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Arabs Massacred Jews in the Holy Land Before Israel Existed — and the Media Has No Clue
October 7, 2023, was the largest massacre of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. Hamas and other Iranian-backed proxies invaded Israel, murdering 1,200 people and taking hundreds of hostages. Many of the victims were killed in the most gruesome fashion imaginable: parents were tortured in front of their children, the elderly were slaughtered at bus stops, families were burned alive in their own homes, babies murdered in cribs, all while gleeful terrorists proudly filmed their handiwork.
October 7 was also the largest invasion and attack by Islamist terrorists in modern history. It was part of an attempted genocide by a group that calls for Israel’s destruction.
The Washington Post, however, calls it “armed resistance.”
This was the phrase used in the Post’s Aug. 28, 2024, dispatch, “What to know about Palestinian militant groups operating in the West Bank.”
Ostensibly a primer about terrorist groups operating in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), the article misinformed more than it informed.
The Post’s Claire Parker claimed that “Palestinians have engaged in armed resistance since the state’s founding in 1948, when an estimated 750,000 Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes.”
Notably “armed resistance” is a euphemism used by US-designated terrorist groups like Hamas to refer to terrorism. Parker is literally echoing terrorist rhetoric. She’s also dead wrong.
In fact, Arab terrorist groups were targeting, attacking, and murdering Jews decades before Israel was recreated.
Indeed, there are entire books on the subject (Yeshoua Porath’s two volume, The Emergence of the Palestinian Arab National Movement, while 50 years old, is perhaps the most comprehensive). Evidence on the score is both abundant and part of the historical record; it is highlighted in numerous histories, newspaper accounts of the day, and memoirs.
Hamas even names its “Qassam rockets” after Sheikh Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, an Islamist cleric born in what is today Syria, and who perpetrated terrorist attacks until he was killed by British policemen in November 1935. Hamas also has the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, which perpetrate terrorist attacks.
And Qassam was not alone in his efforts to murder Jews.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Palestinian terrorist groups like the Green Hand, the Black Hand, and others, murdered Jews, officials from the British Mandatory government that controlled the area after World War I, and Arab critics.
CAMERA has highlighted this important history in numerous op-eds throughout the years, including in National Review, Mosaic magazine, and, most recently The Washington Times. As CAMERA noted in an April 14, 2020, essay for Mosaic, “Century-Old Lessons from a Jerusalem Pogrom,” these terrorist groups resented any social and political equality with Jews and perpetrated organized mass violence as early as 1920. In the nearly three decades before Israel was recreated, hundreds of attacks occurred, with hundreds of victims.
As CAMERA detailed in an Oct. 17, 2023 Washington Times Op-Ed, entitled “Palestinian terrorists have been murdering babies for a century,” and the terrorists often murdered their victims in the most depraved manner possible.
In 1929 in Hebron, for example, one British policeman, RJ Cafferata, later testified that he discovered “an Arab cutting off a child’s head with a sword.” Cafferata shot him dead before seeing another terrorist armed with a dagger and “standing over a woman covered with blood.” The policemen killed him. Women were raped en masse. Many were tortured.
A Dutch-Canadian journalist, Pierre Van Paassen, detailed the aftermath at one rabbi’s house: “the rooms looked like a slaughterhouse…Not a single item had been left intact except a large black-and-white photograph of Dr. Theodore Herzl.”
The murderers, he noted, had “draped the blood-drenched underwear of a woman” around the picture frame. Van Paassen later described how he wanted to “gather up the severed sexual organs and the cut-off sexual organs and the cut-off breasts we had seen lying over the floor and in the beds.” A Jewish baker, Noah Imerman, was burned to death in a kerosene stove.
A week after the massacre in Hebron, another unfolded in Safed. One eyewitness, David Hacohen, later testified that he saw “homes set on fire” and victims “stabbed to pieces,” their bodies “mutilated and burned.” The terrorists even targeted an orphanage, where they “smashed the children’s heads and cut off their hands” before burning the building.
