Paul JB

MUFC.

[Mor Edge Insight @MorEdge_Insight]

This is the tape people quoting the 1967 lines never play. You simply have to watch this. Seeing this footage and hearing the words spoken directly by the Arabs in their own voice just blew me away, especially the Saudi King.

This is some of the most unbelievable old footage that every western leader needs to watch, and every Arab country except the UAE wishes was never published. If you want to understand why I believe Saudi are as evil now as they were then, it’s because MBS speaks with the same tongue.

In the weeks before the Six-Day War, Nasser threw the UN force out of Sinai, closed the Straits of Tiran, and told the Arab world the point was no longer the straits or Syria but turning the clock back twenty years, to before Israel existed. Kuwait, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco pledged their armies to the United Command.

Jordan’s ties to Iraq and Saudi Arabia were there to put more men and tanks on Israel’s border.
King Hussein and Abdel Nasser, Syria and Iraq, and the crowds were sure they were going to war and sure they were going to win.

King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, a bitter opponent of Nasser, joined anyway. Asked if Saudi Arabia would go to war against Israel, he said they were ready to go to the furthest extremity. Asked what sequence of events he wanted to see in the Middle East, he said the first thing is the extermination of Israel.

Radio Cairo then broadcast into Israel, in Hebrew, that they would kill them all and torch them. There was no Israeli television in 1967, so Israelis watched Egyptian television and saw the street celebrations, Nasser with his MiG-21 pilots, and the tanks moving into Sinai. The Arab press ran the caricatures of Jews crushed and pierced. Rabbis consecrated parks as mass graveyards. Civilians gave blood and dug trenches. A mother in that footage says she had already decided that if they were conquered she would turn on the gas so her children would not fall into their hands.

General Shlomo Gazit, head of Israeli military intelligence research in 1967, says they had gone back to the days of the War of Independence, a threat of annihilation, and the Jews panicked.

That is what the 1967 lines were.

Armistice lines from a war the Arab states started to erase the country, not a border anybody agreed, and not a map a moderate Saudi Arabia was standing apart from. Faisal was in it. The words are on the tape.

The first war was to annihilate Israel, the second was to exterminate it, and in 1973 the Syrian army came down off the Golan far enough that the general staff thought the state was in danger of being destroyed.

A Palestinian state on those lines is not a flag and a parliament. At the narrowest point that line sits about nine to fifteen miles from the sea, on the high ground overlooking Tel Aviv, the airport, and the road that holds the country together, with Gaza on the other side. Put an armed faction in both places, the kind that already ran Gaza after Israel left in 2005, and you’ve built the encirclement those wars failed to finish, with half of Jerusalem thrown in.

Jordan held that half from 1948 to 1967 and emptied the Jewish Quarter. Nobody who watches this tape, and watched the events of October 7, signs that map and calls it peace. There can never and will never be a Two State Solution, because the Arab intention to genocide the Jews in 1948 and 1967 is exactly the same as it is today.

[Paul JB @pauljacoben]

@Janeblades2 @sbsnjc @SangitaMyska @Okwonga @JakeWSimons Jane, something tells me nothing is going to reduce your level of anger at your own life. I'm afraid that includes made up stories about Jews.

[Paul JB @pauljacoben]

@yhazony What a Shanda.

[Paul JB @pauljacoben]

@Cernovich The response. https://t.co/2fpRxyHjaZ

[Mike @Doranimated]

Jonathan Keeperman (@L0m3z) gave a speech at the Nat Con conference, and I posted a crude reaction to it. He asked me politely if I would explain myself. Here is my response:

Jonathan, thank you for your gracious response to my rather ungracious characterization of your speech. I appreciate your civility. Let me explain what provoked my reaction.

I agree with your central premise. Today's political climate calls on us to justify the American-Israeli alliance in terms of American national interests. But after calling for a hardheaded accounting of costs and benefits, you never actually perform one. Instead, you offer a selective account of the grievances that some American nationalists harbor toward Israel and its supporters. At several points, you toggle almost imperceptibly between describing those grievances impartially to validating them, without acknowledging the toggle.

You came to Jerusalem while the United States and Israel were engaged in a war against Iran. American and Israeli forces have fought alongside one another on an extraordinary scale. Both countries have committed military power and made great sacrifices in a struggle against a common enemy. Yet you barely acknowledge the war, let alone consider what it reveals about the value of the alliance.

