Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: lumish

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Tuesday, May 22, 2018

Gazan Waves (Mike Lumish)

The Gazan border with Israel, May 2018

Everyone who cares about the Jewish people and the well-being of Israel is writing about the Hamas Embassy Riots.

We are doing so because Western media people are, yet again, yapping against Israel on cue from the vicious antisemitic ding-bats in Gaza like trained seals yelping for sardines.

We've known for so long about Western media bias against Israel, but this seems even worse than usual. They are honestly portraying a massive Hamas assault with upwards of 50,000 people against the Jews of Israel as an Israeli aggression against innocent Palestinian protestors and their children.

This means that CNN, MSNBC, the Daily News, and the New York Times are, yet again, responsible, in some measure, for violence against Jews around the world because they always portray Israel as the aggressor. They almost never provide any meaningful historical context or treat Palestinian-Arabs as anything beyond unruly children in need of a pat on the head and a chocolate chip cookie.

This lethal journalism -- as American historian from Boston University, Richard Landes, calls it --will result in international blowback toward Israel and toward Jewish people around the world, and that is the Gazan Wave. But this is nothing new and let us just hope that the coming flood is not among the worst.

An important exception is Matti Friedman in a recent article for, yes, the New York Times entitled, Falling for Hamas’s Split-Screen Fallacy. Friedman is notable among those of us who follow "the conflict" for breaking ground in his first-hand analysis of lethal western journalistic bias against Israel. In this most recent piece, he takes his essential thesis and applies it to the Hamas attack on the Israeli border. He writes:

Hamas understood that Western news outlets wanted a simple story about villains and victims and would stick to that script, whether because of ideological sympathy, coercion or ignorance. The press could be trusted to present dead human beings not as victims of the terrorist group that controls their lives, or of a tragic confluence of events, but of an unwarranted Israeli slaughter. The willingness of reporters to cooperate with that script gave Hamas the incentive to keep using it.

Which is to say, yet again the mainstream media outlets are slanting the story, much to my ongoing astonishment, in Hamas' favor. Let us not forget that Hamas is the very same organization that calls for the genocide of the Jews in its charter through this venerable hadith.

The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews."

Whatever the heinous gibberish above may mean to contemporary jihadis, we must make Westerners understand that the Gazan Arabs who sought to murder Jews over the last several weeks were not "demonstrators." They were not "protestors." And they were certainly not unarmed.

These were not college students sleeping in Lincoln Park in Chicago, 1968, in opposition to the war in Vietnam during the Democratic National Convention. Many of these violent rioters were actually paid by Hamas according to the extent of their injuries and the families of the martyrs received thousands of dollars. They carried knives, hand-axes, meat cleavers, guns, children, and Molotov cocktails. They also flew kites with Nazi swastikas attached to incendiary devices for the purpose of burning fields and crops and houses, if not people.

Hamas even provided instructions on where the weak points of the barrier are, where the nearest Jewish villages are in reference to those weak points, and how to carry out the murder and kidnappings of Jewish civilians.

So, yes, the IDF was very restrained given the fact that these were people coming to kill their friends and families. But how would China react under similar circumstances, if crazed enemies were coming to kill Chinese babies? How would Russians react? I will tell you one thing, if Texans saw 50,000 Mexicans on the border of Laredo with guns and machetes and Molotov cocktails, shooting at the cops, and thousands of burning tires darkening the skies as they were screaming for the blood of American children... they would have shot them down like dogs.

There would not have been 60 dead. There would have been at least 600 dead, if not many more.

{Of course, Mexicans would never have brought their own children into a conflict with armed Texans.}

Nonetheless, Hamas wanted dead Arabs to parade before anti-Zionist cameras for the purpose of delegitimizing Israel and stoking hatred toward Jews and they got those dead Arabs, including children, and their families were paid for this atrocity. Nonetheless, this is causing well-meaning people throughout the world to honestly believe that Israel assaulted unarmed Arab men, women, and children. And why should they not believe it after so many decades of mainstream media suggestion of Jewish persecution of the "indigenous" Arabs and centuries of blood-libels and hate?

It just fits so neatly into the "Palestinian narrative" of unending victimhood, even as they ruin their own societies, sacrifice their own children on an Aztec altar of blood, and seek the genocide of my brothers and sisters.