These events are thoroughly documented. The British government held hearings on them, and Western newspapers reported on them at the time. The Middle East analyst Oren Kessler highlighted them in his 2023 bestseller Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict, which detailed, at length, the various terror groups operating in British-ruled Mandate Palestine in the 1930s. It is utterly disqualifying for someone to be writing about the Israel-Islamist conflict today not to be aware of this relevant history.
Indeed, many of the details — homes being incinerated, mass rape, and sexual violence, children being murdered, the elderly tortured — keenly illustrate that the Palestinian terrorists who perpetrated the October 7 massacre have much in common with their forebearers who murdered Jews one hundred years ago.
To acknowledge this, however, is tantamount to admitting that Arab terrorists aren’t murdering Jews because of the creation of Israel, or the existence of “settlements,” or “1967 lines.” Rather they resent any political or social equality with Jews. As terrorists screamed during the 1920 massacre in Jerusalem: “the Jews are our dogs.”
This sentiment was highlighted in a May 13, 2011, Hamas Al-Aqsa TV interview with Sara Jaber, a 92-year-old woman who looked back at the Hebron massacre with fondness. “We, the people of Hebron, massacred the Jews. My father massacred them and brought back some stuff,” according to a translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute. “Massacred the Jews.”
Or as the Washington Post’s Claire Parker, would call it “armed resistance.”
Notably, Parker’s claim about terrorism beginning in 1948 omits other relevant details, not least of which is that Zionists accepted, and Arab leaders rejected, numerous offers for a “two-state solution.”
Indeed, the 1948 war — which became Israel’s War of Independence — erupted when the Arab League and Palestinian Arab leaders rejected a UN partition plan that would’ve created something that hadn’t ever existed: a Palestinian Arab state.
Yet Arab leaders were unwilling to accept such a state if it meant living peacefully next to a Jewish one. Accordingly, they sought to “annihilate” the Jewish state, openly seeking to commit another genocide a mere three years after World War II and the Holocaust.
Arab nations, as well as the Muslim Brotherhood and the so-called Army of the Holy War, attacked the fledgling nation. Estimates of Arab refugees vary, with the “750,000” figure cited by Parker being on the high end. Notably, Parker omits the more than 800,000 Jewish refugees from Muslim lands who were exiled because of that conflict. Omitting rejected offers for Palestinian statehood and peace and Jewish refugees, while claiming that terrorism was due to Israel’s creation is, as they say, “a tell” — it reveals Parker’s bias. So too is referring to terrorism as “armed resistance.”
Yet, this isn’t the first time that Parker has regurgitated language used by terror groups like Hamas.
Hours after the October 7 attack, Parker filed a dispatch claiming that an Israeli counterterrorist raid on Al-Aqsa mosque “stoked tensions,” leading to the attack by the terror group. But as CAMERA has highlighted, Palestinian terrorist groups have long used the false claim that Jews seek to damage or destroy the mosque to incite anti-Jewish violence.
The founding father of Palestinian nationalism, Amin al-Husseini, did precisely that leading up to the 1929 massacres detailed above — massacres in which more than 133 Jewish men, women, and children were murdered, and 339 were injured. There are even entire reports highlighting how Palestinian leaders employ what the scholar Nadav Shragai has called the “Al-Aqsa is in danger” libel prior to attacks.
More to the point, evidence indicates that the October 7 massacre — called “Al-Aqsa Flood” by Hamas — took years to plan and was massive in both scope and ambition. This was obvious within hours of the attack itself. Parker’s decision to parrot Hamas claims that the attack was the result of a recent counterterrorist raid indicates more than just ignorance about the history of the “Al Aqsa” libel and terrorist rhetoric — it shows a remarkable lack of common sense or, less diplomatically, intelligence.
As The Washington Post unintentionally proves, there is a great deal of difference between being a reporter with deep historical understanding and being a stenographer for terrorist groups.
The writer is a Senior Research Analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.
The post Arabs Massacred Jews in the Holy Land Before Israel Existed — and the Media Has No Clue first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Vast Majority of US Jews Reject Jewish Voice for Peace, Other Anti-Zionist Groups, Polling Data Shows

Pro-Hamas protesters led by Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) demonstrate outside the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 14, 2024. Photo: Derek French via Reuters Connect
A new poll released on Wednesday underscores how far removed Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and other anti-Zionist organizations that claim to represent Jews are from mainstream Jewish views on Israel, Zionism, and the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians.
