Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: book review

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Monday, December 02, 2019

Book review: "With All Due Respect," by Nikki Haley

Nikki Haley's "With All Due Respect" is not exactly an autobiography. Instead, it is an account of her life as the governor of South Carolina and as the United States Ambassador to the UN, with attention paid to specific crises and events and how she handled them.

The first major crisis was the racist mass murder at the AME Church in Charleston, and Haley's attempts to ensure that things don't get out of hand - not least from national media who parachuted in with the assumption that South Carolina is a bigoted Southern state and this event reflects that bigotry. Haley herself, whose parents are from India, proves that this is not the case.

Haley shows a strong moral sense throughout the book, and a willingness to fight for what is right. She inherited a good ol' boys network where votes in the South Carolina legislature were done with voice only so there was no accountability as to who voted for what - including pay raises. She was blackballed from various committees when she tried to fight that system when she was in the legislature.

During the 2016 Republican primary race, Haley supported fellow child of immigrants Marco Rubio. She tangled with Donald Trump when she was campaigning for Rubio and called on Trump to release his tax returns; Trump tweeted that "The people of South Carolina are embarrassed by Nikki Haley!" She tweeted back with "Bless your heart," essentially a Southern woman code unmistakably meaning "screw you" in the most polite way possible. She says Trump respected her after that.

After he was elected, Trump first asked Haley to consider being Secretary of State, a position she knew she was not qualified for and told him that. Shortly thereafter he offered her the UN ambassadorship. Haley's response indicates a lot about her - and about Trump.

She said she would do it under three conditions: that she become a full cabinet member, that she become a member of the NSC, and that she could say what she thinks. She didn't want to report to anyone but Trump himself and she wanted a say in all policy decisions. Trump immediately agreed to all the conditions.

This served her well, but it meant that Trump had at least two representatives who could make foreign policy decisions independently of each other, Haley and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. If there is any villain in this book, it is Tillerson, who kept trying to undermine Haley and who worked with White House Chief of Staff John Kelly to undermine the President, trying to recruit her. But a quote later in the book from Kelly laid out the problem: there were four "secretaries of state:" Haley, Tillerson, Jared Kushner and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster. Haley doesn't spell it out but there was no real guidance from the White House to sync up their messages, and this is a severe shortcoming from a president who styles himself as an expert on business.

Haley was empowered, and she would often call Trump to make sure he agreed with her - although she makes it clear that she sometimes they disagreed. But from Haley's position at the UN, the US is meant to lead a world that is hungry for leadership, and it is meant to push for human rights throughout the world. Neither of these are what Donald Trump is known for, although he has done things behind the scenes for human rights that he does not get credit for - Haley points out how the Obama White House would promise to promote human rights in Syria or Crimea, but they did little, while the Trump administration did far more to punish human rights violators and attack Syrian chemical weapons factories.

She and the President agreed on other tenets of Haley's work at the UN: the US will not throw its friends under the bus as Obama did with Israel, and the US will start demanding its friends act like friends at the UN. She excoriated Obama not only for abstaining in the UNSC resolution 2334 against Israel, but also for abstaining in an annual General Assembly vote blaming the US for the poverty and oppression of the Cuban people.

Obama didn't even want to defend the US on something that outrageous. He thought if the US goes along with the rest of the world, everyone else will like the US better. Haley knows what every thinking person knows - if you don't respect yourself, no one will respect you.

Surprisingly, Haley was not a flag-waving Zionist before she was appointed to the UN. All she knew was that Israel was America's friend and that friends have each other's backs. As she took her crash course in international affairs, she realized that Israel was usually right in its positions; she concisely takes apart UNRWA in the book, for example. She pushed hard for moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem over the objections of Tillerson and Kelly.

There is much more - how she negotiated with China and Russia to get the UN Security Council to impose sanctions on North Korea; how she tangled with Tillerson on ending the bad Iran nuclear deal, how she called Trump after his statements of "fine people on both sides" after the Charlottesville killings and told him that his job was to heal the wounds of racism, not to stoke them, how she responded when being thrown under the bus for a screw-up where she announced one thing on Face the Nation when asked to by the White House but Trump changed his mind and the White House said perhaps she was "confused." "With all due respect, I don't get confused" was her sound bite response.

It is a little hard to believe Haley when she says that she left the UN on her own and not in frustration of working with a dysfunctional administration. After all, she brought her own team to be her staff at the UN from South Carolina and they moved their families to New York with the expectation of being there for longer than they were.

She clearly doesn't want to pick a fight with Trump and treats him with respect throughout the book. Many of her defenses of him ring true. But while she downplays her differences with the President, one gets the impression that there was more there than she writes.

Altogether, my already high opinion of Haley has gone up. I hope she does run for President in 2024 (honestly, I wish she would run now!) Haley's America is one that we can all aspire to be a part of.

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Book review: "Be Strong and of Good Courage," by Dennis Ross and David Makovsky

"Be Strong and of Good Courage," released in September, is a bit of a bait and switch.

It's subtitle, "How Israel's Most Important Leaders Shaped Its Destiny," makes it appear that the book is a biography of David Ben-Gurion, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon centered on the key decisions they made that made them into leaders. Four of the five chapters are indeed focused on those leaders, edited in such a way that the same stories aren't repeated.

But the book is really about its fifth chapter, called "Israel's Fateful Choice." All the stories beforehand were curated to lead to this fifth chapter, where authors Dennis Ross and David Makovsky argue that Israel must do something bold - in their minds, in line with the fateful choices made by Israel's previous leaders - to avoid Israel becoming a binational state.

The major leadership choices that the authors concentrate on are Ben Gurion's decision to declare the State of Israel immediately upon the British leaving Palestine (it was not as obvious a decision as it appears in hindsight,) Begin's making peace with Egypt and ultimately giving up the entire Sinai for peace, Rabin's peace agreement with the PLO and Sharon's decision to withdraw unilaterally from Gaza. The Begin chapter includes fifty pages on the negotiations over the Sinai and less than one sentence on the bombing of the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq, which gives an idea of their definition of leadership.

The biography chapters are not bad, even if they are slanted towards the last chapter. For example, Ben Gurion is quoted by Sharon as saying that Israel could have taken the land to the Jordan (presumably in 1948) but decided not to because then the Jews would be a minority. But Ross/Makovsky would never quote Ben Gurion's words as an introduction to a book about Hebron written in 1970:

Don't forget: the beginnings of Israel's greatest king were in Hebron, the city to which came the first Hebrew about eight hundred years before King David, and we will make a great and awful mistake if we fail to settle Hebron, neighbor and predecessor of Jerusalem, with a large Jewish settlement, constantly growing and expanding, very soon. This will also be a blessing to the Arab neighbors. Hebron is worthy to be Jerusalem's sister.

It is difficult to imagine a more pro-settlement statement.

There are also some new insights, both from newly uncovered archives and from Ross' own direct experience. My favorite new piece of information is in a footnote:

This anecdote hints at so much: Arafat's pre-planning the intifada and having little interest in compromise at Camp David, the dangers of Israeli unilateral withdrawals and how they are perceived in the Arab world, how Arafat would think that he can gain more from violence than from negotiations, the fundamental importance of pride and honor in Arab politics. A book based on these insights would be a valuable one indeed.

The stories are all shaded towards Chapter Five, implying that real leaders would decide today to effectively withdraw to the route of the security barrier unilaterally in order to preserve Israel's Jewish majority. (For example, they quote Sharon as saying he had to withdraw from Gaza because he felt that any successor prime ministers would be politicians, not visionaries.)

Ross and Makovsky are not starry eyed J-Streeters. They know quite well what Israel's challenges are, and do not expect a Palestinian peace partner to emerge any time soon. They know that Israel must keep the Jordan Valley one way or another with the Jordan River as the only truly effective secure border for Israel. But they have blind spots as well, such as thinking that the US could pressure Europe to accept that Israel would keep the settlement blocs to the east of the security barrier, when Europe would do no such thing because it has spent twenty years saying that the "1967 lines" are the basis for any peace agreement - they have spent so much political capital on that "solution" that they cannot change course, especially when Palestinians would scream about a "land grab" and not look at it as Ross/Makovsky intend, that they have a path to a nation of their own.