But what is truly joyous at this moment, aside from the swirling chaos, is the fact that these insidious media outlets did their very best to ruin what should have been a beautiful moment. After 2,000 years of diaspora, a major world power, the United States, finally recognized Yerushalayim as the capital city of the Jewish people.

That, as my friend Avi Abelow would say, is truly a miracle.

Nonetheless, Israel is, yet again, subject to a rising wave of world hatred stoked by the media who almost always describe Jewish self-defense as a form of aggression.

But the Gazan waves of hatred wash across all Jews who care about Israel, wherever we live in the world.

It even splashes onto the beaches of northern California.

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.

Ruth Wisse and the Israeli "Messy House" Metaphor (Michael Lumish)

Ruth Wisse
Professor of Yiddish Literature, Havard

Israel has been in for vicious criticism recently over its response to the violent Arab March of Return.

Hamas sent about 30,000 soldiers, and families of soldiers, to challenge the integrity of the fence between Israel and Gaza. They have also burned thousands of tires near that fence creating a local environmental catastrophe.

About seventeen people were killed in the first wave of this little adventure-slash-picnic and, according to some sources, about seven hundred people were shot by the IDF.

{This statistic, by the way, is difficult to believe. If the IDF shot up over seven hundred people there would definitely be more than seventeen, or so, dead.}

Simultaneously, Israelis are in an uproar over their version of the Middle East / African immigration crisis.

There are about 38,000 illegal immigrants from Africa in the country who have created their own little ghetto in south Tel Aviv. Some are calling that neighborhood "Little Africa." The high-pitched, table-pounding debate within Israel is about just what to do with these people.

The right-wing wants them deported because they are illegal immigrants and the left-wing wants them to move in with your grandmother.

In recent months it looked as if the Netanyahu government might deport them back to Africa, but a deal was struck through the offices of the United Nations wherein Western countries would take in half of those illegal immigrants and Israel would assimilate the other half. My sense is that this was a compromise that most on both sides of the argument could live with.

Needless to say, Netanyahu canceled the deal and now no one is happy. The left-wing in Israel is screaming from the rafters that this is cruel because all refugees deserve - as a friend of mine put it -"to have their specific, individual case heard by a fair system of refugee determination."

Meanwhile the right-wing is upset because of Netanyahu's unreliability and flip-flop-o'mania.

As the criticism of Israel begins to ramp-up in this current developing season of Israel Hatred, it is important to keep in mind some very wise words from Harvard Professor of Yiddish literature Ruth Wisse who, I assume, will forgive me for paraphrasing.

In a lecture a few years ago she used a metaphor to criticize the friendly critics of Israel who just wish that Israel was a more moral country. These are the kind of people who genuinely regret that Israel fails to be a Light Unto the Nations and who champion Tikkun Olam.

Professor Wisse asks us to consider the following scenario:

Let us imagine that you own a house in a particular neighborhood and one day a friendly neighbor dropped by for a beer and chit-chat on a hot summer Sunday afternoon. This is a guy who lives just down the street, who you know by first name, and who you've been more-or-less friendly with for years.

Suppose this neighbor suggested, as you're settin' on the porch, that you really needed to clean up your yard and house a bit because things are getting a little messy. He's talking as a friend to a friend and in an entirely non-hostile manner. You know, the yard needs a little weed-whacking and there is still that broken window in the second bedroom that must be replaced.

But let's say that, in truth, your house is the best-kept house in the neighborhood. The houses surrounding your house and those nearby are obnoxious wrecks. Yards are entirely overgrown like jungles. Roofs are caving in.

Neighbor kids are running around with slingshots, but no pants.

And let's say that you've always wanted to live peaceably with these neighbors, yet they throw rocks through your windows and threaten violence and death upon your family.

What would you think of your friend's advice to trim your weeds under those circumstances?

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.

Sarah Tuttle-Singer and the "Palestinian Narrative" (Michael Lumish)

I find the Jewish Indigeneity Question fascinating.

I recently published an article thanking native American thinker and activist, Ryan Bellerose for advancing the importance of Israel to the Jewish people from an indigenous rights perspective.

Sarah Tuttle-Singer is the New Media editor for the Times of Israel (TOI) and is no fan of Bellerose and Bellerose is no fan of Tuttle-Singer.

That much is certain.

{When these two cross paths they circle one another like a cat facing a pit bull.}

I happen to be - for the moment at least - friendly with both.