Commissioned by The Jewish Majority, a nonprofit founded by a researcher whose aim is to monitor and accurately report Jewish opinion on the most consequential issues affecting the community, the poll found that the vast majority of American Jews believe that anti-Zionist movements and anti-Israel university protests are antisemitic.
The findings also showed that Jews across the US overwhelmingly oppose the views and tactics of JVP, a prominent anti-Israel group which has helped organize widespread demonstrations against the Jewish state during the war in Gaza.
Founded in 1996 at the University of California, Berkeley, JVP describes itself as “the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world.” It was infamously one of the first organizations to blame Israel following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust.
“Israeli apartheid and occupation — and the United States complicity in that oppression — are the source of all this violence,” JVP said as Israelis were still counting their dead and missing.
American Jews who responded to The Jewish Majority’s poll overwhelmingly reject this line of thinking. Seventy percent said they believe that anti-Zionism of any stripe is antisemitic; 85 percent believe that Hamas, whom JVP described as “the oppressed,” is a genocidal group; and 79 percent support vocally pro-Israel groups such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization JVP has defamed as “not a credible source on antisemitism and racism.”
Additionally, JVP’s methods of protest are unpopular among American Jews, The Jewish Majority added, noting that 75 percent disapprove of “blocking traffic” and only 18 percent approve of protesters’ wearing masks to conceal their identities. Sixty percent also disagree with staging protests outside the homes of public officials, a common JVP tactic.
“Plain and simple, Jewish Voice for Peace is an extremist group that does not represent the views of the overwhelming majority of American Jews,” Jonathan Schulman, The Jewish Majority’s executive director, said in a statement accompanying the poll results. “American Jews share a strong and consistent stance against anti-Zionists as well as a deep concern over rising antisemitism and the tactics used by organizations like JVP.”
He continued, “It is high time people see through the charade: JVP is not representative of anyone but a marginal fringe, even if a few radical Jews are involved in their movement.”
The Jewish Majority’s poll was conducted by Public Opinion Strategies.
Jewish Voice for Peace’s inner workings, messaging, and political activities were recently documented in a groundbreaking report on the group published last month by StandWithUs, a Jewish civil rights group based in Los Angeles, California.
Titled, “A Shield for Hate, Not a Voice for Peace,” the report noted that JVP has promoted a distorted history of Zionism and Israel, accusing the movement for Jewish self-determination of everything from training US police officers to violate the rights of African Americans to abusing “Jewish history.” In doing so, it has allied with extremist groups such as WithinOurLifetime — whose founder has threatened to set Jews on fire and led a movement to harass Jews on New York City’s public transportation — and Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), which celebrated Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre and has proclaimed that “the Zionist entity has no right to exist.”
The report also stated that JVP has collaborated with anti-Israel entities such as Samidoun, which identifies itself as a “Palestinian prisoner solidarity network,” to hold rallies. Samidoun described Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities in Israel as “a brave and heroic operation.” The United States and Canada each imposed sanctions on Samidoun in October, labeling the organization a “sham charity” and accusing it of fundraising for designated terrorist groups such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
JVP has also compared Zionism to Nazism.
“This is Holocaust inversion — an antisemitic tactic in which the genocide Jews faced in the past is used to promote baseless hatred against Jews today,” the StandWithUs report said. “The only group benefiting from JVP’s Holocaust inversion is Hamas — a truly genocidal terrorist group. JVP has helped shield them from accountability for launching the war, ruthlessly militarizing civilian areas across Gaza, stealing humanitarian aid, and rejecting nearly every proposed ceasefire and hostage release deal.”
In June 2024, the Anti-Defamation League filed a complaint with the US Federal Election Commission (FEC) accusing the political fundraising arm of JVP of transgressing federal election law by misrepresenting its spending and receiving unlawful donations from corporate entities, citing “discrepancies” in the organization’s income and expense reports.
