Wednesday, June 11, 2014
UNESCO deletes ‘Israel’ from title of its exhibit on Jewish ties to Israel
Six months ago, when UNESCO canceled an exhibition about the Jewish people’s connection to the Land of Israel just before its scheduled opening, Professor Robert Wistrich, its author, was livid. The cancellation, which followed Arab pressure, was disgraceful, he fumed, an appalling “betrayal” that proved that the organization is “subjected, entirely, to political considerations,” because “there’s one standard for Jews, and there’s another standard for non-Jews, especially if they’re Arabs.”Pro-Israel Muslim Vassar student’s lonely fight to defend Israel
The situation has much improved since then, Wistrich and others involved in the project assert, as the exhibition opened on Wednesday afternoon at UNESCO headquarters in Paris. And yet changes have been made to the exhibition since it was nixed in January.
Most strikingly, the word “Israel” has been deleted from the exhibition’s title and replaced by “Holy Land.” An exhibit that was initially called “The 3,500 year relationship of the Jewish People to the Land of Israel” is now entitled “The 3,500 year relationship of the Jewish People with the Holy Land.”
In December 2013, the American Studies Association released a resolution boycotting Israel. Reminiscent of students in 1975, the Vassar administration swiftly rejected this resolution right after New Years 2014.Anti-Israel 'Ads Against Apartheid' Line Walls of Boston Subway
Thirty-nine Vassar faculty then wrote a letter condemning Vassar College’s decision. Students for Justice in Palestine proceeded to swoop down on pro-Israel and neutral students. They protested a class taking a trip to Israel inside an academic building and intimidated the professors.
At a Vassar Open forum I attended in May 2014 shortly before graduation, Vassar College President Catharine Hill made clear that she never has condemned the picketing of the class, and any impressions otherwise are wrong:
Following complaints about the picketing of the classroom, the Vassar Committee on Inclusion and Excellence organized an open forum led by Professor Kiese Laymon that de facto established any criticism of SJP was motivated by racism, civility was a “cardboard notion,” and taking a trip to Israel was the equivalent of organizing an outing to Jim Crow Mississippi.
Not surprisingly, the only acceptable thing to say on campus became the lie that Israel is a racist, apartheid state.
A new ad campaign sponsored by the organization Ads Against Apartheid has brought hostility to Israel to the Boston subway system. The advertising campaign, which features three different posters and is found in the MBTA's State Street Station, promotes various anti-Semitic myths and has caused outrage in the Greater Boston community.
According to AAA's website, " One of the ads highlights the number of Palestinian homes systematically destroyed by Israel – over 25,000 homes, leaving thousands of families homeless. A second ad calls attention to the 150 Jewish-only cities Israel has built on internationally-recognized Palestinian land. Both ads challenge Israel’s commitment to peace with a banner that reads, “Does Israel want peace..or land?”
The last of the three ads features a young Palestinian girl with statistics about the tragic level of violence perpetrated by the Israeli military – “Israel has killed 1 Palestinian child every 4 days since 2000.”
In 2013, Norway Government Pension Fund Investment in Israeli Stock Market Rose 43% to $1 Billion
The Government Pension Fund of Norway, the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world, has increased its position in shares of Israeli companies, adding five new companies to a portfolio of 62 stocks valued at a billion dollars (NIS 3.5 billion) on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, Israel’s Globes business daily reported on Tuesday.Metropolitan Opera Stands by Anti-Semitic Opera
In 2013, the value of its investment in companies traded on the TASE rose by 43 percent in nominal terms, from NIS 2.4 billion to nearly NIS 3.5 billion, Globes said. “Even discounting the boom on the stock exchange, the rise is impressive: the fund’s proportionate holding in shares on the Tel Aviv 100 list grew by 21% last year, exceeding 0.5% of the total of shares listed,” the newspaper said. (h/t Yenta Press)
In quotes given to Haaretz, multiple leaders of the Metropolitan Opera stood by the Met's decision to host the anti-Semitic opera Death of Klinghoffer.J Street Donor to Host President Obama
“We certainly realize that because of its sensitive subject matter Klinghoffer is different than most other contemporary operas, and we expect that it will attract more comment as we approach its scheduled performances in the fall,” explained Lee Abrahamian, the Met’s director of communications.
Peter Gelb, the Metropolitan Opera’s general manager, echoed Abrahamian's sentimement, saying the opera is “one of the most important musical compositions of the late 20th century.”
According to the Boston Globe, a major donor to the leftist organization J Street will be hosting president Barack Obama on Wednesday evening. The event will take place at the home of Jewish donors Paul & Joanne Egerman, benefiting the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, according to an invitation obtained by the Boston Globe. Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-MA), and Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) are all expected to attend. "Tickets to the event, which include dinner and a photo, are $32,400 per person," according to the Globe.Clinton Accuses Israel of Being Occupying Force
Egerman is a member of J Street's Advisory Council, the J Street Boston Executive Committee and is involved with the New Israel Fund. On Twitter, Egerman refers to himself as "an enthusiastic supporter of Elizabeth Warren."