Tuttle-Singer recently made Aliyah from Los Angeles and is now raising two children in the Old City. She has taken some pretty terrific photographs from around Jerusalem and seems to have thrown herself into the wilds of Israel with great joyousness.

She is also the author of the recently published book, Jerusalem, Drawn and Quartered: A Year Spent Living in the Christian, Muslim, Armenian, and Jewish Quarters of Old Jerusalem.

This last Sunday, March 11, Tuttle-Singer, in a Facebook post, linked to her recent piece entitled, On Passover, I’ll pour out wine for Mahmoud, too.

It is an interesting piece.

She describes a dinner that she enjoyed with Muslim friends in the Arab Quarter of the Old City and notes:

Leila doesn’t speak any Hebrew, but Fadi can but he won’t.

“My Hebrew is actually good,” he told me that night we met. “But it’s the principle of the thing.”

The principle of the thing.

What troubles me is that this does not trouble Tuttle-Singer.

She writes:

“I won’t shake your hand,” he tells me when Fadi introduces us. “It isn’t because you’re a Jew or an Israeli, so don’t be offended. I won’t shake your hand because you are a woman – because I am a Muslim man, and we do not shake hands with women that are not our closest relatives or our wives. You know this custom, no? You have it in your own religion.”

We do. And over the years of living here in Israel, I’ve learned when it’s ok to shake hands and when it isn’t.

As a New Yorker and a Californian, I am happy to say that I have never learned any such thing.

As a liberal, I do not condescend to such prejudices.

This insult came from the owner of the restaurant, presumably knowing that he was speaking with a Jewish media person, who also told her with great earnestness:

We are not killers, we are not thieves. We don’t want to hurt you. But we do have a story and that story is our truth, and that story and that truth is we were here first, and you took our land and you kicked us out of our houses and we are yearning to return. (My emphasis.)

In the Facebook thread beneath her link to that post I wrote:

Well, thankfully, history as a field of knowledge does not deal in personal truths. There is no "our truth" or "it is true for me."

Sarah responded with an elegant, "Really?"

Yes, my friend, really.

A Historiographical Snippet

History as a field of knowledge resides at the crux of the Humanities and the Social Sciences and is, thus by necessity, interpretive.

This is why there is always a significant element of subjectivity within even the most scrupulously professional historical narratives. Nonetheless, for a narrative to be a historical narrative it must be grounded in something that closely resembles the truth of the past.

We do not simply get to make up our own "narratives" as the Palestinian-Arab leadership has done, and then insist that ahistorical nonsense be taken seriously.

No field of knowledge works in such a manner because the lights would not go on and the aeroplanes would never fly.

For example, I cannot claim that Richard Nixon was the President of the United States during World War II and then demand that people respect my narrative.

It is for this very same reason that Mahmoud Abbas should not stand up before the UN Security Council, and be taken seriously, as he did on February 20, 2018, and claim that Palestinian-Arabs “are the descendants of the Canaanites that lived in Palestine 5,000 years ago.”

People can say whatever they want, but we are under no obligation to take poisonous nonsense seriously and we shouldn't.

The Discussion

In response, Tuttle-Singer claimed, "narrative can determine whether there is peace or whether there isn't."

I get her point, I suppose, but I must wonder what kind of stable and lasting peace can the Jewish people hope for if that peace is grounded in falsehoods that erase Jewish history?

Furthermore, the notion that the Jewish people stole the land from the "indigenous" Arab population is so obviously false as to hardly need refutation.

Part of what made this online exchange interesting, however, was that a gentleman with significant historical credentials took the lead on Tuttle-Singer's side of the discussion. He reminded me that the winners write the history books - which, by the way, is no longer the case in the West - and that all history is told from personal perspectives and ideological perspectives and that "Jewish history is a perfect example for a mix of historical fact - and religious-infused fiction."

I then asked this gentleman:

Does any group of people have a greater claim to indigeneity to the land between the River and the Sea than do the Jewish people?

His response is worth quoting in full:

I never participated in the silly game of "who was here first?" and "who was here longer?" Because - independent of who plays it - at its core, it is never an attempt to prove one's own roots in this soil. It is always an attempt to prove that the "other" has less rights, less roots, should be ignored, needs to leave - or at least accept the rule of his adversary. The same applies to the even sillier game of "whose side can claim to be a real people and whose side is an invented people."