The complaint lodged a slew of charges against Jewish Voice for Peace’s political action committee (JVP PAC), including spending almost no money on candidates running for office — a political action committee’s main purpose. From 2020-2023, JVP PAC reported spending $82,956, but just a small fraction of that sum — $1,775, just over 2 percent — was spent on candidates, according to the complaint. The money went elsewhere, being paid out in one case for “legal services” provided by a company which “doesn’t appear to practice law” and other expenses.
JVP continues to have the support of powerful friends in the world of progressive philanthropy, a formidable subset of the American elite, amid these scandals and controversies.
Since 2017 it has — according to a 2023 report by the National Association of Scholars — received $480,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a philanthropic foundation whose endowment is valued at $1.27 billion. Between 2014 and 2015 alone, JVP brought in over half a million dollars in grants from various foundations, including the Open Society Policy Center — founded by billionaire George Soros — the Kaphan Foundation, and others.
According to the recent StandWithUs report, JVP has received substantial financial assistance from organizations tied to Lebanon and Iran.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Vast Majority of US Jews Reject Jewish Voice for Peace, Other Anti-Zionist Groups, Polling Data Shows first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Turkey’s Erdogan Demands Israel Pay Reparations for Gaza, Says Palestinian State ‘Must Not Be Delayed’

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks during a joint statement to the media in Baghdad, Iraq, April 22, 2024. Photo: AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/Pool via REUTERS
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday demanded Israel pay reparations “for the harm it inflicted through its aggressive actions in Gaza” and urged the immediate establishment of a Palestinian state.
During a press conference with Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto in West Java, as part of his Asian tour to Malaysia and Pakistan, Erdogan rejected US President Donald Trump’s plan to “take over” the Gaza Strip to rebuild the war-torn enclave while relocating Palestinians elsewhere during reconstruction efforts.
Like many other Middle Eastern leaders who rejected Trump’s proposal, Erdogan also advocated for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“The creation of a sovereign, territorially united State of Palestine within the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital cannot be delayed any further,” he said during the press conference, as aired by the Turkish TRT Haber TV channel.
“Any step, proposal, or project that undermines this matter is illegitimate in our view, and it means more conflicts, bloodshed, and instability,” he continued.
During Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House last week, Trump called on Egypt, Jordan, and other Arab states to take in Palestinians from Gaza after nearly 16 months of war between Israel and Hamas.
“Until there is peace in Gaza, until the Palestinians achieve peace, peace in the region is impossible,” the Turkish president said.
With talks underway to extend the fragile Israel-Hamas ceasefire, Erdogan also demanded that Israel must pay reparations “for the harm it inflicted through its aggressive actions in Gaza.”
“The cost of Israel’s 15-month attacks in Gaza is about $100 billion,” he said. “The law dictates that the perpetrator must compensate for the damage.”
Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists started the war in Gaza when they murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped 251 hostages during their invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Israel responded with a military campaign aimed at freeing the hostages and dismantling Hamas’s military and governing capabilities in neighboring Gaza.
Last month, both sides reached a ceasefire and hostage-release deal brokered by the US, Egypt, and Qatar.
Under phase one, Hamas agreed to release 33 Israeli hostages, eight of whom are deceased, in exchange for Israel freeing over 1,900 Palestinian prisoners, many of whom are serving multiple life sentences for terrorism-related offenses.
So far, 16 of the 33 hostages have been released during the first phase, which is set to last six weeks.
During the press conference, Erdogan also announced that Turkey and Indonesia will join forces in the reconstruction of Gaza.
Last month, Erdogan met with Hamas leader Muhammad Ismail Darwish in Ankara.
Turkey has been one of the most outspoken critics of Israel during the Gaza war, even threatening to invade the Jewish state and calling on the United Nations to use force if it cannot stop Israel’s military campaign against Hamas.
Last year, Ankara also ceased all exports and imports to and from Israel, citing the “humanitarian tragedy” in the Palestinian territories as the reason.
Erdogan has frequently defended Hamas terrorists as “resistance fighters” against what he described as an Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. He and other Turkish leaders have repeatedly compared Israel with Nazi Germany and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with Adolf Hitler.
