Nearly six years ago I gave a lecture at Yeshiva University on how to answer anti-Israel arguments. Since the lecture was over an hour and twenty minutes, I decided to break it up into 20 sections, one each to answer one popular anti-Israel argument.
Here is part 15.
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This is not even the first time Malaysia has blocked Israel from participating in a sports event.
As Elder of Ziyon pointed out 3 years ago, Malaysia also blocked 2 Israeli teenagers from competing in the 45th Youth Sailing World Championships held there in 2016. Malaysia also refused visas to Israel that year to prevent them from participating in the World Team Table Tennis Championships. The International Table Tennis Federation threatened a ban, but in the end, Israel withdrew because of security concerns.
Paralympics logo. Fair use
But Malaysia has no problem hosting Hamas terrorists, for whom it hosts their own special "events".
When Malaysia’s prime minister Najib Razak visited the Gaza in 2013, he became the first non-Arab leader to visit Hamas since it grabbed control from the PA in a bloody civil war in 2007. Razak pledged Hamas political and financial support -- all of which is mutually beneficial: improving Hamas’ image worldwide, while also strengthening Razak’s own standing in Malaysia’s Muslim community.
Few Malaysians have laid eyes on a Jew; the tiny Jewish community emigrated decades ago. Nevertheless, Malaysia has become an example of a phenomenon called “Anti-Semitism without Jews.” Last March, for instance, the Federal Territory Islamic Affairs Department sent out an official sermon to be read in all mosques, stating that “Muslims must understand Jews are the main enemy to Muslims as proven by their egotistical behaviour and murders performed by them.” About 60% of Malaysians are Muslim.
In Kuala Lumpur, it’s routine to blame the Jews for everything from economic failures to the bad press Malaysia gets in foreign (“Jewish-owned”) newspapers.
Ten years ago, Forbes ran an article on The Myth Of A Moderate Malaysia. Even without having to make any mention of either Jews (around 100 remain) or Israel in the article, the article had no trouble seeing that
Malaysia has rejected secularism in favor of a kind of ethnoreligious apartheid that belongs more in a medieval kingdom than in a modern democratic republic.
In Malaysia, Islam is the state religion. Higher education, the bureaucracy and vast swathes of the economy are operated as a kind of spoils system almost exclusively for Malays, whom the state defines as Muslim. Race and religion determine everything from your odds of getting into medical school to the amount you're expected to put down for an apartment.
Not surprisingly, Malaysia is also a big supporter of BDS. Last year there was a call to boycott Malaysia’s largest television service provider, Astro, because it allegedly made a business deal with the Israeli software and service provider Amdocs. Malaysia also put pressure on McDonalds and Tesco, for alleged business relations with Israel. To counter this, these companies downplay the political aspect of their connection and instead emphasize how they provide jobs and help Malaysia's economic growth.
Yet Malaysia avoids the consequences of its actions, as its leader Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad manages to walk a thin line condemning the US while also playing a supportive role in fighting terrorism.
Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad.
Public Domain
Dr. Mahathir has cracked down hard on suspected terrorists and shared intelligence with the United States, the kind of support the Bush administration wishes it were getting from Indonesia.
Some American officials have said Malaysia was a launching pad for Sept. 11, that it is a base for Islamic terrorists. Although a few of the hijackers did pass time here, Western and Asian analysts say that this is a moderate Islamic country, where extremists are as unwelcome as they are in Europe or the United States. [emphasis added]
It was a just a few months after that 2002 Times article that Malaysia's opposition Pan-Malaysia Islamic Party invited terrorists from Hamas and Hezbollah to speak at their conference, they claimed they had no formal links. That may be when Malaysia and Hamas terrorists started to begin to get close. At the time, Current Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad was prime minister then too -- and accused the opposition party of fomenting extremism.
So all things being equal, the question is not merely what is taking the International Federation for Paralympic Swimming so long to take real action.
The question is why are they holding their Olympics there to begin with?
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Muslim and Christian holy sites in "Palestine" are "defiled" and "desecrated" by the presence of Israelis/Jews. This hateful demonization is often expressed by Palestinians, including Palestinian leaders.
