You're proud of the young Jews who are bashing Birthright, the organization which your family personally benefited from for years? Wow, what an ingrate. #BiteTheHandThatFeedsYou.
(This may be a long thread.)
Your husband, Jay Golan was named CEO and President of Birthright Israel Foundation in 2005 and he remained in that position until 2012, meaning that for about seven years your family enjoyed his salary, paid for by the government of Israel and benefactors such as Sheldon Adelson
Jay's successor's salary was about $500K, according to @jdforward (Thank you, Forward, for digging into the financials of Jewish institutions!). I imagine your husband was also well-compensated. Did he "return the birthright"? Or did it help pay for Sophie's college tuition?
Sheldon Adelson has donated tens of millions, if not billions of dollars to Birthright over the years. Yet Sophie derides him as having a "twisted vision" of Jewish safety. And you posted an article comparing him to Farrakhan. Did you return his "despicable" money?
Yes, your husband spent years helping to raise money for a program which strengthens Jewish youth's connection to Israel. In 2007, he described how participants meet Israeli Arabs and Bedouin "to learn about Israel's cultural complexity." IfNotNow lies.
More recently, your daughter Sophie participated in Birthright Israel herself, in June of 2014. She had a great time, by the looks of it. Now she says "Israel is wrong" and shouldn't be defended.
Yes, Sophie Ellman-Golan, media person for Women's March and staunch ally of anti-Israel activist Linda Sarsour, was a Birthright participant. She didn't walk out. She didn't protest. She rode donkeys and camels, went swimming, and danced at the kotel. And befriended IDF soldiers
A few weeks after her trip ended, the three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped. She reached out to the soldiers who had been on her trip, saying she was thinking of them and hoping they were safe. I guess she used to think Israel was worth defending.
These are the soldiers tagged in that post.
Looks like she had fun sharing Sheldon Adelson's "twisted vision" of the Jewish future.
She even turned to her fellow Birthright participants, those terribly misguided and brainwashed tools of the evil Israeli government, to join her social activism.
So, in summary, you and your family happily benefited from the generosity of the Israeli government, wealthy Jewish donors, and "the Jewish establishment", and now you shit all over them. Well done, rabbi. I hope you're proud of that, too. (rant over)
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On its face, President Donald Trump’s announcement that he is pulling US forces out of Syria seems like an unfriendly act towards Israel. But it isn’t. Trump’s decision to pull US forces out of Syria is of a piece with outgoing US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley’s address on Tuesday to the UN Security Council regarding the Palestinian conflict with Israel. Both statements reflect the depths of the administration’s friendship and support for the State of Israel.
In Haley’s speech at the Security Council’s monthly meeting concerning the Palestinians’ conflict with Israel she decried the “UN’s obsession with Israel.”
Haley noted that the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians has failed for 50 years. And she said that it is time to try something new. She enjoined her “Arab and European brothers and sisters” to move beyond the “failed talking points” that formed the basis of the failed peace plans of the past half century.
Haley’s address intuited a key point that has never been raised by a senior US official. The “peace process” which has been ongoing between Israel and the PLO since 1993 is antithetical to actual peace.
Consequently, any effort to achieve actual peace between Israel and the Palestinians requires the abandonment of the “peace process.”
Haley made this clear by acknowledging that Israel has far less to gain and much more to lose from the peace process than the Palestinians do.
In her words, “Israel wants a peace agreement, but it doesn’t need one.”
“Both sides would benefit tremendously from a peace agreement. But the Palestinians would benefit more and the Israelis would risk more,” Haley said.
She added that if efforts to achieve peace were to fail, “Israel would continue to grow and prosper.”
The Palestinians on the other hand, “would continue to suffer.”
Haley’s insight puts paid the popular claim that Israel’s survival depends on the establishment of a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria, Gaza and northern, eastern and southern Jerusalem. For years, pro-Palestinian forces have insisted that their demand that Israel surrender its capital and its heartland to the PLO is actually a pro-Israel position. Indeed, they say, anyone who rejects it is anti-Israel.
