Showing posts with label Opinion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Opinion. Show all posts

Thursday, February 09, 2017


 Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column


I opened my newspaper this morning (Wednesday) and was greeted with the headline: the White House has no comment on the regularization law that was passed yesterday, and will talk about it when PM Netanyahu visits Washington to meet with President Trump next week.

Imagine my relief. I mean, why should the White House have an opinion about something which is really an internal Israeli affair? I am amused – well, pretty irritated, actually – by the way Ha’aretz and my social media friends have decided to call it the “land grab law,” when it actually goes farther to compensate owners of land than customary common law would. As Eugene Kontorovich explains,

Israel’s proposed “Regulations Bill” has attracted broad international criticism, including from the U.S. State Department and the European Union, as well as from opposition Israeli politicians and some government lawyers. The bill seeks to solve a situation in which, over several decades, over one thousand Israeli homes in West Bank settlements have been built in open areas to which Palestinians subsequently asserted property claims, typically based on broad give-aways of state land by the King of Jordan during the Hashemite occupation (1949-67). The homes are in communities built with some level of government involvement. Thus the bill provides the government would compensate the landowners 125% of the value of the land, in order to allow the communities that have been built there to remain.

The plots are generally open, uncultivated fields. The frequently used characterization of “private Palestinian lands” is misleading. In the overwhelming majority of cases, no individual Palestinians have come forward to claim the lands. Indeed, in most cases, no property claimants asserted their interests for decades after houses were built, a situation that in common law would certainly warrant the application of adverse possession doctrines, under which long-term possession of property unprotested by owners can change legal title, exactly to prevent these kinds of conflict between long-term users and owners who slept on their rights . Under Jordanian law, rules of prescription, which would turn the land over to its existing inhabitants, would apply. In cases like the community of Amona, which inspired but are not covered by the law, the Court made its determination without any fact-finding, and the lands claimed by the Palestinian petitioners only slightly overlap with those on which the Israeli homes stand.

It’s not really a big deal, is it? No Palestinians are being exploited, and the residents of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria are just getting the same kind of protection for their investment as people in the rest of Israel, the US and many other developed countries have. Better, since the state is willing to pick up the tab for compensation.

Of course the world leaders in virtue and morality, the EU and the governments of Germany and France, are dead set against the law. The folks whose wisdom brought us two world wars and a Holocaust have “lost confidence” that we are serious about the “two-state solution” that they hope will slice our country into indefensibility. 

Later today I listened on the radio to the reactions of the European representatives in Israel. You would think that the Knesset had passed a law demanding that the Palestinians must throw all their male children into the sea, and not one that simply makes it possible to compensate people in return for taking property that they may not even have clear title to, and haven’t used for years, if ever. I am becoming more and more convinced that after Iran, Europe is our greatest enemy, and the Palestinians their weapon.

Well, Amona is rubble, its residents are homeless, and the cabal made up of the Civil Administration (the military entity that rules Area C, where almost all Jewish settlements are and few Arabs live), the left-leaning legal establishment, and the subversive European-paid NGOs are smacking their lips over how they will do the same to numerous other Jewish communities, just as soon as the Supreme Court voids the new law.

Because, after all, who cares what the democratically elected Knesset and government decide? Don’t we understand who really runs the country and knows what’s good for us? Those religious settler fanatics are an obstacle to peace! Just ask the talking heads on Israeli radio and TV.

Which brings me to the next headline: Channel 2 reports that Netanyahu told the police that have been investigating him nonstop for who knows how long, that he didn’t know about bottles of champagne and other gifts received by his wife from a businessman friend, and he didn’t check the value of cigars that he himself was given. He just smoked them! Not only that, but he told the police that he bought plenty of cigars with his own money.

So, just some random thoughts on this “scandal:” Channel 2 has been selectively dribbling out information about Netanyahu’s supposedly confidential police investigations for months. Where do they get it, and why is it OK for them to release out-of-context snippets of interrogations in a country where the names and faces of people accused of crimes are routinely redacted from news reports?

The investigation itself is on the same level as one of the previous ones, in which Mrs. Netanyahu was accused of returning deposit bottles that had been used at official functions, and keeping the money. Yes, she did it; yes, the small amount of money was returned; and yes, the silliness of creating a scandal about deposit bottles was duly noted.

