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

Wednesday, April 04, 2018


A rather neat coincidence, I thought, that my husband was released from Facebook “jail” an hour before the Passover holiday began. Another name for Passover, is, after all, Zman Cheruteinu, the time we mark our freedom; our liberation from bondage. Four days later, however, while the holiday celebrating our freedom was still in full force, my husband landed back in the (Facebook) slammer once more.
This was getting ridiculous.
Both times, my husband was reported for comments that were several years old. There appears to be no Facebook statute of limitations for reporting comments. Though the notifications, telling of a ban, offer a way to mark a "sentence" as a “mistake,” doing so yields no response. There is, in actuality, no way to appeal a ban, no recourse to justice. Anyone can troll your timeline, report a random comment, and Facebook duly puts you, the “offender” in jail.
Why choose an old comment? In doing so, the troll protects his identity. There is no way to connect the anonymous report to an actual thread, hence no way to connect the report to an actual person.
In the pro-Israel community, getting trolled for an old comment and put into Facebook jail has become a badge of honor. If you’re getting banned, you have the right politics. But it’s an ugly thing when social media is used to still the pro-Israel voice; where dissent is disallowed, at least temporarily, with Facebook a willing assistant/enabler.
Ryan Bellerose is a staunch Israel advocate and blogger. He’s been banned—put in Facebook jail—five times thus far, each time for way old comments. In one of the reported comments, Ryan jokingly called his friend a “vampire” for staying up so late on social media. This is the comment that was reported as “offensive.” No appeal possible, no recourse, no sane person to whom one might explain that the charge is drummed up, false, ridiculous. Facebook is an omniscient Big Brother. Justice is what Facebook says it is.
But you know how in TV shows, the villain always has to brag and give himself away? The guy who reported Ryan bragged about it using a fake profile. And a friend recognized that fake profile.

By the way, Ryan tells me he only uses his own name for the Facebook profiles he creates. Mark Rowan and Krista Kay are real people in their own right. The troll is not just a troll, but a paranoid troll at that.

Here is the troll using another alias, laughing at Ryan, bragging in an obscenity-laced screed of his prowess in silencing Ryan's important voice for Israel .


Indefatigable pro-Israel blogger Ari Fuld has also been put in Facebook jail numerous times. Like Ryan and like my husband, Ari has discovered the workaround is each time creating a new Facebook profile. But the troll watches out for and targets the new profiles, encouraging others to follow suit:



The troll sees fake profiles everywhere. The Morris Goldberg profile is not Ari, by the way. Just as Ryan is not Mark Rowan or Krista.

Here the troll (varying the spelling of his/her name) brags about reporting Ari's old comment, posting screenshots:




I put a call out: be in touch with me if you've been in FB jail for a way old comment. I was inundated with responses. But perhaps the Guinness Book record for most time in FB jail should go to David Meir, who writes, “Since 2010, I have been so much in FB jail that it makes at least 3 or 4 years.
“I'm not joking.
“I just got out of FB jail and the account went back in [jail] after less than an hour and so did my second David Meir [Facebook profile] after less than a day.
“Thing is that as soon as I go out of FB jail I go right back in so obviously someone is watching my posting pattern and when he (or she) sees I don't comment anymore, wait for a month and then reports again so I am almost continuously in FB jail.
“Something must be done, it is simply criminal that a nobody can report comments you've made years ago and have so much power to virtually block you from ever being on FB.”
Lea Yarden has three alternating Facebook profiles, and all three have often been in “jail” for comments made many years previously. She too is an Israel advocate, and proud Zionist. “One day I got suspended from Facebook for old comments. And it kept happening over and over again. Not just me. All my friends. They were from hate groups where antisemites gang up on Jews and Zionists.
“They called us awful names. ‘Kike.’ ‘Dirty Jew pigs.’ ‘Monkeys.’ Then the icing on the cake were the words ‘Jump back in the ovens dirty Jews’ and ‘Hitler didn’t finish the job.’
“We thought we could change minds with facts. But they didn’t want facts. They wanted to degrade us. We reported every antisemitic comment. But Facebook didn’t think ‘dirty Jew’ or ‘jump back in the ovens’ violated their community standards.
“I removed myself from the groups. Sometime later the bans started. A 1-day ban, 3 days, one week and then the 30-day ban. You would have a few days when the 30 days were over then get hit with another 30-day ban from three and four-year-old comments. Three and four-year-old comments!! What was going on?
“This was happening to all my friends. It was surreal. Why would Facebook ban us over years old comments? We just can’t figure it out.”
Karen Shlomo is in Facebook “jail” for the ninth time in three years. She too, is being reported for old comments. I asked Karen the age of the comments that are being reported. She told me that they are three years old. 
Karen knows the age of the comments because she recognized a word that she stopped using three years ago on Facebook. She found out the hard way that certain language is bound to be reported, and learned to phrase things more carefully to escape censorship. But when someone is obsessively trolling your timeline, they’re going to find those old comments with the politically incorrect wording, and yes, they’re going to use those ancient comments to stifle your voice.
S, like my husband, Ryan, and Ari, knows the identity of the man who is trolling her. It’s actually the same person trolling all four of them, using fake profiles most of the time. But in one case, the troll outed himself, using his real email address, phone number, and signature when complaining about S to S’s husband at his work address (!), accusing S of infidelity (among other iniquities), and threatening litigation.