One of the consequences of the U.S. pullout from Syria is that Trump will finally abandon Obama’s pro-Iranian policy in Syria. True, he isn’t replacing it with an anti-Iranian policy in Syria. But all the same, by abandoning a pro-Iranian policy in Syria, the move will lend some coherence to the U.S.’s overall strategy for countering Iran’s growing power and influence in the region and worldwide.
Israel’s Hadashot news channel reported on Wednesday that along with Trump’s decision to remove U.S. forces from Syria, U.S. officials told Israel that if Hezbollah gains a more powerful position in the next Lebanese government, the U.S. will end its support for the LAF and agree to Israel’s request that it place an economic embargo on the Lebanese government.
Hezbollah announced its intention to take control over Lebanon’s health ministry shortly after the elections in May. The ministry has one of the largest budgets and plenty of disposable cash. The U.S. had already warned Lebanese President Michel Aoun that it would end its support for Lebanon if Hezbollah receives the health ministry.
On Thursday, it was reported that Hezbollah loyalist Jamil Jabak will serve as Lebanese health minister in the next government. If the U.S. follows through on its promise to end its support for Lebanon as a result, then the Trump administration will entirely abandon Obama’s pro-Iranian policy in the Middle East.
From Israel’s perspective, continued U.S. support for the Hezbollah-controlled Lebanese government and military has been a major concern. In 2006, due the Bush administration’s support for the Lebanese government, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice prohibited Israel from targeting Lebanese infrastructures and other resources critical to Hezbollah’s war effort. If the U.S. is true to its word and aligns its policy towards Lebanon with Israel, the move will vastly expand Israel’s ability to decisively defeat Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy army in Lebanon, in the next war.
Commenting Thursday morning about Trump’s announcement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “We will continue to act in Syria to prevent Iran’s effort to militarily entrench itself against us. We are not reducing our efforts, we will increase our efforts.”
Netanyahu added, “I know that we do so with the full support and backing of the U.S.”
Time will tell whether Trump’s decision to remove U.S. forces from Syria was a prelude to disaster for U.S. allies and a boon for America’s enemies, or whether the opposite is the case. But what is clear enough is that move is not entirely negative.
There is one thing that Palestine obsessives never seem obsessed with: the opinions of Palestinians. There's no mystery here—asking what Palestinians believe exposes a fundamental problem with the liberal approach to the peace process, which is based on the belief that Palestinians are willing to live peacefully beside Israel.
If such a mentality prevailed, it would be easily revealed through polling. The Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research conducts a quarterly poll of Palestinians that is largely focused on internal political questions but also surveys views toward Israel and peace. That one never reads media coverage of this poll suggests that its findings are reliably inconvenient. The latest poll is out. What does it say?
If a new presidential election was held today between the current president, Fatah's Mahmoud Abbas, and the leader of the terrorist group Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas would beat Fatah 49 percent to 42 percent.
88 per cent said that Palestinians who sell property to Jews are traitors. 64 percent said the punishment for selling property to Jews should be the death penalty.
Palestinians oppose the concept of a two-state solution, 55 percent to 43 percent.
"A large minority of 44 percent thinks that armed struggle is the most effective means of establishing a Palestinian state next to the state of Israel while 28 percent believe that negotiation is the most effective means and 23 percent think non-violent resistance is the most effective."
In lieu of negotiations, "54 percent support a return to an armed intifada," i.e. terrorism.
50 percent of Palestinians reject in principle the holding of negotiations in order to resolve the conflict.
There exists an entire class of people in Washington and other western capitals who have devoted their careers to promoting Palestinian statehood, a quest now entering its fourth fruitless decade. Such people—many with good intentions—regularly explore every aspect of this issue in excruciating detail, every aspect except the one that matters the most: Palestinian public opinion.