The fact is that the same media people that deliberately mischaracterize the regularization law and also gleefully bash Netanyahu on every occasion, are running a long-term project to make him look like a crook. How much of the evening news is devoted to his non-scandals, almost every day? How many hours has he wasted, answering police questions and trying to deal with the fallout from these frivolous investigations? He’s the Prime Minister of the strongest country in the region, economically and militarily, the one and only Jewish state – which half the world hates and wants to destroy – and you are busting his balls about some cigars?

This isn’t really funny. Netanyahu has said that he believes there is a media campaign to force the Attorney General to indict him. And if he is indicted, he could be forced to resign.

The story on page 11 of the newspaper reminds me that not everything is frivolous or political. It is about Trump and Iran trading barbs over the Iranian missile development program. Now that Obama is gone, it may be possible for the US and Israel to develop an effective policy to prevent their common enemy, Iran, from producing and deploying nuclear weapons. 

I devoutly hope that this will be the main subject for discussion between Netanyahu and Trump, rather than Judean real estate law. Or cigars.





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Wednesday, February 08, 2017


Europe punishes Israel, blared the headline in Israel National News. “Ha!” I thought to myself. “They kill 6 million of us and then they punish us? What was that, then? The Spring Cotillion?”
"Selection" of Hungarian Jews on the ramp at the death camp Auschwitz-II (Birkenau) in Poland during German occupation, May/June 1944. Jews were sent either to work or to the gas chamber.
Europe. It takes a special kind of chutzpah to be so steadfast, so single-minded in one’s pursuit of hatred’s aim: the Jews. This is a story not lacking in any irony!
Jewish refugees being marched away by British police at Croydon airport in March 1939. They were put on a flight to Warsaw.

Think on it: the Romans oust the Jews from their land and so they go to Europe (some of them dragged there as slaves). Europe tortures the Jews for two-thousand years with all manner of pogroms and expulsions and then tries to finish them off once and for all, while Great Britain prevents them from coming back to whence they came from in the first place.
The Jewish poet Süßkind von Trimberg wearing a Jewish hat (Codex Manesse, 14th century.)
No one else much wants them. Certainly not FDR. Even though he knew exactly what was going on.

But after the Holocaust, all of them are forced to do something: the European nations, America, the UN. And so it is decided they’ll throw money at the creation of a Jewish State, Israel. They’ll give lip service to the idea of a Jewish National Home. Britain, meanwhile, will secretly arm the Arabs from behind the scenes in hopes of counteracting all these efforts.

And the glory of it! Even should the Jews succeed and manage to defend the Jewish State of Israel against all odds, all those Arabs who want them dead after all those Germans who wanted them dead, then at least they’ll all be in one place.

Yes. They managed to murder 6 million Jews, spread as they were throughout Europe. But 6-7 million of the suckers concentrated (get it?) in one tiny country the size of the state of Vermont? What with nuclear weapons a thing, this time they figure they can’t lose. Just point and shoot, as the saying goes.
Fettmilch Riot: The plundering of the Judengasse (Jewry) in Frankfurt on August 22, 1614

That is approximately (okay, so exactly) what went through this author’s head while reading about Europe punishing Israel over the passing of Israel’s brand spanking new Regulation Law, which gives 125% of the value of the land, or an equivalent piece of land to any Arab who can prove ownership of land on which a Jew built a home in Judea and Samaria.

You have to understand: Jews didn’t build in Judea and Samaria indiscriminately, but did their utmost to ascertain that the land in question was public—that there were no previous owners. Then and only then did Jews build homes with the government’s okay and assistance. These claims that keep coming up, they’re BOGUS. The claimants do not even need to show a deed. So of course people are going to claim land they want if they don’t even need to prove ownership with papers of some sort.

