Tag Archives: Ramadan

Gaza: The Goebsie Big Lie-Blood Libel Awards

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Today, I will reveal the honorees for First Annual—okay, they might have to be more frequent—Big Lie-Blood Libel Awards, for the individuals or collectives who have done the most recently to promote the Big Lie and the Blood Libel against the Jewish people (see chart for hints).

Timeline of deaths with blood libelers

But first: Just as the holy, peaceful, month of Ramadan—including four sacred Fridays and the feast of Eid-al-Fitr—blessedly passed with none of the predicted Islamic violence on the Temple Mount (the Noble Sanctuary), in the Middle East, and throughout the world, so the martial, belligerent, massive, unprecedented attack on Israel last night passed with virtually no damage. The coalition that completely blocked the attack included the US, the UK, France, and Jordan shooting down Iranian missiles and drones and Saudi Arabia providing logistic support. Imagine the degree of cooperation that such coordinated response must have involved. Now imagine the formidable coalition that will follow the war, annealed by alliance against this attack. My brother likens the attack to an amateur boxer throwing a hundred punches none of which lands, then waiting with tired arms for the professional blow that will pop his lights out. Now we’ll see what punch Israel uses. Its stock market finished higher today.

But back to our Big Lie-Blood Libel Awards, known colloquially as Goebbsies in honor of Joseph Goebbels, the master propagandist who put it to history’s most effective use.

The chart above shows today’s Goebbsie honorees against the timeline of the dramatically declining deaths in Gaza since the war started. These are total deaths in successive two-week periods (the blue line) as provided by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry and reported by the United Nations. There are many reasons to doubt these numbers, which are almost certainly over-estimates, but I am accepting them for present purposes because I want to focus on the steep decline—by Hamas’s numbers—and the remarkable fact that the lower the number of deaths got, the bigger the Big Lie got and the Bloodier the Blood Libel got as well. Five of the six Big Lies and Blood Libels shown here were smeared on Israel and the Jews when the number of deaths was about one quarter of what it was in the first month of the war—and declining. Continue reading →

Gaza War: A Visual Aid

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(Blogging on the Gaza War since January 14th. Please link them on to others.)

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then I shouldn’t have much more work to do this week. I started with the very good public website of Kevin Drum, who presented the first graph in the top half of the picture (panel a). Based on data from the (Hamas-run) Gaza Health Ministry via the UN, it displays the daily deaths (red dots) of Gazans from October 7 to February 19, with a linear function (dotted black line) fitted to the daily data. This function declines from between 300-400 in October to 100 in February.

The lower part of the figure (panel b, my responsibility alone) is my attempt to extend Drum’s excellent graph from February to today. The daily deaths (also from the Gaza Health Ministry via the UN) are shown as blue dots, with the red line representing the 7-day moving average. Please note that the two graphs are on very different scales. Continue reading →

Gaza War: Silly Sauce

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(Scroll down to see earlier posts starting January 14th.)

Given certain remarks in the news lately, I thought it might be silly season, but not everybody is silly. Upon careful investigation I learned about Silly Sauce. Like beluga caviar, it is only for a select few—but not the rich. Only political leaders who can’t resist sipping it and don’t mind brain fog.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) first alerted me. He must have sipped some from his hip flask before going down to the Senate floor on March 14th. It was an interesting speech, touching to me in many ways. He said he was speaking for “a silent majority” of “mainstream Jewish Americans” in his “nuanced” view of the Gaza War. He’s a landsman of mine; I went to the next high school over from his a few years earlier. We grew up in the same culture of Brooklyn-Jewish love for Israel in the time when its survival was unlikely. “We love Israel in our bones.”

But, “What horrifies so many Jews especially…is that Israel is falling short” of “distinctive Jewish values.” What exactly are those? He recounts the history of the conflict and the “perfidy” of Hamas in a way that most Jews, including Israelis, can accept. He blasts the right-wing thugs in the Israeli cabinet and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas as “obstacles to peace.”

