How many missiles did Israel shoot? I'll tell you!

Ali Abuminah of Electronic Intifada asks what he thinks is a damning question:

Whenever you hear Israel’s tired hasbara refrain about rockets, rockets, rockets, remember to ask the question Yousef Munayyer recently asked: Why don’t Israel’s spokespeople ever tell us how many rockets, missiles and bullets Israel has fired on Gaza?

Of course the answer is because it is by orders of magnitude greater in both number and explosive power than anything Palestinian armed groups have or ever could muster against Israel.

Well, luckily for Abuninah, we can know how many missiles Israel shot into Gaza over the past few days - because PCHR counts every report of a missile, even those that cause no injuries or damage, and even some that never happened.

So using the numbers provided by a biased, lying anti-Israel organization that cannot even call the IDF by its name, we can count:

11 missiles fired on Friday and Saturday,
10 missiles fired on Sunday, and
8 missiles fired on Monday.

That's a whopping maximum of 29 missiles the PCHR claims (including at least one that was fictional) that Israel's dreaded war machine shot at Gaza over four days.

Not exactly carpet bombing, is it?

In comparison, Gaza terror groups shot about 250-300 rockets at Israel in the same time period. Meaning they shot ten times as many projectiles at Israeli towns as Israel shot at specific terrorist targets.

And most of the rockets fired by the Gaza terrorists were not the small "homemade" Qassams, but professional 122 mm Grad rockets, probably of Chinese or Russian manufacture, often with a payload of about 20 kg of explosives. They are not firecrackers.

Needless to say, when Israel shoots a missile, it generally hits the exact target intended. When Islamic Jihad fired a rocket, it aims at the general direction of where ever it thinks it can kill the most civilians. For moral midgets like Abuminah to pretend that somehow Israel's actions are worse than those of terror groups in Gaza is simply an attempt to justify terrorism.

Yes, Israel has far more firepower, but in no possible universe can you say that Israeli fire was disproportionate to the rockets that came out of Gaza.

You're welcome, Ali.

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Rabid Israel-haters say Gilad Atzmon is too Zionist for them

A group of people whose single-minded aim is to take away the Jewish right of self-determination has decided that Gilad Atzmon's nutty anti-semitic rantings is too crazy - even for them.

From the "US Palestinian Community Network," quoted in Electronic Intifada:

For many years now, Gilad Atzmon, a musician born in Israel and currently living in the United Kingdom, has taken on the self-appointed task of defining for the Palestinian movement the nature of our struggle, and the philosophy underpinning it. He has done so through his various blogs and Internet outlets, in speeches, and in articles. He is currently on tour in the United States promoting his most recent book, entitled, The Wandering Who.

With this letter, we call for the disavowal of Atzmon by fellow Palestinian organizers, as well as Palestine solidarity activists, and allies of the Palestinian people, and note the dangers of supporting Atzmon’s political work and writings and providing any platforms for their dissemination. We do so as Palestinian organizers and activists, working across continents, campaigns, and ideological positions.

Atzmon’s politics rest on one main overriding assertion that serves as springboard for vicious attacks on anyone who disagrees with his obsession with “Jewishness”. He claims that all Jewish politics is “tribal,” and essentially, Zionist. Zionism, to Atzmon, is not a settler-colonial project, but a trans-historical “Jewish” one, part and parcel of defining one’s self as a Jew. Therefore, he claims, one cannot self-describe as a Jew and also do work in solidarity with Palestine, because to identify as a Jew is to be a Zionist. We could not disagree more. Indeed, we believe Atzmon’s argument is itself Zionist because it agrees with the ideology of Zionism and Israel that the only way to be a Jew is to be a Zionist.

Palestinians have faced two centuries of orientalist, colonialist and imperialist domination of our native lands. And so as Palestinians, we see such language as immoral and completely outside the core foundations of humanism, equality and justice, on which the struggle for Palestine and its national movement rests. As countless Palestinian activists and organizers, their parties, associations and campaigns, have attested throughout the last century, our struggle was never, and will never be, with Jews, or Judaism, no matter how much Zionism insists that our enemies are the Jews. Rather, our struggle is with Zionism, a modern European settler colonial movement, similar to movements in many other parts of the world that aim to displace indigenous people and build new European societies on their lands.

...Indeed, we regard any attempt to link and adopt antisemitic or racist language, even if it is within a self-described anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist politics, as reaffirming and legitimizing Zionism.