Need a crash course in contemporary land rights in Judea and Samaria? You’ve got it. Here’s what historian and political analyst Dr. Moshe Dann, has to say on the subject:
After the Six Day War in 1967 . . . the IDF commander ruled that the IDF would follow Jordanian law completely and exclusively [regarding land ownership in Judea and Samaria], except where it conflicted with IDF rules and regulations. This was an administrative decision, not law, and exceptions were made, for example to apply Israeli law concerning VAT. But regarding land ownership, the Civil Administration (Minhal) followed Jordanian law. This became important several decades later as Jews built new communities and as Arab Palestinians and NGOs Peace Now, Yesh Din and Rabbis for Human Rights, appealed to the High Court claiming that Jews had built their homes and property on “privately owned land.” 
Their claims are based on massive land distributions that were carried out by Jordan during the early 1960’s in Judea and Samaria (the 'West Bank'). These arbitrary land grants were unconditional and, according to Mandate and Jordanian law, when recorded in the land registry, gave the recipients title and permanent possession. Most of the land was never used and no taxes were paid, which are required by Ottoman law, and therefore should have nullified any claims of ownership. 
Since Jordan’s occupation of Judea, Samaria and parts of Jerusalem was illegal, and its claim to be the legitimate sovereign was rejected by the entire international community, except for England and Pakistan, the IDF was under no obligation to recognize Jordan’s authority, including its laws and legal structure. Three Israeli laws were already in force and should have been employed: 
1. The Area of Jurisdiction and Powers Ordinance (1948) requires that Israeli land laws be applied to "any part of Palestine which the Minister of Defense has defined by proclamation as being held by the Defense Army of Israel." According to late attorney and legal expert Howard Grief, this law “was enacted for the sole purpose of recovering for the Jewish State those lands that had been recognized as integral parts of the Jewish National Home under international law in 1920 and had always been considered the patrimony of the Jewish People." 
2. The Emergency Regulations (Cultivation of Waste [Uncultivated] Lands) Law (1949) “authorizes the Ministry of Agriculture to declare lands as ‘waste’ lands and to take control over ‘uncultivated’ land.” 
3. The Emergency Land Requisition (Regulation) Law (1949) authorizes the requisition of land when it is “necessary for the defense of the state, public security, the maintenance of essential supplies or essential public services, the absorption of immigrants or the rehabilitation of ex-soldiers or war invalids.”
Regarding the new Regulation Law, Dann says the media is making out as though Israel were legalizing land theft, though nothing could be further from the truth. A piece of property could have been registered in someone’s name 60 years ago, though that person is long gone. "Sometimes we can't even find out if that person ever existed. So people claim to be descendants of that person thereby to own land and that certifies them without ever going to court," says Dann.

Now let’s say you didn’t just read about Jordanian land rights and how these claims for land cannot be proven, and don’t even need to be proven in order for the leftist Israeli High Court of Justice to rule in their favor against the settlers. Let’s say you’re completely ignorant of the contemporary history of the area, but you do know that these territories are the heart and soul of the Jewish people, indigenous territory.

How could a European be so bold as to tell a Jew he cannot live in Judea and Samaria? Do Europeans not read their own bible? Are they so utterly ignorant of history that they do not know where Jews come from?

Of course not. Everyone knows it and no one is fooling anyone else. Everyone knows where Jews come from. Just as everyone knows where Arabs come from (hint: Jews=Judea, Arabs=Arabia).

They threw us out of our land, put us in ghettos, forbade us most forms of employment, tortured us with pogroms and expulsions, systematically gassed and burned us by the millions, and now deny us the right to build homes in the land they know we come from. The land that is OURS by birthright.
A 15th-century German woodcut showing an alleged host desecration.
1: the hosts are stolen
2: the hosts bleed when pierced by a Jew
3: the Jews are arrested
4: they are burned alive.
And so, Europe is punishing us! Denying us the pleasure of their company by delaying a meeting between Israeli and European officials. (Oh darn. Don’t you just hate that?)

Oh. Also they chastised us, with various talking heads calling for a repeal of a law that actually goes above and beyond what has been legally required of other countries in similar situations. Prof. Eugene Kontorovich writes:
In several prominent cases, long-term occupiers have used compensated takings, and the international community appears to have acquiesced, and certainly did not declare it illegal.  Examples include the Turkish occupation of Northern Cyprus, where a compensation scheme aimed at permitting Turkish settlers to remain in Greek properties was approved in 2005 by the European Court of Human Rights. Similarly, the Russian occupation of Crimea takes private property with compensation (often in the form of other land), even for highly controversial projects like the Kerch Bridge, which will serve to deeply entrench the occupation and facilitate the transfer of settlers. Yet while many aspects of Russia’s occupation of Crimea have been denounced as illegal by the international community, the use of eminent domain has not. In particular, the ICC Prosecutor’s report on possible Russian crimes in Crimea makes no mention of it. The fact that many aspects of Russia’s Crimean occupation have been explicitly criticized on international law grounds, but this one ignored, suggests that it is not seen as illegal. 
Indeed, property owners who have been compensated have no injury to complain of. As the French Government wrote in its submission to the International Court of Justice in the Wall Case, “international law…  requires compensation which effectively makes good the entire injury suffered by the owners of the property in question. Indeed, claims of violations of international law are often accompanied by demands for compensation. This may be the first case where it is the payment of above-market compensation is claimed as an international law violation. 
In short, prior to the introduction of the Israeli “Regulations” bill, neither the consensus of commentators nor any state practice supported the view that the prohibition on confiscation or seizure of private property in occupied territories applies to land-use regulations accompanied by the payment of complete compensation.
So there you have it: Europe is punishing the Jews for doing more than should be expected of them, especially since everyone knows the territory in question is Jewish indigenous territory, even if they’re all LYING about it, and calling it an “illegal occupation.”