Surely that experience belongs at the center of any serious discussion of what America gains from Israel.

There is also a question of elementary respect. You came to a country at war to explain why Americans are growing weary of its demands on their attention and resources. You found time to discuss the immigration preferences of liberal American Jews and the political sins of the ADL, but not the soldiers fighting, the lives being lost, or the sacrifices being made in a common struggle. Whatever your intentions, that is a failure to recognize the gravity of the occasion.

And it is inseparable from the larger failure of your analysis. You tell us that Israel receives $3.8 billion annually in American assistance. But what does the United States receive in return? What is the value of Israeli intelligence, military power, technological innovation, and cooperation against common adversaries? What role does Israel play in America's competition with Iran, China, and Russia? What would it cost the United States to replace the capabilities and regional influence that the alliance provides?

These questions are the beginning of the prudential calculation you call for but never undertake. More importantly, what would happen if Washington weakened the relationship to the point that Israel concluded it could no longer rely on the United States?

No sane Israeli wants that outcome. But national survival may force Israel to contemplate it in the coming years. Israel would not simply disappear as a strategic actor. It would become a more independent one, making decisions about war, peace, deterrence, and relations with other powers with less regard for American preferences.

American support does not give Washington control over Israeli decisions, but it does help keep Israeli military power integrated into an American-led regional order. That is an asset with considerable strategic value. If Israel became a de facto free agent, Washington might save money and escape some immediate obligations, but it would also surrender influence over one of the most formidable military powers in the Middle East.

And Israel would not be operating in a vacuum. China and Russia would have opportunities to exploit the resulting realignment. Iran would have opportunities of its own. The regional order would change, and not necessarily to America's advantage.

Perhaps you believe this would be a good bargain. But you never consider the possibility, much less calculate its costs. You call for realism while leaving the most consequential strategic questions unexamined.

Your treatment of the American right is similarly selective. You emphasize the growing skepticism of younger conservatives, but you never mention that Donald Trump, the dominant figure in the nationalist movement you describe, has taken American military cooperation with Israel to unprecedented levels.

Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital, recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, withdrew from the Iran nuclear agreement, and brokered the Abraham Accords. In his second term, he went much further, committing American military power to a joint war against Iran. How does his record fit your account of national conservatism? Why does the behavior of the nationalist president receive less attention than the attitudes of young nationalists? Is Trump an anomaly? Does he misunderstand the movement he leads? Or might his support for Israel reflect a nationalist assessment of American interests fundamentally different from the one you describe? These questions are indispensable to your argument. Yet you don't address them.

I am also troubled by your treatment of antisemitism. You correctly observe that accusations of antisemitism no longer carry the political force they once did. But the declining effectiveness of an accusation tells us nothing about the reality or seriousness of the phenomenon it describes.

There has been a conspicuous resurgence of antisemitic rhetoric in parts of the American right. Influential voices have promoted the idea that American foreign policy is controlled by Jews or manipulated on Israel's behalf. Such claims encourage Americans to interpret strategic decisions through theories of sinister manipulation rather than through an examination of American interests.

Antisemitism, therefore, is not simply a problem for Jews. It is a problem for American national security, political judgment, and national cohesion. It also offers opportunities to foreign adversaries seeking to weaken the United States from within.

Yet in a speech devoted to explaining declining support for Israel on the right, you give remarkably little attention to the role that antisemitic agitation has played in producing that decline. Instead, you place considerable responsibility on Israel's American defenders. You blame neoconservatives for opposing Trump, liberal Jews for supporting immigration, and even the ADL for antagonizing populists.

Your reference to the ADL is particularly strange. What do the immigration preferences of liberal American Jews have to do with the strategic value of America's alliance with Israel? The ADL is an American Jewish organization, not an arm of the Israeli government. American Jews are predominantly liberal. They disagree with national conservatives on many domestic questions. So what?

Even if every criticism you make of the ADL were justified, what do they have to do with the value of Israel as an American ally? Nothing, unless one assumes that Israel bears responsibility for the political behavior of American Jews. That is precisely the kind of collective attribution that ought to be examined critically, not casually incorporated into an explanation of why Americans are turning against Israel.