...As Palestinians, it is our collective responsibility, whether we are in Palestine or in exile, to assert our guidance of our grassroots liberation struggle. We must protect the integrity of our movement, and to do so we must continue to remain vigilant that those for whom we provide platforms actually speak to its principles.

When the Palestinian people call for self-determination and decolonization of our homeland, we do so in the promise and hope of a community founded on justice, where all are free, all are equal and all are welcome.

Until liberation and return.

I don't know if it is worth fisking the absolute stupidity and purposeful lies seen here - for example, the ridiculous idea that Zionism is colonialism, or the myth that Palestinian Arab nationalism would accept Jews as equals, or even the sheer hypocrisy of stating that "Palestinians," who have enjoyed peoplehood for a few decades at most, have a greater claim for self-determination than the 3000 year old Jewish nation (which these signatories deny even exists.)

The people who signed this are attempting to put on a "moderate" facade on their sheer hate by distancing themselves from a Holocaust denier and anti-semite, but their excuses are hardly more moral than Atzmon's sickening rhetoric. It is equally anti-semitic to deny Jewish peoplehood and Jewish self-determination.

And who signed it? A score of Arab academics and thinkers, whose signatures to this letter show that there is no relationship between being an intellectual and being a moral human being. They include Ali Abunimah, Joseph Massad, Omar Barghouti and a host of prominent Palestinian Arab professors and activists who cloak their hate in big words and lofty-sounding concepts - that only apply to their own people.

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The Forward's jihad against Touro College and JOU

Naomi Zeveloff at The Jewish Daily Forward wrote an article entitled "Is Jerusalem Online U. a Real College"?

The article is trying to create a controversy about how an Israel education and advocacy website has had some of its materials used by Touro College for a small number of students to gain credit.

The headline itself is proof of how little interest the Forward has in telling the truth, because buried in the eighth paragraph the founder of JOU says quite clearly that the website is an education portal, not a university.

Zeveloff's ire seems to be that JOU "boasts an explicitly pro-Israel mission that seems distinctly at odds with academic principles."

Only two classes from JOU can gain credits at Touro, and only one of them, "Israel Inside/Out", is what is making Zeveloff so upset - so much so that she has a follow-up article where she attempts to marshal academic experts to agree with her that such a class should be considered problematic.

I have not taken the course myself, but the list of people giving lectures - while they may be biased - hardly exhibits the fluff that Zeveloff implies. They include Sir Martin Gilbert, Professor Bernard Lewis and Dr. Daniel Pipes, Professor Alan Dershowitz, and Bassem Eid, the executive director for The Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group along with others who are without a doubt staunchly pro-Israel like Caroline Glick.

It seems that being angry at a single course in a college that offers hundreds of courses - and the implication that somehow because of that course one should question the academic strength of the entire college - shows far more about the reporter than it does about Touro.

For example, one person that Zeveloff quotes in each of the two articles is Zachary Lockman, NYU professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, who said that the syllabus for this course strikes him as "tendentious."

Perhaps. But a quick look at NYU's Middle East courses* reveals one called The Emergence of the Modern Middle East, taught this term by Nahid Mozaffari. In that course, only one book is recommended that discusses Israel specifically - and that book is "A History of Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples" by Ilan Pappe. In the introduction to that very book Pappe writes:

My bias is apparent despite the desire of my peers that I stick to facts and the "truth" when reconstructing past realities. I view any such construction as vain and presumptuous. This book is written by one who admits compassion for the colonized not the colonizer; who sympathizes with the occupied not the occupiers.

Which means that according to NYU, the only book worth reading in this course that talks about Israel is written by a pseudo-historian who freely admits that he is not interested in even the pretense of bias and who is against the very idea of Israel.

To me, the idea that a course on Israel in a Jewish school is biased towards Israel, where the contents and goals of the course are open for everyone to see, is far less offensive than the idea that students at a multi-cultural school are force-fed a biased version of history in their courses under the guise of being fair and balanced.

And this is only a tiny example. Who can expect that Joseph Massad's classes at Columbia have anything good to say about Israel, when he states ad nauseum that Israel is racist and colonialist? Indeed, Columbia's new Center for Palestine Studies is apparently a way to bash Israel under the guise of academia.

JOU, on the other hand, does not try to hide its agenda. Zeveloff spends quite a bit of time finding nefarious-sounding connections between JOU and Aish HaTorah and other pro-Israel organizations and funders, all in an attempt to give the reader the impression that something is really rotten there, without quite finding anything substantial.

