Here are some more items that the assiduous, objective and open-minded mainstream media may have unaccountably failed to bring properly to your attention.
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The Israel Defence Forces haven’t just been finding Hamas operatives in the tunnels of Gaza. They also captured two Chinese Communist Party engineers in the tunnel network.
This was revealed by Guermantes Lailari, a former lieutenant colonel in the US Air Force who is now based in Taiwan. He told a webinar:
There were two PLA engineers that they found in the tunnels. And China rapidly tried to put pressure on Israel to return them and even try to get the Russians to put some pressure on Israel to return these two guys. And they went back to China. I don't think they were interrogated. I don't know for sure. But why are there two PLA tunnel engineers in Gaza? To me, that's very suspect….we can suspect that that there was some involvement of China in helping Hamas design these tunnels that went on for miles and miles and were very sophisticated.
Surprised? A follow-up article in Newsweek pointed out the close ties between the Chinese Communist Party and Hamas. Pesach Wolicki reported:
The Hamas movement is part of the Palestinian national fabric and China is keen on relations with it," Chinese diplomat Wang Kejian told Hamas during a meeting with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Qatar in March, according to Hamas. It was around this time that a video was widely disseminated on Chinese social media in which a TV presenter bragged that "TikTok has won big for Palestine.”
The CCP-Hamas partnership goes both ways. Khaled Meshal, a top Hamas leader, said in early November in an interview on Arabic TV that Hamas "seeks cooperation with the superpowers, China and Russia." He added that China should take inspiration from the Hamas invasion of Israel for their own plans to conquer Taiwan…China and Iran have a comprehensive strategic partnership and share the goal of bringing down the United States. This is why China is promoting Iran's geopolitical goals in the Middle East.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, made a very bad mistake in cosying up to China as he did. One of the many mistaken assumptions in Israeli life which, as a result of the October 7 pogrom, needs to be drastically revised.
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The tireless monitoring group UN Watch has scored a palpable hit. The UN has launched an investigation into claims by UN Watch that Francesca Albanese, the UN Human Rights Council’s “Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967”, illegally accepted money from pro-Hamas groups to fund an estimated $20,000 trip to Australia and New Zealand, in which she lobbied a major pension fund to divest from Israel.
Albanese’s Special Rapporteur role was created to target Israel for demonisation as part of the UN’s signature campaign to vilify and thus destroy the Jewish state. Her mandate is to investigate “violations of the principles and bases of international law” by Israel alone. It makes no mention of violations by the Palestinians, even though the Palestinian Authority and Hamas are tyrannical regimes and serial violators of human rights while Israel is a democracy governed by the rule of law.
The UN certainly selected a particularly ripe candidate for this vicious role. As UN Watch reports:
A former lawyer with UNRWA who co-founded a global network to lobby against Israel, Albanese recently became the first UN human rights rapporteur in the history of the United Nations to be condemned by France and Germany for antisemitism.
She was also censured in 2022 by the US Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, after it was revealed she had published a fundraising appeal for UNRWA claiming that “America is subjugated by the Jewish lobby.” In 2023, a bipartisan group of 18 lawmakers condemned her refusal to denounce terrorism against Israelis.
Hillel Neuer, the head of UN Watch, has called her
one of the most dangerous antisemites in the international arena today.
So she was a perfect pick by the UN. Let’s see now where its own investigation takes it.
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There have been some more particularly disturbing attacks on diaspora Jews.
Last Friday Rabbi Arnie Saunders, the Conservative candidate for Bury South in Britain’s general election, went to the Bilal Mosque in Prestwich, Manchester at the invitation of mosque elders. As you can see here, this elderly rabbi was abused, intimidated and threatened by people at the mosque who called him a “snake”. He has called his treatment antisemitic and reported the incident to the police. The mosque has condemned the incident. The JC reports:
Although he insisted that “the vast majority of people at the mosque were courteous”, and that “at no point” did he feel physically threatened, he thought the mosque “could have done more” to protect him from the “unpleasant” events that took place.