On Thursday, UNIFIL spokesperson Andrea Tenenti was interviewed on an i24NEWS program called The Rundown. At one point, starting at 3:33 and extending to 4:40, Tenenti described just what UNIFIL's mandate is:So, according to Tenenti:
o UNIFIL's job is limited to monitoringo UNIFIL has no mandate to disarm Hezbollaho UNIFIL is not allowed to search private property
UNIFIL spokesperson Andrea Tenenti. Video screengrab
Pellegrini made it clear, however, that UNIFIL's mission, even with the new rules of engagement, does not include disarming Hezbollah. "It's not my job," hesaid. UNIFIL's role, he said, is to assist the Lebanese army in guaranteeing state authority over all Lebanese territory.
In his first interview to an Israeli paper since the war in Lebanon, Pellegrini revealed that last week a Syrian weapons convoy on its way to Hizbullah was intercepted by the Lebanese army near the Lebanese-Syrian border. While the new rules of engagement set by the UN allowed the new UNIFIL force to open fire in order to implement resolution 1701, Pellegrini said he would not automatically order his troops to open fire on Hizbullah guerrillas if they werespotted on their way to the Blue Line to attack Israel. The job of the new multinational force, he said, was to assist the Lebanese army and not to disarm or engage Hizbullah or even to prevent its attacks.
Pellegrini's admission that UNIFIL is allowed to use force to implement Resolution 1701 contradicts Tenenti's claim that UNIFIL's role is just to monitor. That Pellegrini goes on to turn around and then claim that their role is to assist the Lebanese army and not to disarm, engage or prevent attacks is puzzling.It also contradicts the text of Resolution 1701, which:
authorizes UNIFIL to take all necessary action in areas of deployment of its
forces and as it deems within its capabilities, to ensure that its area of operations is not utilized for hostile activities of any kind, to resist attempts by forceful means to prevent it from discharging its duties under the mandate of the Security Council, and to protect United Nations personnel, facilities, installations and equipment, ensure the security and freedom of movement of United Nations personnel, humanitarian workers and, without prejudice to the responsibility of the Government of Lebanon, to protect civilians under imminent threat of physical violence;
Again, this assigns to UNIFIL more than just a monitoring role.Now, what about a mandate to disarm Hezbollah?Back to the text of Resolution 1701, which:
Requests the Secretary-General to develop, in liaison with relevant international actors and the concerned parties, proposals to implement the relevant provisions of the Taif Accords, and resolutions 1559 (2004) and 1680 (2006), including disarmament...
Who are the relevant "international actors" who are supposed to implement disarmament?Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan appears not to havegotten the memo -
Annan angered Israeli officials when he told Channel 2 on Tuesday that "dismantling Hizbullah is not the direct mandate of the UN," which could only help Lebanon disarm the organization.
Resolution 1701 implies an orchestrated effort; the only proposal that Annan seems to have developed was to keep the UN as far away as possible. But if UNIFIL is supposed "to ensure that its area of operations is not utilized for hostile activities of any kind," how is it supposed to maintain that kind of control without having the authority to disarm Hezbollah at some level?The last point Tenenti makes is that UNIFIL has no authority to search private property.But according to the Reportof the Secretary-General on the implementation of Security Council resolution 1701, that is not exactly accurate either:
In accordance with its mandate, UNIFIL does not proactively search for weapons in the south. UNIFIL cannot enter or search private property unless there is credible evidence of a violation of the resolution, including an imminent threat of hostile activity from that location. In situations in which specific information is received regarding the illegal presence of armed personnel, weapons or infrastructure inside its area of operations, UNIFIL, in cooperation with the Lebanese Armed Forces, has remained determined to act with all means available within its mandate and capabilities.