Chapter 5 is clearly directed at one person, Benjamin Netanyahu. The authors do give him grudging respect for his skill in relations with Russia, his improvement in relations with Gulf states and in deterring Iran in Syria. But his allowing settlements to continue to grow (even if he has slowed that down significantly for most of his time in office) is his major sin, allowing Israel to drift towards an unsaid but implied apartheid. (To their credit, they do not count Gaza as being occupied by Israel in their demographic arguments.)

What is the real solution to the demographic problem? It is a difficult question to be sure, but their solution is just as flawed as the ones they attack from Israel's right. Most people agree - right and left- that Palestinians deserve to be treated well; that Israel can do things that can improve their lives and make a fresh view of what is needed for security and what is kept in place because of inertia. (Would allowing Palestinians to have 4G networking really hurt Israel's security? Such a move could jump start a Palestinian Internet economy where the location of the workers is not important.) My own modest addition to the ideas thrown around would be to take advantage of the better relationships with the Gulf countries and come up with incentives from the US or Israel or both to have them give true citizenship to Palestinians - the most educated and most industrious Arab population, who would improve the futures of those countries. This cold crack the Arab consensus that it is in the best interests of Palestinians to keep them stateless, forever.

I wish that Be Strong and of Good Courage was not quite as polemical as it is. A good biography of these four Israeli leaders would be worth reading on its own.

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Book Review: Speaking for Israel by @AvivaKlompas

Ron Prosor is Israeli UN ambassador I enjoyed quoting most in this site. I published the full text of several of his speeches. The speeches were witty, and always included some funny jokes or sound bites.

From 2013 through 2015, they were written by his chief speechwriter, Aviva Klompas.

Klompas has now written an account of her time working at Israel's Mission to the UN, entitled Speaking for Israel. It is a fun read, at times funny and at times maddening, as this polite Canadian woman gets thrown into Israeli government insanity, working long hours for little pay but with the satisfaction of knowing that she was helping Israel.

After an interview where she is asked to do an impossible task (write an op-ed about Mali in 30 minutes,) Klompas is hired and hurled into international politics and Israeli bluntness.

Prosor is the star. Personable, funny and charismatic, he also has a very clear idea of what kind of message he wants to give to the UN and journalists. He loves cheesy one-liners and Winston Churchill quotes. But sometimes he wants to show a righteous anger at how ridiculous and unfair a world is that constantly vilifies Israel.

Klompas manages to get inside his head and write what he wants. But she also has to write for visiting ministers (their speeches are supposed to be written in Israel yet somehow they always arrive empty-handed and requiring a speech in an instant). Prosor might want to write an op-ed for the New York Times or Wall Street Journal - and it is Klompas who actually does the writing.

Much like his boss, Binyamin Netanyahu, Ron Prosor loved props for his speeches. During the 2014 Gaza war he was to speak at the UN Security Council, and Klompas suggested he play the sound of the Tzeva Adom sirens that Israelis in the range of Gaza rockets had to hear day and night. Without having a chance to practice, Prosor spoke and Klompas gave her phone, siren blaring, to Prosor at the proper time.

Beyond that, Klompas had even more pressure during UN sessions. Israel has the right to respond to others' speeches, and while before Prosor it rarely exercised that right, he used it liberally. This means that Klompas had to write a response in real time in the UN chambers to be handed to the ambassador.

Not that Prosor couldn't work without her. His extemporaneous speeches were great as well. But he had a lot to do and needed his staff to do work like this. Klompas herself needed lots of help from interns and other staffers, and when things were really crazy during that 2014 war she once reached out to her predecessor to give her a hand.

Klompas describes the all-nighters, the constant pressure, the contradictory demands from different people, and the "advice" from people who were not native English speakers. She talks about Prosor's attempts to help Israel gain an equal footing at the UN as every other nation, something denied to Israel traditionally because of Arab hate. She describes her shock at being expected to just pick up a phone and call the Israeli ambassador to the US on his cell phone for advice on a section of a speech.

One accented person called her, without identifying himself, and asked for a lesson in pronouncing the word "lengths." (After a few minutes, she gave up and told him he got it perfect.)

The book is filled with funny anecdotes like those. But in between those stories and excerpts of speeches, it describes Israel's position on everything, its history with trying to reach peace with the Palestinians, the endemic anti-Israel bias at the UN, and other background information that makes "Speaking for Israel" a nice defense of Israel as well.

(The forward from Alan Dershowitz is a worthless page and a half. It looks like it was written in ten minutes and is more an ego trip for Dershowitz. But his name is just as prominent on the cover as Klompas'. Marketing!)

"Speaking for Israel" does not describe much about Klompas' personal life, and it may have benefited from a bit more opening up - we have no idea how this high pressure position affected her social life or if she had any social life outside the Mission at all. It has little about her upbringing or family. (I had to go to her webpage to find out she is now Associate Vice President of Israel & Global Jewish Citizenship at Combined Jewish Philanthropies in Boston.)

"Speaking for Israel" is an entertaining and educational book, showing not only what goes on behind the scenes at the Israel Mission to the UN (which I had the privilege of visiting earlier this year) but also how Israel defends itself in the international arena. It also might be a great introduction to showing today's youth how a young person with skills but no prior experience can make a real difference for Israel.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Book Review: "Unveiled" by Yasmine Mohammed

Yamine Mohammed is an ex-Muslim who now helps Muslims and ex-Muslims deal with their circumstances with their communities and families.

Her recently published memoir, Unveiled, is a truly harrowing account of her life. It is ultimately a heroic story of how she managed to overcome a sickeningly abusive childhood and to escape her circumstances, while shining a light on how millions of Muslims are forced to live.

To be sure, most Muslims do not have to endure what Yasmine did. Her mother has severe psychological problems and turned to extreme Islam in order to find order in her own life. She married (according to Islam) an abusive man who was already married and who insisted on strict application of rules that he called Muslim. This man sexually abused Yasmine.

But the real abuse came from her mother. She only got pregnant with Yasmine in order to try to keep her first husband from leaving her and since that plot failed, she treated Yasmine like an unwanted excretion from her body that she was stuck with. (She would actually tell her that.)

Her mother embraced the most extreme Islam of her husband in order to find meaning in her own damaged life.

To a large extent, the book is Yasmine's relationship with, and attempts to break free from, her mother - a woman who would tell her husband that 6-year old Yasmine didn't do her prayers properly so that he would brutally beat his stepdaughter on the bottoms of her feet so the bruises wouldn't show.

Yasmine grew up believing that she was worthless and that her mother held the key to allow her into heaven, so she was in a never-ending cycle of trying to gain love from a woman who truly hated her. But she would always question the rules she was forced to live under, and sometimes she would meet others who liked her for who she was, giving her a glimmer of much-needed self-esteem under the crushing weight of the twin burdens of her family and Islam.

So many times in her life it looked like she would finally break free, only to be reeled back in by circumstances.

Chillingly, Yasmine finally gave in to be married to a man her mother chose for her that her mother herself tried to seduce. This man imprisoned her in every real sense, even beating her for idly singing the alphabet song when looking up something in a reference book. Their baby's birth both cemented her prison sentence and gave her the resolve to escape so her daughter would never have to live through the same hell she did.

She finally managed a (Canadian) divorce, and only later found out that her husband was a major Al Qaeda terrorist.

Slowly, sometimes agonizingly so, Yasmine manages to escape the hell of her upbringing.

How much of her awful childhood was a result of Islam and how much from a psychotic mother and abusive stepfather/"uncle"? Yasmine brings statistics and plenty of anecdotes from other Muslims and ex-Muslims about things like female genital mutilation, sexual assault and the psychological pain from wearing a hijab and (later) a full burka. She mentions a friend who broke free, and when she fell and hurt herself and her boyfriend ran to see if she was OK she assumed he would berate her for being so stupid. That's how generations of women are taught to think about themselves.

