Showing posts with label Deborah Lipstadt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Deborah Lipstadt. Show all posts

Thursday, April 27, 2023

From Ian:

Jeffrey Herf: Israel Is Antiracist, Anti-Colonialist, Anti-Fascist (and Was from the Start)
Nor did support for Israel come only from the Soviet bloc. Liberals and leftists in London, Paris, New York, and Washington heard Jamal Husseini, the representative of the Arab Higher Committee to the United Nations, reject a Jewish state in Palestine, because, he said, it would undermine the “racial homogeneity” of the Arab world. Such remarks resonated in a profoundly negative fashion with Americans who had followed the appalling news out of Germany during and after the war. In the Senate, Robert Wagner, a major author of New Deal legislation, extolled the Jewish contribution to the Allied cause. He had already denounced appeasement of the Arabs during the war. With the Allied victory, continuing to appease Arab rejectionism surely made no sense. In the House, Democratic Congressman Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn led efforts to focus attention on Jamal Husseini’s cousin, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, who had entered into a written understanding with Germany and Italy to “solve the question of the Jewish elements, which exist in Palestine and in the other Arab countries . . . as the Jewish question was solved in Germany and Italy.”

The liberal media also took note. Husseini’s collaboration with the Nazis was thoroughly documented in the New York Post as well as in the left-wing publications PM and The Nation, by I.F. Stone, Freda Kirchwey, and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Edgar Mowrer, who urged Husseini’s indictment at Nuremberg. Nevertheless, despite extensive State Department files on Husseini’s collaboration with the Nazis, the American bureaucracy succeeded in resisting efforts to put him on trial and publish its evidence of his Nazi-era activities.

The brief confluence of Soviet and liberal Western sympathies for the nascent Jewish state was brilliantly exploited by Ben-Gurion. He understood better than anyone that it presented a unique moment to bring Israel into existence, with the assent of the world’s two great powers — and that it was an opportunity that would soon close, as indeed it did. During the “anti-cosmopolitan” purges of the early 1950s, Stalin reversed course, spread the lie that Israel was a product of American imperialism, repressed the memory of Soviet support for the Zionist project, and launched a four-decade campaign of vilification against Zionism and Israel. It was one of the most successful propaganda campaigns of the Cold War.

Stalin succeeded in rewriting American history, too. His insistence that it was the Americans and not the Soviets who had wholeheartedly supported the establishment of the State of Israel carried the day. And yet the records of the Departments of State and Defense and the CIA clearly document their emphatic and consequential opposition to the Zionist project.

The differences between the international political landscape of the late 1940s and the one that emerged first in Soviet and then world politics in the 1950s and 1960s need to be reflected in American-Jewish discussions about the establishment of Israel. Contrary to what we’ve heard at the United Nations for decades, in international BDS efforts, and in academic descriptions of Israel, the Zionist project was never a colonialist one.

Just the reverse. The generation that created the state, and its supporters abroad, viewed it as part of the era of liberal and leftist opposition to colonialism, racism, and, of course, antisemitism. The evidence is clear: Whatever faults Israel may have, its origins had nothing to do with American or British imperialism. The argument to the contrary is a conventional unwisdom that has found a home in too much scholarship and journalism of recent decades. Israel’s establishment was not a miracle that eludes historical explanation. It was an episode of enormous moral and military courage for which space was created by canny and hard-headed political leaders in the cause of historical justice — in particular David Ben-Gurion, who seized a fleeting moment, Israel’s moment, to create an enduring achievement.
Daniel Ben-Ami: Why the world has turned against Israel
From Israel's foundation in 1948 through the 1960s, the left generally celebrated Israel as an expression of Jews' right to national self-determination. By the 1990s, however, Western elites started to reject the idea of national self-determination. Yet the denigration of the right to national self-determination undermines the Palestinian cause, too.

Indeed, many of today's anti-Israel activists aren't really interested in Palestinian self-determination. They are mainly concerned with attacking Israel as a symbol of everything they dislike. This leads them to uncritically endorse Hamas, the leading Islamist representative of the Palestinians, and often Islamism more broadly.

Islamism's goal is not national self-determination, for the Palestinians or anyone else. Rather, it wants to create an international Islamic order. The destruction of Israel - and not the creation of a Palestinian state - is seen as central to achieving that objective. Islamists regard Jews as an expression of "cosmic Satanic evil," who should be physically exterminated if Islam is to flourish.