In similar fashion, the troll attempted to damage Ari’s reputation and even his livelihood: “I have posts that people sent to the TV station I work in [suggesting] that I have an ‘attraction’ to little boys," relates Ari.
While comments can only be reported anonymously, sometimes the nature of a reported comment outs the reporter as in this comment of Ari’s that landed him once again in jail (for "bullying"):
And in this case too, the troll could not resist bragging:
One unifying thread between the troll and the people he reports is that he sees himself as a defender of Sarah Tuttle-Singer, the new media editor of the Times of Israel. The friendship between the two is quite public.






Which is why S tried writing to the Times of Israel. She thought perhaps they’d stop the harassment. But she received no response. Not from TOI and not from Facebook.
As she did her research on the troll, however, she saw he was using a corrupted swastika to decorate his blog’s homepage, along with a quote that speaks of restoring a "free and Christian Germany."


Considering the threatening nature of his comments (whether under his real name or an alias) to her and her husband or to a Facebook audience at large. . . 
 . . . S felt quite within her rights reporting him to the FBI.
Will the FBI respond? I don’t know. But I do know that Facebook must be held to account for its practice of allowing old, innocuous comments to be reported, for stifling free speech, for listening to and acceding to the demands of horrid, anti-Israel trolls.



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Monday, April 02, 2018



It’s only natural that we humans make sense of the world by placing things into categories. Action movies vs. comedies. The “Fruits and Vegetables food group vs. “Breads and Cereals.” Conservative vs. liberal.
Mental shortcuts that help us streamline our thinking are called “heuristics,” and while they can be an asset when trying to figure out the new and unexpected, they can also be a source of vulnerability, creating openings for those who understand heuristics to manipulate us.
Often such manipulation is innocent. For example, the “Four Food Groups” of my youth referenced in the first paragraph has been replaced by different structures over time, such as the “Food Pyramid” or “My Plate.” All of these were designed to accomplish a public good (getting Americans to eat a healthy, balanced diet) by tapping into the general human desire to make complex information simple through easy-to-grasp categorization.
More sinister manipulation takes place when communication, particularly political communication, takes advantage of heuristics-driven vulnerabilities in our mental makeup.
For example, the common practice of defining your opponent in a political campaign (by endlessly repeating he or she is a plutocrat or elitist – regardless of the subject allegedly being discussed) is an effort to get the public to make the quick and permanent association between the opposing candidate and the adjective chosen to define them (plutocrat, elitist, etc.). For once such an association is in place, appeals to understand the defined candidate as a complex human being become nearly impossible.
Similarly, an accusation that aligns with intuition (ideally delivered via a catchy slogan) is an easy way to get people to believe a crisis or problem exists, without having to do any research (or thinking) on their own. What is the scope and nature of America’s current problems vis-à-vis immigration, race relations and sexual harassment, for example? No need to think about the details if we simply embrace the #MAGA, #BlackLivesMatter or #MeToo hashtags thoughtfully provided to us by people we have never met.
In the realm of BDS, the most well-known example of manipulative, heuristics-based politics is the “Apartheid” slur which anti-Israel activists pepper spray at audiences, regardless of what topic is being debated. Some have even gone so far as to replace “Israel” (already in scare quotes) with “Apartheid Israel” in written communication. The point of such efforts is clear: to cement the idea that Israel is the successor to Apartheid South Africa in people’s minds to the point where no amount of factual information can shake that notion loose.
While there is always a certain contempt for the audience built into political activism based on simplification and manipulation, the communication accompanying last weekend’s clashes at the Gaza border raises this contempt to the level of a dare.
There has always been a certain amount of objective reality Israel-haters insist their allies reject, from the Jenin “massacre” that never was, to the notion that Israel deliberately targets civilians whenever Hamas or Hezbollah decide to heat up a border. But the storyline that poured forth from Hamas’ news sources, amplified by that organization’s Amen Corner in the West (that the clash was a peaceful protest fired upon indiscriminately by brutal Israeli soldiers), is so divorced from the information and images before our eyes that it can only be seen as testimony to the contempt Hamas has for not just the public, but for their own supporters.
For example, what would make an organization scream that everyone killed at the border was an innocent civilian, while also proudly announcing the death of martyrs associated with terrorist groups (along with photos of those martyrs clad in camo)?
To a certain extent, such behavior assumes propaganda storylines developed during previous clashes (ones featuring Israeli brutality visited exclusively upon Palestinian innocents) will take hold immediately once new violence breaks out. But it also assumes the public to be made up of unbelievably ignorant suckers, as well as assuming full ownership over the minds of friends and allies who are being asked to scream at the top of their lungs that 2 + 2 = 5.