Again, instead of maintaining just a monitoring mode, UNIFIL does have a mandateto search homes when there is evidence of violations. More than that, the text clearly states that when the illegal presence of weapons is detected, UNIFIL notonly has the authority to search but also to act "with all means available" -- meaning that it can disarm.There is, in fact, a documented caseof UNIFIL doing a search of private homes in 2010, using sniffer dogs and resulting in villagers retaliating by grabbing the weapons of a UNIFIL patrol, throwing stones at them and blocking the road.In this case, it was UNIFIL that was disarmed.The bottom line is that clearly, the role of UNIFIL was not intended to be as
passive as Tenenti claims, limited to monitoring.
o UNIFIL is allowed to use forceo The issue of disarming Hezbollah is a hot potato everyone is trying to avoid, but there is no clear indication that UNIFIL cannot disarm Hezbollah in specific circumstances "to prevent hostile activities"o UNIFIL is allowed to do searches when there is evidence of a violation
The fact that Hezbollah was able to dig multiple tunnels into Israel is just onemore reminder of UNIFIL's failure to do its job.
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At History News Network, professor of social studies and history at NYU Robert Cohen states flatly that Alice Walker is not an antisemite:
Whatever the merits of Walker’s reading of Icke, her life history has been one in which she has consistently and eloquently battled bigotry since her teenage college years at Spelman College where she was active in the Atlanta movement against racial discrimination and the Jim Crow system. As one who has studied Walker’s history of political activism, I find no trace of anti-Semitism, but instead find a humane identification with the oppressed, including Palestinians, and a dedication to battling war, poverty, and hatred.
... I know this because this year I published a book on Howard Zinn, Spelman, and the Atlanta student movement, Howard Zinn’s Southern Diary: Sit-Ins, Civil Rights, and Black Women’s Student Activism, and Walker wrote a foreword to it that described in moving terms how her and her family’s love of education and reverence for teachers, along with her passion for freedom, and justice, motivated her to stand up for her beloved [Jewish] teacher.
Wow. Just wow.
A supposed scholar who has spent a great deal of time studying Walker not only brushes off her defense of David Icke, chooses not to mention Walker's antisemitic poem, on her website today, about Jews and the Talmud, based on her meticulous research of watching YouTube videos.
Walker says that for centuries Jews have been taught by their rabbis that they should enslave "goyim." Walker says that Jewish rabbis have taught generations of students that Jesus is burning in hell because he stood up for the poor. Walker claims that Jews are taught from birth to kill "goyim" (which she helpfully defines as "us," since Jews are clearly The Other.)
This isn't "support for Palestinian rights." This is Nazi-level Jew-hatred, Protocols of the Elders of Zion-level filth, far worse than what I see in the worst of Arabic media.
To excuse this hate and these lies is to be complicit in them.
Walker's poem should exclude her from any respectable circles. Full stop. Anyone who disagrees because of the good work she has done is enabling antisemitism in academia and intellectual circles. It is beyond immoral - it is dangerous.
The most charitable thing one can say about Cohen is that he is unaware of Walker's antisemitism in her poem and her earlier books (where she says that Israeli Jews have used the dictum, that "might even be enshrined in the Torah," that possession is nine tenths of the law.) If that is so, he is not a scholar - he is a hack and a fraud.
The least charitable thing you can say is that Cohen is aware of Walker's antisemitism (as he is clearly aware of her full throated support for Icke's Jew-hatred) and that he consciously decided to defend her anyway.
Either way, if he doesn't pull this article, he has been proven to have no intellectual honesty.
This is twice in one week that History News Network has published ridiculous defenses of antisemites. In the previous article, Jews who felt that someone who accuses Jews of poisoning Palestinian wells of antisemitism are the real racists.
HNN needs to employ some fact checkers, because what used to be a good and useful site is in danger of being subverted by "academics" whose goals are anything but the truth.
(h/t Phil)
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Every week since they started on March 30, the weekly Gaza protests (usually riots) have had a different theme.
Today's theme is "loyalty to the heroes of resistance in the West Bank."
The statement issued along with the announcement said "The Palestinian people have the right to resist the occupation in all forms guaranteed by international laws" - a patently false statement - and it called for "an escalation of the resistance to the Israeli offensive on the West Bank."
Meaning that they are urging West Bank Arabs to shoot more pregnant women and stab more children and any other Jews they can find in Judea and Samaria.
Ironically, all the recent attacks occurred in drive-by shootings, on the very roads that Israel haters keep claiming are "for Jews only."
