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The ‘Gaza Famine’ Myth
Egyptian trucks carrying humanitarian aid make their way to the Gaza Strip, amid the ongoing conflict in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, at the Kerem Shalom crossing in southern Israel, May 30, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen
JNS.org – It’s now quite clear that there are simply no facts at all—none—that will alter the fixed narrative of lies, distortions and blood libels with which the liberal internationalist order is demonizing and delegitimizing Israel.
The claim that Israel is starving the civilians of Gaza and causing an imminent famine has been pumped out incessantly since soon after the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war.
In February, the United Nations said that more than a quarter of Gaza’s 2.3 million people were “estimated to be facing catastrophic levels of deprivation and starvation” and that, without action, widespread famine was “almost inevitable.”
In March, Biden administration officials told Benny Gantz—then a member of Israel’s war cabinet who was visiting Washington, D.C.—that the “food shortage crisis” impacting Palestinians in Gaza was “intolerable.”
At the end of that month, Janti Soeripto, president and chief executive of Save the Children US, declared that famine and starvation in Gaza were already happening.
In May, Director of the World Food Program Cindy McCain said that parts of Gaza were experiencing a “full-blown famine” that was rapidly spreading throughout the territory.
Also last month, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court sought arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on the grounds that Israel was “causing starvation as a method of war including the denial of humanitarian relief supplies [and] deliberately targeting civilians in conflict.”
The world has brushed aside Israel’s repeated protests that there has been no shortage of food trucks arriving with aid for Gaza and that the problem lay instead with distribution because Hamas was stealing the supplies.
Instead, the liberal international establishment has repeatedly demanded that Israel immediately stop the war, thus inescapably surrendering to Hamas and forfeiting the military leverage required to free the remaining hostages.
Yet now, the famine claims have been debunked.
The Famine Review Committee (FRC) conducts investigations into world hunger on behalf of a partnership formed between governments, international organizations and NGOs.
In March, the committee reported that “famine is now projected and imminent” in northern Gaza and was expected to take hold before the end of May. Preventing such a famine, it stated, required “an immediate political decision for a ceasefire together with a significant and immediate increase in humanitarian and commercial access to the entire population of Gaza.”
In April, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), a food security monitoring initiative founded in 1985 by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), went even further by stating there was “reasonable evidence” that, since April, northern Gaza had been experiencing a famine and this would persist at least until the end of July.
But on June 4, the Famine Review Committee published a report in which it rejected the FEWS NET analysis as not “plausible” and said it could not endorse its famine projection.
The committee said there was a lack of reliable evidence about the number of trucks entering Gaza and the level of humanitarian assistance that was arriving and being distributed around its various areas.
In order to compensate for these gaps in the data, it said, FEWS NET had relied on “multiple layers of assumptions and inference” about food availability and access as well as nutritional status and mortality, and had made “deliberate choices over assumptions, without the necessary supporting evidence.”
Such assumptions, said the committee, had ignored or underestimated the value of both commercial sources of food and certain forms of humanitarian aid.
Although this didn’t alter the fact that Gaza was experiencing “extreme human suffering” and that urgent measures were needed to boost humanitarian supplies, the committee concluded that flows of aid and the availability of food had increased significantly in March and April and “that nearly 100 percent of daily kilocalorie requirements were available for the estimated population of 300,000 people in April, even using conservative calculations.”
In other words, the committee reversed its own dire predictions and damned the famine early warning network for excluding evidence that gave the lie to its anti-Israel narrative. The categorical declarations of imminent famine being caused by wicked, heartless, war-criminal Israel just weren’t true.
It’s worth remembering that USAID, the parent body of FEWS NET, is run by Samantha Power, who served as US ambassador to the United Nations during the Obama administration.
In 2002, Power suggested in a “thought experiment” that America might have to invade Israel to prevent an Israeli genocide against the Palestinians. She also suggested that the only people who might be alienated by this would be American Jews, who she said exercised tremendous political and financial power over America.
Other research has also exploded the “Gaza famine” claims. At Columbia University, two professors have said the evidence shows that sufficient amounts of food are being supplied to Gaza.
They told The Jerusalem Post that it was “a myth that Israel is responsible for famine in Gaza” and suggested that the International Criminal Court and UN had joined Hamas in blaming Israel for a “famine that never was, hoping to stop the war.”
Yet there are no signs that these rebuttals of the “Gaza famine” claim are having any effect on the Israel-bashing crowd. A few days ago, The New York Times was still referring to “starving civilians” and blaming deaths from malnutrition on “restrictions on aid and commercial goods entering Gaza.”
BBC News reported this week that “warnings of famine are looming once again in northern Gaza,” broadcasting distressing footage of infants said to be suffering from dehydration and malnutrition caused by restrictions on aid at the Rafah and Kerem Shalom border crossings.