Europe is good at a lot of things: chocolate, cheese, wine. But probably the thing it does best is punish the Jews.

The good news is, we’re just going to keep building homes, having babies, and being a just and democratic nation, and there’s not a thing they can do about it.

So there.

Nyah.



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Tuesday, February 07, 2017



How many people stop to consider what life is like, after the terror attack is over?

Very often lives are changed, forever.

The murder of Dafna Meir was one of the more horrifying attacks Israel experienced last year. How many people stopped to consider Renana afterwards? What will her life be like?

Eldest of Dafna and Natan Meir’s six children, it was Renana who interrupted the terrorist in the middle of stabbing her mother to death. It was Renana who saw the terrorist trying to pull the knife out of her mother’s body so he could stab more people.

It was Renana who saw Dafna struggling to keep the knife inside her body so that he couldn’t hurt her children.

3 of her 6 children were in the house. Dafna’s refusal to allow them to be hurt and Renana’s screams were what made the terrorist give up and run away.

The night of the attack I wrote “How can home be the place where the heart is when that is the place where mommy’s heart stopped beating?”

How can you go on living in a house that was a home, a sanctuary that became a living nightmare? How can you walk across the floor your mother laid on while life fled from her body? How can you use that room as if it was just a regular room?

Over the past year, the people of Israel got glimpses of the spirit of the Meir family. We learned more about how extraordinary Dafna was. We also saw how Natan took all his children in hand and made sure their family life continued with light and with love.

For some reason, many assume a man won’t be able to take care of children on his own. Natan was horrified that there were those who questioned whether or not he would continue taking care of the children he and Dafna had adopted. How could that even be a question?! Dafna had wanted a big family. After they had their own children, she wanted to give a warm and loving home to additional children who needed it, so they adopted. How could anyone think that Natan would abandon the children that Dafna wanted so much? How could anyone think he would treat them differently from his biological children? They are all one family.

A terrorist could steal Dafna from them. Violence could break their family unit but it would not ruin their family. No terrorist could steal their family spirit.

Kindness is a choice. Happiness is a choice. Even when the most horrible things happen it is still possible to choose light. It isn’t easy, but it is possible.

The Meir family dramatically renovated their home. They worked on different ways to honor Dafna’s memory. Through sorrow that is difficult to fathom, an experience almost impossible to comprehend or process, they continued to live, always striving for the light.
Interestingly, Meir comes from the Hebrew word for light and means “giving light,” like a candle gives light in the darkness. And that is exactly what they have done - their example has been a light to us all.

“Or” means light in Hebrew. Interestingly, that is also the name of Renana’s fiancé. She recently announced their engagement in a touching Facebook post, saying:

“My Or who tells me not to cry, gives me reasons to be happy.
My Or who feels the evil with me, is the essence of goodness.
My light, on the day of my private devastation, on the backdrop of the Temple Mount where the Temple is sorely missed, chose that together we will build and grow.
Of course I said yes!”

I don’t know Renana and yet my heat leaps with joy to read her words.

I do not need to know her to know that no girl should ever have had to experience what she experienced. I ache for her pain, knowing that time does not heal. One learns to grow with the pain, one choose to live and be happy despite the pain but the loss never goes away.

There will always be a gaping hole where Renana’s mother is supposed to be.

I, who lost my father to cancer at a young age, can imagine what it is like for Renana. Each time she wishes she could tell her mother something, only to be hit with the reality of what happened…

What’s it like to get engaged and not be able to share your happiness with your mom? Hopes and dreams, plans will have to be made with other people…

What will it be like to have children without Dafna? I can imagine but I don’t know how Renana will feel. The only thing I am certain of is that Dafna’s example will make Renana a stronger, better mother.

The daughter who saw her mother die so that her children would not be hurt, can only become a stunning mother herself.

Renana will always carry with her the Meir family light. Now she also has Or who will add to her light. I pray that together they will have a wonderful life, full of happiness, good health and joy, free of troubles and sorrow.

And I hope they have a lot of children.






