Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Palestinian State of Failure
A fascinating discussion from Jonathan Schanzer on the John Batcheler show.The punching bag bigots of anti-Israel boycotts
Listen to the whole thing and learn yourself something.
I was not aware, until Batcheler’s introductory comments, about the NYC bomb plot targeting Golda Meir. Guess who uncovered the plot. The NSA.
Note how Fatah was formed in 1959, 8 years before the “occupation” of the West Bank. It’s never been about the West Bank, it’s been the failure to recognize Israel, and the use of the “peace process” as just a stepping stone.
Schanzer’s book is State of Failure: Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, and the Unmaking of the Palestinian State.
The question worth asking would be; what drives elements like Hamas and Hezbollah to hate Israel. It is not about the “settlements”, the “refugees” and the “occupation”. It is about the very existence of Israel; the existence of a free, humane and enlightened society in a neighborhood of bigotry, despotism and tyranny.Stand With US "Divestment" in Action on Campus
The contempt and hatred of Israel is in fact contempt and hatred of Western Democracy and Civilization. The radical Left in the West hates the values signified by Israel just as much as the religious supremacists in the Arab world do. It is a match made in hell in which the BDS campaign plays cupid bringing these sadists and masochists together to form an unholy alliance.
It would be hilarious, if it wasn’t so tragic. The BDS campaign uses the avenues and free spaces provided by the liberal and open societies to hit at the very core of values that built them in the first place. It uses University campuses, faculty unions and student bodies to divide and polarize. It targets trade unions, local communities and churches to spread the mean-spirited gospel of BDS.
The BDS campaign will never achieve its intended goal of “bringing Israel to its knees”. However, it is bound to have unintended consequences.
The practitioners of BDS are bent upon disrupting the free flow of knowledge, academic discourse and civilizational advancement in the Western World. They must not be allowed to do so, for we are all in peril if they are.
Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism continues
Speaking in Detroit’s Joe Louis Arena to a crowd of 18,000 people mostly African American, Nation of Islam “Honorable Minister” Louis Farrakhan resumed his decades-old diatribe of slander towards the Jewish people at the annual “Saviours Day” convention.Jewish museum reinstates invitation to John Judis
The paranoid leader of the Chicago based all-male black militant organization did not hesitate to further trash his reputation. The 80-year-old “Minister” said he was in good company to be mentioned alongside Henry Ford, when he brought up how they were both accused of being anti-Semitic.
In his own words: “A great man who was called an anti-Semite. I feel like I’m in good company.”
On Sunday, museum director David Marwell posted an item on the museum’s website announcing that the June 1 event with Judis, author of “Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict” and a senior editor at The New Republic, would go forward.Darshan-Leitner: Oxfam Still Hasn't Responded
Last week, the museum reportedly nixed the event amid concerns, according to a museum spokeswoman, that “the controversy would overshadow the content.”
Marwell said he had not wanted to invite Judis in the first place, but his staff had done so without his approval. Rescinding the invitation, Marwell wrote, would have raised the “ugly specter of succumbing to pressure and giving in to outside influence,” and therefore the museum would go ahead with a Judis event.
With a little effort, Israel can fight back, and even win, against the attempts to deligitimize it, said attorney Nitzana Darshan-Leitner. Speaking to Arutz Sheva Monday, Darshan-Leitner said that her organization, Shurat Hadin, had not yet received a response from Oxfam, after Shurat Hadin accused the international group of having ties to terror groups.Jewish-American Student Leader Rebukes ‘Israel Apartheid Week 2014′ for Using His Image in Promotional Video (VIDEO)
In a letter to Oxfam, Shurat Hadin wrote that the group had “provided financial aid and additional forms of material support to the Union of Health Workers Committees (UHWC) and the Union of Agricultural Workers Committees (“UAWC”), instrumentalities of the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (“PFLP”) in the Hamas controlled Gaza Strip and the Palestinian Authority.”
A Jewish-American student leader on Monday called for ‘Israel Apartheid Week 2014‘ to retract a promotional video that he said “fraudulently edits” his appearance on a televised Fox network program, where he denounced a previous anti-Israel event, as promoting their cause.American Studies Assoc. tells Regional Chapters not to communicate with me
In an interview with The Algemeiner, Brandeis University senior Joshua Nass said, “I am disgusted with this video.”
