Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: This is Zionism

Showing posts with label This is Zionism. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 14, 2018

Who Knew? Putin’s a Zionist! (Judean Rose)

In a bombshell interview with Megyn Kelly, Putin, set to handily win reelection as Russia’s president on March 18, declared that no Russians meddled in the American presidential election. And even if Russians did meddle in the American presidential election, those Russians don’t represent the state.

"So what if they're Russians?" said Putin. “There are 146 million Russians. So what? I don't care. I couldn't care less. They do not represent the interests of the Russian state."

And here’s where it gets really interesting, because this is where Putin said the “J” word. "Maybe they're not even Russians," he said. "Maybe they're Ukrainians, Tatars, Jews, just with Russian citizenship. Even that needs to be checked. Maybe they have dual citizenship. Or maybe a green card. Maybe it was the Americans who paid them for this work. How do you know? I don't know."

Leaders of Jewish organizations went nuts over this statement with both the AJC and the ADL referencing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

President Putin suggesting that Russian Federation minorities, be they Ukrainian, Tatar, or Jewish, were behind U.S. election meddling is eerily reminiscent of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He should clarify his comments at the earliest opportunity. https://t.co/NsG1qFSlWq
— AJC (@AJCGlobal) March 10, 2018

Our CEO & National Director @JGreenblattADL’s full statement on comments made by the Russian president that gives new life to classic anti-Semitic stereotypes: https://t.co/YTvmnCLmWR pic.twitter.com/00Egv5XfmZ
— ADL (@ADL_National) March 11, 2018

Zionist Union MK Ksenia Svetlova drew a connection to recent remarks by Poland’s president accusing Jews of perpetrating the Polish Holocaust.

We r quite familiar with the oldies “Maybe Jews run the world, maybe Jews use blood for their rituals, maybe Jews had slaughtered Jews in Poland” . Now comes the latest hit “maybe Jews meddled in US elections”. Our government has to condemn strongly this statement #putin #jews https://t.co/pz2JFc4hYi
— Ksenia Svetlova (@KseniaSvetlova) March 10, 2018

The National Coalition Supporting Eurasion Jewry (NCSEJ) said Putin’s remarks were troubling, and requested a clarification. “Russia’s history of anti-Semitism goes back centuries,” said the NCSEJ statement. “It is unfortunate that President Putin, who has gone out of his way to support the Russian Jewish community, resorted in this interview to promoting old and offensive stereotypes.”

But it isn’t the stereotyping that bothered me about Putin’s statement. It was the fact that, to him, Russian Jews aren’t Russians—they’re just Jews with Russian citizenship. The fact that Jews with Russian citizenship don’t, to him, count as actual Russians, suggests that he thinks that either A) Jews aren’t like other humans and therefore, just having Russian citizenship can’t make them Russians, or B) Jews aren’t human—they’re some kind of alien breed, neither animal nor human, so of course, if Jews aren’t human, they can’t be Russian.

There is, of course, another possibility: perhaps Putin believes that Jews, as the Chosen People, have only one nationality as inheritors of the Promised Land, in other words, they can be nationals only of Israel. In which case, we’re all totally off-base slamming him like this for his supposed antisemitism. Tsk. Turns out, Putin’s a Zionist, all along! He believes that Israel belongs to the Jews, that all Jews originate from and belong in Israel, and that Jews can have no true nationality other than Israeli!

Well, I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, so I’m going to go with that third possibility. And now that we’ve stipulated that Putin is a Zionist, I know he'll be over the moon to know that those of us Jews who are finally where we’re supposed to be, i.e. Israel, and NOT RUSSIA, are gleefully breeding our merry little hearts out.

Here’s my latest contribution to the gene pool: the first son of my son, my 12th grandchild.

Varda with Baby Epstein (Not Russian)

My message to Putin: Despite my Russian Jewish ancestry, you’ll be glad to hear that my new grandson is most definitely NOT RUSSIAN.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Israel's deaf-blind theater troupe touches audiences

This is Zionism.

The YouTube page has links where you can download performances.

(h/t Mike)

Rare footage of Operation Solomon, 1991

You don't need to understand Hebrew to be moved by this footage of Ethiopian Jews being saved anf flown to Israel in 1991's Operation Solomon.

Here's a frame showing a family on the plane:

Doesn't Zionism look like racism here?

(h/t Joel)

Israelis give 1000 hearing aids to Palestinian Arabs

From YNet Hebrew:

From Israel with Love: A thousand Palestinians were given hearing aids

A thousand Palestinians received, for the first time, hearing aids undera joint project of the Sheba Medical Center, Starkey Foundation and Physicians for Human Rights. A Ynet reporter joined doctors in Tulkarm and watched the smiles that came on the faces of people who, for the first time, could hear.

The cost of the devices is about one million dollars.

...or about $1000 per person.

This is Zionism.

This is Zionism: IDF Alpine Unit (video)

I decided to turn one of my "This Is Zionism" posters into a video. Enjoy!

StandWithUs has the posters here.

Also, special thanks to Israel21C from where I found most of these photos and which has far more such stories.

Sidney Lumet's legacy in Zionism, civil rights - and hasbara

Here is a chapter of American Jewish history I was not aware of:

Academy Award winning film director Sidney Lumet, who passed away on April 9 at age 86, is remembered for classics such as “Twelve Angry Men,” the courtroom drama that challenged racial prejudice and which Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has cited as a major influence on her career.