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Thursday, March 29, 2018

 Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column


Western Jew-hatred is making a major comeback today on both sides of the Atlantic.

Muslim antisemitism, which is written into the Qu’ran, has always been there, has always expressed itself violently, and is only attracting particular attention today because of the increasing number of Muslims in Western countries.

But non-Muslims in greater and greater numbers, in Europe and North America, have recently been discovering the joy of hating Jews. There are various reasons for this. One is contagion from Muslims. This particularly applies to the political Left, which is rushing to embrace what they see as the oppressed, colonized Muslim world, despite the clear evidence that its culture is generally violent, anti-democratic, misogynistic, homophobic, and almost everything they purport to despise. Muslims, for their part, have been quick to pick up anti-Jewish themes that first developed in Christian Europe – and  then these ideas get fed back to post-Christian progressives, who lap it up.

The documented horrors of the Holocaust for a time served to immunize the West against traditional Jew-hatred (this is why Gen. Eisenhower went out of his way to publicize the atrocities of the Holocaust). But constantly repeated descriptions of horrible events caused those descriptions to lose their impact; and even had the opposite of the desired effect, causing recipients – especially in Europe where there are residual guilt feelings – to say “shut up, we’re tired of hearing about it.”

This is the paradox of “Holocaust education” and why there can be too much of it. On the one hand, it’s important to know the historical facts and to understand how genocide develops from popular hatred plus governmental, connivance (South African whites should pay attention to this dynamic). On the other hand, it can dull the feeling of horror evoked by those facts and even produce more hatred of targeted groups like Jews. Look at the veneration of Hitler by some Muslim students, or the prevalence of Holocaust denial in both traditional “right-wing” Jew hatred and the Islamic variety.

In recent years, the memes of Jew-hatred mutated into anti-Zionism. Instead of hating individual Jews, which is taboo, it’s possible to hate their collective expression of identity in the form of the Jewish state. This mutation did not trigger the same immune response, and anti-Zionism became the most common expression of Jew-hatred by progressives who wouldn’t be caught dead on the Stormfront website. But an interesting thing happened: hating Israel led to hating Zionists, and what is a Zionist but a Jew? Some of the old themes came back, like the blood libel – only instead of making matzot from the blood of Christian children, the IDF was accused of stealing organs from dead Palestinians, or deliberately targeting Palestinian children.

On the right, the themes are reminiscent of the 19th century political antisemitism that Hitler adopted. It features hook-nosed Jewish financiers (“Rothschilds”) running the world, financing wars and revolutions, Jews controlling media, the arts and education, “polluting” the culture with sexual deviance, atheism, and of course communism. Tying it all together is an overarching conspiracy.

Today’s proponents of this theory blame the Jewish conspiracy for trying to destroy “white” culture by importing Muslims into Europe and the US, and empowering racial minorities (exemplified by the Movement for Black Lives in the US). They point to the over-representation of Jews in finance, media, academics, and – importantly – leftist political movements. As the taboos against individual Jew-hatred have weakened for Muslims and the Left, they have also been lifted for the extreme Right.