“This is all faked. They fraudulently edited in my image to make it seem I support their anti-Israel smears, when I am one of the student leaders speaking out the most loudly in favor of Israel.”
We reported yesterday how incoming American Studies Association President Lisa Duggan of NYU organized an anti-Israel conference through NYU, but didn’t want those who disagree to know about it (via Elder of Ziyon). The Facebook post about the event since has been taken down.Anti-Israel activists pan Israeli gay pride float
It appears that secrecy is the new policy at ASA.
Earlier this month I wrote to ASA Regional Chapter Presidents asking for their position on whether the ASA academic boycott of Israel applied to Regional Chapters and their events, such as regional conventions. This is an important issue because much of ASA’s presence — other than its Annual Meeting — takes place through the Chapters. To understand the scope and application of the boycott, we need to know whether the Regional Chapters will follow the boycott.
Apparently the ASA Exceutive Committee is not happy about this inquiry, and has told the Regional Chapters not to communicate with me other than to refer me to the ASA boycott resolution itself (which, of course, I already have). This amounts to a complete non-communication strategy.
A handful of protesters dressed in pink and bearing placards protesting “Israeli apartheid” tried to approach the float organized by Israel’s embassy at the beginning of the parade in Auckland on Saturday night. They said they were criticizing Israel’s “pinkwashing” of human rights.Here are the 10 countries where homosexuality may be punished by death
But Patricia Deen, the embassy’s spokesperson, said: “We were just there because we are proud of who we are, the fact that we are the only country in the Middle East where gay people are accepted.”
“We were also there to promote the Tel Aviv gay parade…Their pride parade is one of the biggest parties in the whole wide world. We have a proud Israeli and Jewish gay community in New Zealand and in Israel,” Deen said.
She also told GayNZ.com: “Even though we were being disrupted it was in the beginning of the parade. But through the whole parade we were being cheered, people were saying ‘shalom.’”
Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Mauritania, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan and the United Arab EmiratesWho Is to Blame for "Islamophobia" in the UK?
If you look at the London Tube Bombing of 7/7; the Madrid Train Bombing; two attacks on the World Trade Center; the murders of Lee Rigby, Theo Van Gogh, Daniel Pearl, Nick Berg, Ilan Halimi, and countless other attack and threats, how can we honestly expect people not to be "Islamophobic"? It would appear we have no one to blame but ourselves.Sanitation Truck Kills Crown Heights Jew; Community Doesn’t Violently Riot For Some Reason (satire)
If we Muslims are actually opposed to these Islamist hate preachers, why are we failing to take a unanimous public stance against them, to disown and isolate them from our community?
New York City officials are puzzling over the Crown Heights Jewish community’s non-violent reaction to the killing of one of its members by a Department of Sanitation trash collection truck yesterday morning.BBC’s Alkashif slips gratuitous Israel mentions into Gaza Greek god story
A 25-year-old Rabbinical student was crossing Carroll Street when the truck turned right from Kingston Avenue and struck him. Paramedics pronounced him dead at the scene. In reaction, the local Jewish community, primarily members of the Lubavitch sect of Hasidim, expressed their collective anger by not going on a murderous rampage through the streets.
Whatever the truth behind the discovery of the statue and whatever the reasons behind the timing of the story’s sudden extensive promotion in the international media some six months after its initial discovery, one thing is certain: Shahdi Alkashif’s context-free introduction of Israeli ‘restrictions’ on the entry of building materials to the Gaza Strip into the story and his claim that “people cannot move out of Gaza” are both misleading and gratuitous and can only be seen as being politically motivated insertions.Guardian film critic downplays Hitler comments of director Lars von Trier
Though Von Trier apologized after the row, he later retracted his apology during an interview with GQ.Jews told to get lost at Toulouse anti-racism rally
Moreover, as you can see in the clip, the director may have attempted a bit of humor towards the end to break the tension, but seemed quite serious when stating that he sympathized with Hitler “a little bit”. And, the French Police evidently didn’t think it was merely a joke when they investigated Von Trier for a possible violation of French laws against the justification of war crimes.