What is the desired end-result of these debates? That Mohammed, whose family has been living here for 500 or 1000 years, gets the idea that Jews had a temple around 2000 years ago - and another one before that - and that he and his fellow Palestinians agree that they are not really Palestinians, hand you the keys to the Temple Mount and proceed to pack their bags and leave these parts?

What is it for the other side? That David, whose family has been dreaming of returning to the Holy Land for 2000 years will agree that he is not really Jewish, but a colonizing occupier, that his rights here have expired long ago - and then proceed to move back wherever his parents of grandparents came from?

Honestly, it is depressingly sad to see so many intelligent minds, who could spend their time improving this country that has so many other problems - wasting it on these decade-old silly debates and attempts to win an argument.

The simple fact is that both sides feel a deep connection to this land and both sides have a right to feel it. So all those intelligent minds should get busy and develop concepts for peaceful coexistence. Those who do - and there are people here who have worked on that for decades despite all the frustrations - have my respect. The others - well - I (and I think Sarah does the same) am trying to convince them to stop being part of the problem - and become part of the solution.

Indigeneity, of course, is not about "the silly game of 'who was here first?'"

Indigeneity refers to the roots of a culture and the people who comprise that culture in all of its branches... even including New York Jews who live in California.

The Jewish people are the indigenous people to the Land of Israel because that is the place where our ancestors forged the beginnings of a multivariant culture and cultivated the Hebrew language and the Jewish religion and those other aspects that bring us together as one.

From a practical standpoint, however, this scholar asked an important question:

What is the desired end-result of these debates?

The desired result cannot be to convince Arabs that they should respect Israel as the indigenous homeland of the Jewish people.

I agree, that this is simply not going to happen... history or no history, because the "Palestinian narrative" will not permit.

However, we can stop equivocating in the face of the enemies of the Jewish people, and their congresses and parliaments and advocates, yes, even restauranteurs.

The truth, of course, is that the "Palestinian narrative" of pristine victimhood is nonsense.

The Jewish people are a people who remain under siege within the very home of our ancestry.

What we can do is bang that truth into the skulls of the European Union, the United Nations, the Democratic Party, and, at long last, the US Department of State.

Until we stand up for ourselves, no one else is going to do so.

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.

Acknowledging Ryan Bellerose (Michael Lumish)

Ryan Bellerose is a friend of the pro-Jewish / pro-Israel community who, like many of us, has grown increasingly skeptical of the two-state solution.

I met the guy online when he arrived at Israel Thrives a couple of years ago for the purpose of kicking the holy crap out of one of my regulars.

Bellerose is a Métis from the Paddle Prairie settlement of northern Alberta - I want to stress northern Alberta - and a fighter for the rights and well-being of indigenous peoples, including the Jewish people.

This makes him highly unusual among indigenous rights activists because he is with the very few who recognize Jewish indigenous rights. Jewish people, for progressive-left internal political reasons, have been left out of the Indigenous Rights Club.

Instead, we are considered white, imperialist, racist, militaristic, colonialist, inhumane, apartheid-lovers.

In a recent article for Tablet, Bellerose writes:

Now, to understand indigeneity, one must also understand indigenous people, how we see ourselves, and how we see the world. At its simplest, indigenous status stems from the genesis of a culture, language, and traditions in conjunction with its connections to an ancestral land, most commonly derived from ties to pre-colonial peoples. Once a people have such a cultural, linguistic, and spiritual genesis as well as a coalescence as a people, they are generally acknowledged as an indigenous people.

Bellerose's discussion of indigeneity is grounded in a 1981 report to the United Nations Economic and Social Council written by anthropologist José Martínez Cobo.

Bellerose, it should also be understood, stands up on the street as well as in the pages of Tablet.

I very much wish that he had been around during the vigils for Edward Joffe and Leon Kanner.

Reem Assil, of Reem's antisemitic restaurant, for reasons that defy the moral imagination, venerates the genocidal Jew murderer, Rasmea Odeh. Furthermore, she is now actually being rewarded for that hatred.

The New York Times recently published a piece concerning Assil's joint by Rebecca Flint Marx entitled, An Arab Bakery in Oakland full of California Love.

Full of California Love.

One of the hysterical things about this article is that Marx made a correction in the body of the text shortly after it was published reading:

In 1970, Ms. Odeh was convicted by Israeli courts for her role in the murder of two students.

