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‘JEWS COGENS’: August 8-14, 2025 • Vaetchanan / Shabbat Nachamu • 14 Av 5785 • Vol. 24, No. 25
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One rule for me, another for thee HOWard BrESSlEr THE JEwISH STAR
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here is a legal term, jus cogens, that refers to a category of norms — peremptory norms — that govern international law. The term speaks to a body of law from which no exemption is permitted, including war crimes and crimes against humanity — rules from which international state actors cannot be excused from compliance. But lately, there appears to be another area of international law: the law of Jews cogens. That would be a set of “norms” that are only considered normal and inescapable when applied to the Jewish state.
France
When Islamic terrorists killed 128 people and wounded 200 in Paris, France’s President announced: “To all those who have seen these awful things I want to say that we are going to lead a war which will be pitiless.” But when similar Islamic extremists kill ten times that number — and also rape, mutilate and kidnap hundreds of people in Israel — France intends to reward them with a state of their own. This is France, which collaborated with the Nazis during its Vichy regime, that now seeks to punish the Jewish state for refusing to allow people who mean to commit genocide against it to do so, endangering Jews with its fecklessness.
England
Even if anime robots like this one were subject to jus cogens (defined as fundamental principles of international law from which no exception is permitted) and they violated those rules by committing such attrocities as genocide, it’s unlikely the international community would call them to account. While anime robots — and killer-states such as China, Sudan and Syria — get a free-pass, Israel, uniquely, is subject to exaggerated claims under what our columnist calls Jews cogens. Andrey, Adobe
England, in response to Islamic terror attacks in London in 2017, expressed that “[the attacks] are bound together by the single, evil ideology of Islamist extremism that preaches hatred, sows division, and promotes sectarianism. It is an ideology that claims our Western values of freedom, democracy See Blood-stained England and France on page 2
Pro-Israel at the Times? Fuhgeddaboudit! A Timesman for 35 years, he’d never be hired there today
YAAKOV ORT
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ERUSALEM — After working for the New York Times for 35 years (and now, almost 20 years after I retired as managing director for creative services), this and a related post on Facebook is my first public criticism of the work of my for-
mer colleagues. In the past, I’ve confined my comments to a private Facebook group of about 2,500 Times alumni and staff, as well as to personal discussions with friends and former co-workers. But what we are seeing at the Times today is not just bad journalism. It is an appalling twisting of the facts and a mindful, heartless concealment of the truth. Last Saturday, rather than running a photo of hostage Evyatar David being forced to dig his own grave by Hamas terrorists and writing about the actual reaction of millions of Is-
raelis who had seen it, the video desk and foreign desk ran an article leading with a photo of a relative handful of protesters in Tel Aviv, with the following headline and subhead: Hundreds Protest in Tel Aviv After Hostage Videos Surface From Gaza: The circulation of videos created by Hamas showing Israeli hostages living in dire conditions incited families to protest in Tel Aviv on Saturday to demand a cease-fire and the return of their loved ones. If the Times still had a Jerusalem bureau that reported the thoughts, communications and actions of the vast majority of Israelis, as
it once did, it would have told readers that the reaction of millions to this and other photos and videos of the physical and psychological torture of our children is neither fear nor protest. It is horror, rage and resolve. he symbolism of the photo is so apt, since this is exactly what most current Times news, editorial and op-ed page writers and editors — and those justifiably fearful of the Islamic street in the West — are arguing daily that the people of Israel should do: Dig our own graves. See Newspaper of record on page 3
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