The explosive growth of social media has been accompanied by an ideology that nothing is out of bounds anymore. The internet’s filter bubble effect has driven both Left and Right to greater extremism, and the widespread reach of the net, augmented by Twitter and Facebook, has resulted in a perfect storm of Jew-hatred in the developed world.

An interesting example is the controversy over an article by the conservative psychologist Jordan B. Peterson, in which he tackles the question of whether the theory of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy makes sense. Peterson grants the over-representation of Jews in critical areas, but argues that the explanation lies in the higher average intelligence and prevalence of the personality trait of “openness to experience” (in part, creativity and intellectual curiosity – here is a test for this trait*) in Ashkenazi Jews. Combined with the principle that one should favor the simplest explanation for a given phenomenon (“Occam’s razor”), he concludes,
So, what’s the story? No conspiracy. Get it? No conspiracy. Jewish people are over-represented in positions of competence and authority because, as a group, they have a higher mean IQ. The effect of this group difference (approximately the difference between the typical high school student and the typical state college student) is magnified for occupations/interests that require high general cognitive ability. Equal over-representation may also occur in political movements associated with the left, because high IQ is associated with Openness to Experience, which is in turn associated with liberal/left-leaning political proclivities.

There is no evidence whatsoever that Ashkenazi Jews are over-represented in any occupations/interests for reasons other than intelligence and the associated effects of intelligence on personality and political belief. Thus, no conspiratorial claims based on ethnic identity need to be given credence. [emphasis in original]

As you can read in the comments to Peterson’s article, many of his readers (and almost all those who commented aren’t buying it). Some of them argue that the over-representation of Jews is a result of “cultural nepotism,” the propensity to hire or appoint people that are like yourself. There is a great deal of offensive antisemitism in the comments, but cultural nepotism is real and can’t be discounted. I have noticed that Hispanics are over-represented in non-academic staff at Fresno State University, and Yemenite Jews among municipal employees here in Rehovot. These are not exactly conspiracies, but they didn’t happen by accident either.

However, regardless of the way the over-representation developed, it is not proof of a conspiracy. As Peterson implies in the second paragraph above, a conspiracy is collusion for a purpose, and there is zero real evidence for such collusion. In addition, there is one very important personality trait that characterizes Jews which both Peterson and the conspiracy theorists ignore.

That is what I call, for lack of a better word, the fractious nature of the Jewish people. Everyone knows the joke about the two Jews marooned on a desert Island who immediately build three synagogues: one Ashkenazi, one Sephardic (a variation has Orthodox and Reform), and one that neither will set foot in. Jews tend to violently disagree about almost anything – a visit to Israel’s Knesset will establish this – and especially politics.

In particular, they disagree about Israel. The greatest anti-Zionists are always Jews: two newspapers that attack the Jewish state on a daily basis, the New York Times and Ha’aretz, are both owned by Jews and have numerous Jews on their staffs. Jewish anti-Israel organizations include J Street, If Not Now, Jewish Voice for Peace, and more. Anti-Israel Jews in more mainstream organizations like university Hillel Foundations and Jewish Community Relations Councils work to subvert previously pro-Israel groups.

Virtually all the Jewish Hollywood moguls that are often cited by conspiracy theorists supported the presidency of Barack Obama, the US president least friendly to Israel since its establishment.

Even inside Israel, there is an active contingent of Jews who work for Israeli NGOs that accept funding from hostile foreign governments to produce propaganda against the state and to promote “lawfare” against  the government and the IDF.

The state is just one of the subjects that Jews bitterly disagree upon, but it is central to the conspiracy theories. One of Israel’s greatest enemies, the financier George Soros, is of Jewish extraction (although he is not a practicing Jew in any sense). Conspiracy theorists who almost always include Soros as one of the leaders of the conspiracy also believe that the conspiracy influences the US to provide military aid to Israel. Believe me, no conspiracy that included Soros would do that!

The Jew-hating Right and Left are often in violent opposition, but they came together in the Occupy Wall Street movement, which I was surprised to find was supported by the American Nazi Party and David Duke, as well as leftist groups, Hezbollah and the Council on American-Islamic relations.

Similar conspiracy theories have been around since the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were forged in the 19th century, and probably before that. The Protocols themselves, although known to be fiction, are still popular, especially in the Arab world but also in the West.

There have certainly been conspiracies in history, but the idea of a massive, worldwide cabal with great power that would have to include hundreds of members, and yet about which there is no real, documented evidence – although plenty of made-up stories – is so unlikely as to be considered impossible.