There is no way most Muslims grow up in such an environment, certainly not in Canada where Yasmine was born, but her story is not so different from how many Muslim women are forced to live in Muslim-majority countries. She had opportunities to meet others, especially the years she was allowed to go to public school, and to start to question things. Most Muslim women in Islamic countries do not even have that lifeline.

Her final chapter is an appeal to today's feminists, who are so anxious to find something to protest that they spend their time blowing up truly minor issues like whether to remove the "e" from "women" yet they ignore the patriarchy and often abuse that is imposed on hundreds of millions of girls and women, today, in Muslim-majority countries. Fear of being labeled "Islamophobic" wins out over helping so many who are imprisoned as Yasmine was. It is a damning indictment of today's Western feminism and a world where Nike would never consider to put its logo on Mormon women's underwear but happily places it on a hijab that so many wear not out of free will but out of fear.

This is a frightening and ultimately uplifting book about a remarkable woman and her incredible journey.

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Book Review: "I Am Not A Spy," the adventures of a Zionist Jew in the Arab world

I met Michael Bassin this past week. He is a super-nice, friendly, outgoing guy, and he told me about a book he wrote about his adventures in the Arab world and later in the IDF.

If I hadn't met him in person, I wouldn't have believed the stories in the book. And his book, "I Am Not A Spy," published in 2017, is a must-read.

As an idealistic American high school student, Bassin asked Dennis Ross what he could personally do to help bring peace between Israel and the Arab world. Ross answered that he must get to know the other side on a personal level, reminding him that one doesn't make peace with friends.

Bassin took this advice as literally as one can.

After studying classical Arabic at George Washington University, Michael spent a semester at the American University at Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates - over the objections of his Conservative Jewish parents.

Michael first stopped off in Egypt, and later visited Amman, Jordan. Being a naturally open guy, and not wanting to deceive anyone, he let people who asked know that he was Jewish. He was quickly informed by Christians in Egypt - screamed at, actually - that revealing that he was Jewish was an incredibly stupid and dangerous thing to do in the most antisemitic country in the world.

Even so, when he went to Sharjah, he decided to tell anyone who asked that he was Jewish and let his winning personality allow people to see that Jews weren't evil.

Sharjah takes up the major part of Bassin's story, and it is fascinating. Bassin is not the idealistic, "Jewish Voice for Peace" type that you would imagine would want to spend time in the Arab world telling people how evil Israel is. Michael is a Zionist and a very well informed one. On the other hand, he truly wants to forge relationships with the Arabs he meets.

The cast of characters at the university is diverse. There is Mo, who loves the excitement of being friends with a Jew but whose brother is trying to defame Michael among the students at every turn. There is Jake, a Christian American who is mistaken as a Jew. A professor admits to Michael that he used to work in Israel and loves it there. Other professors don't even try to hide their antisemitism. Two Arabs from Jerusalem become unlikely Zionist allies, delighting in making other Arabs uncomfortable with their stories of how good Israel is. An apparent UAE spy is sent to seduce him and ply him with drugs to give an excuse to expel him from the country. Osama, a dead ringer for Bin Laden, tries to convert Michael to Islam.

Michael is accused of being an Israeli spy at school, but he laughs it all off - after all, a spy wouldn't admit he was Jewish. Yet when he feels discomfort at how people are treating him, especially the Palestinians on campus, he is not intimidated - instead, he attends a Palestinian Cultural Club event. While everyone is shocked, over the next few weeks a number of Palestinians approach him individually and ask him to explain the Israeli point of view. His guts, and the PCC leaders who didn't dare confront him at the meeting making them look like cowards, increased everyone's respect for him.

One of the curious Palestinians was a beautiful, hijabi girl, Samira, who had been frightened of him before the event. They flirted with each other but they knew that he cannot go further, because her life would be in danger should the news get out. Innocent things can mean life and death. Michael found this out later when a friend whose computer he used to email an Israeli friend (his own Internet was shut down by a vindictive dormitory manager) ended up getting abducted and beaten by UAE security forces, accusing the friends of being an Israeli spy.

To me, the most foolhardy thing Michael did was go to Beirut on vacation - right after the 2006 Lebanon war. Originally invited by Lebanese students, they all ended up canceling their plans as Hezbollah was set to possibly violently take over the country. Michael and Jake went ahead, and saw that even all of the Beirut Sunnis and Christians abandoned the city in fear. But once they were there, they toured the ruins of the Shiite sections of Beirut.

One detail from this episode stood out for me. As they approached the bombed out section they say posters with photos of young boys who were "martyred" by Israeli bombs. Michael felt bad for the loss of innocent lives. Then they meet 17-year old Mohammed, excited to see Americans, who tells them, "Everyone left Beit Jibail when the war started. But Hezbollah picked certain people to stay and become shahid. They said it was important to have people stand in front of fighters when they fight the Israelis."

Mohammed's own younger brother was one of those chosen to be a human shield for Hezbollah. And Mohammed was happy that his brother was chosen to be a martyr just so Hezbollah could accuse Israel of killing kids.

Amazingly, Michael and Jake even manage to get to Damascus for a couple of days, followed by a member of the not-so-secret police - they end up asking him for directions to a good restaurant since it was so obvious he was following them.

The book takes a turn when, after college, Bassin volunteers for the IDF, where his fluency in Arabic is taken advantage of. He is assigned patrol duty in Judea and Samaria and tries to bring humanity to the Palestinians he meets, and he narrates the tension between wanting to be friendly and knowing that he must act as an authority figure or else security at large would suffer. This section of the book resembles parts of Marc Goldberg's "Beyond the Green Line."

"I Am Not A Spy" is sprinkled with funny and touching anecdotes - his search with his Emirati friends for a jinn is worth the price of the book by itself.

Most importantly, Bassin describes the Arab mentality better than anyone else has. So many so-called "experts" pretend to know how the Arabs think, but Arabs know how they must act around NGOs and journalists to avoid bringing shame to their people. By living with them and being pro-active instead of timid, Bassin gained the respect and trust of many Arabs who candidly told him of the antisemitism they were taught from birth.

It was an unexpected treat to meet Michael and another treat to read his book. I strongly recommend it to everyone - especially the "progressives" who pretend to want peace but whose idea of peace is to meekly do whatever the Arabs demand from them.

Bassin respects and wants peace with Arabs but, unlike the progressive crowd, he also respects himself.

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Book review: Israel Denial by Cary Nelson

The Academic Engagement Network and Indiana University Press have released "Israel Denial: Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, & the Faculty Campaign Against the Jewish State" by Cary Nelson.

Nelson is a professor of Liberal Arts and English at the University of Illinois and Urbana-Champaign. His liberal arts background gives him an uncommon insight into the worst part of anti-Israel and antisemitic attitudes on college campuses today.

The centerpiece of the book is four chapters that each take on the writings of one of the four major intellectual leaders of the anti-Israel movement: Judith Butler, Steven Salaita, Saree Makdisi and Jasbir Puar.

In each of these chapters, Nelson methodically destroys their arguments, one by one. He doesn't just prove that, say, Jasbir Puar is a liar in her claims that Israel purposefully maims and stunts the growth of Palestinian children - he goes through their entire written record on the topic of Israel and shoots down their arguments, one fact at a time.

Nelson's audience seems to be fellow academics who can be convinced by the arguments of these BDS supporting, Israel hating professors. Nelson has spent several years visiting Israel and the territories and has done an admirable amount of original research as well as in compiling the facts that prove these academics are wrong. He is careful not to accuse anyone of using antisemitic arguments unless the evidence is overwhelming.

Nelson even admits being an admirer of Butler's work on gender, but that doesn't stop him from going through her almost unreadable prose, extracting her main argument (that Jews are naturally disposed to be forever in the Diaspora and it is actually anti-Jewish to want to live as free, independent people in the Land of Israel) and then demolishing it.

If that was the entire book, it would be worth reading (although the sheer amount of fact checking gets overwhelming after a while.) But Cary Nelson also takes a larger view. He provides a critical analysis of the entire BDS movement and its philosophy, and shows that its claims to non-violence are specious (as their plan for a binational state could never come about without war) and that their claims to only be against Israeli institutions and not individuals are absurd. He brings example after example of BDS intimidation on campus, and highlights how universities are ill equipped to protect students and professors who are the victims of BDS campaigns.