I am not saying that "Israel: Inside/Out" is a fantastic college course, or that it represents the pinnacle of academic standards. But in a world when students at even Ivy League schools can find dozens of classes that teach nothing and hand out A's as if they were candy, it hardly seems controversial that a Jewish college gives credit for a pro-Israel course.

I would argue that Zeveloff is far guiltier posing as an objective journalist while writing these two hit pieces than Touro or JOU are in openly offering a single for-credit course that is biased towards Israel.

(Disclaimer: I have done some graphics work for JOU, including this poster for an educational initiative they have for Jewish high school students. And one more disclaimer: A long, long time ago, under a different name, I wrote a funny article that ended up being used as source material in at least one college course.)

*UPDATE: A reader who has taken the NYU class I mentioned says that Dr. Mozaffari's class at NYU also uses Efraim Karsh's Palestine Betrayed as required reading, even though it is not mentioned in the syllabus. He also says that she was very welcoming of student input into potential bias and works hard to give as fair a portrayal as possible. I am very glad to hear it.

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Darling "historian" of anti-Zionists falsified a Ben Gurion quote

From CAMERA:

Filmmaker Porter Speakman, Jr., producer and director of the 2010 movie With God on Our Side, has issued a press release acknowledging that a quote attributed to David Ben-Gurion by historian Ilan Pappé is not reliable.

In his 2006 book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld Publications), Pappé  reported that in a 1937 letter to his son, David Ben-Gurion wrote the following: “The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.”

It's a damning quote and is featured prominently in With God on Our Side. But it does not appear in any of the sources Pappé cites.

In his book, Pappé provided two references for this quote. The first reference is the July 12, 1937 entry of Ben-Gurion's diary. The second is page 220 of the August-September 1937 issue of New Judea, a newsletter published by the World Zionist Organization.

CAMERA provided electronic copies of both of these sources – neither of which include the quote attributed to Ben-Gurion – to Speakman earlier this week.

In response Speakman issued a press release that states in part:

… this quote cannot be found in the original sources of Ben Gurion's diary and therefore cannot be verified as authentic. While references to this quote exist, we could not find it in its original form. In an effort to be transparent and accurate, the producers have decided to take the extra step of removing it from future printings of "With God On Our Side." We apologize for this change.

The quote attributed to Ben-Gurion also appears in a 2006 article published in The Journal of Palestine Studies. In this article, Pappé provides another source for the quote. He states it appears on pages 167-168 of Charles D. Smith's Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Boston and New York: Beford/St. Martin's Press, 2004.

The quote does not appear here, either.

The editors at the Journal of Palestine Studies are currently investigating the issue.

CAMERA has made numerous attempts to contact Dr. Pappé at the University of Exeter, but the historian has not responded.

The fake Ben Gurion quote is all over the Internet and has been quoted in The Independent, after which Benny Morris wrote in and said that the quote was a falsification.

We've seen before that Pappe makes stuff up whenever he feels like it. We also have seen him admit:

There is no historian in the world who is objective. I am not as interested in what happened as in how people see what's happened....I admit that my ideology influences my historical writings...Indeed the struggle is about ideology, not about facts. Who knows what facts are? We try to convince as many people as we can that our interpretation of the facts is the correct one, and we do it because of ideological reasons, not because we are truthseekers.

He has also said

My bias is apparent despite the desire of my peers that I stick to facts and the "truth" when reconstructing past realities. I view any such construction as vain and presumptuous. This book is written by one who admits compassion for the colonized not the colonizer; who sympathizes with the occupied not the occupiers.

But this is the first time that every single source Pappe supposedly had for a specific quote has been shown to be definitively falsified. He didn't make a mistake - he made up three separate sources for a quote that was nonexistent.

This is not sloppiness. This is historian malpractice. The University of Exeter should take a long, hard look at whether they want their own name sullied by supporting a pseudo-historian who decides what the history would be before he tried to make up facts supporting his pre-existing ideas.

And all who approvingly quotes Pappe, like Richard Falk and John Pilger, are suspect as to their own interest in truth as well.

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The frustration of the anti-Zionist left (updated)

Joseph Dana writes in the UAE's The National:

Last weekend, more than 300,000 Israelis protested for economic reform throughout the country. In Tel Aviv, the epicentre of the housing protests, 250,000 Israelis marched to the defence ministry chanting the slogan "the people want social justice". The demonstrations were some of the largest in Israel's history and have pumped new life into the corpse of Israel's leftist political movement.