Peterson notes that “It hardly needs to be said that although conspiracies do occasionally occur, conspiracy theories are the lowest form of intellectual enterprise.”  He’s right.

_________________

* I took the test and came out “average,” because my high intellectual curiosity was balanced by my preference for routine and my conservative politics! So I am not sure about the utility of this concept.




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Wednesday, March 28, 2018

Government Press Office (Israel) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
“I could never live in Israel,” is something people often drop in conversation. In some respects, they mean this as a compliment. They’re calling me brave. At the same time, they’re calling me foolhardy and worse, because what they really want to know is how anyone could choose to raise children in a dangerous neighborhood: could put their children’s lives at risk.
I could do what some do and answer with statistics that prove it’s more dangerous to live in New York than in Jerusalem. Statistics are infinitely malleable that way. But that would be dishonest. The fact is, in New York, there aren’t a lot of people getting killed in horrible ways because they’re Jewish.
In Jerusalem, on the other hand, if someone is the victim of violence, God forbid, it’s almost always because that person is Jewish.
Which is kind of crazy, if you think about it, and in some ways, defeats the purpose of living in the Jewish State. Isn’t the idea to escape antisemitism? To live and breathe free in our own land?
If peace isn’t arriving any time soon, what’s the point of sticking out one’s neck to live in a place where you might be blown up, stabbed, stoned to death, or rammed by a truck because of your religion?



Where’s the advantage in that??
After all, I might have stayed in Pittsburgh. My mom has, in the past, wondered at my Aliyah, “Israel is for people who have no other place to live, persecuted people, poor people. People from places like Morocco, France, and Russia.”
A lot of Israelis agree with her. These Israelis have no love for Western immigrants. We look like show-offs, brandishing our bravado. Trying to be oh-so-tough and Israeli. We’re not fooling THEM, the real Israelis. The ones who don’t speak Hebrew with cringe-worthy American accents.
But I’m here in Israel a long time now. I’m what’s called a “vatik.” A veteran.
I know it’s dangerous. I know it’s a dangerous place to raise children.
And still: I choose to live in Israel. I choose to raise my 12 children here.
In spite of the danger.
Because some things are more important than even life itself.
The land, for instance.
If someone dies, God forbid, in order to strengthen the Land of Israel, this is a huge mitzvah. It’s a mitzvah no one aspires to and everyone dreads. But a mitzvah all the same.
Which is the difference between Jews who come to live in and raise families in Israel, and the 700,000 so-called Arab “refugees” who fled Israel in 1948.

The Economist, October 2, 1948: "Of the 62,000 Arabs who formerly lived in Haifa not more than 5,000 or 6,000 remained. Various factors influenced their decision to seek safety in flight. There is but little doubt that the most potent of the factors were the announcements made over the air by the Higher Arab Executive, urging the Arabs to quit ... It was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades."
Near East Arabic Radio, April 3, 1948: "It must not be forgotten that the Arab Higher Committee encouraged the refugees to flee from their homes in Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem, and that certain leaders . . . make political capital out of their miserable situation . . ."
Nimr el Hawari, Commander of the Palestine Arab Youth Organization, in his book Sir Am Nakbah (The Secret Behind the Disaster, Nazareth, 1955), quoted Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Said as saying "We will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter in. The Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down."
Golda Meir famously traveled to Haifa to try to convince the fleeing Arabs to remain during the Arab offensive on Haifa. But they didn’t listen. They were afraid they’d be accused of being traitors. By the time the fighting in Haifa was over, more than 50,000 had turned tail and fled to neighboring countries.
A British police report from that time notes that "every effort is being made by the Jews to persuade the Arab populace to stay and carry on with their normal lives.”
You see? They weren’t expelled. They fled. They fled at the behest of the invading Arab armies, even though Israeli leaders begged them to stay, and pledged their safety. They were afraid.
And it wasn’t just Haifa. It happened everywhere in Israel. The few Arabs who did stay were granted full citizenship after the war ended. Because they stayed the course.
The rest fled because they put their lives and their safety ahead of the land, ahead of their beautiful homes . . .

(photo credit: Dov Epstein)
(photo credit: Dov Epstein)
(photo credit: Dov Epstein)


. . . many of which now, as a result, belong to Jews: Jews who stayed the course, stayed in Israel, risking their lives.