The same problem appears in your treatment of America's wars in the Middle East. You say they are closely associated with Israeli interests. Associated by whom? Which wars? Which interests? And how accurately does that association explain actual American decisions?

You leave those questions unanswered. Instead, you point to deeply tendentious interpretations of American foreign policy -- ones often advanced by antisemites such as Tucker Carlson -- as though they were established facts. Arguments frequently employed by Israel's worst antagonists enter your speech disguised as an objective description of American attitudes.

This brings me to a broader problem with your method. You present yourself as a relatively detached observer of Israel and an informed observer of the American right. But throughout the speech, you alternate between describing the attitudes of nationalists and adopting their explanations for those attitudes. Reporting that some conservatives blame Israel for America's Middle Eastern wars is one thing. Treating that blame as an adequate explanation of their alienation is another.

Political attitudes do not develop in a vacuum. Personalities, institutions, and campaigns of persuasion shape them. Yet your account assigns considerable agency to Israel's defenders, whose conduct supposedly alienated the nationalist right, while giving remarkably little attention to the people on the right actively encouraging hostility toward Israel and Jews based on the most vile lies. You thus present the consequences of an ideological struggle as though they were an impersonal historical development to which Israelis must accommodate themselves.

Finally, there is something peculiar about the posture of the speech itself. You begin by explaining that Israel has never occupied a central place in your thinking and that you make no claim to expertise about it. Fair enough. But you then proceed to deliver sweeping judgments about the future of the alliance and the political adjustments Israelis must make.

There is nothing wrong with an outsider offering uncomfortable observations. But the authority of those observations depends on their accuracy, not on the speaker's professed detachment. You conclude by imagining an Israel that Americans "do not have to think about."

But the Middle East will not cease to matter to the United States simply because Americans grow tired of thinking about Israel. Iran will not abandon its ambitions. China and Russia will not relinquish their interests. And Israel's enemies will not stop threatening it because American voters would prefer to concentrate on domestic affairs.

The question is whether America is better positioned to manage those challenges with Israel as a close ally or with Israel acting increasingly on its own. That is the prudential question you say would should address. It is also the question your speech conspicuously avoids.

I don't know you. I have no basis for judging your intentions. I accept that you may regard your speech as a candid warning delivered in good faith. But whatever your intentions, its effect is to give a veneer of dispassionate analysis to a series of highly dubious claims about Israel, Jews, and American foreign policy. That is what I objected to. And it is why I reacted so strongly.

[Paul JB @pauljacoben]

@Legally_Italian @Doranimated @L0m3z Turn off twitter and you’ll find your not as angry with Israel.

Of course…I’m not forcing you to. I don’t want you to think I control you.

[Paul JB @pauljacoben]

@willchamberlain I did. And as far as I see it says its the Jews fault people hate Jews because

1- they like Israel too much (can’t imagine why..)

2- the ADL wrote material on the Batlacan.

3- people don’t have a positive view on Israel because …something something Jews.

What did I miss?

[Paul JB @pauljacoben]

@Cernovich So to clear:

Saying Jews really like Israel got you cancelled. Interesting.

Jews hold Israel closer than u hold the UK and even after the 3 yrs we’ve had you can’t work out why.

The experience most people have of Israel is ADL books on the Bataclan.

Damn Jews.

[Paul JB @pauljacoben]

@Gen_X_Explainer @Cernovich And how many Jews have said to you “were chosen/we’re more special”?

[Mehagopyan @Mehagopyan]

الألمان لا يحتفلون بالهولوكوست.
اليابانيون لا ينزلون إلى الشوارع للاحتفال بهجوم بيرل هاربر.
الأمريكيون لا يحتفلون بذكرى قنبله هيروشيما وناجازاكي.
لكن الفلسطينيين ومؤيديهم ينزلون إلى الشوارع للاحتفال بيوم ٧ أكتوبر، اليوم الذي اغتصبوا فيه اليهوديات وقتلوا المدنيين وأحرقوهم أحياء...

[Imam of Peace @Imamofpeace]

A Statement of Conscience on October 7

I will not start by saying ‘as a Muslim’ or ‘as an imam’, but as a human being.

On October 7, over 1,200 innocent people were killed in a single day. Families were shot in their homes. Young people out dancing were hunted across open fields. Over 250 people, including children and the elderly, were dragged into Gaza as hostages. I think of a mother hiding in a safe room with her baby’s mouth covered. I think of a father listening as the line went quiet. I think of families who waited month after month for someone to come home, only to receive a coffin. I didn’t need my faith to recognize the evil of what happened. My heart told me first.