Participants in a march against anti-Semitism and other forms of racism in the French city of Toulouse hurled anti-Zionist insults at Jewish fellow demonstrators.Thessaloniki Jews suing Germany in European court
Some of the insults were directed at Nicole Yardeni, who heads the local chapter of the CRIF umbrella group of Jewish communities, during the march on Saturday by 2,000 people. The march was organized by a gay group, Arc-en-Ciel, following the spraying of anti-Semitic and anti-gay slogans in several locales last week in Toulouse.
At one point, a group of demonstrators started chanting “Yardeni, get lost” and “CRIF, fascists, Zionists, get lost.”
The ransom was paid to free some 9,000 of Thessaloniki’s Jewish men, aged 18 to 45, from forced labor by the Germans, who took control of the city in 1942. The German civilian administrator of the Thessaloniki , Max Merten, demanded some 2.5 billion drachmas to release them.German Paper Depicts Zuckerberg as Hook-Nosed Octopus
“They were sick and dying and starving and working without food, so the community collected the money to pay,” said Saltiel.
In total, 1.9 billion drachmas, or nearly $69 million, was paid before the Germans began transporting Thessaloniki Jews to the death camps. More than 49,000 Jews out of the city’s prewar Jewish population of 55,000 were deported. Fewer than 2,000 survived.
The Süddeutsche promptly apologized—on Twitter, naturally, in the form of a simple Twitter message, declaring “We are sorry!” But the fire continued, fueled by the fact that it wasn’t the first time the SZ has been at the receiving end of recently public disapproval for a caricature that related negatively to the wider Jewish theme: Less than a year ago, in July 2013, the newspaper published a drawing by Ernst Kahl showing a hungry Gruffalo-like monster, a true Moloch, being served by a waitress with a full plate, with the subtitle: “Germany serves!” The picture was supposed to illustrate “nearly free servings of German arms” to the insatiable monster that is the State of Israel. The outrage was great. The president of the Association of German Jews, Dieter Gauman, responded that the cartoon was on the level of Stürmer, the infamous Third Reich magazine that frequently depicted Jews as world ruling monsters. “I am most surprised that anti-Semitic associations are so superficially permitted to happen, given the seriousness of this paper otherwise,” he wrote.German Paper Apologizes for Yet Another Anti-Semitic Cartoon
Forced to explain himself, Mohr told the Jerusalem Post the cartoon was his take on Facebook acquiring WhatsApp. The caricature, he said, wasn’t intended to be viewed as an expression of anti-Semitism or as a personal attack on Zuckerberg, adding, I am sorry that it led to this misunderstanding and hurt the feelings of some readers.Ukrainian Jewish Center Attacked With Molotov Cocktails
Mohr subsequently revised the cartoon.
The Chabad Jewish center in the southeast Ukrainian city of Zaporozhye was firebombed with Molotov cocktails on Monday. The masked perpetrators managed to escape, but their images were caught by security cameras.Israel, Germany to sign work-visa deal
Although no one was hurt and the damage to the building was minimal, Chabad Rabbi Nachum Ehrentrau, the chief rabbi of the city and the surrounding region, expressed concern that police would not make it a priority to investigate the incident due to the protests that engulfed the country in the past week, culminating Saturday with the overthrow of President Viktor Yanukovych by the Ukrainian Parliament.
Among the numerous bilateral pacts Israel and Germany are set to sign at their annual government- to-government meeting on Tuesday is one that will enable Israeli youths to work for up to a year in the central European country.Jewish actor, writer, director Harold Ramis dies at 69
The program will be reciprocal, and German youths will have the opportunity to do the same in Israel.
Under the plan, young adults aged 18-30 can apply for the visas and look for work to help them pay for travel or gain experience in a particular field.
Harold Ramis, the bespectacled “Ghostbusters” sidekick to Bill Murray whose early grounding in live comedy led to blockbuster movies such as “National Lampoon’s Animal House,” ”Caddyshack” and “Groundhog Day,” died Monday. He was 69.
Ramis, who suffered for several years from an autoimmune disease that caused inflammation and damage to his blood vessels, died at his home in the Chicago suburbs, surrounded by family and friends, his talent agency said.
Perhaps his greatest legacy is his influence on generations of comedians, actors and directors due to his ability to infuse comedy with a broader, sometimes spiritual message, said Andrew Alexander, president and CEO of The Second City. Ramis got his start with the Chicago-based improvisational comedy theater, along with future co-stars Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi and Murray.
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