So, the Times acknowledges that Odeh is a convicted murderer, yet the headline still reads, An Arab Bakery in Oakland full of California Love.

The only conclusion that I can come to is that the New York Times thinks that you're a bunch of idiots.

Furthermore, Justin Phillips of the San Francisco Chronicle tells us that Reem Assil continues meteoric rise with new fine-dining restaurant at Jack London Square.

Oh, joy.

{But I digress.}

The reason that Bellerose matters is because he encourages a widening of our understanding of the conflict.

By rightfully insisting upon the indigeneity of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel he forces an expansion of the conversation both geographically and historically.

This is not a fight merely between Israelis and Arabs residing within the Jewish home. This is a fight between the indigenous Jewish population and their former Arab and Muslim conquerors who have yet to give up on reinstating theo-political domination. This makes it a struggle between the tiny Jewish minority in the Middle East and the far larger Arab and Muslim populations that surround them.

That is the obvious implication of insisting upon Jewish indigeneity because the very idea of Jewish indigeneity to the Land of Israel contradicts Arab and Muslim imperial ambitions within the Jewish home.

It is inescapable.

Another obvious implication is that this is not merely a modern conflict. History did not begin in 1948, nor 1967.

Anyone with even a glancing understanding of the history of the region acknowledges that between the time of Muhammad until the failure of the Ottoman Empire during World War I, Jewish people - and other such dhimmi-sorts - lived as second and third-class non-citizens.

The late professor Martin Gilbert described dhimmi status under Muslim rule as follows:

There could be no building of new synagogues or churches. Dhimmis could not ride horses, but only donkeys; they could not use saddles, but only ride sidesaddle. Further, they could not employ a Muslim. Jews and Christians alike had to wear special hats, cloaks and shoes to mark them out from Muslims. They were even obliged to carry signs on their clothing or to wear types and colors of clothing that would indicate they were not Muslims, while at the same time avoid clothing that had any association with Mohammed and Islam. Most notably, green clothing was forbidden...

Other aspects of dhimmi existence were that Jews - and also Christians - were not to be given Muslim names, were not to prevent anyone from converting to Islam, and were not to be allowed tombs that were higher than those of Muslims. Men could enter public bathhouses only when they wore a special sign around their neck distinguishing them from Muslims, while women could not bathe with Muslim women and had to use separate bathhouses instead. Sexual relations with a Muslim woman were forbidden, as was cursing the Prophet in public - an offense punishable by death.

Under dhimmi rules as they evolved, neither Jews nor Christians could carry guns, build new places of worship or repair old ones without permission,or build any place of worship that was higher than a mosque. A non-Muslim could not inherit anything from a Muslim. A non-Muslim man could not marry a Muslim woman, although a Muslim man could marry a Christian or a Jewish woman.

.

Martin Gilbert, In Ishmael's House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2010) 32 - 33.

The conflict is greater in scope both geographically and historically then most people realize and that is particularly true of progressive-left enemies to the Jewish people who see the conflict as a result of twentieth-century "Zionist" aggression.

By insisting upon the indigeneity of the Jewish people to Israel, Bellerose forces us to rethink dominant formulations around the conflict in two fundamental ways.

1) The Jews are the colonized indigenous population who managed to free themselves from thirteen centuries under the boot of Arab and Muslim imperialism.

2) This is not a conflict between "Zionists" or Israelis versus Palestinian-Arabs. What we are seeing, rather, is the current moment in the long Arab and Muslim war against Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East grounded in Koranic malice.

The concept of indigeneity is key and while Bellerose knows it, most Jews do not.

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.

"The glorification of terror and violence in our community" (Michael Lumish)

Matthew Finkelstein, in hat, and Susan George (right) from Vallejo,
and other members of Oakland United Against Hate,
protest outside of Reem's California bakery in Oakland, Calif., on Sunday, January 28, 2018.
They are protesting a mural of Rasmea Odeh located inside of the bakery.
(Nhat V. Meyer/Bay Area News Group)

Last Sunday, on the afternoon of January 28, about fifty people arrived at the Fruitvale BART Station in Oakland, California, for the purpose of staring at one another across a notoriously ugly, racially-grounded, political divide.

The problem revolves around Reem's Cafe...or, as I like to think of it, Reem Assil's Racist Flatbread and Terror Joint.