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The 1977 Export Administration Act, which I helped author at President Jimmy Carter's direction, prohibits American companies and individuals from participating in unsanctioned boycotts against U.S. allies, including Israel. For four decades, the law has been upheld by the courts.
Recently, U.S. companies have been facing the aggressive politics of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which is working against Israel through international governmental organizations (IGOs).
For three years, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), operating under a mandate from the UN Human Rights Council, has been working to create a database of companies that conduct business beyond the "green line," including east Jerusalem and the Jewish Quarter of the Old City. Companies that appear on such a list may be subject to new, unsanctioned boycotts.
In response, bipartisan legislation is pending to address this new challenge, the Israel Anti-Boycott Act (IABA). The IABA is carefully crafted to update the 1977 legislation by extending the prohibition against complying with boycotts to cover boycott-related activities by IGOs like the UN or the EU.
Some have raised free speech objections to the new legislation. However, like the 1977 legislation, the IABA exclusively targets commercial conduct only, not political speech or activities. U.S. courts have consistently ruled that regulating these commercial activities does not violate the First Amendment.
All the IABA does is follow the constitutional authority that underpinned the 1977 legislation by prohibiting U.S. individuals and companies from providing requested information to an IGO to assist in its efforts to further a boycott against a country friendly to the U.S. The IABA protects American companies from being pressured by IGOs.
Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) urged Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) to not include the Israel Anti-Boycott Act into an upcoming spending bill.
Sanders and Feinstein argued in a letter that they are against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, but the Israel Anti-Boycott Act is at odds with the First Amendment.
“Federal district courts in Kansas and Arizona have similarly considered state laws that target political boycotts of Israel and found them to violate the First Amendment,” Sanders and Feinstein wrote. “For example, in Jordahl vs. Brnovich, the court held in granting a preliminary injunction, ‘The type of collective action targeted by the [law] specifically implicates the rights of assembly that Americans and Arizonans use ‘to bring about political, social, and economic charge.’”
The senators also criticized the bill for cracking down on “certain constitutionally-protected political activity aimed solely at Israeli settlements in the West Bank.”
“At a time when the [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu government is pursuing policies clearly aimed at foreclosing the two-state solution, it is deeply disappointing that Congress would consider penalizing criticism of those policies,” Sanders and Feinstein wrote.
Brooke Goldstein, executive director of the Lawfare Project, told the Journal in an emailed statement that Sanders and Feinstein are “mistaken” about the bill violating the First Amendment.
In a piece titled “Zionism, Pan-Africanism, and White Nationalism,” author Shaul Magid argues that because Zionism was a “lodestar for other minority attempts to solve the problem of the limits of ethnic self-determination,” it is, therefore a racialized movement that can offer freedom but never equality.
There are several problems with his analysis, which I will attempt to explain in full below.
Magid correctly points out how Zionism was a model for the beleaguered African-American community, beginning with Pan-Africanist Edward Blyden’s feeling of inspiration after reading Theodore Herzl’s Der Judenstaadt. The twin messages of self-empowerment and chosenness proved especially compelling to a people constantly told by the dominant society that they were less than nothing and attracted black leaders from W.E.B. Dubois and Marcus Garvey to Stokley Carmichael.
But in many ways, this is where the similarities end. Although a message of self-actualization and unique destiny are part of the Zionist creed, there are other ideas within statist Zionism that make it incompatible with the notions of racial purity contained in Marcus Garvey and Louis Farrakhan’s Black Nationalism.
For starters, while Zionism concerns itself with a particular ethnic group, it does not concern itself with a particular race insofar as race connotes skin color. And this speaks to the inherent contradictions within the very concept of black nationalism. On the one hand, a call for black nationalism via a separatist movement would naturally be attractive to a people persecuted by the dominant society. On the other hand, the black experience is, ironically and paradoxically, an American creation. The shared history, culture, and collective experience of black Americans is one that is bounded by and fixed within an American construct. In this way, black American culture cannot be separated from its American roots, and calls for black nationalism are rooted in an unsolvable contradiction.
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