Other than Fox News, it seems that no mainstream media outlet has reported the Famine Review Committee’s findings that the claim of famine in Gaza cannot be justified. Nor have the anti-Israel humanitarian organizations, although the World Health Organization’s Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has now subtly adjusted his rhetoric by talking about “famine-like conditions.”
Famine is not the only anti-Israel falsehood whose debunking has been ignored. The mainstream media and humanitarian crowd are still using the Hamas figure of 37,000-plus civilians killed in Gaza, despite the fact that the UN itself revised its own casualty totals sharply downwards after it emerged that some of the claimed deaths had been drawn from media sources and were fabricated.
Some outlets such as The New York Times, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Time magazine are still claiming that the International Court of Justice said the Palestinians in Gaza faced a “plausible risk of genocide” even though the court said no such thing. As the ICJ President Joan Donoghue herself said, the court decided “that the Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide. … It didn’t decide that the claim of genocide was plausible.”
While Israel continues to be defamed by blood libels about famine and its war of self-defense in Gaza, some five million are facing actual famine in Sudan where up to 150,000 have been killed and up to 10 million displaced. Some 25 million are estimated to need humanitarian assistance as a result of a 14-month-long civil war.
Yet this vast and catastrophic scale of human suffering is being almost totally ignored. On Fox News, Hadeel Oueis, editor-in-chief of the pan-Arab media outlet Jusoor, said: “Sudanese [people] are asking why the world turns a blind eye as the third-largest country in Africa is laid to waste while at the same time fixating on the smaller conflict in Gaza.”
Good question. The answer is as obvious as it is brutal: The world only cares about suffering humanity when it can blame the Jews. That malevolent prism shapes a fixed and murderous narrative about Israel and the Jewish people that no actual facts can be allowed to disturb.
The post The ‘Gaza Famine’ Myth first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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A pro-Israel rally at the University of Toronto was headlined by Columbia University professor Shai Davidai
Around 200 people gathered for a pro-Israel demonstration at University of Toronto’s downtown campus at King’s College Circle—which was the site of one of Canada’s largest pro-Palestinian encampments during May […]
The post A pro-Israel rally at the University of Toronto was headlined by Columbia University professor Shai Davidai appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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‘Not Welcome’: New Pro-Hamas Campaign Aims to Abolish Hillel Campus Chapters
A statue of George Washington tied with a Palestinian flag and a keffiyeh inside a pro-Hamas encampment is pictured at George Washington University in Washington, DC, US, May 2, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Craig Hudson
The campus group National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) is waging a campaign to gut Jewish life in academia, calling for the abolition of Hillel International campus chapters, the largest collegiate organization for Jewish students in the world.
“Over the past several decades, Hillel has monopolized for Jewish campus life into a pipeline for pro-Israel indoctrination, genocide-apologia, and material support to the Zionist project and its crimes,” a social media account operating the campaign, titled #DropHillel, said in a manifesto published last week. “Across the country, Hillel chapters have invited Israeli soldiers to their campuses; promoted propaganda trips such as birthright; and organized charity drives for the Israeli military.”
It continued, “Such actions reveal Hillel’s ideological and material investment in Zionism, despite the organization’s facade as being simply a ‘Jewish cultural space.’”
DropHillel claims to be “Jewish-led,” although only a small minority of Jews oppose Zionism, and the group has been linked to and promoted by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters.
Hillel International has provided Jewish students a home away from home during the academic year. However, NSJP says it wants to “weaken” it and “dismantle oppression.”
The idea has already been picked up by pro-Hamas student groups at one college, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, according to The Daily Tar Heel, the school’s official student newspaper. On Oct. 9, it reported, a member of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) unveiled the idea for “no more Hillel” during a rally which, among other things, demanded removing Israel from UNC’s study abroad program and adopting the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. Addressing the comments to the paper days later, SJP, which has been linked to Islamist terrorist organizations, proclaimed that shuttering Hillel is a coveted goal of the anti-Zionist movement.
“Zionism is a racist supremacist ideology advocating for the creation and sustenance of an ethnostate through the expulsion and annihilation of native people,” the group told the paper. “Therefore, any group that advocates for a supremacist ideology — be it the KKK, the Proud Boys, Hillel, or Heels for Israel — should not be welcome on campus.”
The #DropHillel campaign came amid an unprecedented surge in anti-Israel incidents on college campuses, which, according to a report published last month by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), have reached crisis levels.
Revealing a “staggering” 477 percent increase in anti-Zionist activity involving assault, vandalism, and other phenomena, the report — titled “Anti-Israel Activism on US Campuses, 2023-2024” — painted a bleak picture of America’s higher education system poisoned by political extremism and hate.