The Palestinian slogan, "from the river to the sea" (meaning from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean), is popular among both Islamists and Western leftists. Islamists often state openly that they want to murder most if not all of the Jews living there. So when they chant "Palestine should be free," they typically mean free of Jews.
Stephen Daisley: Why I love Israel
[T]here are plenty of reasons for Zionists to be gloomy on this, Israel’s 75th birthday, but there is one reason for optimism that outshines them all: Israel is 75. Israel was created; survived an immediate Arab effort to annihilate it; ingathered the survivors of the death camps; settled the land and built kibbutzim; struggled through the lean and lonely years; triumphed in the Six-Day War and reunited Jerusalem; pulled through the Yom Kippur War; endured two intifadas; rescued Beta Israel and welcomed the refuseniks; lost Yamit, lost Rabin, lost Gush Katif; made the desert bloom with fruits and microchips; and made peace with Arab nations. All of that in 75 years and, despite impossible odds, Israel lives yet.

Israel is a hard country and for many a hard country to love. It is flinty but whiny, eager for the world’s love but diplomatically tin-eared, unsentimental but gripped by existential angst. It is a country that adores its army and reveres military discipline but is so hectically informal that you wonder how it made it to 75 days, let alone 75 years. It also boasts the highest density of rude people in the known universe, although I find that strangely endearing. I have never loved Israel more than the time the manager of a Tel Aviv minimart yelled at me for a) not speaking Hebrew, b) being a foreign journalist, and c) coming in to shop when she was trying to watch TV. Only in Israel, the innovation nation, could they invent the inconvenience store.

If Zionism is the theory, Israel is the practice and like all practical translations of idealism it is compromised, haphazard, sometimes unsightly, and occasionally disheartening. But that tension between Zionism and Israel, between ahavat and ha’aretz, is where the great debates take place and where the course of Jewish history can be set or changed. Israeli independence, as it reaches 75 years, is still a miraculous application of a mundane idea: Jewish self-determination.
Israel Independence Day: Celebrating 75 Years with Natan Sharansky
Former Prisoner of Zion Natan Sharansky's personal journey reflects that of the Jewish people, and the centrality of Israel in his life and Jewish identity mirrors the experiences of so many Jews around the world.

Sharansky: "The existence of Israel and, in a way, the existence of the Jewish people is the best demonstration of the importance of these two basic desires of people - to be free and to belong."

"For a thousand years, what were we fighting for? For our right to live freely in accordance with our identity. And then Israel was established. It could not be created as a non-Jewish state and it would never have succeeded in gathering all the Jews if not for its freedom." "There is no other nation or any other state which embodies the strength of this connection. And if you look at history and compare us with Israel 50 years ago, we have much more freedom and much more identity. We have far more of a Jewish and democratic state, so that's the direction we're heading in....Our history and our triumphs are the best proof of how important it is for these two things to go together." "I grew up [in the Soviet Union] having zero connection with anything Jewish except through antisemitism....It was Israel that came in a very powerful way to the center of our life, from the Six-Day War, and it allowed us to discover our identity, that we have a history, we are a people and we have a state. That gave us the strength to fight for our Jewish rights and for a better world."

"When people simply want tikkun olam [repairing the world] without any identity...your life is very shallow. Look at how all these Birthright kids - whose bar mitzvah was the last time they've had a connection to being Jewish - suddenly discover that it's cool and even interesting to live inside history....Suddenly, they have energy, meaning and understanding....In this age, there is no better way to quickly give Jews a brief injection of the importance and meaning of discovering their Jewish identity than coming to Israel."

Wednesday, December 14, 2022

From Ian:

No, Zionism isn’t out of date
Ha’aretz columnist Anshel Pfeffer does not believe in Zionism. He doesn’t oppose it, he just thinks talking about it is a category mistake:

You cannot be either a Zionist or an anti-Zionist, he says, just as you cannot be a veteran of Iwo Jima unless you were born at least 90 years ago and fought in that battle. Zionism isn’t an ideology. It’s a program, or an ideological plan, to establish a state for Jews in the biblical homeland. And that program was fulfilled on May 14, 1948, when David Ben-Gurion declared Israel’s independence at the old Tel Aviv Museum. That’s it. Done.

"…believing that on the whole, founding the State of Israel was the right thing to do, doesn’t make you a Zionist any more than thinking that Oliver Cromwell was right to overthrow King Charles, makes you a Roundhead. It simply doesn’t matter what you think about long-ago events you didn’t take part in. Israel is a reality and it’s not going anywhere."

He’s wrong. There absolutely is such a thing as Zionist ideology, a set of basic principles that Zionists believe. And here they are:
-There is an am Yehudi, a Jewish people. You might think this is obvious, but Mahmoud Abbas denies it, and so do the “[insert nationality here] of the Mosaic persuasion” crowd, which includes the American Reform Movement.