Yet Nelson remains intellectually honest and consistent - he is a champion of free speech and academic freedom, and he explains exactly what and what is not acceptable on campus while adhering scrupulously to those principles. A professor can teach a class in as biased a manner as he wishes, but he cannot intimidate or punish students who disagree. The book brings a number of examples of cases of extremely biased courses, based on student reports, syllabi and required reading lists.

Nelson also goes behind the scenes on the campaigns by BDS to take over major academic disciplines and associations, often using underhanded methods. He notes how BDS has exposed the shaky foundations of the liberal arts and how a now second generation of anti-Israel academics have turned entire disciplines into the opposite of what academia should be. He highlights how difficult it would be for any Zionist to survive in this academic environment which has been so thoroughly politicized. Most of all, he shows that the embrace by academia of "scholars" who literally make up lies to support their arguments endangers entire academic disciplines that end up looking foolish or worse by allowing these lies to go unchallenged.

After showing that Israel is a bastion of academic freedom and that Arabs are not discriminated against in Israel, one of the most important chapters deals with the little reported lack of Palestinian academic freedom. This chapter involved significant original research and Nelson spent time talking with Palestinian professors and students, describing in harrowing terms how intimidated students are by the political forces on campuses in the West Bank and Gaza. One professor who dared bring students on a trip to visit Auschwitz was not only fired but he was nearly assassinated by terrorists who booby trapped his car to explode when it warmed up from being driven - the car exploded prematurely on an unusually hot day.

The hypocrisy of the BDSers who claim to care about Palestinian academic freedom while there is so little of it in the territories is clear, and has never been described as well before.

Nelson, quixotically, describes a number of things that Israel and the Palestinians could do unilaterally to create an atmosphere where he believes a two state solution can be successful. Nelson did enormous amounts of research into the issue, speaking with lots of Israelis and Palestinians who want peace and who have practical ideas (many of which have merit.) I believe that his wishful thinking, combined with his conviction that a two state solution is the only possible solution, has given him some rare blind spots about exactly how rejectionist and antisemitic the Palestinian people and leaders have become, and how most of them look at a two state solution as only a stage towards their own version of a one state solution. He addresses many of the concerns as far as he can but I don't think he quite gets that there is no solution possible with today's Palestinians, and the only thing to do is to manage the conflict, and not pretend to end it. His ideas for peace are useful in the context of the rest of the book, however, because he can credibly show that the BDS groups who pretend to want peace have no interest in any type of two state solution, and there are no comparable peace plans on that side.

The other part that bothers me about the book is Nelson's obvious antipathy both towards Israeli settlers, who he tends to dismiss as religious fanatics, and the Likud government that dominated Israeli politics of the past decade. Nelson insults Benjamin Netanyahu as a racist while at the same time emphasizing how much Israel has been working to improve the lives of its Arab citizens - exactly during Netanyahu's premiership. He praises Israel's Supreme Court for scrupulously protecting equality of all citizens under the law - but he implies that demolitions of terrorist homes or of illegally built Arab structures are a serious human rights violation, ignoring that the same Supreme Court has allowed that to occur in most cases.

My last nitpick is that Nelson, while fully supporting Israel's right to exist, does not seem to understand the importance of the heartland of Eretz Yisrael - of Hebron, Bethlehem, Shiloh, Bet El - to the very souls of Jews. His desire for a two state solution seems to force him to minimize the importance of the holy places, which he seems to understand intellectually but not viscerally. Israel without the Biblical cities is just another secular nation. We don't need a Jewish Singapore. The very reason that the Arabs insist on ownership of the most holy places in Judaism is because they understand how separating Jews from their ancestral lands and sacred places is the most effective way to destroy the very heart of Israel.

Nelson, who is an expert in poetry, has a chapter on how colleges could improve their teaching about the region by suggesting a course in comparative poetry between Jewish and Palestinian writers. It is certainly an appropriate topic for a college course. Poetry can illustrate the feelings (and myths) of a people better than most other mediums. Yet the poets Nelson chooses to stand in for Israel are all secular, all against the "occupation." If Nelson wants to tell the stories of people through poetry, he should include the works not only of the Israeli superstar poets but also the burgeoning number of religious and settler poets who write of their love of the land in a much different style than the secularists. Given that he wants everyone to empathize with the others' feelings, settlers are no less human than secular Israelis and Palestinians. It is necessary to humanize the settlers, something that hardly happens. Whether one agrees with them or not, they choose to put their lives on the line every day to walk in the footsteps of their ancestors and to hold on to that right. That is the stuff of poetry.

I apologize for spending too much of the review on the small parts that bother me (I have that habit.) I don't want to dissuade anyone from reading this book. Israel Denial is an epic response to BDS and its pseudo-intellectual underpinnings. The book is a huge challenge to the liberal arts academic community to respond to this attack on their very foundations.

Israel Denial is a model of what academic scholarship in the liberal arts should look like.

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Book review: Anti-Zionism On Campus - and how to win the fight

Andrew Pessin and Doron Ben-Atar have edited Anti-Zionism on Campus, a scary look at the situation on many college campuses today in the US and worldwide.

After an introduction by the authors, the book has 24 chapters written by scholars and other employees at colleges and universities, followed by 7 chapters written by students and alumni, describing their experiences clashing with anti-Israel forces on campus.

The stories by the scholars are almost all depressingly similar. A university employee, usually a professor, encounters an anti-Israel group, usually Students for Justice in Palestine or some other group that advocates the boycott of Israel. The encounter could be because the scholar wanted to sponsor a visit by an Israeli scholar, or he/she wanted to fight against a BDS resolution.

The scholars appear to me to be almost always liberal. They support Palestinian rights. Most are against Israel's settlement policy. Some go out of their way to help Palestinians.

They are stunned when they are confronted with BDS hate.

Nearly all of them try to have a dialogue with the BDSers. They try to have debates, or cosponsor lectures on topics they might have in common. They almost beg the BDSers for the chance to present their side of the story so the students can decide for themselves who makes a stronger case.

In literally every case, the BDSers refuse to have any sort of dialogue. They continue to hammer home the message of Israel and Israelis (and often Jews) being racist and colonialist and violators of human rights. They try to add their venom to the agendas of minority groups.

And in nearly every case, the BDSers viciously attack the liberal, usually Jewish scholar who tried so hard to meet with and discuss things with them. The BDSers accuse the professors of harassment or bias or hate or whatever they can.

The depressing pattern continues: in many cases while the pro-Israel scholar tries to defend him or herself through the proper university channels, following the rules of that institution which often forbids them to say anything publicly about the case and often does not allow them legal representation, the BDSers attack the scholar as a racist in social media, often getting their lies published in Electronic Intifada or similar sites.

The scholars are stunned, upset, and feels their hands are tied. The administration more often than not does not step in to stop the libels. (There were a couple of notable exceptions.) The scholars are concerned about their careers, about their ability to teach with the accusation of racism on their heads, accusations that they cannot fight because they trust the university procedures that the Israel haters happily bypass with impunity.

It is a playbook, but each of the scholars are so caught up in defending themselves and in trying to get an apathetic or hostile administration to listen to their side of the story that they do not realize that they cannot win if they play by the rules.

There are some variants in the story but in almost every case people are attacked, professionally as well as crudely, for a principled position, and the people who are supposed to defend this person end up making their lives hell. There are also a couple of more general essays on BDS and its methods and goals.

The student essays are similar - showing intimidation against them for holding a pro-Israel, or an insufficiently anti-Israel, position.

All the campuses described, from the US to UK to Australia and Canada, are simply not places where it is safe to publicly identify as a Zionist or to say anything pro-Israel because you will be attacked and smeared.

There are other important lessons that can be clearly drawn from the book. The BDS movement claims that they do not target individuals - but this book documents that this is exactly what they do.

The people claiming to want "fairness" or "justice" are against Israel's very existence, and against a two state solution. This is not a position of fairness, it is an extremist position of hate that is not only tolerated but celebrated on campus. They will treat anyone who wants actual peace and two states and Palestinian rights with the exact same attacks and the exact same vitriol as if they were right wing Zionist "settlers." Israel is evil, full stop, and they are infecting a generation of students with that message.