In December 2018, the PA "presidential office" stressed that Mahmoud Abbas was to have "urgent conversations" with Arab and international bodies about "the dangerous Israeli escalation," which among other things Abbas' office said is being expressed by "the defilement of the holy sites." [Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Dec. 11, 2018]
Every time an Israeli/Jew enters Judaism's holiest site, the Temple Mount plaza, the PA calls it "an invasion" and a "defilement" or a "desecration."
Recently, official PA radio broadcast a song which included the lyrics: "The Zionist" has "defiled the mosques and churches" in the cities of "Haifa, Ramallah, Gaza, Jaffa, Ramle, Acre, and occupied Jerusalem": "Where is the Arab army, where? ...
Haifa, Ramallah, Gaza, and occupied Jerusalem call to you
Jaffa, Ramle, Acre, and occupied Jerusalem call to you...
The Zionist has defiled their mosques and churches, and trampled our sanctity."
[Official PA radio station The Voice of Palestine, Dec. 19, 2018]
Israelis/Jews "defile" holy sites. This hateful demonization is often expressed by Palestinian leaders. Recently, official PA radio broadcast a song which included the lyrics: "The Zionist has defiled their mosques and churches." Read more here: https://t.co/vVfWajqRYKpic.twitter.com/2THhiMBBwz
Muslim worshipers and guards for the Wakf Islamic religious trust protested on Monday against an Israeli policeman wearing a kippah who tried to enter the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount as part of a routine security patrol.
The protesters barricaded themselves inside the shrine after a large police force was rushed to the area, witnesses said. They demanded that the policeman remove the kippah before entering the site, triggering a standoff with police. The incident ended several hours later.
The Wakf claimed the police detained five east Jerusalem men as they were leaving the Temple Mount after the incident. The five were identified as Fadi Elayan, Yahya Shehadeh, Ahmed Abu Alya, Awad Salaymeh and Luay Abu al-Sa’ed.
The Wakf said in a statement that it had ordered the closure of the Dome of the Rock after an Israeli policeman “attempted to storm it while wearing a kippah.” It said that two Israeli policemen enter the site daily – in the morning and evening – for a routine security check.
“The guards at the Dome of the Rock asked the policeman to remove his kippah before entering the site, but he refused and insisted on entering it even by force,” the Wakf statement said. “The guards then closed all the gates of the Dome of the Rock. Later, police officers were deployed at the entrances to the Dome of the Rock, while the guards and worshipers remained inside.”
This is the kind of story that the "State of Palestine" does not intend to raise during its chairmanship of the largest bloc of developing countries at the UN. It seems that, from the point of view of the Palestinian Authority leadership, Jbara's ordeal does not fall within the category of human rights.
Jbara's story has barely attracted the attention of the international mainstream media. As far as many foreign journalists covering the Middle East are concerned, a Palestinian woman complaining about torture in a Palestinian prison is not newsworthy. Had she been detained by Israel, Jbara would have most likely made it to the front pages of the world's leading newspapers and magazines in a matter of minutes.
The PA regularly complains about human rights violations of Palestinians held in Israeli prison for security-related offenses. But when the PA's own security forces detain and torture a mother of three, Palestinian leaders are found elsewhere -- like at the helm of a UN bloc.
To sum up, Obama rejected America’s moral right to lead in world affairs. He undermined the morality of Israel’s very existence. He rejected the legitimacy of Arab governments and elevated the Muslim Brotherhood as a legitimate force in the Muslim world. And he ignored all of the pathologies of the Arab and Muslim world.
Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran; his hostile treatment of Israel; his support for the overthrow of allied and non-threatening Arab governments in Egypt, in Tunisia, and in Libya; and his refusal to take decisive action against either ISIS or Iranian aggression in Syria all were rooted in the anti-American principles he set out in his Cairo speech.
On Tuesday, Pompeo disavowed and condemned Obama’s speech point by point. Pompeo rejected Obama’s denunciation of American power insisting, “America is a force for good in the Middle East.”