Now it’s understandable that Arabs put their lives ahead of the land. They don’t have that tie to Eretz HaKodesh, the Holy Land. Jerusalem isn’t mentioned in the Quran. Many Arab inhabitants of the Israel of 1947, had only a brief history there. They arrived because the Jews were beginning to arrive. The Arabs were poor. They hoped that following the Jews might mean riding Jewish coattails to prosperity.
Arab hopes were indeed born out. They made money, prospered. Built solid homes. They still prosper in a sense, pretending to be refugees, getting gazillions in aid, getting money to kill Jews.
The Jews prospered, too. They prospered because they stayed. They won the wars, won the land, got the beautiful homes the Arabs built and left. Left because the Arabs had their priorities straight: life, not land.
Yes, for them, life is more important than land. But religion is king above all. Jews and Arabs have a symbiotic relationship in that respect: Jews are willing to die for the land. Arabs are willing to die killing Jews.
Yet the Arabs fled the land at the first sign of trouble. It’s not their abandoned homes they mourn, as their crocodile tears are shed for the TV camera, as they hold out a key, the symbol of return. Because if they really cared so damned much about the land and their homes, they would not have left in the first place.



Left of their own volition.
Which is why they must now pretend they are refugees, that they were expelled. Because the truth doesn’t look so great: Jews stayed the course, stayed in Israel, no matter what. But the Arabs turned tail and fled. Except for the small number who stayed. They received Arab citizenship, a prize from a democracy that wants to live with the Arabs in peace. They got citizenship because they placed Israel above their most genuine fears and concerns.
As did I.




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Tuesday, March 27, 2018




Sometimes, in Israel, the conversations you overhear are extraordinary. Sometimes, they break your heart.

I was standing in a beautiful overview, looking out on to the northern border of Israel. The hills of Lebanon look the same as the hills of Israel - the Hezbollah flag visible in the village nearest the border the only giveaway that the land there is very different.

The overview was built in memory of Major Benaya Rhein who was killed in the Second Lebanon War. Throughout the war Benaya went on numerous missions to rescue other soldiers. On August 12th 2006 Benaya and his crew were on another rescue mission when their tank was hit by a Hezbollah anti-tank missile. They were all killed.

It was from this breathtaking spot that Benaya and his crew went on their final mission. This spot overlooking the land that they loved, the land that they died to preserve for their family, friends and the generations to come – other people’s children, not theirs.

I stood there, listening to the recording of Benaya’s mother talking about her son, his legacy and the land that he loved. As the recording ended, a father with two small sons entered the lookout.

The younger of the two boys was full of questions.

He had not heard the recording I had just listened to. I don’t think he noticed the stone dedicating the lookout to Benaya.



His questions were all his own, from his own knowledge, experience and understanding of the world.

“Daddy, where was the war?”

“Over there, son.” answered the father.

“But I can't see anything that looks like fighting. Can we go there?”

“No son.”

“Why daddy?”

The father sighed before he answered: “Because we are at war with the people there. We are trying hard not to fight with them and hopefully they will try not to fight with us either.”



A different child, in a different country might have asked: “What’s a war daddy?” Or “Why do they fight us?” Not this boy, not in this country. He already knew.

A different father, in a different country, might have answered his son differently. There was a time when Israeli parents told their children: “Don’t worry, by the time you grow up you won’t have to be a soldier. There will be peace and we won’t need the army anymore.” At the time, they said it because they believed it. Because they hoped and they prayed that their children would not have to experience what they had experienced.


Israeli parents don’t say that to their children anymore. 




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Monday, March 26, 2018



Word has it that a municipality in my area (one with a habit of making official statements on foreign policy matters) will be visited by the boycott brigade next month requesting the city pass some sort of “Israel is guilty of everything” resolution. 

As usual, this is being presented as a simple, straightforward human-rights question, one that will get turned into a “See, a major city agrees with us that Israel is an Apartheid state!!!!!!!” message through the BDS bullhorn if government leaders decide to hand the name and reputation of their city to a group of ruthless, single-issue partisans.

As most readers know, this kind of bait-and-switch is standard operating procedure for the Israel-disliking community, one predictable enough to boil down to a simple and straightforward playbook (part of a larger work that describes ways to defeat these predicable BDS tactics).

Before getting too worked up about the whole affair, keep in mind that even back in 2005 when some of us were dealing with an actual divestment resolution being debated in a neighboring city, we learned that the city where next month’s debate will take place had passed a couple of resolutions condemning Israel for this and that a decade earlier, resolutions no one could remember because they had zero impact outside the BDS bubble.

