ISRAELI EXCEPTIONALISM

JAMES NORTH—Why is Thomas Friedman afraid to write about the rising danger of war with Iran? Fear of being wrong? But he has plenty of practice in that area, although he may not want to add to his losing streak. Here’s just one angle Friedman might follow. Gareth Porter, the longtime independent investigative journalist, just the other day documented in Slatehow the Pentagon is trying to slip phony evidence into its justification for sending another 1500 U.S. troops to the Mideast, raising the risk of an accident that could provoke an awful conflict. (Friedman surely remembers that when he was stationed in Israel in 1988 an American warship accidentally shot down a civilian Iranian airliner, killing all 290 people on board.)

RAMZY BAROUD—While Trump’s (and Netanyahu’s) divisive language is nothing new, Afek and Ney were entrusted with the difficult task of using legal language to explain their countries’ aversion for international law. Prior to the Herzliya Conference, Afek addressed the Israel Bar Association convention in Eilat on May 26. Here, too, he made some ludicrous claims as he absolved, in advance, Israeli soldiers who kill Palestinians. “A soldier who is in a life-threatening situation and acts to defend himself (or) others (he) is responsible for, is receiving and will continue receiving full back-up from the Israeli army,” he said. The above assertion appears far more sinister once we remember Afek’s views on what constitutes a “life-threatening situation”, as he had articulated in Herzliya a few days later.

CJ HOPKINS—A week or so before the event, Felix Klein, Germany’s “Commissioner for Jewish Life and the Fight Against Anti-Semitism,” warned Jews not to wear kippahs in public, on account of the unprecedented explosion of anti-Semitism throughout the country. According to the interior ministry, there were 62 violent anti-Semitic attacks in Germany during 2018, compared to 37 in 2017, which, in a nation of 83 million people, and with a history of real-life, goose-stepping Nazis, and of perpetrating the Holocaust, and so on … well, you can understand the Commissioner’s alarm.

LAURENT GUYENOT—Thanks to courageous investigators, many anomalies in the official explanation of the events of 9/11 were posted on the Internet in the following months, providing evidence that this was a false flag operation, and that Osama bin Laden was innocent, as he repeatedly declared in the Afghan and Pakistani press and on Al Jazeera.[1] The proofs of this appalling fraud have been accumulating ever since, and are now accessible to anyone willing to spend a few hours of research on the Web.