The book is a worthwhile read, if only to understand the macro picture that the writers often miss in their own local academic environment. My only problem with the book is that too often the writers, having been forced to defend themselves in grotesque ways within a system where the cards are stacked against them, go into details of their defenses that are not as fascinating to the reader as the authors might think. Some of the essays are excellent, such as Judea Pearl's.

In every single story, the BDSers are shown to be the most intolerant bigots possible - but since they pretend to be on the side of social justice, our esteemed institutions of higher learning are not willing to label them what they are: hate groups.

That is really the lesson that I get from this book, even though it is emphatically not a lesson that most of the victims of BDS have managed to understand even today. Too many of the authors of the essays still hold on to the fantasy that open debate will solve the problem, that people will eventually reject BDS in the marketplace of ideas.

BDS is hate. SJP is a hate group. It does not want dialogue - it only wants to demonize the Jewish citizens of Israel and anyone who does not follow their BDS manifesto of boycott, divestment and sanctions, purportedly by "Palestinian civil society." The BDSers are bullies, not academics. There is nothing that is beneath the BDSers, including defacing the doors of faculty and threatening them.

The only way to fight BDS is to use their playbook. Just as they want everyone to associate Israel with the words "apartheid" and "racist," we need to associate BDS with hate and bigotry. Not to wait until a person becomes a victim, but to be proactive, the way BDS is. To put "BDS=HATE" stickers on every poster, every "apartheid wall," every flyer. To make sure that every college student, when they see the initials SJP or BDS or whichever anti-Israel organization is on campus, sees the word "HATE."

And these people must be attacked the way they attack the pro-Israel crowd. If they try to silence an Israeli speaker or stop a pro-Israel activity, then they must be charged with bigotry and hate through the proper university channels. Put them on the defensive. Make them waste their time finding lawyers and trying to keep their positions.

Professors, especially the apparently mostly liberal professors writing in this book, are generally loathe to be muscular, pro-active Zionists who defend Israel proudly. That is because they have already accepted a campus that is anti-Israel and they still believe in an ideal campus that hasn't existed since the 1960s.

But if they want to bring campuses back to becoming places that value debate and arguments, then these professors and scholars and students need to push against BDS' Achilles heel, that they refuse to debate. Insist that they want to debate and emphasize that BDS advocates are babies who cannot defend themselves in open debate.

BDS is aggressive and regressive. Zionism is progressive. Zionism needs to be equally proud, equally public, and equally willing to demonize and expose the haters.

Only then will college students gravitate towards the pro-Israel position. People want to be associated with the proud, not the cowering.

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Book review: Industry of Lies, by Ben Dror Yemini

Before you even bother to read this review, just order the book, now. Do not waste a second.

In fact, order more than one. If you have any liberal friends who are not so far gone as to have closed their minds off about Israel, send them a copy of this book.

Industry of Lies: Media, Academia, and the Israeli-Arab Conflict, by Ben-Dror Yemini, is the best book to debunk anti-Israel lies bar none.

For one thing, it is a well-researched piece of scholarship that methodically dismantles the claims of the anti-Israel crowd. Yemini not only goes after the lies but also the decontextualization of things that Israel is involved with.

For example, in chapter 3, Yemini shows that mass population exchanges have happened many times in the 20th century, and that it was universally regarded as a humane way to end conflict at that time, to keep warring groups separated and to minimize slaughter of the minority population. The population exchange between Jews in Arab countries and Arabs under Israeli rule followed the pattern of India/Pakistan, for example.

But moreover in the specific context of Palestine, the people advocating transfer of populations in the 1920s and 1930s were Arab leaders themselves! And other proponents of transfer of Arabs out of a potential Jewish state include not one but two Nobel Peace Prize winners, Norman Angell and Christian Lange. The Zionists were hesitant about transfer, the rest of the world thought it was a great idea.

This is but one small example of how Ben Dror Yemini takes the major anti-Israel talking points - in this case, the lie that Zionism was based on the idea of ethnic cleansing - and reveals the true context for what happened behind the Arab flight from Israel-controlled areas.

The book is literally filled with incredible nuggets of historical as well as current information. The idea of returning refugees to Israel was opposed by Palestinian leaders like Haj Amin Husseini and Emil Ghouri in 19498 and only a fraction of the 25,000 refugees Israel offered to allow to return actually took advantage of the offer in 1949 and 1950. He shows how the "right of return" was always meant to destroy Israel, using quotes from Arab leaders - and how the Arabs refused to integrate Palestinian refugees in their own countries in defiance of UN resolutions. Even though the ideas that Israel engages in "genocide" or "apartheid" are absurd on the face of it, Yemini actually crunches the numbers and shows how such charges cannot possibly come from any honest researcher.

Yemini takes on the charlatan historians, academic frauds, glory-seeking washed up rock stars. He shows dispassionately how small the Israel-Arab conflict is in comparison with other conflicts around the globe - and how those other conflicts, and their victims, are ignored while Palestinian victims are given financial and moral support far out of proportion both to their suffering and to their actual actions.

But the book is more than just a list of facts. Yemini is throwing the gauntlet to the leftists and liberals who think that their anti-Israel obsession is based on justice and not hate.

Yemini is no right-winger. He supports a two-state solution, he is against settlements and at one point he shows that he favored an Ehud Olmert peace plan that would have gone beyond any other with the holy places of Jerusalem under international control. But he is under no illusions about the peacefulness of the Arabs nor about the crazed accusations by Israel's enemies to Israel. He shows that the Palestinians have been the ones to reject peace, over and over again, and that their goals appear to be against any real peace.

Yemini is happy to criticize Israel. He will insult the far right in Israel. But he will not stand still while Haaretz makes up complete lies about Israel and offers them to the world as evidence of how reprehensible Israel supposedly is.

While most other books that make the case for Israel appeal only to committed Zionists, Ben Dror Yemini's Industry of Lies is meant to be read by Israel's critics. Its blurbs are written by Ari Shavit (who is the target of some of Yemini's criticism) and Ehud Barak.

Critics of Israel who are willing to have an open mind should be encouraged to read this. Accomplished liars like Roger Waters or Ilan Pappe or Judith Butler will never deign to allow any of his arguments to go past their armor of hate, but college students who only hear a fourth-hand regurgitation of lies about Israel should read this book.

But beyond that, the book is still a goldmine for the pro-Israel crowd. Yemini's arguments are often novel and different. The book has thousands of footnotes, of which many can become expanded into full articles. (Disclaimer: I am referenced several times.)

In short, this book is a must read for people who love Israel, people who think they love Israel but who have been convinced that it has become evil incarnate, and people who still can think for themselves about Israel and the Middle East.

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Book review: Beyond the Green Line

Marc Goldberg has written a great first-hand memoir of what it is like to be an IDF grunt in the territories during the second intifada.

Goldberg, who wrote about some of this in his blog, made aliyah from England and joined the IDF as a "lone soldier." He dreamed to become Chief of Staff.

But things didn't work out how he wanted.

In "Beyond the Green Line," Goldberg gives a great description of how the IDF selects who will go to which unit. For example, the officers aren't looking at recruits who are the strongest or fastest - but the ones who help their fellow soldiers.

Marc is nothing if not honest. He describes his problems learning Hebrew, his disappointment at not making it into the Sayeret Tzanhanim and instead joining Orev, and his experiences at boot camp. Goldberg tries to be the best soldier he can be and he is a wonderful storyteller as he describes the tough training he went through - which is nothing like what you see in movies about the US Army.

After he finally passes and becomes a paratrooper, he is ready to face the enemy. But in 2003, the enemy was not the Syria army - it was the Palestinian terrorists of the second intifada.

The new soldier knows he is doing important work. But it is hardly what he wanted. He has to watch Arab families whose home needs to become lookouts for operations elsewhere in the Arab city. He mans checkpoints, finding Arabs with sheep in their trunk. He confronts British "peacemakers" who try to get under his skin.

But he also picks up suspected suicide bombers. Acting as s lookout, he notices the crucial clue necessary to catch two wanted terrorists.