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Monday, February 06, 2017

By Petra Marquardt-Bigman

Nobody can know how the Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust would feel about the now so fashionable use of their despair and suffering for the benefit of today’s mostly Muslim refugees. I have repeatedly tried to explain why I think the comparison is inappropriate; but even though more influential writers have also adamantly opposed this facile “lesson of history,” it only seems to become more popular. One notable example for this trend is the Twitter account St. Louis Manifest: set up for the recent International Holocaust Remembrance Day, it quickly gained almost 74,000 followers by combining the commemoration of the Jewish refugees on board the St. Louis, who were denied entry to the US and later killed by the Nazis, with the message #RefugeesWelcome. In the same spirit, columnist Peter Beinart decreed on Twitter that it was completely unacceptable for Jewish organizations to commemorate the Holocaust without forcefully rejecting the Trump administration’s recent “Muslim ban” (which isn’t really a “Muslim ban”).



In a probably futile attempt to make the virtue-signalers think twice, Lee Smith argued in Tablet that if today’s Syrian refugees are the “new Jews,” we should urgently figure out who are the new Nazis. According to Smith, it is Iran and “its crack troops, the Quds Force,” as well as Iranian proxies like Hezbollah and Assad ally Russia “that hunted Sunni Arabs like animals and slaughtered them or sent them running for their lives. These are the Nazis. That’s who sent the Syrians running for their lives like Jews fleeing Hitler.”

Writing at The American Interest, Walter Russell Mead and Nicholas M. Gallagher make a similar argument:

“The refugee question is not the only uncomfortable parallel between the 1930s and our own time. The real problem in the 1930s wasn’t the lack of compassion for Jewish and other refugees; it was the feckless appeasement of Adolf Hitler and the unwillingness to confront him that empowered the Nazi persecution of the Jews and created hundreds of thousands of refugees. So today the true villain of the Syria story—aside from Syria, Russia, and Iran—is the feckless Obama foreign policy that allowed a cyst to metastasize into a cancer, just as Britain, France, and America once allowed Hitler to grow into the master of Europe.
The Obama officials and cheerleaders now guilt-tripping the country over ‘heartlessness’ toward Syria refugees are giving hypocrisy a bad name. Bad foreign policy is the cause of the heartbreak in Syria today, not bad immigration policy. The world does not need lectures from Susan Rice and Samantha Power on what we should do about Syrian refugees; the best way to deal with refugee flows is to prevent them from happening. The Holocaust was not caused by the Reed-Johnson Act [which sharply curtailed immigration since 1924]; it was caused by Nazi hatred, enabled by naive liberal illusions about the ‘arc of history’ that prevented the West from mobilizing against Hitler when he was weak and [could have been] easily defeated.”

But current controversies about Muslim immigration are of course not just about Syrian refugees, and arguably, everyone who is eager to cite “lessons” of the 1930s and 1940s should be confronted with the fact that the murderous Jew-hatred of this time remains not only fairly popular in the Muslim world, but is further fortified by ancient Islamic enmity to Jews. While there is plenty of evidence for these unfortunate facts, the perhaps best example is the popular Muslim leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi. It is crucial to understand how enormously influential Qaradawi is: A 2009 book entitled “The Global Mufti” asserts that “Qaradawi is unquestionably the most important Sunni religious figure in the world today,” and a Huffington Post/World Post list of Arab “thought leaders” ranks the now ninety-year old cleric as number three for 2016.

According to the Huffington Post, Qaradawi is best known for his program “Sharia and Life,” which is broadcast on Al Jazeera and has an estimated audience of 60 million worldwide; he has also published more than 120 books, and helped found the popular website IslamOnline, for which he has long served as “chief religious scholar.”

Interestingly, even the Huffington Post notes in its short biography on Qaradawi that due to some “controversial” views, he was refused entry to the UK (2008) and France (2012). One could add that also his US visa was revoked already in 1999, and he has even become controversial in the Arab world because many regard him “as the religious voice giving power to people in Arab countries to rise against their oppressive rulers.” Along with many Muslim Brotherhood members, an Egyptian court sentenced Qaradawi (in absentia) to death in 2015; Georgetown professor Abdullah Al-Arian denounced the sentence in his Al Jazeera column and praised Qaradawi as “possibly the most prominent religious authority in the Sunni Muslim world.”

Westerners who are eager to use the victims of the Holocaust for today’s political debates should be familiar with some of the relevant views of this highly influential Muslim scholar, who – as Al-Arian illustrates – has also well-placed admirers in the West.

In a speech broadcast on Al Jazeera TV on January 30, 2009, Qaradawi declared:

“Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them – even though they exaggerated this issue – he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers.”