Of the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power in Egypt following Mubarak’s ouster in 2011, Pompeo said
Pompeo went on to describe the Trump administration’s actions to restore and strengthen America’s alliances with its Arab allies, its strategy for countering Iranian aggression, and cultivating good relations between the Arab states and Israel.
He underlined the America’s continued commitment to utterly destroying Islamic State forces in Syria, even after U.S. forces are withdrawn. And he spoke in great detail about U.S. actions to curtail Iranian power and influence throughout the region.
There is little doubt that the media, the foreign policy establishment, the European Union and the Democrats will continue to seek to undermine Trump’s policies in the Middle East with the intention of paving the way for a restoration of Obama’s policies – based on Obama’s Cairo speech from January 4, 2009.
But on Thursday, by condemning and disavowing that speech in detail, from the place where it was delivered, Pompeo drove a spear through the lie at its very heart – that America is anything other than a force of good in the Middle East.
Nina Burleigh is Newsweek's National Politics Correspondent and a New York Times bestselling author.
And she is apparently also an antisemitic conspiracy theorist.
It started with a thread by Sarah Kendzior, a self described "Writer and scholar. Co-host of @gaslitnation. Author of the NYT bestseller THE VIEW FROM FLYOVER COUNTRY." In the thread she talks about lots of anti-Trump stories that she believes have inexplicably been dropped, like the charge that he raped a 13-year old girl, that he was involved in Israeli firm Black Cube targeting supporters of the Iran deal, and that "Chabad is used as a cover for criminal activity by international mafias and key players in the Trump team including Sater, Cohen, Kushner, Ivanka, etc. Briefly explored by Politico, then dropped."
Every tweet in the thread implicated one or more Jews.
Kendzior ended her thread with,
There are many more undercovered stories, but the press seems particularly reluctant to pursue these. Which is not surprising since those who do write about them are threatened. Why officials also seem reluctant to investigate or prosecute obvious crimes - now there's a story...
The "third rail of American journalism," according to Burleigh, is obviously - Jews. That's why no one wants to pursue these "obvious" crimes.
No one has seemed to tell this to Bernie Madoff, Harvey Weinstein, Woody Allen, Anthony Weiner, Eliot Spitzer, Sholom Rubashkin, Jeremy Reichberg, the yeshivas of New York City...
This is a truly bizarre tweet (note that the Mossad is not mentioned by Kendzior. although Black Cube boasts some former Mossad members.) It betrays what Burleigh really feels.
I have not found any similar antisemitic craziness from Burleigh, although she ludicrously claimed that "settlers periodically try to take back the Dome of the Rock from the Muslims in Old Jerusalem," which makes her a sloppy reporter - but no sloppier than many other such "professionals" who write what they believe rather than the facts.
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For the past week, the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt has been closed.
While it had been closed for much of the past six years, last May it was opened as Hamas allowed the Palestinian Authority to man the crossing. Egypt severely restricted who could travel through the crossings but several thousand were allowed to cross in both directions monthly.
Then on January 9, the PA announced that it will stop its presence at the crossing, ostensibly because their employees were being harassed and arrested by Hamas. However, Palestinian Authority Minister of Civil Affairs Hussein Al Sheikh said in an interview that the closure was part of the PA's attempts to pressure Hamas into surrendering in their longstanding dispute.
It should be noted that Egypt can open the crossing any time it wants, but at this time it refuses to open it unless the Palestinian Authority is there. In the past Egypt did open the crossing sporadically to traffic when Hamas controlled the crossing, and during the time the Muslim Brotherhood controlled Egypt the crossing was open often. On Sunday, Egypt did allow crossing one way into Gaza, but not out, so PA presence is certainly not necessary for the border to be opened.
As usual, the news story is of little interest to international media, because Palestinian suffering from infighting is not nearly as interesting to the world as when Israel can be blamed.