Fine. But he gives Bibi Netanyahu special attention. Almost all he says about Bibi would be endorsed by the great majority of Israelis. Eighty-five percent disapprove of Bibi, and a growing number support early elections—which Schumer crossed a line to call for.

But here’s the silly part: Schumer calls Bibi too an obstacle to peace, which implies that without him the war would be different. It would not. If 85 percent of Israelis dislike Bibi, about the same percentage approve of how the war is being conducted. Replace Bibi with Gantz or Gallant, and you will get the same war, the same operation in Rafa, the same checking of aid trucks for weapons. The vast majority of Israelis want the war to continue until Hamas is completely disabled.

Apparently Chuck then passed the Silly Sauce on to Vice President Kamala Harris, Continue reading →

Gaza War: Hamas is Haman

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(Scroll down to see earlier posts starting January 14th.)

We have passed not just the start of Ramadan, but the first and second Fridays, with today’s noon service considered particularly sacred. Forty thousand Israeli Muslim citizens and East Jerusalem Residents have come to the Noble Sanctuary—for Jews, The Temple Mount—each Friday to pray in one of its two great mosques, without a single untoward incident. Aside from a lone gunman in the West Bank, these Ramadan Fridays have been peaceful in the region and throughout the Muslim world. Estimates of Muslims visiting the Old City of Jerusalem today are up to 120,000. An Israeli journalist reporting from the crowded Noble Sanctuary as services let out described the atmosphere as reverent and celebratory.

Meanwhile, the tiny Jewish world—there are 100 Muslims for every Jew—is preparing for Purim, an irreverent, raucous, often drunken celebration of the survival of the Persian Jews, who came under deadly threat some 2,600 years ago. The Book of Esther,  chanted aloud in the evening and following morning in synagogues circling the globe, tells the story.

This year Purim begins tomorrow, Saturday, exactly 24 weeks after the Saturday (both the Sabbath and another Jewish holy day), on which Hamas terrorists committed grotesque mass atrocities against 1200 Jews and others in Israel, deliberately inviting destruction on themselves and the women and children they hide behind. Many say that this was the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. That it was, but actually the Nazis rarely took the time to rape women with knives or cut off the limbs of children before killing them. The Nazis did torture Jews at times, but mainly aimed at efficient mass murder.

Continue reading →

Gaza War: America’s Ramadan Bear Hug

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(Scroll down to see earlier posts in this series, beginning January 14th.)

We are days from Ramadan, sacred to Muslims—30 days of strict daytime fasting ending in a celebratory feast (Eid-al-Fitr) on the last day. It is one of the Five Pillars of Islam, the others being ritual prayer, alms, the holy pilgrimage of the Hajj, and bearing witness to the Oneness of God and the truth of the Prophet Muhammad.

It is a bit confusing to outsiders that Ramadan rotates around the year, because unlike the Chinese and Jewish calendars, which come back to the solar cycle, the Muslim calendar is purely lunar, losing 11 days each year. So the ambience of Ramadan changes—one year wintry, another autumnal—back through the seasons. For my Muslim students, this is a time for spiritual reflection.

However, the idea that Ramadan should restrain Israel from attacking Gaza is very naive. Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on Yom Kippur of 1973, the holiest day of the year when Israeli Jews were in synagogues fasting, and the mass atrocities committed by Hamas came on what was both the Sabbath and a holy day. But Muslims have never considered Ramadan a time when war must stop, because the Qur’an does not forbid it.

In the long war between Iraq and Iran, both Islamic, key assaults by each side not only coincided with Ramadan but were named for it. Iran launched Operation Ramadan, then the largest land battle since World War II, on July 13, 1982, three weeks into the fast.  100,000 troops swept into Iraq in human waves; many had signed martyrdom contracts called “Passports to Paradise.” In six weeks an estimated 80,000 were killed on both sides.

And Iraq launched Operation Ramadan Mubarak (Blessed Ramadan) the day before Ramadan began in 1988, sending 100,000 troops against Iran with heavy use of chemical weapons. Iranian resistance collapsed. Continue reading →