So apparently, Qaradawi would prefer to see Muslims not as the new Jews, but rather as the new Nazis.

A few weeks before Qaradawi expressed his hope that Muslims would follow in Hitler’s footsteps, he also prayed in a Friday sermon that was aired by Al Jazeera TV:

“Oh Allah, take the Jews, the treacherous aggressors. Oh Allah, take this profligate, cunning, arrogant band of people. Oh Allah, they have spread much tyranny and corruption in the land. Pour Your wrath upon them, oh our God. Lie in wait for them. […] oh Allah, take this oppressive, tyrannical band of people. Oh Allah, take this oppressive, Jewish, Zionist band of people. Oh Allah, do not spare a single one of them. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them, down to the very last one.”

These kind of fervent prayers calling on Allah to kill all the Jews are not uncommon – here is a selection: a Palestinian preacher (2010); a Hamas imam (2011); a Spanish imam (2014); an Italian preacher (2014); an imam in Berlin (2014); a Qatari sheikh (2014); a Palestinian sheikh (2016).
As far as Qaradawi is concerned, he had freely promoted his intense Jew-hatred already for years. In 2003, he published a book (in Arabic) explaining his “rulings” on Palestine; the book was translated to English in 2007. In this book Qaradawi warns Muslims not to be friends with “Jews, in general, and Israelis, in particular;” he describes Jews as “devourers of Riba (usury) and ill-gotten money” and as “true examples of miserliness and stinginess;” he also claims that Jews “have killed Prophet Zakariyya and Prophet Yahya and wove conspiracies against Jesus Christ.”

However, as Mark Gardner and Dave Rich noted in their review (full pdf text), the “most striking part of the book” is Qaradawi’s discussion of a notorious hadith [i.e. records “of the traditions or sayings of the Prophet Muhammad” which are viewed “as a major source of religious law and moral guidance, second only to the authority of the Qurʾān”] that also appears prominently in the Hamas Charter and reads:

“The last day will not come unless you fight Jews. A Jew will hide himself behind stones and trees and stones and trees will say, O servant of Allah [or O Muslim] there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.””

Qaradawi describes this hadith as “one of the miracles of our Prophet” and elaborates:

“[W]e believe that the battle between us and the Jews is coming. Such a battle is not driven by nationalistic causes or patriotic belonging; it is rather driven by religious incentives. This battle is not going to happen between Arabs and Zionists, or between Jews and Palestinians, or between Jews or anybody else. It is between Muslims and Jews as is clearly stated in the hadith. This battle will occur between the collective body of Muslims and the collective body of Jews i.e. all Muslims and all Jews. (p. 77).”

Gardner and Rich argue that Qaradawi “personifies the combination of theological anti-Judaism, modern European antisemitism and conflict-driven Judeophobia that make up contemporary Islamist attitudes to Jews.” But given the fact that Qaradawi has long been recognized as “possibly the most prominent religious authority in the Sunni Muslim world” – to quote Georgetown professor Abdullah Al-Arian – it is by no means clear that only “Islamists” would share his views on Jews. And indeed, there is plenty of evidence that antisemitism is not only rampant in the Arab and Muslim world, but also prevalent in Muslim communities in the West.


I would have thought that if we want to draw “lessons” from the Holocaust, one of the most important would be to never again ignore incitement to murderous Jew-hatred. But the recent International Holocaust Remembrance Day was just one of many occasions to realize that I’m apparently wrong.