But the one issue glaringly missing from these demonstrations demanding "social justice" is the most urgent social justice issue in the region: the equality of everyone under Israeli rule, including Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Despite the connection between economic hardship and the settlements, Israeli protesters have been careful not to connect their struggle with Palestinian solidarity or an end to occupation.

This is partly tactical. In the climate of radical politics, Israeli public opinion meets any discussion of the occupation with a negative reaction. Protest organisers say economic reform would not receive the 87 per cent public approval rating that it enjoys if the early demonstrations had been overtly anti-occupation. However, after a month of increasing protests, questions about "social justice" can hardly ignore the occupation or unequal conditions for non-Jews.

Organisers are desperate to show that the demonstrations include all Israelis. As the protests have gained momentum, Arab-Israelis, among the most disenfranchised people in the country, have slowly joined. But displays of Zionist politics have been overwhelming.

How can a protest in Israel, borrowing the revolutionary energy of the Arab Spring, ignore Israel's military control of the Palestinians?

Dana and his anti-Israel fellow travelers have been tweeting their frustration about this issue for weeks now. They see the tent protests as an opportunity wasted, as a tragically Zionist phenomenon when it should have been, they believe, an anti-Zionist movement.

Of course, their complaints have been based more on their hatred of Zionism than on any logic.

The protests touch upon a romantic memory of Israel's socialist past, when the entire country felt that it was like one big kibbutz and everyone was in it together. Whether this is true or not, and whether a massive social program would help more than it would ultimately hurt, is not the issue for now - the point is that the tent movement is a quintessentially Zionist response to perceived economic and economic inequity.

In other words, it's the economy, stupid.

Dana and his pals love to say that the "settlements" are the cause of the economy's woes, as they paint a picture of massive Israeli investment in helping crazed rightists on hilltops oppress their Palestinian Arab neighbors. This is false to begin with.

Beyond that, if the anti-Zionist left would get their way and a half million Jews were ethnically cleansed from their homes, it would cost hundreds of billions of dollars - money that every Israeli taxpayer would have to pay!  It cost about $2 billion to remove a few thousand Jews from Gaza; the cost of Dana's idea of "social justice" would be a huge burden on the Israeli economy, making the chances of affordable housing in Israel much more remote. As much as Dana loves to pretend that the settlements are expensive, he never addresses the flip side.

If you want a back of the envelope calculation, Ha'aretz reported that the total cost of building the Jewish communities across the Green Line was $17 billion - of which $13.5 billion were for the homes that the Jewish residents paid for themselves, Many of the other public buildings like synagogues were paid for by the residents as well, not the state. It would cost an order of magnitude more to evict them, and such a move would hugely exacerbate the housing crisis that prompted the tent protests to begin with.

So Dana's agenda is exactly the opposite of that of the tent-protesters. He wants them to pay a massive personal price for a program of ethnic cleansing that they do not support.

There is, of course, another angle that Dana and his fellow anti-Zionists always ignore as they push their half-baked arguments. Israelis - real Israelis of all types, right and left, not the coffee-shop Tel Avivians of Dana's world - have become extraordinarily cynical about Palestinian Arabs.

The Israeli Left enthusiastically supported Oslo. Even though there were plenty of terror attacks during the process in the 1990s, before the intifada, they were downplayed by the government and the media because of the desire for peace which seemed at hand.

Arafat's intransigence at Camp David, followed immediately with the pre-planned terror war that cost thousands of lives, left the Left with no one who really believed in the peace process. Sure, the Ha'aretz crowd would still push the concept, but real Israelis, including the Left, saw that the PLO's goals were far from peaceful. They felt let down and their idealism crumbled.

From an economic perspective, the PLO-engineered intifada was hugely expensive. The additional security measures cost Israeli taxpayers - a cost that continues to this day.

Dana and his friends will never mention the intifada except in how they believe it was justified by Israeli policies. To them, the intifada is another "social justice" movement, and they cannot figure out the difference between Arab suicide bombers and tent-dwellers on Rothschild Boulevard.

Dana's world does not include the Zionist Left, the mainstream Left that built the state (and, incidentally, is part of the government.) His viewpoints are fringe within Israeli society. His stated objective would result in the exact opposite to what the protesters want.

And his knowledge that his opinions are so far out of whack with those of the mainstream is frustrating him to no end.

