B’nai B’rith International has issued the following statement:

B’nai B’rith International condemns the American Studies Association’s (ASA) continued one-sided criticism of Israel and its distorted views of Hamas as the organization demanded the United States withdraw its support for Israel and asserted that “the U.S. is complicit in the ongoing siege of Gaza, Israeli war crimes, and Palestinian suffering.” 

This is the second time this year that the ASA has censured Israel after unanimously voting for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions in December 2013. In a recent press release, the organization condemned Israel for “attacks on identifiable academic institutions are part of its campaign of collective punishment that has already claimed more than 1,650 lives”—referring, in part, to Israel’s targeted strike on Gaza’s Islamic University.

The ASA continues to place blame solely on Israel for its incursion into Gaza and ignores not only Hamas’ incessant rocket fire at the Jewish state, but also the organization’s widespread use of human shields. The ASA takes issue with the Israel Defense Forces’ targeting of a university, but does not mention that it was used as a weapon’s production facility. The ASA also fails to mention that Hamas’ use of academic institutions as human shields for armaments and personnel is a routine, encouraged practice.

In keeping with its earlier academic boycott in response to the Israel’s supposed human rights violations against Palestinians, the ASA continues to exercise selective memory and bias when evaluating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This latest demand is just another showing of its complicity with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

B’nai B’rith International has issued the following statement:


In the wake of the naming of partisan “experts” to the United Nations Human Rights Council’s (UNHRC) “independent, international commission of inquiry” on Gaza, B’nai B’rith International reaffirms its clear expectation of bias on the part of the probe. The UNHRC selected William Schabas of Canada, Doudou Diène of Senegal, and Amal Alamuddin of Britain. 

B’nai B’rith considers the commission itself illegitimate as it was born of a UNHRC resolution that stridently excoriated Israel in advance of the “inquiry” it launched and didn’t so much as mention Hamas by name. It was specifically designed to scrutinize not years of cross-border terrorist attacks against Israelis, but‎ rather Israel’s defensive response to them. Any suggestion that there is equivalence between terrorism and a state defending its civilians from that threat is both outrageous and unacceptable.

Naming individuals with prior, public positions harshly critical of Israeli policy reinforces strong anticipation that the Gaza probe’s conclusions are foregone. Schabas, for example, was quoted in 2013 as saying, “my favorite would be [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu within the dock of the International Criminal Court.”

Alamuddin—who is engaged to actor George Clooney—has now said she is unavailable to sit on the UNHRC commission. Nonetheless, she specified in a statement that she was “horrified” by what she called the “crimes” committed in the “occupied Gaza Strip.” Gaza, however, saw all Israeli military personnel and civilians depart in 2005, and it has been the origin of relentless, criminal violence against the civilians of Israel by Palestinian terrorist groups led by Hamas. Her intended appointment reveals not only the inherent bias of the UNHRC commission and its dispatchers, but also a deplorable attempt to garner publicity for yet another exercise in anti-Israel bias. 

B’nai B’rith International wrote to a key official in the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Matthias Behnke, expressing concern over the lack of transparency in civilian-casualty figures released by the United Nations during Israel’s conflict with Hamas in Gaza. 

Though Behnke told The New York Times that the United Nations uses human rights groups to calculate and categorize casualties and claimed it was “not that complicated” to obtain the data, he declined to identify the human rights groups the United Nations has consulted and the methodology being used. 

In their letter, B’nai B’rith International Executive Vice President Daniel S. Mariaschin and U.N. and Intercommunal Affairs Director David J. Michaels wrote: “During times when the United Nations cannot establish the veracity of its ‘estimates’ – or cannot provide assurances that data is uninfluenced by ‘local authorities’ controlled in whole or in part by belligerents – we expect U.N. bodies to desist from circulating information that can impair defensive efforts and irresponsibly embolden those committed to recurring conflict that ensnares Israeli and Palestinian civilians alike.”

The letter can be read in full here. 

B’nai B’rith International has issued the following statement:

When it comes to Israel, Jimmy Carter continues to distort the facts on the ground. In his latest anti-Israel screed, the former U.S. president rebukes Israel for the current situation in Gaza. In an op-ed for Foreign Policy’s website, co-written with former Irish President Mary Robinson, they write: “there is no humane or legal justification' for Israel’s actions,” and say that Israel has “pulverized large parts of Gaza, including thousands of homes, schools, and hospitals.”

The death of civilians is always a tragedy. But no army in the world has been more careful in preventing and limiting civilian casualties than the Israel Defense Forces. It is widely known that the IDF warns residents in built-up areas through the use of texts, emails, phone calls and leaflets. Carter and Robinson fail to note that the terrorist entity that rules Gaza, Hamas, hides among civilians, using human shields to draw fire to its own civilian population. Hamas rocket launchers and stockpiles of rockets and other weapons have been found in schools, at United Nations facilities and in residential neighborhoods.

Robinson has a similar history to Carter when it comes to bias against Israel. She presided over the 2001 World Conference Against Racism, now commonly known as Durban I, which is infamous for degenerating into an anti-Israel hate-fest. As high commission of human rights for the United Nations, Robinson lost control of that conference and allowed anti-Israel and anti-Semitic rhetoric to overwhelm the proceedings.

The Carter and Robinson op-ed also suggests that Israel lift Gaza sanctions as well as remove a blockade that they say prevents goods from entering Gaza. But when the crossings were open and cement was freely brought in for the ostensible purpose of construction, it was directed to the building of a massive tunnel network meant to support Hamas’ military infrastructure.   

It also bears noting that even during the fighting, some 1,800 trucks have entered Gaza from Israel carrying medicines, food and other humanitarian supplies.