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As everyone on the planet knows by now, an executive order by the new US administration regarding immigration has triggered tsunamis of controversy across the globe. Given that we’ve been chest deep in commentary regarding that decision since it was made, I’ll forgo talking about debate over that policy in order to focus on one specific reaction to it.
Over the last week, more than 4000 academics have signed a petition calling on scholars to boycott academic conferences in the US until the immigration ban is lifted. As far as I know, that boycott does not extend to refusing Americans access to conferences outside the US, nor have I yet heard calls for international academics to shun their US colleagues by, for example, refusing to review or publish their research, or rejecting graduate students or grants applications based on nationality.
Still, this measured approach is grounded in the assumption that punishing American academics for actions taken by the US government is an appropriate choice of action. I’ve not yet heard that this assumption is based on alleged culpability of American academics (or academic institutions) for US policy. We’ve heard people make that case in other academic boycott debates by applying a principle that says any college or university taking government money or performing research that contributes to government decision-making is automatically complicit in the actions of that government. So far, however, the only direct criticisms I’ve heard are complaints that some academic associations have not taken official stands protesting Trump’s controversial immigration policy quickly enough.
Absent the assignment of blame, it might be that international academics – lacking other ways to protest US immigration policy – are doing what they can, regardless of whether it will have any impact on those setting that policy. In which case, American scholars are being asked to serve as “mere means” towards the protestor’s political ends.
Regardless of motivation, a principled stance against any academic boycott of any kind says that research, scholarship, and the free flow of ideas should transcend politics. Cary Nelson – former leader of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) – sums up this argument [behind a paywall, unfortunately], which should be read alongside his masterful work which provides the historic backstory to our society’s choice to grant one profession – academia – special privileges which fall under the category of “Academic Freedom.”
Given that it is academics who benefit most directly from special considerations granted to no other profession, one wonders why some of those academics seem so trigger-happy to act in ways that undermine this global societal compact by trying to punish or exclude one another on political grounds. As ever, the dynamite that has been laid which undermines an important principle of civil society is labeled BDS.
Recall that the only significant academic boycott over the last decade is the one directed at the Jewish state. And in this debate, none of the aforementioned cautions or qualifications are in place. One can argue whether a French academic refusing to attend a conference in Chicago is punishing someone else, or just making a personal choice. The same argument cannot be made, however, by those pushing academic institutions, associations and individuals to shun their Israeli colleagues in every possible way.
So if a conference boycott does take hold targeting American academic meetings, the gate is already wide open to escalate it to include all the things the BDSers want done to Israeli scholars (refusal to cooperate, rejection of papers, etc.). And as the construct of academic freedom unravels, what will keep others (including supporters of the current President) from calling for boycotts of other academic institutions or associations based on a different set of political gripes?
While we’re on the subject of BDS talking points, what about the argument that the proposed sweeping academic boycotts only target Israeli institutions and thus in no way should be seen as an attempt to punish individual scholars? Well academic conferences and the organizations that run them are also institutions, yet it’s hard to imagine that one can harm an institution that consists solely of people talking to each other without harming the participants in those conversations. This case study that describes the personal suffering caused by an “institutional boycott” of University of Illinois also provides an empirical nail for the coffin of the “intuitional-boycotts-don’t-harm-individuals argument.
Finally, one of the reasons I described that argument made by AAUP’s Cary Nelson argument against all academic boycotts as “principled” is that it is universal, which allows him to consistently fight against academic boycotts of Israel and the US, Trumps immigration ban, and other issues that stand in the way of scholarly discourse.
In contrast, look at how much the boycotters must tie themselves into knots trying to jibe their claims to stand for universal principle (like human rights and academic freedom) with the narrowness of their target list (currently standing at one, maybe two, with the greatest abusers of scholars, students and free inquiry permanently off their agenda).
As noted previously, academic freedom is not a natural phenomenon like gravity or even a natural corollary of the Rights of Man, but remains a relatively recent social invention that benefits scholars by preventing the vagaries of politics from impacting their work. To throw all that away in the name of “Israel Must Go” seems a pretty big sacrifice for such ugly and immoral ends.



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Sunday, February 05, 2017


This is the most pathological moment in US political history since 1968.

I come out of the progressive-left, but the movement lost me when I started noticing Nazi Swastikas entwined with Stars of David at anti-war rallies in San Francisco.

Once it became clear that anti-Zionists were making homes for themselves within the Obama administration, I knew that it was time for me to leave the party. Asking Jews to sit across the Democratic Party table from anti-Semitic anti-Zionists, such as Linda Sarsour, is something akin to asking black Americans to sit across the Democratic Party table in political kinship with the Klan.

It is suggesting common-cause with an anti-Zionist seeking to bring Sharia into the United States under the cover of feminism. (Of feminism, for chrissake.) This is not a criticism of Muslims as people, but it is very definitely a criticism of Sharia. Whatever else Sharia may be, it is a theological-political ideology and thus open to public scrutiny and criticism. This is particularly true when the head-chopping of non-submissive women or the throwing of Gay people off of rooftops is seen
as a moral imperative for so many within the Islamic faith.

Jewish people need to draw the line at anti-Semitic anti-Zionism of the type represented by Sarsour who once twittered that "nothing is creepier than Zionism."

In the meantime the progressive-left, the Democratic Party, and Clinton Incorporated have turned Trump into the Devil, but what they fail to understand is that their intense and overblown hatred immunizes the guy from their own criticisms.