Goldberg tries on occasion to inject some humanity in this strange situation where the IDF needs to operate among a mostly civilian population. He kicks a soccer ball back and forth with an Arab kid. At one point he even feeds a bunch of kids who would otherwise have been throwing rocks.

And Goldberg is not shy about describing his frustration at going on meaningless missions. In Nablus, his unity tried to enforce a curfew - and everyone ignored them. Rubber bullets were shot - no reaction from the people going about their business. Finally tear gas - and the people avoided the tear gas but remained doing their business.

Goldberg is chosen (probably because he knows English) to babysit Birthright participants. Even more bizarrely, he is then chosen to go to America and be a prop for very rich Jews to raise money or show off their IDF connections. He felt guilty that he was being treated to this luxury while his buddies were slogging through the rain and mud.

The most exciting part of the book is where Goldberg and his team get hit with a booby-trapped bomb. Luckily, the bomb had no shrapnel or ball bearings - it knocked them down but on one was injured.

Goldberg also describes the not-so-nice parts of the IDF. Sometimes, soldiers do things they aren't supposed to; they do take advantage of the Arabs in ways beyond what the mission requires. And he is sick about it.

Finally, Goldberg describes his difficulty at adjusting back to civilian life, in his usual uncensored style. He is as hard on himself as he is on anyone else.

This book is not about heroism or major battles. It is an account of a lone soldier, who must follow commands even when they make no sense, and who is not allowed to fight the way he was trained. Goldberg is unsparing in his descriptions of what this life is like, the frustrations, the abuses but also the successes when a wanted man or woman is apprehended and people's lives are saved. This is the war that Israel is forced to fight, a war that soldiers are not trained for, but as with everything else, the IDF needs to improvise- sometimes imperfectly - to secure the Jewish state.

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Islamic Gender Apartheid, by Phyllis Chesler (book review)

Phyllis Chesler is a true liberal - and as such, she is a thorn in the side of the politically correct crowd who style themselves as liberals but are simply inconsistent socialists who think that loving the underdog is what liberalism means.

Chesler's latest book, Islamic Gender Apartheid: Exposing a Veiled War Against Women, is a collection of over 100 of articles she wrote over a 14 year period from 2003 to 2016, all on the topic of how Muslims and Islam treat women.

Chesler knows what she is talking about. In 1961, she fell in love and married a sophisticated Afghan man who took her to Afghanistan to "meet his family." Thus began a months-long virtual imprisonment and first-hand experience with how Muslims treat women - even in a time before most Afghan women were veiled.

When she managed to escape after months of being debased and mistreated, Chesler started her career as a feminist, authoring dozens of books on the topic over the years.

As she says:

When I returned to the United States, there were few feminist stirrings. However, within five years, I became a leader of America's new feminist movement. In 1967, I became active in the National Organization for Women, as well as in various feminist consciousness-raising groups and campaigns. In 1969, I pioneered women's studies classes for credit, cofounded the Association for Women in Psychology, and began delivering feminist lectures. I also began work on my first book, Women and Madness,[3] which became an oft-cited feminist text.

Firsthand experience of life under Islam as a woman held captive in Kabul has shaped the kind of feminist I became and have remained—one who is not multiculturally "correct." By seeing how women interacted with men and then with each other, I learned how incredibly servile oppressed peoples could be and how deadly the oppressed could be toward each other. Beebee Jan was cruel to her female servants. She beat her elderly personal servant and verbally humiliated our young and pregnant housemaid. It was an observation that stayed with me.

While multiculturalism has become increasingly popular, I never could accept cultural relativism. Instead, what I experienced in Afghanistan as a woman taught me the necessity of applying a single standard of human rights, not one tailored to each culture. In 1971—less than a decade after my Kabul captivity—I spoke about rescuing women of Bangladesh raped en masse during that country's war for independence from Pakistan. The suffering of women in the developing world should be considered no less important than the issues feminists address in the West. Accordingly, I called for an invasion of Bosnia long before Washington did anything, and I called for similar military action in Rwanda, Afghanistan, and Sudan.

In recent years, I fear that the "peace and love" crowd in the West has refused to understand how Islamism endangers Western values and lives, beginning with our commitment to women's rights and human rights. The Islamists who are beheading civilians, stoning Muslim women to death, jailing Muslim dissidents, and bombing civilians on every continent are now moving among us both in the East and in the West. While some feminist leaders and groups have come to publicize the atrocities against women in the Islamic world, they have not tied it to any feminist foreign policy. Women's studies programs should have been the first to sound the alarm. They do not. More than four decades after I was a virtual prisoner in Afghanistan, I realize how far the Western feminist movement has to go.

This book is an exploration of Chesler's fight against Islamic gender apartheid - the burqa and chador, honor killings, lashings and stonings of women in Islamic countries who stand up for themselves, routine rapes, female genital mutilation and other horrible crimes against women in Muslim countries.

These are the stories that the Western media usually refuses to cover. Chesler has an encyclopedic knowledge of Muslim crimes against women in the Muslim world as well as in the West.

And, Phyllis Chesler knows the history of the women's movement - since she has been there from the beginning of the Second Wave. She can recall a time, back in 2001, when Oprah Winfrey could help remove a burqa from a young woman in front of 18,000 cheering women at Madison Square Garden - a scene that is literally impossible to imagine today as these same "feminists' are defending the burqa as just another fashion choice and not a moving sensory-deprivation prison.

She also talks about the brave Muslim (and ex-Muslim) feminists who are fighting the good fight against this systematic discrimination and abuse. These are her friends. She defends them against the hypocrites of today's Left who insult these incredibly brave women. And, in her characteristic fearlessness, Chesler excoriates the modern Left who are willing to give Muslim crimes against women a pass.

One of my favorite passages is where Chesler responds to a faux-feminist who accuses her of racism for her criticism of the sexual assault of CBS News reporter Lara Logan in Cairo:

Where were you when I began marching for civil rights of African-americans in the early 160s and tutoring black children in Harlem? .... Read all or any of my articles about what life is like for women in the Middle East and in central Asia, read my studies about honor killings and about the work I’ve been doing on behalf of girls and women who have applied for asylum in the United States and who are in flight from being honor murdered.

These girls and women are not white women. They are all women of color. Do you believe that men of color have the right to treat “their” women barbarically? And that we are obliged to collaborate in sexism in order to be on the right side of racism?

Marcotte: Your accusation of “racism” constitutes a new and terribly fashionable McCarthyism, one that plagues our world. (Yes, I know: McCarthy was also before your time.)

Today, when real racists (think of the ethnic Arab Muslims in Sudan who have committed genocide and gender cleansing against the African Muslims and Christians in Darfur), real fascists, real totalitarians, real barbarians, want to brand, shame, delegitimize, and silence anyone who dares to expose their racism and misogyny, they simply call her a “racist.” The accusation functions as a leper’s bell around one’s neck. It is meant to keep others away, meant to warn people that if, they, too, say similar things or associate with a known “racist,” that they will also be branded as “racists.”

The accusation of “racism” is the new, politically correct version of the old accusation of “communism.” Today, those who level this accusation tend to be leftists, socialists, “progressives,” faux feminists, and real communists.

Most of the articles chosen for the book are relatively short pieces that Chesler published at sites like FrontPage, Pajamas Media, Israel National News or even the Huffington Post. She sparkles, though, when she is given the space to show her scholarship in the longer pieces she wrote for Middle East Forum and other journals, with footnotes.

I recently stumbled across a ridiculous book put out by a university press that claims that anyone who says that they support women's rights in Muslim countries is really an Islamophobe. Chesler proves this thesis wrong, decisively, by fearlessly standing up for Muslim women and defending Muslim reformers.

Islamic Gender Apartheid is a fearless defense of Western liberal values in the face of political correctness and modern witch hunting.

(Cross-posted at Scholars for Peace in the Middle East)

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Book review:The Anti-Israel Agenda

The Anti-Israel Agenda is a terrific summary of how the the world has adopted the irrational hate of the Jewish state as a legitimate political idea.

Edited by Alex Ryvchin, the Director of Public Affairs at the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the book has chapters written by the top experts in each field it covers.