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Judaism is a term for a false religion distorted from the true religion which Moses came, since he did not come with Judaism, but came with Islam (p. 135)
The Zionist movement is a Jewish political movement which managed to convince most of the Jews to control the whole world in order to have dominance (page 136, not screen-captured)
The current Torah is full of cruelty and barbarism, and the Jews are allowed to cheat, steal and treachery , deceit, murder and other things that the current Torah contained. (p. 137)
You know how Arabs love to say that they have no problems with Jews and Judaism?
That doesn't quite jive with what their textbooks say.
This is all online, I checked the translations as best I could. Feel free to factcheck me.
(h/t WC)
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EAPPI, the World Council of Churches’ flagship project on Israel and the Arab-Israel conflict, has brought 1,800 volunteers to the West Bank to “witness life under occupation.” The World Council of Churches does not run similar activities in other conflict zones. By singling out Israel, EAPPI embodies antisemitism, as defined in the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s working definition.
Despite marketing itself as a human rights and protection program, EAPPI places significant emphasis on political advocacy before, during, and after the trip. When volunteers return to their home countries and churches, they engage in anti-Israel advocacy, such as BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) campaigns and comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany.
Participants are selected by country-specific non-governmental organizations (NGOs) known as “National Coordinators.” The National Coordinators are also active in BDS and other delegitimization campaigns against Israel.
EAPPI receives funding from a variety of sources, including the WCC and National Coordinators. Funding from different governments is directed to EAPPI through the National Coordinators and via UNICEF.
EAPPI contributes to a UN “Working Group” consisting of a number of UN agencies and NGOs that collaborate on and coordinate politicized anti-Israel campaigns in the West Bank. In this capacity, EAPPI does “a lot of administrative work which is fed into UN systems.”
EAPPI partners with a number of political NGOs in the region, including groups that support BDS campaigns against Israel and/or that accuse Israel of “war crimes.”
The significant problems with EAPPI, as laid out in this report, should be seen in light of the antisemitism1 and demonization that emerges from EAPPI’s parent body (World Council of Churches), partners, and affiliated staff.
WCC leadership and EAPPI volunteers have repeatedly made comparisons of Israeli actions to those of Nazi Germany in their advocacy sessions. For example, WCC general secretary Dr. Olav Fyske Tveit said: “I heard about the occupation of my country during the five years of World War II as the story of my parents. Now I see and hear the stories of 50 years of occupation.”
In 2017, an observer Rev. Gordon Timbers of the Presbyterian Church of Canada gave a presentation. When an audience member asked if “Jewish people who go in to see...the model of the gas chambers” see similarities between that and the West Bank, Timbers responded that “there are similarities,” including the use of identification papers.
South African EAPPI activist Itani Rasalanavho said during an “Apartheid Week” event in his home country that “the time has come to say that the victims of the Holocaust have now become the perpetrators.”
In a presentation by Rev. Joan Fisher, an EAPPI activist, she quotes a Palestinian cleric as saying: “We are sympathetic to the suffering of our Jewish brothers and sisters in the Holocaust, but you don’t deal with one injustice by creating another injustice.”
The IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitsm states that “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” is an example of antisemitism.
The WCC supports boycotts and divestment from settlements, but EAPPI activists have called for a boycott of all of Israel.
The EAPPI publication “Faith Under Occupation” called in 2012 for “sanctions and suspension of US aid to Israel,” to “challenge Israel in local and international courts” and “economic boycotts.”
EAPPI National Coordinator in South Africa Dudu Mahlangu-Masango signed a letter to then-president Jacob Zuma calling “on our government and civil society to instigate broad-based boycott, divestment and sanctions on Israel” in 2012. She repeated this call in a 2018 television interview, calling for “total sanctions” on Israel.
Following the 2016 presidential election, Weisman wrote a book which purported to be about anti-Semitism titled, (((Semitism))): Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump.
Weisman did three things in his book. He used the presence of antisemitism on the right as a means to castigate the entire Republican party and conservative movement as antisemitic. He ignored and dismissed antisemitism on the Left. And finally, Weisman attacked Judaism, Jews who observe Judaism, and Jews who support Israel.
Weisman accused pro-Israel American Jews of disloyalty to America, arguing, “The American Jewish obsession with Israel has taken our eyes off not only the politics of our own country, the growing gulf between rich and poor, and the rising tide of nationalism but also our own grounding in faith.”