For emotional reasons of her own, political activist Reem Assil has taken it upon herself to introduce Jew hatred into the Oakland culinary scene by featuring a floor-to-ceiling image of anti-Jewish murderer, Rasmea Odeh in her little bakery/cafe near a major Bay Area transportation hub.

Odeh, along with her partner, Aisha Odeh and their friends within the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), killed 21-year-old Leon Kanner of Netanya, Israel, and 22-year-old Eddie Joffe on February 21, 1969, in a Jerusalem grocery.

Both were college students.

I find it profoundly disconcerting that within living memory of the Shoah - the genocide of the Jews - the very city that I live in, a city that proudly claims itself against race hate is perfectly comfortable... with race hate.

What the City of Oakland is showing the rest of the United States is that urinating on Jews is just fine and that honoring the murderers of innocent Jews in a public manner is a righteous matter of "social justice."

So on that perfectly beautiful Sunday afternoon those who despise Israel sat with Reem Assil in the cafe - in a closed, RSVP-Only event - and discussed with professor Sunaina Maira (UC Davis), author of Boycott!: The Academy and Justice for Palestine, how best to eliminate Jewish self-determination and self-defense from the world stage.

Jewish people and friends of Jewish people - maybe twenty of us total - stood outside in the courtyard beside the leadership of Faith Meltzer, Susan George, and Matthew Finkelstein.

Faith Meltzer and Lara Kiswani

In a video for the East Bay Times under an article entitled, Palestinian mural protesters, bakery backers face off in Oakland, reporter George Kelly gives his readership clips of statements by pro-Jewish / pro-Israel advocate Faith Meltzer, for Oakland Unified Against Hate, and anti-Zionist activist Lara Kiswani who writes for the anti-Zionist online journal, Electronic Intifada.

George Kelly: Did the group begin in response to Reem's opening?

Faith Meltzer: Only in response to the mural. Reem's has had a presence in the farmers' market. My family has actually eaten there. And it is only since this mural of Rasmea Odeh that we realized that this was something that we needed to mobilize against because this is the glorification of terror and violence in our community. (My emphasis.)

Lara Kiswani: Today there is an event here that is put on by Sunaina Maira who published a book through the University of California about the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement... And so, because of the event and the subject matter is about BDS, boycott, divestment, and sanctions, Israel, and that is we are being critical of apartheid and the colonialist state of Israel at this time, the demonstrators have called for another protest today.

Kiswani also refers to the Jewish people and friends of Jewish people who object to the mural of a Jew murderer as "racist."

The fundamental difference between Meltzer and Kiswani - aside from the fact that Meltzer cares about the well-being of the tiny Jewish minority around the world and Kiswani obviously does not - is that Meltzer wants to organize against the murder and hatred of Jewish people while Kiswani, despite her best intentions, promotes it.

Kiswani favors opposing Israel (i.e., the Jewish people) by any means necessary.

She calls us apartheid-enthusiasts and colonialists on the very land of our own heritage, the very land where Jewish identity was forged.

This would be like calling indigenous Métis activist Ryan Bellerose a colonist in Alberta.

George and Finkelstein Demonstrate the Failure of Liberalism
within Progressive-Left anti-Zionism

While Meltzer stood before the press directly prior to the vigil/protest at Reem's, Susan George and Matthew Finkelstein endeavored to talk to Reem's anti-liberal supporters.

The most important moment in this entire event came when Finkelstein and George requested that those who faced us actually speak with us.

They wanted to know just why it is that as progressives and Democrats and alleged liberals they were standing up for a retail establishment that venerates the murdering of Jewish people?

We can unpack that question... we can put it into the nicest possible terms... but we can only do so through dialogue and dialogue is the very foundation of Enlightenment liberalism.

But make no mistake, as recent polling definitively shows, the progressive-left and the Democratic Party honestly believes that the Jews in the Middle East deserve a good ass-kicking.

Look at these numbers:

According to 2018 Pew polling, 79 percent of Republicans sympathize more with Israel - by which they essentially mean the Jews - than they do with the Palestinian-Arabs.

Only 27 percent of Democrats do so.

That is a tough fact, but it is a fact that must be acknowledged.

Another fact that must be acknowledged is that the progressive-left, in the United States, is straying well beyond liberalism.