NGO Monitor's Gerald Steinberg writes a brief but excellent history of how NGOs adopted the anti-Israel agenda, concentrating on the infamous Durban conference.

UN Watch's Hillel Neuer contributes a chapter on the UN's anti-Israel bias.

Michael Dickson and Max Samarov, of StandWithUs, discuss the hate of Israel on American campuses.

Seth Frantzman, op-ed editor at the Jerusalem Post, discusses media bias against Israel.

Colonel Richard Kemp discusses the libelous claims of war crimes against Israel, and Arsen Ostrovsky discusses attacks on Israel in social media.

There are also chapters on attacks on Israel in British trade unions, a great summary of the attitudes towards Israel from various Christian denominations with lots of material on Palestinian Christian supercessionism, and Professor Alan Dershowitz writes a conclusion on why the anti-Israel movement is wrong.

That's a formidable line-up, yet the book is less than 200 pages.

This is an essential introduction to the topic and taken as a whole it shows the scope of anti-Israel activities worldwide, from the micro to the macro levels. When seen as a whole, one can only conclude that the anti-Israel agenda is a pathology of hate that has little to do with Israel's own actions or supposed crimes.

While the book does not take the path to describe this is just a modern manifestation of antisemitism, it is difficult to come up with any other conclusion.

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Book review: Hello, Refugees! by Tuvia Tenenbom

Did I ever tell you about my dinner with Tuvia Tenenbom?

Tuvia is a bestselling author that I've reviewed twice here. He writes in a very entertaining style. I like Tuvia!

I was invited to a dinner party about a month ago hosted by Phyllis Chesler in her apartment. The food was great and the guests were even more so. One of them was Tuvia, who is a lot like Phyllis in important ways.

Phyllis is one of the pioneers of the modern women's movement. However, she has become disillusioned with her old friends who have now become anti-Zionist and anti-Israel. Phyllis, no fool, knows first hand how dangerous Islam is to feminism and how feminism and Zionism fit together naturally.

In other words, both Phyllis and Tuvia care little about political correctness. They care about the truth. That's why I like them.

Over a delicious dinner, Tuvia asks me why I didn't review his book about his travels through America. I tell him that if he sends me a review copy, I'd be happy to! I have a weak spot for free books, just like Tuvia has a weak spot for good food and honest people no matter who they are or what they believe.

During the course of the evening, Tuvia tries to wheedle out of me my real name. My anonymity is almost a shtick now, but I refuse to tell it to him. He keeps trying. He asks the server to pour me liquor. He asks me other questions to trap me to tell it to him.

I realize fairly soon, having read his work, that he won't give up until he gets the answer. I also realize that I am giving him my address to send the book to, so he can figure out my name anyway! So I tell him my name, knowing that he would like it. He does.

After I review his book, Tuvia emails me asking me if I'll review his brand new book, Hello Refugees!, about his travels throughout Germany to dig up information about the huge wave of Muslim refugees that were admitted there. I am skeptical about whether this fits into the general theme of the blog, but he writes back to me and says:

It’s about a people who not long ago were very busy cremating Jews and are now quite busy trying to impress the world that they the best human beings world-wide, so that can stand tall and tell the Jews what they really think of them. Is this not an Elder's cup of tea?

I agree it is my cup of tea and in no time the book arrives at my doorstep.

Tuvia writes in an entertaining way, first person and present tense. His style, both in writing and interviewing, is knowingly naive. But Tuvia is quite smart and he a skilled interviewer who can almost always get past the soundbites to find out what his subject really thinks. Sometimes he employs subterfuge to get there.

We are traveling along with him as he takes his rental car from city to city in Germany, speaking to any refugees he can find and sneaking in to their refugee camps/housing. In general, these places are guarded by good German guards who will not let in any Westerners or any reporters. Tuvia knows Arabic, and he convinces the refugees he meets to let him in so they can tell him their stories.

Tuvia genuinely likes his Arab friends, and he is genuinely horrified at the conditions of most of the places they are staying. The Germans are happy to allow these refugees into their country but didn't plan very well how they would be housed. So groups that have hated each other for centuries are thrown together, where in at least one place they spend the evenings knifing each other.

Nice!

Tenenbom also speaks to German officials, from the left and the right.

One question he asks every German he meets is, why are the Germans so much more welcoming of these refugees than any other European country? The answer, no matter whom he asks, is the same: Because of Adolf. The Germans do not want anyone to think that they are still Nazis and they want to show the world how progressive and open-minded and open-hearted they are so everyone will love them.

There is another fairly consistent pattern among the German leftists he meets. They like to bring up, often unprompted, how evil Israel is. They'll throw the word "Gaza" in the conversation even if they don't know Tenenbom is Jewish. They want the world to know not only that they are progressive and welcoming, but also that they are better than those Israeli Jews whose grandparents they gassed to death.

Another surprising bit comes when Tuvia interviews the most hated right-wing Germans, who are reviled as today's Nazis. Every single one says that they support giving asylum to people who are genuinely fleeing persecution and war, for example in Syria. They want to allow entry to people who would be killed in an instant if they returned to their homes.

The German Right is more liberal than many centrist Americans.

But this doesn't stop them from being spit upon, hounded, and regarded as evil incarnate by the good Germans who are so proud of how they have transcended the nastiness of the past and now treat their Muslims better than they treated their Jews. Sure they are still in camps, with inadequate medicine and plumbing and beds, but they aren't dead! And besides, the Jews are acting horribly in Israel now, so the Germans can feel good about themselves.

In fact, many of the refugees that Tuvia interviews are economic "refugees," looking for a better life in Europe. They aren't in danger. They want to marry blonde German women.

The good German liberals aren't so liberal as they are self-righteous. They don't really care about the condition of their Muslim guests, but they want everyone to know that they are really good people today, and not like their own ancestors. (East Germans don't have the same complex, Tuvia notes.)

Hello, Refugees! is an entertaining read. While it isn't about Jews and Israel, in many ways it explains a great deal about how Jews and Israelis are treated today. But most of all, as always, Tenenbom shows in his deceptively simple style that the truth is far more complex than any of the intellectuals can understand.

(If you didn't notice, I tried to mimic Tenenbom's writing style here. With mixed results.)

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Book Review: Tuvia Tenenbom's "The Lies They Tell"

As I read "The Lies They Tell," Tuvia Tenenbom's account of his visiting some 28 of the 50 United States over the course of about a year, I found myself thinking of two disparate classics of pop culture..

The first is Simon and Garfunkel's classic "America", a song about a road trip to find the real America.

The other is Columbo, the character played by the late Peter Falk, whose rumpled, seemingly distracted and always underestimated detective always gets to the bottom of the crime.

Tenenbom is Columbo, and he unearths a much more cynical take on Americans than Paul Simon's summary of them being "empty and aching."

As he did in his book "Catch the Jew" Tenenbom travels through a country - this time, the United States - and talks to everyone who catches his fancy to better understand what America is all about.

The results aren't pretty.

Tenenbom visits the "Red Zone" of Detroit, a neighborhood where black people shoot each other for little reason. Tenenbom notes, "There are countless Western humanitarian organizations, funded to the tune of billions, that send activists all over the world to improve the lot of the downtrodden. why aren't they here?" It turns out that Detroit has dozens of similar hopeless crime-riddled neighborhoods.

In a similar vein, Tenenbom visits the equally dismal Englewood district of Chicago that Barack Obama claims to have helped out so much while he was organizing communities. It is a hellhole where gangs rule and people are afraid. No one can name a single thing that improved since Obama claims he helped them so much. Police, heavily armed and armored, are aghast that Tenenbom is there, strongly urging him to leave as soon as possible.

But Tenenbom also visits vapid liberal intellectuals in Fargo, gun collectors and prisoners in Wisconsin, cowboys (or echoes of cowboys) in Montana, Seattle yuppies who pretend to care about the downtrodden but who ignore the huge number of homeless people on their streets, Native American reservations where no one knows anything about their own history as they spend their days in a drunken stupor, the Henry Ford Museum where even the helpful databases have been purged of the word "Jew" to whitewash his antisemitism, black churches where Tenenbom is transported by the music and beauty as he contrasts it to the black gangs who kill each other when they don't like how they are looked at.

