognizing the value of scientific and historical sources and facts is a society that will fail.

[(((gavmor))) @gavmor]

@LCabonena Nice fire pool

[(((gavmor))) @gavmor]

@kid_kumalo https://t.co/bz4DN5bpGG

[Kosher @koshercockney]

Holy shit! So fucking embarrassing for @susanabulhawa

Seems she filled out a form on her website and didn’t even bother to press send before screenshotting it and pretending it was hate mail

So yeah seems she’s been red-handed being a Hate Mail hoaxer 🤷🏻‍♂️

[Dr Brian of London 🇮🇱 @brianoflondon]

This is genuinely one of the most amazing things I've read in decades.

[Orli Peter @orlipeter]

You can hear the echo if you listen across media outlets. A line dropped here, a shrug there, each one shifting the Overton window another inch. Until the moral ground moves beneath our feet and the unthinkable becomes speakable: that shooting up Jewish children in a synagogue nursery is somehow justified because …something something …Israel.

[SK Tedeschi @skedeschi]

A reminder: this raving lunatic was a professor at a major UK university and when Jewish students complained, hundreds of academics and public figures wrote a letter in support of him.

Presumably, as his beloved Islamic terrorist regime is dead: he will now need a job.

[(((gavmor))) @gavmor]

P

[WSM @TheJaundicedEye]

The Roedean School antisemitism row has roiled an elite school for two weeks and forced top resignations, yet Daily Maverick hasn’t run a single report. Nor have Business Day or IOL. So much for staying ‘informed’ in the heavily pro-ANC curated SA news environment.

[Howard Feldman @HowardFeldman]

@RediTlhabi I am looking forward to your retraction and apology to the Jewish community once you have listened to the recording of the conversation between the heads of schools..

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

The war on Zionism is necessarily a war on history. How could it be otherwise? Zionism was the only Jewish movement that correctly predicted anything close to what was to come, the only one that prepared for it, and so the only one that actually saved Jews in the 20th century outside the English speaking world.

This clown is a case in point, pretending that Ben Gurion was keen on Jews dying at Auschwitz. Because Zionists are fascists are Nazis, or something.

It’s true that until roughly the spring of 1944, the Zionist leadership was afraid to call for the mass bombardment of Auschwitz. Not because they didn’t care, but because as many as 150,000 Jewish inmates were housed there. They were afraid for their lives.

But when hard intelligence came into Ben Gurion’s hands of the sheer scale of the industrialized killing, they reversed that position in June and called desperately for the bombings.

And Allied commanders, of course, flatly refused.

To frame that tormented debate as some kind of Zionist lack of concern or even culpability is exactly the kind of ahistorical lie you have to hide behind to be an anti-Zionist.

It’s sad to watch how they twist and turn in the antisemite’s gaze, how keen they are to erase the Jewish story just to find absolution with the haters of Jews.

[Elica Le Bon الیکا‌ ل بن @elicalebon]

Urgent: how to help save a young protester’s life.

I cannot believe how many years we’ve had to recycle this dystopian practice. God, when will it end? #ErfanSoltani

[Mike Abel @abelmike]

Without question, we are witnessing the greatest #hypocrisy of our time, playing out on social media.

All those hand-wringing Hollywood “celebrities” displaying zero concern whatsoever for human rights and atrocities happening in full view of the world, in real time.

Next time they open their big mouths around being “concerned” about human life, tell them to sit the hell down. Hypocrites!!

[Eve Barlow @Eve_Barlow]

I am a proud to see countless Jewish voice stand shoulder to shoulder with our brothers and sisters in Iran

[Eve Barlow @Eve_Barlow]

Let me make this clear, I am glad that the BBC, the Left and the human rights organizations have remained silent on Iran. When the regime falls, you will all lose your authority and status. You will be recognized only as the frauds you have always been.

[Elica Le Bon الیکا‌ ل بن @elicalebon]

Chills all over my body. This is Tehran right now, the masses screaming “azadi azadi azadi” (freedom freedom freedom). For reference, 48 hours ago, @PahlaviReza issued a directive to take to the streets today at 8pm (it’s now around 11pm). The video was viewed almost 90 million times. The population of Iran is about 90 million. They heard his word and poured into the streets, unafraid.

To everybody that said the people of Iran don’t want regime change—echoing the regime’s propaganda that this was American imperialism or a “Zionist psy-op”—it’s time to disappear into the bushes like Homer.

The Iranian people have trampled every lie under foot. They are coming for the terrorists.

Stand back. It’s go time.

[LBC @LBC]

“If the Jewish world is taken to be equal of Nazi perpetrators, then we no longer feel collectively guilty about the Holocaust.”

Lawyer Anthony Julius tells @AndrewMarr9 the real reason behind the recent rise in antisemitism.

[Simon Schama @simon_schama]

Deborah exactly right about "Globalise the Intifada": it's an instruction to murder Jews world-wide

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

The death toll from the horrendous Bondi Beach massacre continues to rise. Latest count is an appalling 16 dead. For those who’ve been marching these past few years demanding to ‘globalise the intifada’ this is a barbarous anti-Semitic consequence of their pro-Islamist stupidity. Western intelligence services wondering if this is a terrible one-off atrocity. Or a harbinger of worse to come in other countries over the festive season.