The aspiring MP for Bury South told the JC that he has received an outpouring of support from across the community, “including from the local Muslim community,” and noted that in the original video the president of the mosque and imam were also subjected to verbal abuse.
Saunders also told he just wanted the matter “to be put to bed.” He added that he didn’t “want to be a hero” but thought he handled the matter in “the right way” and was proud of the fact that, in the face of aggressive demands to condemn the IDF, he refused to do so.
Last Saturday, three pro-Israel attendees of one of many anti-Israel sessions hosted by a group called Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair at the West Asheville Library in North Carolina were attacked and forcibly dragged out by masked activists. The Algemeiner reports:
At one point, according to video circulated on social media, a presenter stopped the event, drawing everyone’s attention to the three pro-Israel attendees.The others in attendance expressed concern that their public event was being live streamed by “Zionists.” The presenter immediately joked about the possibility of a “murder here.”
The attendees and anti-Israel activists were then asked by a presenter, “I’ll let you guys decide. What do you want to do?” The pro-Israel attendees were immediately told to leave with multiple people yelling out “bye.”
After further discussion, the presenter asked for a show of hands on how to proceed. An attendee said, “They are not f—king welcome here.” Someone else was heard saying, “I don’t trust them.”
At about two minutes and 20 seconds into the video, activists began encircling Moritz, Buckley, and Campbell. While about 80 percent of the attendees were women, a group of large men stood over the pro-Israel attendees and loudly clapped their hands while yelling “Free Palestine.” The video then goes black while the audio continues with a clear struggle being heard.
According to video and interviews with those targeted at the event, an activist grabbed Buckley’s phone, instigating mob violence against the three pro-Israel attendees. She was reportedly punched, kicked, and stomped. Her phone was stolen and later found, having been thrown on nearby property.
All three pro-Israel attendees reported being dragged out of the library. Campbell, an 80-year-old military veteran with cancer and a stent in his heart, was stomped, assaulted, and pushed to the ground, a footprint clearly visible on his shorts. His phone was also taken and later found in a trashcan. Local police encouraged Campbell to see a doctor.
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Meanwhile, in the Middle East itself not all Muslims are delivering the narrative being pushed by their sympathisers in the west. Watch this clip to see a woman in Gaza furiously blaming Hamas for the plight of Gaza’s residents and saying: “I prefer the Jews”.
While opinion polling shows that the vast majority of Gazans still want to murder Jews and destroy Israel, the opposition to Hamas over provoking the war and doing nothing to protect the lives of the people has become so great it’s now bursting into the open — so much so that even the BBC is running a story about this today. It reports:
Some have publicly criticised Hamas for hiding the hostages in apartments near a busy marketplace, or for firing rockets from civilian areas.
Residents have told the BBC that swearing and cursing against the Hamas leadership is now common in the markets, and that some drivers of donkey carts have even nicknamed their animals after the Hamas leader in Gaza —Yahya Sinwar — urging the donkeys forward with shouts of “Yallah, Sinwar!”
“People say things like, ‘Hamas has destroyed us’ or even call on God to take their lives,” one man said.
The BBC reports a truth about Gaza!! I think I’ll have to go and lie down.
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Finally, get your heads round this one. Jewish airline passengers have been appalled to find that some staff at Heathrow airport are sporting Palestine flag badges, despite an airport rule that staff aren’t allowed to wear political or religious items.
This followed an incident in which Heathrow Border Force staff were accused of singling out Israeli passengers arriving on an El Al flight who were shunted into a separate room and subjected to more intensive security checks after staff noticed the Israeli flag on their luggage.
One might assume that staff wearing the Palestinian flag on their lapels were doing so because they were similarly hostile to Israel and supported the Palestinian Arabs in Gaza. But with a straight face, Heathrow authorities have said that the badge is to tell Arab passengers that these staff members … speak Arabic!
Which presumably comes as news to them.