In May, Egerman co-authored an article that was little more than a smear campaign against the J Street Challenge and which served as a reminder of the viciousness of J Street's leftist bullying. (h/t MtTB)
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accuses Israel of being an occupying force in her new memoir Hard Choices and claims that the Jewish state denies “dignity and self determination” to Palestinians in the West Bank.Mike Lumish: Hillary’s Right-Wing Delusions
Clinton recalls being surprised by what she termed “life under occupation for the Palestinians,” according to the book.
Pro-Israel officials and insiders on Capitol Hill have called Clinton’s comments tone deaf and said that her claim that Israel is an occupying force reveals a bias against the Jewish state.
One of the main differences, I suppose, between myself and other western-left diaspora Jews on this issue, is that I have come to the conclusion that we are essentially playing a rigged game. What the Jewish people in the Middle East want more than anything is to simply be left the hell alone to create their computer software and to litigate against one another.The useful idiots of the BDS campaign
The Arabs, however, since the time of that Muhammad Guy, have been hell-bent-for-fury in opposition to Jewish sovereignty. They opposed Jewish sovereignty on Jewish land in the seventh century, just as they oppose Jewish sovereignty on Jewish land today. Nothing much has changed, really. The great Arab majority despised the tiny Jewish minority for theocratic reasons in the seventh century, just as they do so today for precisely those same reasons.
In 2001, the Durban Conference was held in South Africa under the banner of fighting racism. The conference quickly turned into a festival of hatred and incitement against the State of Israel.ON MY MIND: UCLA’s BDS trial
Since then and to this very day, the goal of the "Durban strategy," whose most prominent tool is the boycott and sanctions campaign against Israel (BDS), is not promoting reconciliation or peace based on two states for two people, but destroying the original sin of the State of Israel's establishment as a national home for the Jewish people. The two leaders of the campaign, Omar Barghouti and Ali Abunimah, have said it themselves.
What does this have to do with Breaking the Silence? Well, in the past few years the organization's activists have become partners in the campaign. The organization's founder, Yehuda Shaul, who has become a draft dodger, was a guest of the South African office of the BDS movement in August 2013. (h/t Yoel)
The BDS campaign knows no bounds. Individuals, even college students, apparently are fair game for the aggressive effort to punish those who engage with the State of Israel.Dershowitz, ex-justice ministry official face off over how to fight boycott, lawfare
Lauren Rogers, a UCLA junior, recently found herself targeted by a well-organized, malicious campaign spearheaded by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).
Rogers could not have imagined that her visit to Israel last December on an AJC Project Interchange (PI) educational seminar would lead to the kind of abuse by fellow students that she was forced to endure. The SJP took her and another student, Sunny Singh, who visited Israel with ADL, to the campus-based student-run Judicial Board, a quasi-court that holds trials and renders opinions.
Renown lawyer and Israel activist Alan Dershowitz and former deputy attorney-general for international affairs Shavit Mathias on Tuesday had a surprising face-off over how best to fight the BDS and lawfare campaigns confronting Israel.The Unbecoming Appropriation of “Apartheid”
While for most of the panel at IDC’s Herzliya Conference, the participants were merely describing what is causing the campaign and their ideas for combating it, near the end of the panel discussion the two participants got into a heated debate about whether Israeli policy-makers should consider the campaign when making decisions.
Dershowitz advocated making Israeli policy decisions based solely on Israel’s national interests. He warned that worrying too much about how decisions would impact Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions and lawfare would place Israel at the mercy of these campaigns.
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), an organization that consistently preaches anti-Semitism on college campuses, frequently compares the security situation in Israel to South African apartheid. Anti-Israel propagandists use images of the security barrier and the checkpoints to demonize Israel as an “occupying power” and to equate it to one of the worst instances of state-sponsored segregation in the 20th century. The comparison is seen as so atrocious that even citizens of South Africa find it morally reprehensible.Muslim Feminist Declaration Blacklisted by Western Feminists
“The comparison is disgusting,” says Nkosi Kennedy, a native of Johannesburg. “It brings out the emotions and the trauma that South Africans do not wish to revisit and does so in a very unacceptable way.”
Kennedy represents the first generation in his family in over a century not to live under the brutal regime that separated people on the basis of skin color. His grandfather and father, for example, were born in one-room shacks because the apartheid regime did not allow black South Africans into hospitals. Those were reserved for the white minority.
A historic convention that is to be held in the United States for the rights of Muslim women is being studiously ignored by western feminists.Economist imperiously lectures Europe’s Jews on their exaggerated fears of antisemitism
A group of Muslim women, led by attorney Nadia Shahram, will hold a convention in Seneca Falls to issue a “Declaration of the Equalities for Muslim Women" on July 18-19. The genderist establishment appears to be purposely sweeping the event under the rug, however, and only Arutz Sheva contributor Phyllis Chesler has written an article about it thus far, if Google search is to be trusted.