The post Turkey’s Erdogan Demands Israel Pay Reparations for Gaza, Says Palestinian State ‘Must Not Be Delayed’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Boston University Rejects Proposal to Divest From Israel

College students in the Boston, Massachusetts area hold dueling demonstrations amid Israel’s war with Hamas in April 2024. Photo: Vincent Ricci via Reuters Connect
Boston University has rejected the group Students for Justice in Palestine’s (SJP) call for its endowment to be divested of holdings in companies which sell armaments to the Israeli military, becoming the latest higher education institution to refuse this key tenet of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
“The endowment is no longer the vehicle for political debate; nevertheless, I will continue to seek ways that members of our community can engage with each other on political issues of our day including the conflict in the Middle East,” university president Melissa Gilliam said on Tuesday in a statement which reported the will of the board of trustees. “Our traditions of free speech and academic freedom are critical to who we are as an institution, and so is our tradition of finding common ground to engage difficult topics while respecting the dignity of every individual.”
Gilliam’s announcement comes amid SJP’s push to hold a student government administered referendum on divestment, a policy goal the group has pursued since Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Its hopes were dashed on Tuesday when what SJP described as “technical difficulties” caused the referendum to be postponed indefinitely. However, SJP hinted that the delay may have been caused by its failing to draw a “representative sample of BU’s undergraduate population” to the polls.
SJP’s relationship with the university is poor, according to The Daily Free Press, Boston University’s official campus newspaper. In November, the Student and Activities Office issued the group a “formal warning” following multiple violations of policies on peaceful assembly. SJP, the Free Press said, occupied an area of the Center for Computing and Data Sciences for two days and tacked anti-Zionist propaganda — which included accusations that Boston University profits from “death” — on school property inside the building despite being forewarned that doing so is verboten. Following the disciplinary action, SJP accused the university of being “discriminatory towards SJP and our events.”
American universities have largely rejected demands to divest from Israel and entities at all linked to the Jewish state, delivering a succession of blows to the pro-Hamas protest movement that students and faculty have pushed with dozens of illegal demonstrations aimed at coercing officials into enacting the policy.
Trinity College turned away BDS advocates in November, citing its “fiduciary responsibilities” and “primary objective of maintaining the endowment’s intergeneration equity.” It also noted that acceding to demands for divestment for the sake of “utilizing the endowment to exert political influence” would injure the college financially, stressing that doing so would “compromise our access to fund managers, in turn undermining the board’s ability to perform its fiduciary obligation.”
The University of Minnesota in August pointed to the same reason for spurning divestment while stressing the extent to which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict polarizes its campus community. It coupled its pronouncement with a new investment policy, a so-called “position of neutrality” which, it says, will be a guardrail protecting university business from the caprices of political opinion.
Colleges and universities will lose tens of billions of dollars collectively from their endowments if they capitulate to demands to divest from Israel, according to a report published in September by JLens, a Jewish investor network that is part of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Titled “The Impact of Israel Divestment on Equity Portfolios: Forecasting BDS’s Financial Toll on University Endowments,” the report presented the potential financial impact of universities adopting the BDS movement, which is widely condemned for being antisemitic.
The losses estimated by JLens are catastrophic. Adopting BDS, it said, would incinerate $33.21 billion of future returns for the 100 largest university endowments over the next 10 years, with Harvard University losing $2.5 billion and the University of Texas losing $2.2 billion. Other schools would forfeit over $1 billion, including the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, and Princeton University. For others, such as the University of Michigan and Dartmouth College, the damages would total in the hundreds of millions.
“This groundbreaking report approached the morally problematic BDS movement from an entirely new direction — its negative impact on portfolio returns,” New York University adjunct professor Michael Lustig said in a statement extolling the report. “JLens has done a great job in quantifying the financial effects of implementing the suggestions of this pernicious movement, and importantly, they ‘show their work’ by providing full transparency into their methodology, and properly caveat the points where assumptions must necessarily be made. This report will prove to be an important tool in helping to fight noxious BDS advocacy.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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