From Ian:
Chief Rabbi of Brussels: There is no future for Jews in Europe
Chief Rabbi of Brussels: There is no future for Jews in Europe
In the shadow of the Paris terror attacks that killed 130 people and as Belgian police sweep the country for terror suspects, the Chief Rabbi of Brussels said Monday that there is no future for Jews in Europe.‘Remaining and expanding’
Rabbi Avraham Gigi spoke to Israeli radio station 103 FM about the atmosphere of fear in the Belgian capital that has been in a state of near lockdown for the past three days.
"There is a sense of fear in the streets, the Belgians understand that they too are targets of terror. Jews now pray in their homes [as opposed to at synagogues] and some of them are planning on emigrating," Gigi said.
"Since Shabbat the city has been paralyzed. The synagogues were closed, something which has not happened since World War Two. People are praying alone or are holding small minyanim [small prayer groups] at private homes. Schools and theaters are closed as are most large stores and public events are not permitted. We live in fear and wait for instructions from the police or the government," he said.
Gigi gave a breakdown of the Belgian Jewish population which he said numbered 50,000.
"There are 25,000 Jews in Brussels, 18,000 in Antwerp and the rest live in smaller places. There has been aliya to Israel as well as emigration to Canada and the US. People understand there is no future for Jews in Europe," he said.
Islamic State has lost around 20-25 percent of its holdings in the course of the last half year. But these losses are manageable. Indeed, the group has in recent weeks continued to expand in a western direction, across the desert to Palmyra and thence into Homs province in Syria. Why, then, embark on a path that risks the destruction of Islamic State at the hands of forces incomparably stronger than it? The answer is that Islamic State does not, like some other manifestations of political Islam in the region, combine vast strategic goals with a certain tactical patience and pragmatism. Rather, existing at the most extreme point of the Sunni Islamist continuum, it is a genuine apocalyptic cult. It has little interest in being left alone to create a model of Islamic governance according to its own lights, as its Western opponents had apparently hoped.Finkelstein vs. Salaita: Battle of the Anti-Israel Professors
Its slogan is “baqiya wa tatamaddad” (remaining and expanding). The latter is as important an imperative as the former. Islamic State must constantly remain in motion and in kinetic action.
If this action results in Western half-measures and prevarication, then this will exemplify the weakness of the enemy to Islamic State supporters and spur further recruitment and further attacks. And if resolve and pushback is exhibited by the enemy, this, too, can be welcomed as part of the process intended to result in the final apocalyptic battles which are part of the Islamic State eschatology.
Because of this, allowing Islamic State to quietly fester in its Syrian and Iraqi domains is apparently not going to work.
The problem and consequent dilemma for Western policy-makers are that Islamic State is only a symptom, albeit a particularly virulent one, of a much larger malady. Were it not so, the matter of destroying a brutal, ramshackle entity in the badlands of Syria and Iraq would be fairly simple. A Western expeditionary force on the ground could achieve it in a matter of weeks and would presumably be welcomed by a grateful population.
This, however, is unlikely to be attempted, precisely because the real (but rarely stated) problem underlying Islamic State is the popularity and legitimacy of virulently anti-Western Sunni Islamist politics among the Sunni Arab populations of the area.
Norman Finkelstein, who is currently teaching at Sakarya University in Turkey after being denied tenure at DePaul University, has some choice words for Steven Salaita. The latter reached an $875,000 settlement with the University of Illinois (UI) in a lawsuit involving UI’s withdrawal of an offered position in its American Indian Studies Program due to his inflammatory, Israel-bashing tweets. Like Finkelstein, Salaita went on to teach in the Middle East, in this case at American University in Beirut (AUB). Neither is happy about it.
Ira Glunts asked Finkelstein to comment on Salaita’s settlement for the left-wing, anti-Israel website Dissident Voice, given that they are both, as he conspiratorially described it, “victim[s] of Jewish lobby pressure.” After declaring at the outset, “I am not a party-liner,” Finkelstein let loose:
I’ve read Salaita – or, let’s say, I’ve endeavored to read him. Even Google has yet to invent a translation program that makes coherent sense of his prose. . . . [I]n a rational world it would be cause for wonder how he got hired in the first place. It’s a telling commentary on the state of the humanities that his tweets got greater scrutiny than his (so-called) scholarship.
Finkelstein maintained that Salaita was hardly a victim, given his hefty settlement and the fact that he now holds “the prestigious Edward Said chair” at AUB:
That’s not bad for someone with a PhD from the University of Oklahoma who, before being hired to teach Native American Studies at an excellent second-tier university, last taught English composition at Virginia Tech.