Weisman’s January 4 article in the Times was an amplification of the arguments he made in his book. Again he ignored left wing anti-Semitism. He regurgitated Goldberg’s allegations of Israeli moral infirmity. He defended Tlaib and Omar and their hatred for Israel. And thne, Weisman insisted that American Jewry should forget its ties to Jewish tradition and to the Jewish people and instead embrace an identity based entirely on leftist ideology and propaganda.
In his words, “American Jewry has been going its own way for 150 years, a drift that has created something of a new religion, or at least a new branch of one of the world’s most ancient faiths.”
It is hard to know how influential the Times‘ ever-escalating campaign against Jews will be on the American Jewish community. Survey results and other data indicate that the vast majority of American Jews are not buying the claim that Israel is morally infirm, incapable of discerning its national interest, and deserving of hatred and destruction.
Most American Jews don’t think that American Jews should tell Israel how to handle the security and other challenges it faces. And even as anti-Israel groups in the American Jewish community receive adulation and attention disproportionate to their small numbers, they do not seem to have built major inroads into the Jewish community. This explains why their efforts are directed towards weakening existing Jewish institutions rather than building their own. Their constituencies are too small to support them.
But whether the New York Times succeeds or fails in its campaign to mainstream leftist antisemitism, shame pro-Israel American Jews, and detach the Jewish community in the U.S. from Israel and the rest of the Jewish world, it is worth taking note of, and condemning, what the newspaper is attempting to do.
Nearly six years ago I gave a lecture at Yeshiva University on how to answer anti-Israel arguments. Since the lecture was over an hour and twenty minutes, I decided to break it up into 20 sections, one each to answer one popular anti-Israel argument.
Here is part 14. This has not aged since 2013.
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The term headlining this post refers to a century-long
conflict in European history when England and France fought what were really a
series of wars over the course of more than a century (from 1337-1453).
The phrase “100 Years’ War” was later applied by historians
to cover a period in which the cause of specific flareups varied (succession
battles, fights over lands, military ambition and hubris) as two powerful and dynastically
entangled European powers battled for dominance, forming distinct national
identities as “England” and “France” in the process.
Remind you of anything?
When most people describe the history of the Arab-Israeli
conflict (or, as Ruth Wisse prefers, the
Arab War Against the Jews), they tend to highlight specific armed
conflicts between nation states that broke out in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 (occasionally
including the 1982 Lebanon war against the PLO in the mix), with skirmishes and
terrorism marking every year between “real wars” involving the armies of nation
states.
Over the last two decades, full-scale wars attached to
specific years and ongoing small-scale assaults on civilians have been
supplemented by organized non-state militaries in Lebanon (Hezbollah) and Gaza
(Hamas) attacking Israel with missiles and – most recently – attempting at
large-scale infiltration through tunneling.
Because clashes between the Israeli army and Hezbollah (2006) and Hamas
(2008, 2012 and 2014) did not involve wars between states, these fights tend to
not be grouped in with 1948, 1967, etc.
Our tendency to use the term “war” to describe certain types
of conflicts blurs the reality that the war between Israel and its neighbors
should really be seen as another 100 Years’ War, one declared against the Jews
decades before Israeli became a reality in which even major wars like 1967 can
be seen as battles in a single, large, ongoing conflict.
If you use the term “war” not to describe any event
involving people shooting at one another, but reserve it for a specific
conflict or set of conflicts designed to accomplish political goals, then wars
can only end with the victory of one side over the other or, in some cases,
reconciliation between belligerents (often motivated by exhaustion or a new internal
or external threat).
When clear victory and defeat is not present, the end of one
conflict is better thought of as a cease fire, during which belligerents take a
time out to repair damage, heal wounds, and prepare for another go when timing
is right. In the case of England v.
France in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, there was very little reason
to end the war entirely, given that no victory was ever definitive enough to
cause one or the other party to surrender.
So it continued generation after generation until civil war in one
nation (England) led to new leaders finally calling it quits.