The venue is the same one in which, in 1848, American feminists including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Susan B. Anthony launched their famous Declaration of Sentiments.
Though there are of course a small number of anti-Jewish incidents in the state perpetrated by a minuscule number of Israeli Arabs, all Jews living in Israel (and European Jews considering emigrating there) are secure in the knowledge that the government will use the power of the state – a nation whose very raison d’être is to serve as a Guardian of the Jews – to fiercely protect their freedom.Article ruled not impartial by ESC five years ago remains on BBC website
One needn’t resort to unserious hyperbole about the “return to the 1930′s” to take Jewish fears seriously, and be gravely concerned that – 70 years after the Holocaust – a disturbingly high percentage of what’s left of European Jewry once again feel themselves under the yoke of the continent’s oldest hatred.
This anniversary week of the Six Day War we have been looking at some of the portrayals of that event which appear when a member of the public conducts an internet search for BBC produced content on the subject: see here and here.Former Hungarian anti-Semite describes Jewish awakening
Another item which appears on the first page of search results is Jeremy Bowen’s 2007 article titled “How 1967 defined the Middle East“. As readers may recall, the original version of that article was the subject of complaints to the BBC and the Editorial Standards Committee’s subsequent findings – which can be viewed here – upheld and partially upheld a range of specific points – much to Jeremy Bowen’s continuing chagrin.
He was a rising star of Hungary’s far-right, dumped by his party after he admitted he was a Jew. Two years later, Csanad Szegedi has completed an astonishing transformation: He goes to synagogue, eats Kosher food and has adopted the Hebrew name Dovid.Anti-Semitic Slight in Bay Area Yearbook
As a leader in Hungary’s Jobbik Party, Szegedi whipped up crowds by accusing Jews of “buying up the country” and mocking the “Jewishness” of Hungary’s political class. Then came the revelation that upended his career: His maternal grandparents were Jews — which under Jewish law made him one, too. Szegedi acknowledged his roots after video surfaced of a suspected blackmailer confronting him with evidence of his Jewishness.
In the political wilderness, Szegedi has apparently had a spiritual awakening.
Its not a harmless prank.French Birthright expected to increase tenfold this year
A Bay Area family is reeling from a slur printed in their son's high school yearbook.
In a team photo in the Monta Vista High School yearbook, a student intentionally changed the last three letters of classmate's name to "Jew". It was unnoticed by the yearbook adviser and ultimately was published and distributed in 1,600 copies of the yearbook.
The boy's family are Israeli.
The number of French participants in Taglit-Birthright Israel is slated to increase to 1,000 this year from approximately 100 a year ago.Israeli NGO Designs World’s First Kid-Friendly Wheelchair
The Birthright organization decided to focus on France this year due to recent anti-Semitic attacks there, expanding its cooperation with local Jewish organizations and increasing its French online marketing effort.
“We have decided as an act of solidarity with this great Jewish community to expose its younger generation to the values of Judaism and Israel through an experiential trip together with young Israelis in order to return to France with a deeper sense of pride and clearer understanding of the Jewish people,” Birthright spokeswoman Karine Brown wrote in an email to JTA.
We often take our ability to move from point A to point B for granted, but for 65 million people around the world, moving without a wheelchair is impossible. Of those 65 million who require wheelchairs for mobility, some 20 million people, including five million children, do not have access to them.Nepal is latest to use Israeli public-health model
NGO ‘Wheelchairs of Hope’ is aspiring to dramatically change this by designing the world’s first affordable wheelchairs built especially for children. And with with the UN, the WHO and two Nobel Prize winners as backers, it might just be able to get there.
When South African Jewish doctors Sidney and Emily Kark packed their bags in 1959 to immigrate to Israel, they took with them a new brand of putting medicine into practice in the developing world.Fighting wind with grit, opera group makes Masada into backdrop
Their Community Oriented Primary Care (COPC) model started in rural Zulu villages, took root in Israel and formed the basis of the country’s first school of public health, the Braun School of Public Health at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem — one of the few schools to be endorsed by the World Health Organization as a Collaborating Center for Capacity Building in Public Health.
Since 1960, more than 1,000 health professionals from at least 90 countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe and North America have received training from the COPC team in Jerusalem. Recently the model was implemented, on request, in Nepal at Dhulikhel Hospital in Kathmandu.
Thanks to support from the Israeli Embassy in Nepal, which decided to forgo its cultural entertainment budget to start the program a few years ago, as well as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for donating the computer infrastructure, Dhulikhel Hospital will host a digitally connected network of 20 community clinics to answer pressing health needs.
Masada, the ancient fortress known as the site of a desperate battle of Jews against Romans two millennia ago, doesn’t lack for visitors.
Tourists, bar and bat mitzvah celebrants, army units marking the end of training, high school classes finishing a history class — all make their way to the flat plateau to consider the meaning of the last stand of a band of Jewish zealots against the Romans.
And now, in mid-June, it’s the season of the opera audience, when La Traviata opens at the base of Masada Thursday night.
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