-The survival of the Jewish people requires the Jewish state, a state that is more than just a state with a Jewish majority. The precise meaning of “more” differs according to the faction of the Zionist movement to which one belongs, but the Nation-State Law that was passed by the Knesset in 2018 is an example of a secular attempt to explicate that.

-Only in the Jewish state can a person fully realize his Jewish identity. You can still be a Zionist if you don’t believe that all Jews ought to live in the Jewish state, but Zionism includes the idea that diaspora life is sub-optimal even when it is not actively dangerous.

-One needn’t be a Jew to be a Zionist. Agree with the principles above and you are a Zionist, regardless of your own religion or ethnicity.

Pfeffer points out that there were religious and secular, socialist and revisionist Zionisms. This was true before 1948, and it’s still true today. But all of them affirm the principles above. The existence of factions doesn’t negate the truth behind an ideology. After all, these are Jews we are talking about!
Tom Stoppard and the Failure of ‘Diasporism’
As much as the contributions of Diaspora Jews should inspire pride and celebration, it has become clear that there has emerged no serious alternative other than Israel for those who would sustainably perpetuate specifically Jewish achievement and inquiry. Those of us in the Diaspora will not all move there—although Stoppard is here to remind us that Jews will always require a refuge from the forces of hatred that now seek Israel’s destruction. But we are called upon to support the Zionist project not only as a form of self-defense but also to continue providing the wider world with the fruits of Jewish labors. Leopoldstadt’s invocation of a potential Jewish state at the play’s beginning, and Israel’s existence at its end as the tiny remnant of the Merz and Jacobowicz families gathers in the once-grand apartment of assimilation in 1955, mark it as one of the most profoundly Zionist documents of our time.

It is a reflection of the durability and power of anti-Semitism that, even if the playwright had uncovered the facts of his own Jewish past in 1955 the way his young British character does, rather than in the 1980s, he would have risked a great deal by writing Leopoldstadt as a young man in the wake of his career-making success with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 1966. He likely would have become known as a Jewish, rather than a British, playwright—a dramatist making a special pleading due to the tragedy visited upon his own family. No, it was his established reputation as the greatest living English dramatist that has enabled this unlikely production—among other things, Leopoldstadt has a cast of 38, the largest any play on Broadway has seen in generations. Therein lies yet another lesson about the limits of Diasporism.
The Hanukkah Queen Who Saved the Jews
A generation after the Hanukkah miracle, in the midst of great turmoil, Salome Alexandra defended Judaism and restored Jewish practice.

The story of Hanukkah is one of the best-known in Jewish history: how a small group of faithful Jews, led by the Maccabees, revolted against their Hellenist Greek rulers during the years 167-160 BCE, and restored the Temple in Jerusalem to Jewish worship once again.

Their unlikely military victory and the miracle of a single jug of oil burning in the Temple’s golden Menorah for eight days are celebrated during the holiday of Hanukkah. Less known is what came next.

The “Maccabee” brothers (named after one brother, Judas Maccabeus) established the Hasmonean royal dynasty that ruled the Jewish kingdom of Judea for over 200 years. Far from presiding over a peaceful nation, the Hasmonean rulers were mercurial, autocratic, and ruled a land continually on the brink of civil war. It fell to Queen Salome Alexandra - also known as Shlomit Alexandra and as Shlomzion - to stand up to some of the most terrifying dictators imaginable, champion traditional Judaism, and restore peace to Judea.

A key fact that’s often ignored in telling the Hanukkah story is that many Jews at the time embraced a Hellenist lifestyle, worshiping Greek deities and embracing Greek values. Within a generation of the Hanukkah miracle, the Jewish community was again riven into factions, most notably the Sadducees, who rejected the Talmud and many Jewish elements of a traditional Jewish lifestyle and who dominated the ruling classes, and the Pharisees who clung to Jewish traditions and lifestyles.

Queen Salome and her Wicked Husband
Queen Salome was born into a prominent scholarly family and married into royalty. She possessed incredible courage and calmness. Salome’s brother was Shimon ben Shetach, one of Judea’s most renowned rabbis and a champion of the Pharisee cause. When it became too dangerous for her brother to remain in Judea because of Sadducee persecution, Queen Salome hid him, as well as other rabbinic allies of traditional Judaism.

Thursday, October 27, 2022

From Ian:

Marking 4 years since Tree of Life massacre, Biden rues ‘ugly rise’ of antisemitism
US President Joe Biden led memorial messages and vows to combat antisemitism on Thursday, marking four years since a gunman shot dead eleven Jewish worshipers and injured seven others at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

“A quiet Shabbat morning was shattered by gunfire and hate, and a place of sanctuary became a place of carnage,” Biden said in a statement.