Such unending multi-generational conflict can seem unworldly
in a modern age when not squandering resources and lives in warfare confers so
many human and material benefits. Who
would sacrifice not just themselves but their children, their children’s
children and their children’s children’s children in a century of military
conflict when ending it would increase prosperity and hope for so many?
But as we have learned over the centuries, the ambition of
leaders – especially in unfree societies – tends to trump factors such as the
good of citizen/subjects.
And why not? Kings
and tyrants tend to be the last ones to lose their fortunes or lives in the
wars they instigate – and only when they are defeated. In the case of every war that’s racked the
Middle East over the last century (including those that did not involve
Israel), how many Middle East kings, military dictators or mullahs fell in
battle, or even fell from power after losing the many wars they began? With the
possible exception of Saddam Hussein, I’m hard pressed to think of a single
tyrant who started a war dying of anything other than a coup or natural causes.
As we learned in the last century, ideology (both secular
and religious) can motivate a population to continue a multi-generational
conflict. If you think of the Cold War
as an actual war, with so-called “wars” like Korea and Vietnam (as well as
surrogate superpower conflicts between Israel and the Arab states) serving as
battles in that larger conflict, then it was ideology – good and ill – that
motivated the parties to fight it out until one of them collapsed.
The reality that we might be in a conflict ready to enter
its second century can be both bewildering and disheartening to those of us who
can easily see how much suffering would end if Israel’s enemies simply accepted
the fact that a non-Arab, non-Muslim polity was destined to continue on a tiny
sliver of land in the region.
This dynamic distorts perception, leading to the situation
we are in now in which a subset of Israelis, American Jews and non-Jews (and
others) are unwilling to believe in the true source of a century-long conflict,
instead adopt false “narratives” (such as the war being the result of the Jews
not allowing an Arab presence in the land they
control) to avoid having the contemplate being at war with societies ready to
throw a fourth generation onto the bonfire.
Given all this, the most powerful weapons Israel and her
friends can bring to the battlefield are patience and historic understanding, psychological
resources ultimately more important than the latest military gadgetry.
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The Israeli strike on Iranian warehouses in Damascus on Friday was timed to target a meeting of Hezbollah and Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders who were meeting with Syrian military leaders, the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Jadira reported Monday.
Al-Jadira quoted sources in the Revolutionary Guards who said the Syrian, Iranian, and Hezbollah commanders had convened to discuss a joint Russian-Turkish plan to attack the al-Qaida-affiliated jihadist Nusra Front group in Idlib in northwestern Syria.
The sources told the Kuwaiti paper that the strike came moments after the meeting adjourned and badly wounded two Revolutionary Guard commanders and a number of Hezbollah and Syrian military personnel.
In a highly unusual step, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed on Sunday that Israel was responsible for the strike on the Damascus airport.
"Just in the past 36 hours the IDF struck Iranian targets in Damascus, proving we are more determined than ever to take action against Iran in Syria," Netanyahu said in the weekly cabinet meeting.
Syrian state media reported the strike and claimed that air defenses intercepted most of the missiles. Hezbollah's Al-Manar television reported that the attack covered a wider area than usual, ranging from the eastern Damascus suburb of Dmeir to the village of Dimas in the west near the Lebanon border.
Also on Monday, an Iranian cargo plane crashed in the city of Karaj, near Tehran.
On Sunday evening, Israeli website Intelli Times published photos showing the devastation at the site, saying the same structure had been struck in 2016 after it was identified as a depot housing M-600 surface-to-surface missiles, the Syrian version of the Iranian-made Fateh-110 missiles.
The intelligence blog said the building had been restored later that year, but was now completely destroyed.
It published side-by-side satellite photos, saying one was taken on Friday — where the building can be seen — and the other was taken on Sunday, with the building gone.
On Saturday, Intelli Times reported that hours before the Israeli strike, an Iranian Boeing 747 cargo plane had landed at the airport and unloaded its cargo at a site previously targeted three times by Israel. The aircraft then returned to Iran through Iraqi airspace.