“As the year progressed, Jewish students and Jewish groups on campus came under unrelenting scrutiny for any association, actual or perceived, with Israel or Zionism,” the report said. “This often led to the harassment of Jewish members of campus communities and vandalism of Jewish institutions. In some cases, it led to assault. These developments were underpinned by a steady stream of rhetoric from anti-Israel activists expressing explicit support for US-designated terrorists organizations, such as Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and others.”
The report added that 10 campuses accounted for 16 percent of all incidents tracked by ADL researchers, with Columbia University and the University of Michigan combining for 90 anti-Israel incidents — 52 and 38, respectively. Harvard University, the University of California – Los Angeles, Rutgers University New Brunswick, Stanford University, Cornell University, and others filled out the rest of the top 10. Violence, it continued, was most common at universities in the state of California, where anti-Zionist activists punched a Jewish student for filming him at a protest.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post ‘Not Welcome’: New Pro-Hamas Campaign Aims to Abolish Hillel Campus Chapters first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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‘Muslim for Trump’ Launches Initiatives in Key Battleground States, Says Candidate Will Bring ‘Peace’ to Gaza
Former US President Donald Trump is seen at a campaign event in South Carolina. Photo: Reuters/Sam Wolfe
The “Muslims for Trump” organization has officially launched initiatives to help elect Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump to the White House, arguing that he would be more likely to end the war in Gaza than Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
In a statement released on Monday, the group said it will focus on recruiting Muslim voters in key battleground states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina. The organization both praised Trump for his supposed “peace-focused” approach to ending the war in Gaza and condemned Harris for helping facilitate a so-called “genocide.”
“After meeting with President Trump, it was clear to me he is the right leader for Muslims to get behind,” Rabiul Chowdhury, co-founder of Muslims for Trump and former co-chair of the “Abandon Harris Movement,” said in a statement.
Chowdhury added that during his discussions with Trump, the former president vowed to “ending the escalation of wars and bringing peace to war-torn regions.” In contrast to Trump’s promise to stop the “bloodshed” in Gaza, he claimed, Harris has “recklessly pushed us toward World War III.”
Chowdhury, a self-described “peace advocate,” urged the Muslim community not to fall victim to supposed “misinformation” campaigns by the media and Democrats that paint the former president as hostile to immigrants. He claimed that the former president’s focus is on “ending war, not dividing families through false immigration claims.”
Samra Luqman, chair of the Michigan chapter of Muslims for Trump, underscored the need to punish the Biden administration for what he described as supporting a “genocide” in Gaza.
“The goal of this election is to hold the Biden administration accountable for a genocide. No amount of fear mongering or scare tactics will persuade my community into forgiving the mutilation, live-burning, and genocide of over 200,000 people,” he said.
According to data produced by the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, roughly 40,000 people have died in Gaza since the war began last October. Israel has said that its forces have killed about 20,000 Hamas terrorists during its military campaign.
Israel says it has gone to unprecedented lengths to try and avoid civilian casualties, noting its efforts to evacuate areas before it targets them and to warn residents of impending military operations with leaflets, text messages, and other forms of communication.
On the organization Muslims for Trump’s official website, it claims that the Abraham Accords, a series of historic, Trump administration-brokered normalization agreements between Israel and several countries in the Arab world, helped stabilize the Middle East. It also says that had Trump not lost the 2020 presidential race, the so-called “genocide” could have been prevented.
“Under Trump’s leadership, the Abraham Accords were brokered, fostering peaceful relations between Israel and several Arab countries. Supporters might argue that Trump’s diplomacy prioritized peace and stability in the Middle East, reducing the likelihood of large-scale conflicts like genocide,” the group wrote.
Over the course of his campaign, Trump has repeatedly touted his support for the Jewish state during his singular term in office. Trump has boasted about his administration’s work in fostering the Abraham Accords, promising to resume efforts to strengthen them if he were to win November’s US presidential election.
Harsh US sanctions levied on Iran under Trump crippled the Iranian economy and led its foreign exchange reserves to plummet. Trump and his Republican supporters in the US Congress have criticized the Biden administration for renewing billions of dollars in US sanctions waivers, which had the effect of unlocking frozen funds and allowing the country to access previously inaccessible hard currency.
Trump also recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a strategic region on Israel’s northern border previously controlled by Syria, and also moved the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, recognizing the city as the Jewish state’s capital.
Despite Harris’s repeated efforts to woo Muslim voters, polling data indicates that the demographic has made a dramatic swing away from the Democratic Party. Polling data from the Arab American Institute reveals that Trump slightly edges Harris among Muslim voters by a margin of 42 to 41 percent. A report from the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) shows that Green Party candidate Jill Stein leads Harris and Trump with Muslim voters in the key swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona.
The post ‘Muslim for Trump’ Launches Initiatives in Key Battleground States, Says Candidate Will Bring ‘Peace’ to Gaza first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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