“As we grieve this deadliest act of antisemitism in American history, we stand with the community of Squirrel Hill — and Jewish communities across America and around the world — in resolving to combat antisemitism and hate in all of its forms,” he said.

“This is especially true as we witness an ugly increase in antisemitism in America.”

Listing action the administration has taken to confront antisemitism, Biden noted the appointment of Holocaust expert Deborah Lipstadt as Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, an ambassador-level role.

He also cited the largest-ever increase in funding for security for synagogues and other religious institutes, and other actions announced last month at the United We Stand Summit.

“The rabbis teach that ‘what comes from the heart, enters the heart,'” Biden said, citing the eleventh Century Rabbi Moses ibn Ezra.

“On this difficult day, our hearts are with the families of the victims, the survivors, and all those impacted by the Tree of Life shooting. May their memories be a blessing, and may we continue to bridge the gap between the world we see and the future we seek.”


US Antisemitism Envoy: France ‘Ground Zero’ for European Antisemitism
France has become the epicenter of 21st century antisemitism in Europe — a phenomena which is now beginning to replicate in other countries around the world, the US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism has warned.

“I think that in many ways France has proven to be ‘Ground Zero’ for European antisemitism, in part because of the large Muslim population,” the envoy, Deborah Lipstadt, told a panel hosted by the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF) and the World Jewish Congress (WJC) in Paris on Monday. “If we’d been having this conversation 15 years ago, I would have said France is a unique situation – sadly, it’s not unique anymore.”

In her remarks, which follow a week-long trip to Belgium and France to meet with EU officials on combating antisemitism, Lipstadt cited some of the deadly antisemitic and terrorist attacks that have plagued France over the last twenty years, among them the 2006 kidnapping and murder of Ilan Halimi, a young cellphone salesman, by an antisemitic gang known as “The Barbarians”, as well as the 2012 and 2015 respective gun attacks on a Jewish school in Toulouse and a kosher supermarket in Paris.

Other incidents included the 2017 murder of Sarah Halimi, a Jewish woman who was beaten and thrown to her death from the third-floor window of her Paris apartment by her neighbor, Kobili Traore, during a frenzied antisemitic assault. French Jews were outraged in April 2021 when the country’s highest court upheld an earlier decision that Traore could not be held criminally responsible for Halimi’s death because his intake of marijuana on the night of the killing had rendered him temporarily insane.

Lipstadt warned the evolution of antisemitism which once limited to France had now spread to other countries, including the United States. “I think that in many respects, France emulates what we’ve seen in other places, because it’s not just Islamist extremist antisemitism, it’s also from the right and from the left,” she said.

Lipstadt also noted that the convergence of antisemitic criticism of Israel from the fringes of both right and left wing ideologies is occuring not only in France, but in the US and UK as well.

Monday, July 04, 2022

In April, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Dan Crenshaw sponsored a bipartisan resolution calling for the US to declare infertility as a disease and to fund research to combat infertility.

The resolution says, "Blacks, Hispanics, Ashkenazi Jews, American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, East Asians, Indians and Pakistanis from the Punjab region, and persons of Caribbean, Mediterranean, French Canadian, or Middle Eastern ancestry suffer from disproportionately higher rates of certain diseases and gynecological, endocrine, and autoimmune disorders, that may contribute to higher rates of infertility among these populations."

A Jordanian writer thinks that this is evidence that Jews have taken over the US government.

At the end of a screed attacking Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt, Mohamed Kharroub writes:

There is a strange and provocative bill that reveals the depth of the Zionist penetration into the American political fabric. Democratic Congresswoman Debbie Schultz, who is Jewish, presented a new bill to Congress on 4/29/2022 for Congress to finance research and awareness-raising related to the prevalence of infertility among white/Ashkenazi Jews in Israel.

The draft resolution states that “that the United States Government has a responsibility to help examine, create, and implement solutions to address and alleviate the problems associated with the disease." It is a project that, as usual, has been supported by Jewish/American organizations , which supports Congress funding research and education on infertility rates among Jews/Ashkenazis in Israel...

Do not be surprised that we will wake up one day soon to an American decision to include all white-only Israeli Jews with the US government/free health insurance for life.
Needless to say, the bill doesn't mention Israel once. It mentions Jews fewer times than it mentions Hispanics and American Indians.  Dan Crenshaw is not Jewish. 

Yet to paranoid antisemitic Jordanians, it is proof positive that Jews are forcing Congress to provide health care to "white" Israelis. 

This is the level of paranoid antisemitism that is mainstream in much of the Arab world. 



Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

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