On Friday, the official news agency SANA reported that Syrian air defense batteries opened fire on “hostile Israel missiles” and intercepted “most” of them, a common claim of the Syrian military, which many defense analysts believe to be false or overstated.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor said that “two areas hosting military positions of Iranian forces and the Lebanese Hezbollah movement have been targeted.”
The sites were near the airport and around the Kisweh area south of Damascus, the observatory said.
It is important to note that this internal debate is a major factor in why Israel suddenly chose to end the ambiguity over its operations against Iran in Syria, the transfer of high-quality weapons to Hezbollah, and the advancement of precision missiles and rockets in Syria and Lebanon.
In an interview with The New York Times, the outoging chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot said that Israel had carried out thousands of such attacks, most of them from the air, and others by special units and surface missiles. Prime Minister Benjamin Netayahu repeated this message in the weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday, partly perhaps because Israel wants to make sure that the Iranian leadership is fully aware of the losses and damage they are suffering in Syria under Suleimani, and of the resources they have expended in vain trying to entrench themselves there.
Israel has an intelligence and aerial advantage in the region, and this led to Suleimani's inability to set up shop in Syria. In fact, he wasted tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars on this adventure. None of that has harmed his standing in Iran, however, which is still allowing him to continue his plans to make Iran and Shiite Islam the true powerhouse in the Middle East.
Iran has already cut some of its budgets to foreign proxies, including Hezbollah, and the debate inside the country goes on. Israel meanwhile, is trying to show the all different Iranian camps what the truth is. Israel has an interest in making Iranians understand that these efforts by Suleiman — which Israel has foiled in recent years — cost huge sums, something that is terrribly lacking in the welfare of the people.
As such, Israel decided that it was time to end its policy of ambiguity so that Iranians will finally know why senior Revolutionary Guards officials are coming home in coffins.
Former Foreign Ministry director general Dore Gold said that there are always military operations around elections, “and now given the nature of the threat it is certainly reasonable that those military operations that have started already a couple of years ago will continue.”
He said that those attributing political considerations to Netanyahu going public now with the attacks would be on stronger ground “if these military operations just started now.” But, he said, “considering this is a continuation of past policy as articulated by the outgoing chief of staff, I think these arguments lose ground.”
Gold said that when Israel takes credit for an operation of this sort, “it becomes part of its deterrence posture – there is no longer a doubt, and it is now clear that Israel will do what is necessary to prevent the buildup of an Iranian military presence on Syrian soil.”
Taking responsibility, he said, “adds credibility to Israel's statements about not allowing Iran to convert Syria into a satellite state.”
The timing, he said, is not connected to the elections, but rather to the US intention to remove its forces from Syria.
“I think the discussion of a US withdrawal has perhaps given the Iranians a sense that they now can just take over Syria.,” he said. Israel's taking responsibility for attacks there sends them a clear message that they cannot. It also sends a message that even with the lingering tensions with Moscow over the spy plane incident, Jerusalem will not be deterred from taking action in Syria when it deems it necessary.
Jacob Nagel, who formerly served under Netanyahu as his national security advisor, also mentioned the withdrawal of the US troops as one of the reasons to take credit now.
He said that Israel has spelled out its red lines in Syria for a long time: that it will not allow a terrorist presence on the Golan border, that it will not allow the transfer of precision arms from Iran to Hezbollah, and that it will not allow an Iranian military buildup in the country.
Nagel said regarding the reason for taking responsibility for the attacks now: “Israel wants to make clear to everyone who will listen that we are determined, and will not allow our red lines be crossed.”
The Jewish God Question, by Andrew Pessin, is a very readable compendium that briefly describes the philosophy of dozens of Jewish thinkers over the centuries, from Philo to today.
Over 70 Jewish philosophers are given a short chapter or two (or three). Each chapter is two pages long. Pessin manages to take key points of their thinking and condense them into very few pages.
The book is divided into four parts: pre-Maimonides, Maimonides to Sforno, Spinoza to the 20th century and contemporary Jewish philosophy. Many of the philosophers are within the traditional rabbinic Jewish framework, and many are not.