What is not widely known is that before he became a director, Lumet, as a young actor, was at the center of a 1940s controversy in Baltimore involving Zionist activists and the fight over racial segregation.

In the summer of 1946, hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors languished in Displaced Persons camps in postwar Europe. The British refused to let them enter Mandatory Palestine, for fear of alienating the Arabs. In New York City, the Jewish activists known as the Bergson Group came up with a new way to publicize the survivors’ plight: a Broadway play. They called it “A Flag is Born.”

Ben Hecht, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter, was active in the Bergson Group. So were the Adlers, the “first family” of the Yiddish theater. Hecht wrote the script for “A Flag is Born.” Luther Adler directed it. Adler’s half-sister Celia and another ex-Yiddish theater star,Paul Muni, costarred as elderly Holocaust survivors straggling through postwar Europe. Their sister Stella, the statuesque actress and acting coach, cast her most promising student, 22 year-old Marlon Brando, in the role of David, a passionate young Zionist who encounters the elderly couple in a cemetery. Celia Adler’s son, Prof. Selwyn Freed, told me: “When my mother came home from the first rehearsal, she said of Brando, ‘I can’t remember his name, but boy, is he talented’.The actors all performed for the Screen Actors Guild minimum wage, as a gesture of solidarity with the Zionist cause.

“Flag” played for ten sold-out weeks at Manhattan’s Alvin Theater (today known as the Neil Simon Theater). British critics hated it. The London Evening Standard called it “the most virulent anti-British play ever staged in the United States.” American reviewers were kinder. Walter Winchell said “Flag” was “worth seeing, worth hearing, and worth remembering…it will wring your heart and eyes dry…bring at least eleven handkerchiefs.”

Victor Navasky, publisher emeritus of the political weekly The Nation, was a teenage usher who collected contributions for the Bergson Group after each performance. “The buckets were always full,” he told me. “The audiences were extremely enthusiastic about the play’s message. For me, too, it was a political awakening about the right of the Jews to have their own state.”

After New York City, “Flag” was performed in Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Baltimore (and, reportedly, in a DP camp in Europe). Brando’s contractual obligations prevented him from taking part in the out of town shows. He was replaced by Sidney Lumet.

Lumet was just 22 at the time, but as the son of Yiddish actors Baruch Lumet and Eugenia Wermus, he had been on stage since childhood and made his Broadway debut at age 11. Lumet told me that having grown up in the world of the Yiddish theater, it was “a special thrill” to perform alongside Paul Muni in “Flag.” (He did not know Brando well at that point, but Lumet would later direct him in the 1960 film “The Fugitive Kind.”)

When Lumet and the other cast members of the Broadway hit arrived in Baltimore, local reporters were clamoring for interviews. Lumet spoke to the Baltimore Sun about the inspiring struggle to rebuild the Jewish homeland. “This is the only romantic thing left in the world,” he said. “The homecoming to Palestine, the conquest of a new frontier, against all obstacles.”

On the eve of their performance at Baltimore’s Maryland Theater, controversy erupted when it turned out that the theater restricted African-Americans to the balcony. Neither Hecht nor the cast would tolerate such discrimination. The Bergson Group and the NAACP teamed up to protest: the NAACP threatened to picket, and a Bergson official announced he would bring two black friends to sit with him at the play. The management gave in, allowing African-American patrons to sit wherever they chose. NAACP leaders hailed the “tradition-shattering victory” and used it to facilitate the desegregation of other Baltimore theaters. Lumet, reflecting on the episode six decades later, told me was “very proud” of his part in the protest and “pleasantly surprised that it was so successful.”

For the Bergson Group and its supporters, the fight for civil rights in Baltimore was just as important as their fight for Jewish rights in Palestine. As Ben Hecht put it: “To fight injustice to one group of human beings affords protection to every other group.”

Sidney Lumet’s admirers will remember his extraordinary talents as a filmmaker when they enjoy watching “Serpico,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” or “Twelve Angry Men.” But it’s also worth remembering the role he played in the real-life fight for justice six decades ago.

Now all the plays being written for political purposes are anti-Israel.

We can learn a lot from the Bergson Group in the 1940s.

Speaking of Pamela Anderson...

Gratuitous photo meant to gain more readers

My post that mentioned Pamela Anderson yesterday got lots of attention and probably a couple of thousand hits.

Yet there is more to say about her that illuminates the huge inconsistency of how people on the far left treat Israel.

Israel is the first (and, as far as I know, only) country in the world to have even seriously considered a ban on fur across the board. Certainly, politics has stalled the bill from passing in Knesset, but the fact that it went as far as it did indicates that Israel is, in some respects, a far more liberal country than any other in the world, regardless of the outcome of the bill.

Does this mean that leftists will be more sympathetic to Israel? On the contrary. Here is how the Anti-Fur Coalition reported the political roadblock to the bill:

This situation put Israel in a very negative light as the world watches the dirty political games that are played between the religious parties and the fur lobbyists; instead of taking the opportunity to take a moral and ethical historical step.

More negative than the 192 countries that didn't even consider the issue seriously enough to talk about it?

There's another connection of Pamela Anderson to Israel's liberalism.

Anderson is a guest judge on Israel's version of "Dancing with the Stars."

And, for the first time in any edition of the show worldwide, it will feature a same-sex couple competing.

Again, will any anti-Israel activist, pretending to hate Zionism for liberal reasons, even consider the fact that Israel is acting more liberal than any European country? Will "Queers for Palestine" put out a statement of support for this groundbreaking move?

Not quite.