By highlighting the disparity in the number of deaths on each side, Carter and Robinson miss an important distinction. Hamas should not be lauded for its inability to kill more Israelis. Its goal—with more than 3,000 rockets fired into Israel—is to kill as many civilians as possible.

In his usual myopic reading of the situation in the Middle East, Carter characterizes Hamas as a “legitimate political actor.” This terrorist group, with its mission to destroy Israel written into its charter, is anything but legitimate.

In this piece, as in others, Carter continues to go out of his way to burnish his anti-Israel credentials.

B’nai B’rith International demands that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and those in the government complicit with his expressions of hatred, cease making inflammatory and derogatory remarks against Israel, which has led to incitement and a fear of violence against the Jewish community of Venezuela.

While the Venezuelan government has consistently stoked fear within the country’s Jewish community in the past, Maduro has heightened the anxiety and uncertainty in recent weeks. He has used the conflict in Gaza as a chance to aggressively denounce Israel, reportedly accusing the Jewish state of “a war of extermination against the Palestinian people,” and reportedly comparing Israel’s incursion into the Gaza Strip to the Nazis at Auschwitz. As a result, anti-Semitic graffiti has appeared in Caracas, vitriol against Jews on social media is raging and a Jewish newspaper’s website was hacked.

“B’nai B’rith, and the Jewish community as a whole, has always been concerned with the Venezuelan government’s incendiary statements and actions against Israel. But in recent weeks we’ve seen Maduro promoting a whole new level of hatred,” B’nai B’rith International President Allan J. Jacobs said. “The climate he has created is dangerous to the Jews in his country and wholly out of line with a government’s duty to protect its citizens.”

Maduro also called on the Jewish community to stand against “Israel’s policy of extermination of the Palestinian people.” President of the National Assembly Diosdado Cabello also echoed Maduro’s anti-Israel sentiments, reportedly saying “In Israel, there’s a smell of sulphur, the devil is there.” These statements are then repeated incessantly across state-run media platforms, thus perpetuating this hatred to the masses.

Unsurprisingly, Maduro and members of his government are willfully overlooking the rain of rocket fire Hamas unleashes on Israeli civilians, as well as its use of Palestinian civilians to shield terrorists and armaments.

B'nai B'rith deplores the loss of human life and believes strongly in peace as the only route for progress.

“The comparison of Gaza to Auschwitz alone is a dangerous trope and an outrageous falsehood. When Maduro combines these explosive comments with his own state-media machine and a dangerous political agenda, it creates an alarming situation for the Jewish community in Venezuela,” B’nai B’rith International Executive Vice President Daniel S. Mariaschin said. “B’nai B’rith expresses its solidarity with the Venezuelan Jewish community. We will continue to call attention to and monitor the hate-filled environment that Maduro is intent on fostering.”

B’nai B’rith International wrote to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today to express deep concern about his “choice of language in addressing the ongoing hostilities between Hamas and a United Nations member state, Israel, compelled again to protect its citizens from that Palestinian terrorist organization.” While Ban separately condemned an “upsurge in anti-Semitic attacks, particularly in Europe,” he deplored military shelling outside a U.N. Relief and Works Agency school in Gaza as “a moral outrage” and even “a criminal act.”

In their letter, B’nai B’rith International President Allan J. Jacobs, Executive Vice President Daniel S. Mariaschin and Director of United Nations and Intercommunal Affairs David J. Michaels wrote that they join the secretary-general in distress over any civilian casualties. However, they also had questions for Ban: “Why is the most strident of language reserved only for reported Israeli defensive actions? Has nearly a decade-and-a-half of rockets from Gaza into Israel – now subjecting nearly all Israeli civilians, of all backgrounds, to incessant air raid sirens and bomb shelters – not constituted ‘a moral outrage and a criminal act?’ Does a multi-million-dollar network of underground, cross-border terrorist infiltration tunnels not constitute ‘madness’ that must be definitively ended? Is the storing by Palestinian terrorists of heavy munitions in UNRWA schools – repeatedly uncovered by UNRWA itself over recent weeks – not eminently relevant to the current situation and demanding of your personal intervention of the most urgent kind?”

Noting that the consideration of counterterrorism to be a “criminal act” incentivizes the continued taking of human shields by groups like Hamas, B’nai B’rith advised Ban to concentrate on curbing the flow of arms to Gaza: “We urge you, accordingly, to focus your vital efforts on ensuring the full and immediate demilitarization of the Gaza Strip. It is especially critical that your words and deeds do not contribute to reinforcing the unconscionable behavior of terrorist organizations standing in the way of calm and of peace.”

Click here to read the full letter.

Urges International Community to finally recognize Hamas’ True Intentions 

B’nai B’rith International has issued the following statement:

Hamas has no interest in peace with Israel. The terrorist organization broke the latest internationally brokered cease-fire hours after it took effect, with a string of offensive actions, including using its terror tunnel system to launch a suicide bomber at Israeli soldiers—killing two—kidnapping an Israeli soldier and continuing to fire missiles into Israel.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry strongly condemned Hamas for shattering the cease-fire. Kerry said the kidnapping of the Israeli soldier and the murder of two others is “an outrageous violation of the cease-fire negotiated over the past several days, and of the assurances given to the United States and the United Nations.” Kerry also noted the international community must commit to ending “the tunnel and rocket attacks by Hamas terrorists on Israel.”

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said a kidnapping by Hamas would “constitute a grave violation of the cease-fire, and one that is likely to have very serious consequences for the people of Gaza, Israel and beyond.” Ban also noted that the kidnapping would “call into question the credibility of Hamas’ assurances to the United Nations.”
 
This cease-fire violation should once and for all demonstrate to the international community that Hamas’ only goal is the destruction of Israel.

B’nai B’rith supports Israel as it continues to defend itself.