The Jewish God Question mostly sticks to Jewish thought as a reaction to, or in consonance with, ancient Greek philosophy. Hence, Philo is the first Jewish philosopher who grappled (and tried to synthesize Jewish thinking) with Greek philosophy. There is a large time gap between Philo and the next Jewish philosopher mentioned, Saadia (ben Joseph) Gaon, who similarly tried to make Jewish thinking compatible with rational observation. Pessin shows how Saadia Gaon uses logic to prove that the universe must have had a beginning, as opposed to the prevailing philosophy that it had been there forever, for example.
To give you an idea of what the book is like, here is Chapter 1:
Pessin doesn't only speak about these philosophers' thoughts about God but also about how they look at the Torah, free will vs. predetermination, and the land of Israel.
On the latter theme, for example, he describes the thinking of Zvi Hirsch Kalischer, a 19th century Orthodox rabbi and philosopher who strongly urges Jews to move to Israel, buy land and build farms and communities before the Messiah comes - a proto-Zionism that predates Herzl (also in the book) by some three decades.
But, Pessin notes, he wasn't the first philosopher to urge Jews to return to Israel. That may have been Judah Halevi (12th century CE) where he said that Jews can only achieve our purpose by returning to Israel and rebuilding Jerusalem. One of the chapters on the Ramban (Nachmanides) notes that he also believes that there is a mitzvah for Jews to return to the land.
The book is a fascinating journey through Jewish thought of all stripes. As Pessin points out, it is difficult to read about the German Jewish philosophers of the 19th century who convinced themselves that they were finally being accepted as equals in an enlightened Europe. The founding thinkers of the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements are also given chapters. The modern philosophers' section provide a nice overview of the diversity of the field today, as well as the influence of the Holocaust, the State of Israel and modern liberal thought on today's Jewish philosophy.
Too often I'd read a chapter and think, yeah, that makes sense. Then I'd read another from a bitter opponent of the first and think, yeah, that makes sense too. This book is a toe-tip in an ocean.
The book also introduces Samuel Lebens, a philosopher at the University of Haifa, who writes the afterword and sounds like the kind of guy I'd love to have over for Shabbat. In his afterword he defines two threads that define Jewish philosophy throughout the centuries: the idea of encountering thoughts and ideas and God - not just looking at them as museum pieces but wrestling with them. In fact, I found it fascinating that Lebens describes Jewish philosophers of the past in present-tense terms, which is the way that generations of Jewish yeshiva students have discussed the opinions of rabbis of the past.
The second thread that Lebens describes is the idea of objective truth, which is under assault in postmodern thought. Lebens sees this as pernicious.
I would have loved to have seen a brief biography of the philosophers whose thoughts were detailed here so I could put their thinking in more historic perspective, as well as who argued with them.
But altogether it is a wonderful and accessible introduction to Jewish philosophy, and it will make you think.
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In 1927, the Evening Standard described all of the riches that could be found in the Dead Sea. I found a Popular Science article in 1929 that echoed it:
According to an Egyptian newspaper, the Rothschild family knew of these unimaginable riches worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and that was the reason that they forced the British government to issue the Balfour Declaration to Lord Rothschild.
The writer of the paper takes pains to say that ordinary Jews, and even ordinary Israelis, don't necessarily know about this - even though, we are told, they are really Khazars and not Jews. But the Zionist leaders manipulated the media and the Jews in order to make it appear that Jews always wanted to return to Israel even though that is complete fiction made up "more than fifty years ago." It was all to cover up the Rothschild's greed for Dead Sea riches.
It's a good thing we have Arabic media to explain the truth.
As an interesting footnote, although Dr. Georges Claude was a well-known and brilliant French scientist who invented the neon light and a method to liquefy gases as well as a method to generate power from ocean thermal energy, he ended up collaborating with the Nazis.
As far as I know, no one has yet mined gold in the Dead Sea.
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Tuesday, January 15, 2019
Elder of Ziyon
by Andrew Pessin, is a very readable compendium that briefly describes the philosophy of dozens of Jewish thinkers over the centuries, from Philo to today.