The lack of impact of such symbolic votes outside the city should not minimize the havoc caused within a community when BDS comes knocking and demands everyone take a side on their pet issue. 

Back when divestment was roiling Somerville, I pointed out to city leaders that:

“It’s hard not to notice that, despite the troubles in the Middle East, the towns of Methuen, Springfield and Ipswich do not find their citizens at each other’s throats over the Arab-Israeli conflict.  Nor are aldermen or town meeting members in Medford, Winchester or Malden sorting through hundreds of e-mails a day, trying to rapidly learn enough to officially come down on one side or the other.
The difference between Somerville and virtually every other community in America is that we have chosen to turn a conflict that has challenged and perplexed wise and committed men and women for generations into official city business.”

So, as with every debate instigated by anti-Israel propagandists ready to drag anyone and everyone in their vendetta by any means necessary, next month’s city hall debate will not be about the Middle East.  Rather, it will be over whether city leaders are ready to harm the community they are pledged to serve by dragging it into one of the most vexing conflicts in history, just because a gang of single-issue fanatics insist that this is their only moral choice.




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Thursday, March 22, 2018


 Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column


Israel and the Jewish people have no enemy more vile than the PLO and its dominant faction, Fatah.

The PLO was founded in 1964 by the Arab league as a “Palestinian” organization whose goal was the “liberation of Palestine through armed struggle.” In 1969 it was taken over by Yasser Arafat’s Fatah group, which has controlled it ever since. In 1993-4, the Oslo agreements between Israel and the PLO created the Palestinian Authority (PA), which rules the areas in which 95% or more of the Arabs of Judea and Samaria live. The PA is run by the PLO (despite the victory by Hamas in the last PA election, held in 2006) and its Chairman is Mahmoud Abbas, who is also the head of the PLO and of Fatah.

Probably more Israeli Jews have been murdered by the PLO and its factions than any other terrorist group, including Hamas and Hezbollah. The PLO has gone out of its way to kill Jewish civilians and especially children, as it did in the Moshav Avivim school bus massacre (very interesting link), the Ma’alot massacre, and the Bus of Blood incident (also called the Coastal Road massacre). Here is a list of PLO “operations” until 2004. There have been plenty more since.

In the early 1990s the PLO was isolated in its exile in Tunis and other places, with few recent terrorist atrocities to its “credit” (the ugly Achille Lauro hijacking in 1985 was an exception). But in 1993, the so-called “architects of Oslo” – Yossi Beilin, Yair Hirschfeld, Ron Pundak, Uri Savir, and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres – negotiated an agreement with the PLO which recognized it as the legitimate representative of the “Palestinian people,” and brought PLO terrorists back to Israel to form the PA. Here is how historian Efraim Karsh described the result:

For Israel, it has been the starkest strategic blunder in its history, establishing an ineradicable terror entity on its doorstep, deepening its internal cleavages, destabilizing its political system, and weakening its international standing. For the West Bank [sic] and Gaza Palestinians, it has brought subjugation to the corrupt and repressive PLO and Hamas regimes, which reversed the hesitant advent of civil society in these territories, shattered their socioeconomic wellbeing, and made the prospects of peace and reconciliation with Israel ever more remote.

In their naiveté and delusive wishful thinking, the “architects” believed Arafat’s assurances that he had renounced terrorism and would change the PLO Covenant to delete those articles calling for the violent destruction of the Jewish state. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had his doubts, but could not oppose the fait accompli from the start without being seen as “against peace,” and he soon came under massive pressure from US President Clinton to make a deal.

Arafat immediately began his double game of talking peace in English to the international community and inciting violence in Arabic to his people. Karsh notes,

The next eleven years until Arafat's death on November 11, 2004, offered a recapitulation, over and over again, of the same story. In addressing Israeli or Western audiences, the PLO chairman (and his erstwhile henchmen) would laud the "peace" signed with "my partner Yitzhak Rabin." To his Palestinian constituents, he depicted the accords as transient arrangements required by the needs of the moment. He made constant allusion to the "phased strategy" and the Treaty of Hudaibiya—signed by Muhammad with the people of Mecca in 628, only to be disavowed a couple of years later when the situation shifted in the prophet's favor—and insisted on the "right of return," the standard Palestinian/Arab euphemism for Israel's destruction through demographic subversion.