You cannot be a liberal if you refuse to engage in discourse and what Susan George and Matthew Finkelstein showed us is that the other side refuses to engage in honest dialogue.

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.

Oakland Stands United With Hate (Michael Lumish)

A poster in my neighborhood

As many of you know, Reem's bakery at the Fruitvale BART Station in Oakland, California - the very spot where Oscar Grant was famously shot dead by police in the early hours of New Year's Day, 2009, touching off local riots - continues to display a mural of Rasmea Odeh, one of the murderers of college students Edward Joffe and Leon Kanner in Jerusalem in 1969.

On Sunday, January 28, 2018 - perhaps as you read this - a few pro-Israel / pro-Jewish people will stand outside of this anti-Israel / anti-Jewish politicized bakery that all Jewish people must pass by if we wish to get onto the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART) on our way into San Francisco or anywhere around the Bay Area.

Whenever I pass through those turnstiles, which is fairly often, it puts my mind to nothing so much as 1930s Berlin.

Can you imagine what it is like for any Jewish person in the SF Bay Area to have to walk past a restaurant that publicly celebrates the murder of your own people if you simply wish to take public transportation? And what is even worse is that, in this part of the political universe, if you so much as dare to object you are smeared as a racist and an Islamophobe and a sexist and a transphobe and God Knows What All.

I recently received this note in an email from friends:

COME TO THE VIGIL: Reems Bakery: Sunday, January 28, Reems Bakery Will be Hosting a Book Signing Promoting Academic Boycotts Against Israel. - San Francisco Voice For Israel

ACTION: Please come and join our vigil against this book signing.

In one of the most egregious examples in recent memory of the normalization of anti-Semitism and violence in our community, Reem Assil has decorated her Oakland bakery with a floor to ceiling mural honoring convicted terrorist Rasmea Odeh, who murdered 2 and wounded 9 others when a bomb she placed in a Jerusalem grocery store exploded. On Sunday January 28, the bakery will be hosting a book signing promoting academic boycotts against Israel.

In response, there will be a vigil in front of the bakery, exposing the hate and intolerance, not only of the BDS movement, but of Reem's Bakery.

We'll be gathering at 3:30, Sunday January 28 3301 E 12th St #133, Oakland. Reem's bakery is steps away from Fruitvale BART. Please consider joining us, and pass this information on to any one you think might be interested in coming

Obviously, I am not expecting you guys to leap from your chairs and run down to Fruitvale BART.

I am just letting you know that there are still a few people who give a damn.

StandWithUs did, in fact, stand with us.

But where are the synagogues and other local pro-Jewish / pro-Israel organizations?

And how is it that the city of Oakland does not seem to care one way or the other?

I feel reasonably sure that if Reem's was "Ariel Sharon's Joint and Whiskey Bar" and featured a worshipful mural of Baruch Goldstein the people of Oakland would have arisen as one and shut that place down in a New York Minute with the full support of city government.

As always, it is the blatant hypocrisy that is too much to take.

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The Many Faces of the Sexy Hijabi (Michael Lumish)

An American Hijabi

as given to us by Madison Avenue (2017)

The sexy hijabi is new to American popular culture.

Due to the rise of contemporary political Islam, and mass Muslim immigration into the West, the hijab is now a highly-charged cultural symbol.

For many American and western Muslim women, it is simply a matter of ethnic identity and faith. In that way, it is not so different than a Jew wearing a kippa or a Shield of David pendant on a silver chain.

Among hip and hypocritical, white, western-progressives, such as Linda Sarsour, the hijab represents freedom, because it represents resistance to the wrong kind of white people.

For Iranian feminists, on the other hand - those who are facing true totalitarianism and who are putting their lives on the line in the face of actual oppression - the hijab represents the very misery that western-feminists see as benign inclusivity.

Jewish people - given our history under centuries of Arab and Muslim oppression - sometimes think of the hijab as a symbol of hatred toward us and the submission of women.

But for Madison Avenue, it is just pure gold.

If you Google Image the word "hijab" - at least on my laptop, on this day - the first page is filled with pictures of beautiful women, such as the sexy American hijabi on the upper left of your screen.

{Now that is one hot hijabi mama.}

The Nike Hijabi

There is also the Nike Hijab... "a performance hijab for Muslim women athletes"... for when you want to go running in Central Park or the Golden Gate Park Panhandle.