Whenever they lambaste Trump as a "fascist," or something akin to Hitler, he garners quiet sympathy while making his accusers look malicious, ignorant, and untrustworthy in their conclusions.


The Accelerating Ideological Drumbeat

The intense hatred for Donald Trump is, in part, a result of the accelerating ideological drumbeat around issues of race, gender, and class as derived from the New Left and the Vietnam War. During the 1960s we saw the rise of Second Wave Feminism, the anti-war movement, Gay rights, environmentalism, Black Power, Brown Power and on and on. This churning political chaos blended progressive-left identity politics with socialism eventually resulting in the remarkable challenge by Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2016.

There are, quite obviously, very good historical reasons for all of this. Does anyone really need reminding of how long women in the United States were non-citizens? Or how long black people were slaves? Thus, the New Left take-over of the universities was a response to centuries of unjust marginalization and displacement of the allegedly inferior other.

The problem is not that in speaking up for women, or in opposition to war, or in favor of minority rights, that the Left had nothing to say. They clearly had plenty to say. The problem is that they refused to acknowledge their winnings on the table.

That is, the less racist and sexist the West became in recent decades the harder and faster the drumbeat of race, gender, and class became, eventually emerging, during the Obama administration, as the high-pitched shrill of identity politics that we know today.

And that really is the saddest part.

The faltering liberal West represents the most socially just and welcoming form of political organization in human history, yet it is lambasted by a significant portion of its own citizenry as among the very worst.

Instead of joining with the white American middle-class for the purpose of moving forward in relative harmony, the progressive-left demonized those people, particularly the conservatives among them, as precisely what is wrong with the West today.


One Reason Why Hillary Got Beat

In the months leading into te 2016 presidential election the tempo of progressive-left accusations of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, disaster capitalism, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and generalized badness, approached a crescendo.

One of my favorite examples was when transgender Inside Edition reporter Zoey Tur (née Robert Albert Tur) threatened violence against Brietbart-associated writer and radio talk show host, Ben Shapiro, because Ben referred to her as a "Sir" during a panel discussion on Caitlyn "Bruce" Jenner.

The rather burly Ms. Tur subsequently threatened Shapiro with a "curb stomping" which anyone who has ever seen the movie History X can tell you is a rather unpleasant form of getting one's ass kicked... if not, more likely, dead. Shortly thereafter Shapiro suggested that such brutality might be considered a tad "unladylike" thereby revealing that someone obviously needs to give him a good mansplaining.

Shortly after the election, the MTV "2017 Resolutions for White Guys" video nicely summed-up the progressive-left, politically-correct, coastal zeitgeist that nudged Trump into the winner's box.


While no one ever accused the people over at MTV of being big thinkers, the truth is that during the brief historical moment between World War II and the present the West actually made tremendous gains in social justice. Yet it is precisely at this moment that the cries of racism and sexism and fascism dramatically increased in direct proportion, ironically enough, to the diminishment of racism, sexism, and fascism.

Never before was a society so free and, yet, so despised by so many for its alleged lack of freedom.

In retrospect, therefore, it is not particularly surprising that as the Clinton campaign conjured the "alt-right" as an object of hatred with which to smear Donald Trump that many less partisan Americans refused to buy into that hatred.

The more the Clintonistas pointed the trembling finger of accusation toward all those politically-incorrect heinous "deplorables" - otherwise known as their fellow Americans - the more those people either adopted that attribution as a badge of honor or dismissed the Left as a bunch of anti-white racist, anti-American hate-mongers.

In other words, each time progressives spit the notion that regular Americans from places like Lexington, Kentucky or Provo, Utah or Ottumwa, Iowa were essentially a bunch of bigoted, heteronormative, neanderthal, pig farmers another Republican-operative angel received its wings.


Immunization

By turning Donald Trump into "Genghis Hitler," as my friend Trudy put it, the Left leaves no room for negotiation, discussion, or even thought. By accusing Trump of anything and everything - up to and including "golden showers" in Russian luxury hotel rooms - it immunizes the guy from genuine criticisms.

It means that people who seek some reasonable objectivity in their understanding of what is actually happening must slog through an endless miasma of bullshit to get at a kernel of truth.

And what this means is that the kind of key honest criticisms that could sway the general American citizenry back toward a left-leaning direction are lost in the political swamp, thereby freeing president Trump to do damn near anything he wants. After all, if almost everyone left-of-center is willing to string the guy up for putting his shoes on in the wrong order, why should he not just go forward and do whatever he wants, anyway?

An important question is, will this hatred topple the guy or will it feed his strength?


Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.









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