The supposedly renounced terrorism continued, with Arafat secretly providing funds to terror operatives and even cooperating with Hamas (the one thing they seem to be able to agree upon is the value of killing Jews). After the failure of the Camp David and Taba talks in 2000-1, Arafat sparked the vicious Second Intifada in which the PLO and Hamas together murdered more than 1000 Israeli Jews, mostly civilians, and in which more than 3000 Palestinian Arabs lost their lives.

Most importantly, as soon as he took power Arafat opened what I call the Death Factory, the systematic indoctrination with anti-Israel and anti-Jewish propaganda of Palestinian Arabs in schools and mosques, and via official PA and Fatah newspapers, radio, TV, and websites. More than mere propaganda, the Death Factory teaches Arabs, especially young people, that the greatest achievement in the life of a Palestinian is to kill as many Jews as possible, even – especially – if the killer becomes a martyr in the process. The greatest Palestinian heroes are such martyrs, like Dalal Mughrabi, a young woman who took part in the Bus of Blood massacre. Countless schools, squares, sports facilities, and so on are named after Mughrabi and other exemplars of Palestinism. Hamas, following Arafat’s lead, opened its own Death Factory, featuring children’s TV programs and kindergartens where the children are taught to hate and encouraged to kill as soon as they are able.

Arafat’s successor, the Holocaust-denying, Jew-hating Mahmoud Abbas, has been careful not to be caught directly ordering terrorism. But he continued and expanded the Death Factory, and often lauds captured or martyred terrorists as heroes. In addition to Palestinian nationalism and appeals to Arab honor, traditional antisemitic themes both from the Islamic and European traditions are included. Although the PLO under both Arafat and Abbas has promised numerous times to stop such incitement, it has never done so.

Today, social media have become a force multiplier, amplifying and disseminating the message. In fact, as a result of the autonomous nature of social media, it is doubtful that the Death Factory could be shut down completely even if the PA and Hamas would stop incitement in its own media and schools.

If this were not enough, the PA scandalously pays salaries to the families of terrorists imprisoned by Israel for security offenses, or killed while attempting acts of terrorism. The monthly payments are proportional to the length of the sentence, so the family of a mass murderer who has received multiple life sentences will be paid the most. The PA also will pay to build a new house for the family of a terrorist whose home is demolished. Despite great international pressure – after all, practically all of the PA’s money comes from international donors – Abbas has said that he will never end the program, which in 2016 paid $318 million to the families of “martyrs” and prisoners.

The combination of lifetime indoctrination and incitement with financial incentives has led to a situation in which almost every Arab from the PA, and even some Arab citizens of Israel, have become potential murderers, and in which it is becoming increasingly dangerous to walk the streets or to wait at a bus stop. Arab children as young as 13 have perpetrated terror attacks. Although there has been anti-Jewish terrorism in Israel from the period before the founding of the state, the prevalence of “sudden jihad syndrome” by Arabs unaffiliated with terror groups is unprecedented.

There is no easy solution that doesn’t involve using a time machine to go back to 1993 and intercept the Oslo folly, but there are some things that should be obvious by now:

First and foremost, we must realize that the PLO is an enemy of the state of Israel and the Jewish people. Jews are being murdered regularly by Palestinian Arab terrorists because they are encouraged and paid by the PLO to do so. In effect the PLO has “taken out a contract ” on the Jewish people. Paying a hit man to kill someone is considered murder in civilized countries, and his refusal to stop doing this makes Mahmoud Abbas a murderer. He should be arrested and imprisoned.

We can’t completely shut down the Death Factory because it will continue via social media. But surely we can stop incitement on PA media. TV and radio stations that incite murder or transmit anti-Jewish material can be put off the air. Newspapers can be closed down. Websites can be blocked. We don’t need to ask permission; just do it.

Insofar as the PLO is our enemy, we are not obligated to cooperate with it in any way. In fact, we are at war with the PLO, and cooperation with the enemy in time of war is treason. We should not transfer funds to the PA – which is the PLO under another name – or grant work permits to its citizens. We should encourage our allies to stop funding the PA as well.

We have gotten used to cooperating with the PA because we believe it keeps a lid on terrorism, but what that means is that we are allowing ourselves to be extorted by blackmail and threats. And regardless of our subservience, terrorism continues and grows over time, since we never defeat our enemy.

We don’t have a time machine that would enable someone to snatch the pen out of Rabin’s hand, but recognizing the seriousness of the mistake we made is the first step to fixing it.




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