But I’m a Muslim and an imam, and I owe the world one honest sentence: what was done that day was a crime against God. God teaches that whoever kills one innocent soul, it is as if he had killed all humanity.

This day has an author: Yahya Sinwar. He planned it, ordered it, and knew what would follow. Every death of that day and war he started rests on him and Hamas leaders who sat in tunnels and foreign hotels and called slaughter a victory. It rests on every Palestinian leader who cheered, excused, handed out sweets, or said nothing. They chose this. They own it.

But Sinwar did not invent himself. He was the fruit of a tree planted almost a century ago by the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas named itself in its founding charter as the Brotherhood’s branch in Palestine. The Brotherhood’s poison is slow. It arrives through study circles, youth camps, charity boxes, and kind words to lonely young men. Drop by drop, it teaches him that his religion is a political party, his neighbour is his enemy, the Jew is the cause of his sorrow, and God is pleased by rage. By the time the gun arrives, the soul is already taken.

I have seen this poison in mosques where sermons became rallies and young men could recite slogans but not sit still for a verse on mercy. Every people that let the Brotherhood in has paid in blood and ruined generations. It has never built anything it did not first set on fire.

Behind Hamas stands another hand: the IRGC. It was the IRGC’s money, weapons, and training that turned a hateful idea into an army. One calls itself Sunni and the other Shia, and they may curse each other’s creeds, but they are united in what they worship. It is not God. It is power. The same IRGC that armed the killers of October 7 shoots Iranian girls for showing their hair, hangs young men for asking to be free, and has left graves from Tehran to Damascus to Beirut. They speak in God’s name. So did Pharaoh speak in the name of heaven.

So let me say this clearly. Hamas and the IRGC are not merely enemies of Islam. That would be too small a charge, as if their crime were only against us. They are enemies of God. God is the Giver of life, yet they deal in death. God calls Himself the Most Merciful, yet they have made cruelty a sacrament. God honoured the children of Adam, yet they look at a child and see a target or a shield. To murder what God created and sign His name to it is the oldest blasphemy.

And we Muslims have been too quiet. Some of us were afraid. Some told ourselves it was not our business. Some, God forgive them, felt something other than horror that morning and never confessed it. Silence was the soil this poison grew in. I will not add to it.

So on this anniversary, let us say plainly what our scripture already says. The Jews are not our enemies. They are our cousins in Abraham, and their dead were created by the same God who created us. Today belongs to them: the murdered, the hostages, and families who still set a place at the table. To them I say: I am sorry for what was done to you by men who used the words of my prayers. You’re not alone in your grief or remembrance.

The enemies of God are those who murder in His name. We know their names. It is time we said them from our own pulpits, in our own voices, before they speak for us again.

Imam Tawhidi

[Israel ישראל @Israel]

Just checked.

Still here. 🇮🇱

[Paul JB @pauljacoben]

@SangitaMyska @Okwonga @JakeWSimons I actually think you’re sincere in your belief. And because of that I believe one day you will work out why such a demonstrable lie has been so easy for you to ingest.

On that day you’ll find your life changes for the better.

I hope you get there sooner rather than later.

[spiked @spikedonline]

Gaza is the most lied about war in history. There was no genocide, no famine, no intentional targeting of children. These are modern-day blood libels. We need to expose all the Islamo-left lowlifes who spread these lethal falsehoods, says Brendan O’Neill
https://t.co/HX7wOLaa8K

[Paul JB @pauljacoben]

@DAaronovitch Sorry David could you clarify what the Israeli governments 'version' is.

I presume you can given you've called it a caricature.

[Megan Basham @megbasham]

You know who I've never seen doing things like this in any country to which they've immigrated? Jews.

[Paul JB @pauljacoben]

@David__Osland This is the most beautiful leftist post of the year.

[Paul JB @pauljacoben]

@MatthewStadlen Stadlen - another economic illiterate whose Never created wealth or built anything.

[Talia Yoseph @taliaortati]

Free Balestine brothaaa #fyp

[Paul JB @pauljacoben]

@Kevin_Maguire The biggest problem the UK has is the vast number of economic illiterates like Kevin.