The inspiration for the Nike Hijab came from US fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad who is the first Muslim American woman to wear the traditional patriarchal head-covering during Olympic tournament play and who earned a bronze medal for Team USA.

She is also the inspiration for the Hijabi Barbie doll as Christine Hauser informs us in the New York Times.

This is interesting from a human rights standpoint because the hijab, whatever else it may be, is a symbol of oppression to millions of women around the world.

The reason that women throughout Iran are waving their hijabs before western cameras is in the hope that European and American and Australian feminists will stand up with them against a sexist, theocratic regime.

Iranian women remove their hijabs in defiance

But the western-left simply does not see it that way because western-feminists do not care about non-western patriarchy.

What they seem to care about are "pussy hats" and safe spaces and trigger warnings and gender-neutral pronouns.

So, no such luck, Iranian women.

Western women, particularly western feminists, do not stand with you.

That is, western-feminism is no longer about feminism at all, nor about universal human rights.

In the 1990s, the feminist-left stood up against the Taliban in Afghanistan, but those days are long gone.

During the Women's March, from last year, directly after the election of Donald Trump, American women donned the hijab as a symbol of solidarity with their Muslim sisters throughout the world.

Perhaps the foremost symbol of that march is an image of a young woman, possibly based on Linda Sarsour, in a hijab comprised of stars and stripes.

Women's March Poster (2017)

The basic, most sincere idea behind those who waved that USA hijabi symbol is that all Americans are Americans.

The hijab can easily be thought of us representing the American ideal of inclusivity.

The United States is a nation of nations.

And the most forward-thinking of us - the most progressive of us - want greater inclusivity because, unless we are indigenous to the Americas, all of our ancestors came from elsewhere.

This is Basic USA Thinking 101.

But what does it mean when, in the name of inclusivity and diversity, western-feminists embrace a symbol like the hijab which Iranian women are ridding themselves of as an act of defiance against an oppressive and patriarchal system?

How is it that the western-left - which tells the world that it stands for social justice and universal human rights - embraces a symbol that represents the opposite of those ideals?

In the United States many women who don the hijab, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, usually do so as a matter of choice. For many devout Muslim American women, the hijab is not so much about submitting to a decrepit theocratic-patriarchal system as it is about human modesty and respect for the deity. Some Jewish women, after all, wear headdresses and for much the same reasons.

Nonetheless, the hijab has now become a fashionable symbol that stands at a cultural crossroad between the American ethos of ethnic inclusivity and the illiberal ethos of female oppression as generated by the Islamic faith.

Thus the sexy hijabi has many faces.

She is simultaneously an image of western openness to people from other cultures while also representing, and thereby promoting, the oppression of women within an Islamic context.

Furthermore, of course, for many people, the hijab represents a symbol not only of oppression of Muslim women but also of the oppression of Jews under thirteen centuries of Arab and Muslim imperial rule in the Middle East from the time of Muhammad until the demise of the Ottoman Empire during World War I.

The hijab as a symbol of oppression is concretized for Jewish people when hijabis screech "Alahu Akbar!" at Jewish people visiting the Temple Mount for the purpose of driving us away.

But the hijab as a contradictory and even malicious symbol in western cultural politics is perhaps no more on display than it is in the current Revlon kerfuffle.

Revlon, of course, is a well-known western corporation that sells makeup and other beauty and skin-care products.

The company recently offered the semi-hip American blogger Amani Al-Khatahtbeh their "Changemaker Award" - whatever that is, exactly - but the hijabi hipster refused the honor due to the fact that Revlon also employs Israeli actress Gal Gadot, of Wonder Woman fame, as a corporate spokesmodel.

Gal Gadot, of course, is a Jewish Israeli who served in the IDF, as do almost all Jewish Israeli kids, because their Arab neighbors force them to do so. Unlike western college students, if young Jewish Israelis wish to see their future children survive they must defend themselves and their families and their country in national service... and that goes for Wonder Woman as much as it goes for any other Jewish Israeli girl.

Unlike their soft and spoiled and obnoxious college-aged western critics, Jewish Israeli kids have to put their necks on the line in defense of their families and friends.

When I was growing up among the pugnacious, skateboarding, late twentieth-century East Coast American middle-class kids in our Keds and Adidas, we called antisemitism racism and the American left hated it.

Now it's called cool and they love it.

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.