UPDATE: The paragraph I struck out was overly harsh towards Dana, and I apologize for that. I didn't know that he had lost family members in terror attacks. I don't want it to detract from my main points, though.

Dana did not accept my apology. Instead, in reply he insulted me on Twitter, saying that I "care nothing for human life whether israeli, palestinian or otherwise" and that I am "disgusting" and I am a "pusher of vile hate."

Of course, he refused to apologize for these far worse insults to me. And (as I pointed out to him) I never saw him use such words against the ISM, which explicitly supports the murderers under the name "resistance." He quotes Electronic Intifada liberally without any note of irony about the name of the site. But those purveyors of hate are not nearly as bad as I am, apparently.

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Israeli left: "We want two states!" Arab response: "Screw you!"

The Israeli left tries so hard to be loved by the Palestinian Arabs, but, gosh darn it, they always fall short.

From Budour Youssef Hassan at Electronic Intifada:

Can every instance of Israelis flocking to the streets chanting “End the occupation” be blithely described as solidarity? Should every occasion of Israelis carrying Palestinian flags be ecstatically celebrated as a major boost for the Palestinian cause? Should Palestinians be simply grateful that, amid the increasing construction of settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the overwhelming surge of racism in Israeli society, there are still some Israeli voices willing to “recognize” a Palestinian state?

When persons in a position of privilege formulate and design a solution and impose it on a colonized and occupied people as the only viable solution and the “sole remaining constructive step,” as the 15 July call to action put it, this is not solidarity but rather another form of occupation. Solidarity means not telling people what you think their problem is, let alone telling them what you think the solution should be. Solidarity means not agreeing on everything or even agreeing on a fixed solution but fighting for a shared cause irrespective of the differences.

A quasi-state built on 22 percent of the land of historic Palestine is not what Palestinians have been fighting for over the last 63 years and presenting it as such strips Palestinians of their voices and of their right to decide their own destiny.

... The whole idea of two states for two peoples as the only solution to the Palestinian-Israeli impasse — extremely popular among liberal Zionists — is predicated upon isolationism, exceptionalism and Zionists’ sense of moral righteousness and superiority to Palestinians which grants them the legitimacy to determine the problem, the solution and the means by which this solution shall be achieved.

When the Palestinian Arab leadership decided to launch the terror spree known as the second intifada, it caused many former Israeli leftists to wake up and realize that the Palestinian Arabs were not interested in living in an independent state side by side with Israel. There were some hard-core leftists who kept the faith, continuing to demonstrate and push for a two-state solution and pointing to flawed public opinion polls that seemed to imply that Palestinian Arabs were interested in peace with Israel.

Certainly the minority who march with Palestinian Arab flags feel that they are in the vanguard of solidarity, that they are the "good Jews" and that they are appreciated by the Palestinian Arabs who are happy thattheir cause is being publicized by the enemy.

But this essay shows that the Palestinian Arabs aren't really that appreciative. In fact, they resent it. The activists among them are not demonstrating for peace or equality - but for Arab subjugation of Jews in the Middle East. They are dead-set against the Jewish right of self-determination.

They want Israel destroyed, and they will not be happy until they reach that goal. They make their positions crystal clear.

Yet the sympathetic media and their Israeli leftist buddies continue to act as if these people are liberal, tolerant Arabs. They simply cannot accept that their Arab counterparts are bigoted, hateful warmongers whose entire purpose is the destruction of the Jewish state. It doesn't fit into their worldview, so they willfully ignore it and pretend that they are as interested in peace as they are.

And, as Israellycool points out, this writer who rails against Zionism and the Zionist left is a third-year law student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

The media will reluctantly portray crazed Islamists as being against Israel's very existence, but they will never interview a well-dressed secular Arab whose views are equally intransigent and repulsive.  They prefer to ignore the evidence that is staring them in the face that the Palestinian Arab "left" is not motivated by the desire of peace but of revenge, not of compromise but of conquest. The website that carries this pure, unbridled hate is treated with respect by the New York Times and is funded by the Dutch government.

When will the media call out and start to highlight the pure hate and intransigence that has become mainstream in Palestinian Arab thought?