Tuvia is, many times, taken by the beauty of the land even as he is frustrated, amused and angry at its citizens. He has poetic descriptions of glaciers in Alaska, canyons and mountains and geysers in the West and the prairie in Kansas.

Tenenbom also finds a lot of people with strong opinions on Jews and Israel, views that are not always in concert. A "Jewish Voice for Peace" member in Washington, DC calls him a "fucking filthy Jew" but won't repeat it on camera, claiming only to be pro-Palestinian. A Somalian in Seattle admires Hitler because he killed Jews. A Jewish mayor in Alaska admits, under Tenenbom's probing questions, that there is right-wing antisemitism in his state. Lots of people who say in the same breath that they care about climate change and Palestine. Very few who know the first thing about Palestine; complaining about "Jewish settlers in Gaza" or how "the State of Israel replaced the State of Palestine." American Jewish liberal synagogues more interested in demonizing Israel than supporting the Jewish state. Christian leaders who support Israel but say Jews will all go to hell.

He also finds many Jews who are against Israel and who are very, very concerned about black and racism, especially in the aftermath of the Dylann Roof murders. He cannot find any blacks who give a damn about antisemitism, though.

In the beginning of the book, Tenenbom speaks with outgoing ADL head Abe Foxman, who says that his own surveys find only 10-12% of Americans are antisemitic, but he knows that Tenenbom will find a higher percentage than that, because Tuvia knows how to make people lose their inhibitions. Not only is Foxman exactly correct, but the entire book shows how scared Americans are to say their real opinions on anything. The America that Tenenbom discovers is walking on eggshells, celebrating "freedom" and "liberty" but afraid to express themselves or to offend anyone.

Tenenbom makes a quick detour into Mexico where he sees many people who all look like they belong to the same tribe and who are comfortable in their own skin and their own land. The American melting pot, on the other hand, puts Americans on edge. As he puts it, "Through the process of forcibly dumping its citizens into a giant boiling pot of diversity and shaming them if they are not proud of it, America’s democracy succeeded in instilling fear in the minds of its citizens and effectively created a stench of segregation that reaches the highest heavens.....A telling effect of the forced melting pot is the majority of Americans who are afraid to share their political and religious views with strangers. In the Land of the Free, the Brave are quiet."

The book is filled with biting observations that do not discriminate between right and left, black and white. For example, he describes gentrification in Dallas:

The new residents, whites, are often self-described liberals or progressive liberals who tell anybody listening that they dedicate their lives to helping the poor blacks and Spanish of America. In reality, they are the very ones who drive the blacks and the Spanish into homelessness. To blind you, and themselves, to this reality, they frequent a local bar where a black guy plays the blues, and they feel really, really good and really, really liberal.

Or this description of American Judaism:

People who dedicate their resources to help others and to fight themselves are doomed to succeed on both fronts.

This book is well worth reading.

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Book review: The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture

The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture
Yoram Hazony
Cambridge University Press
2012

I was inspired to read this work as I responded to an article by David Hazony, Yoram's brother, on how to keep young Westerners interested in Judaism. Rather than concentrate on importing Israeli values into the West, which I believe is only a stopgap, I felt that there was a lot of intellectual appeal to Judaism that is outside the traditional Orthodox/yeshiva framework that has not been exploited, and I used this book as an example of how Judaism can be made relevant to the next generation.

But of course I needed to read it myself to make sure that what I said was true. And I am very glad I did.

Yoram Hazony's work here is a challenge to many basic beliefs and ideas that are widely held..

First of all, it is a challenge to traditional philosophy. In Hazony's telling, there has been a huge divide in Western culture between Scripture and classical philosophy and , the first being identified with "revelation" and the latter with "reason." For the last several centuries, "reason" has been elevated and "revelation" denigrated in academia.

Hazony demolishes this idea from two directions. He shows how some influential Greek philosophers framed their own ideas in terms of "revelation." But more importantly, he shows how Western thought has mistakenly conflated Christian Scripture, which indeed is revelation, and Hebrew Scripture, which Hazony argues is far more inclined towards reason. He gives many examples of how God punishes people for doing things that they were never explicitly commanded against, and rewarded for things they were never commanded to do, in stories such as Cain and Abel, the Tower of Babel, Sodom, Shifra and Pua and many others. In these cases it is expected by Hebrew Scripture that people would know what the right thing to do is by using only their own logic.

Hazony shows that Jeremiah holds his own against the Greek philosophers and indicates that the only reason he is not studied with the same attention as a philosopher is because of the idea that the entire Bible has nothing relevant to say about reason. He dedicates an entire chapter on Jeremiah's epistemology.

Hazony also writes a tour de force on the differences between how philosophers have understood truth up until recently and how the Biblical authors understood it, in a way that only now the Western world is catching up to. Very briefly, Hazony shows that from Aristotle onwards, "truth" has been defined as a quality of speech agrees with reality (correspondence theory.) But in Hebrew Scriptures "truth" is a radically different idea - "truth" applies not only to speech but to objects and ideas directly.

Hazony postulates that the Hebrew words normally translated as "truth" and "belief" (emet and emunah) are cognates of each other - something I am not yet convinced of - but he does make a strong case that both words in Hebrew Scripture are different aspects of trustworthiness or reliability. He masterfully hinges his proof that the Hebrew Scripture does not distinguish between word and object with the word "davar" which means both. "Devarim" (plural) are what can be true or false (sheker) , and the only way that a "davar" can be considered true is if it is found to be what it is supposed to be after time and circumstances allow one to see the big picture. (I hope this oversimplification is not inaccurate.)

Only in the last century has philosophy started ti question the idea of the independence of words and reality - yet Judaism always understood the two to be related if not identical.

Secondly, and in a related fashion, this book is a challenge to Christian thought. Hazony highlights the definition of "faith" created by early Church thinker Tertullian, who not only highlights the difference between faith and reason but exults in it, almost bragging that the basic ideas of Christianity are absurd to men of reason. "...You have discovered what they are will you find anything to be so foolish as believing in a God that has been born, and that of a virgin, and of a fleshly nature too, who wallowed in all the before-mentioned humiliations of nature? ... Other matters for shame find I none which can prove me to be shameless in a good sense, and foolish in a happy one, by my own contempt of shame. The Son of God was crucified; I am not ashamed because men must needs be ashamed of it. And the Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd. And He was buried, and rose again; the fact is certain, because it is impossible."

Jewish Scripture does not think like Tertullian. There is no catechism in the Hebrew Scripture that describes everything that must be believed, as Christianity has. On the contrary, the characters in the Hebrew Scripture must work hard to understand the ways of God and even the best of them, Moses, could only glimpse a tiny aspect of them. God's wisdom described in the Hebrew Scripture, or at least a great part of it, is attainable by man through thinking.

Finally, this work is a challenge to traditional Orthodox yeshiva-type thinking. Hazony creates what can only be called a "hiddush" (novelty) in claiming that the Hebrew Scripture makes a distinction between shepherds, who symbolize creativity and even disobedience, with farmers/city builders who symbolize adherence and kingdoms, which the Torah is suspicious of. God instructed man to toil in the fields in his curse after the sin of Adam and Eve, but Abel chose to be a shepherd instead - and God preferred his offering over Cain's. The shepherds, from Abel through Abraham and Moses and David, are not shy about challenging God - and God likes them and rewards them for it. This is not a point that one will be taught in a yeshiva or seminary, but Hazony buttresses his argument well.

Altogether, this is a very important and challenging work. yet it is only meant as an introduction and framework for what hopefully will be a much larger field of philosophy (and, Hazony emphasizes, political theory) based on Hebrew sources.

My point that I made in my earlier article mentioning this book stands: Judaism can offer a great deal of knowledge and wisdom to non-religious Jews. This is, I believe, the key to making Judaism relevant again - the source material from thousands of years ago is relevant today and yet that aspect of it is ignored by most non-religious Jews (and plenty of religious Jews as well.)

For those who like to think, I highly recommend this book.

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