(h/t Rafael)

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Obama asks son of Israeli to be Chief of Staff

Barack Obama's first choice for White House Chief of Staff is Rahm Emanuel, and it appears likely that he will take the job. The best news about Emanuel can be seen in, of all places, the pro-terror Electronic Intifada website. Its editor, Ali Abunimah, has expressed bitter disappointment that Obama has not been publicly espousing the pro-Palestinian Arab stance of his earlier career, and his description of Emanuel is filled with loathing:

During the United States election campaign, racists and pro-Israel hardliners tried to make an issue out of President-elect Barack Obama's middle name, Hussein. Such people might take comfort in another middle name, that of Obama's pick for White House Chief of Staff: Rahm Israel Emanuel. Emanuel is Obama's first high-level appointment and it's one likely to disappointment [sic] those who hoped the president-elect would break with the George W. Bush Administration's pro-Israel policies. White House Chief of Staff is often considered the most powerful office in the executive branch, next to the president. Obama has offered Emanuel the position according to Democratic party sources cited by media including Reuters and The New York Times. Rahm Emanuel was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1959, the son of Benjamin Emanuel, a pediatrician who helped smuggle weapons to the Irgun, the Zionist militia of former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, in the 1940s. Emanuel continued his father's tradition of active support for Israel; during the 1991 Gulf War he volunteered to help maintain Israeli army vehicles near the Lebanon border when southern Lebanon was still occupied by Israeli forces. As White House political director in the first Clinton administration, Emanuel orchestrated the famous 1993 signing ceremony of the "Declaration of Principles" between Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. One of the most influential politicians and fundraisers in his party, Emanuel accompanied Obama to a meeting of AIPAC's executive board just after the Illinois senator had addressed the pro-Israel lobby's conference last June. In Congress, Emanuel has been a consistent and vocal pro-Israel hardliner, sometimes more so than President Bush. In June 2003, for example, he signed a letter criticizing Bush for being insufficiently supportive of Israel. "We were deeply dismayed to hear your criticism of Israel for fighting acts of terror," Emanuel, along with 33 other Democrats wrote to Bush. The letter said that Israel's policy of assassinating Palestinian political leaders "was clearly justified as an application of Israel's right to self-defense" ("Pelosi supports Israel's attacks on Hamas group," San Francisco Chronicle, 14 June 2003). In July 2006, Emanuel was one of several members who called for the cancellation of a speech to Congress by visiting Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki because al-Maliki had criticized Israel's bombing of Lebanon. Emanuel called the Lebanese and Palestinian governments "totalitarian entities with militias and terrorists acting as democracies" in a 19 July 2006 speech supporting a House resolution backing Israel's bombing of both countries that caused thousands of civilian victims. Emanuel has sometimes posed as a defender of Palestinian lives, though never from the constant Israeli violence that is responsible for the vast majority of deaths and injuries. On 14 June 2007 he wrote to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice "on behalf of students in the Gaza Strip whose future is threatened by the ongoing fighting there" which he blamed on "the violence and militancy of their elders." In fact, the fighting between members of Hamas and Fatah, which claimed dozens of lives, was the result of a failed scheme by US-backed militias to violently overthrow the elected Hamas-led national unity government. Emanuel's letter urged Rice "to work with allies in the region, such as Egypt and Jordan, to either find a secure location in Gaza for these students, or to transport them to a neighboring country where they can study and take their exams in peace." Palestinians often view such proposals as a pretext to permanently "transfer" them from their country, as many Israeli leaders have threatened. Emanuel has never said anything in support of millions of Palestinian children whose education has been disrupted by Israeli occupation, closures and blockades. Emanuel has also used his position to explicitly push Israel's interests in normalizing relations with Arab states and isolating Hamas. In 2006 he initiated a letter to President Bush opposing United Arab Emirates (UAE)-based Dubai Ports World's attempt to buy the management business of six US seaports. The letter, signed by dozens of other lawmakers, stated that "The UAE has pledged to provide financial support to the Hamas-led government of the Palestinian Authority and openly participates in the Arab League boycott against Israel." It argued that allowing the deal to go through "not only could place the safety and security of US ports at risk, but enhance the ability of the UAE to bolster the Hamas regime and its efforts to promote terrorism and violence against Israel" ("Dems Tie Israel, Ports," Forward, 10 March 2006). Ira Forman, executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council, told Fox News that picking Emanuel is "just another indication that despite the attempts to imply that Obama would somehow appoint the wrong person or listen to the wrong people when it comes to the US-Israel relationship ... that was never true." Over the course of the campaign, Obama publicly distanced himself from friends and advisers suspected or accused of having "pro-Palestinian" sympathies. There are no early indications of a more balanced course.

When Ali Abuminah is angry, this is usually a good sign.

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