Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, September 11, 2018

09/11 Links: UNRWA’s Bloated Farce; Labour MPs are conferring legitimacy on anti-Semitism; PLO seethes over planned US closure of Washington office

From Ian:

According to the Times of Israel, “A Republican senator introduced a bill Thursday that would require the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) to change its definition of what constitutes a Palestinian refugee in order to receive future US assistance.” The Trump administration wants UNRWA, corrupt and inefficient, to be cut down to size. They want “Palestinian” refugees to be limited to those who really are refugees, that is, people who left Mandatory Palestine, or Israel, almost 70 years ago. They want “Palestinian refugees” to be defined the same way all other refugees have been defined: as people who have fled a particular territory or country, which does not include their descendants. How many “Palestinians” who left Palestine/Israel between 1947 and 1949 are alive today? Estimates range from 20,000 to 40,000. Compare that with the five million “Palestinian refugees” that UNRWA now claims are eligible for its services. But it is UNRWA that is wrong.

One further point that deserves to be made is that even those Arabs who left Palestine/Israel from 1947 to 1949 are not exactly “refugees” in the full meaning of the term. They did not flee persecution at the hands of Israelis. There was no persecution. Some left before, or during, the hostilities, to get out of the way of battles they assumed the Arabs would win, in the belief that they could soon return. Others left after the Arab defeat, for they assumed — wrongly — that the victorious Jews would treat them as the Arabs would have treated the Jews had they won. Again, there was no forcing them out. They did not flee. They chose to leave. If this history were to be taken into account, there would be no “Palestinian” refugees in the proper sense of the term.

UNRWA is a completely corrupt organization. It has been grossly overstaffed, mainly by extravagantly-paid “Palestinians.” The more UNRWA inflates its rolls with the names of millions of descendants of refugees, described and treated as refugees themselves, and the more dead people it keeps on those rolls, the more aid UNRWA can request from its donors. Who are those donors? Ambassador Nikki Haley has pointed out that the fabulously rich Gulf Arabs give very little to support the “Palestinian refugees.” Of the top fourteen contributors to UNRWA, only one — Saudi Arabia — is an Arab country. All the rest are in Europe, save for the United States, which has been the most generous contributor, by far, to UNRWA.

The Americans have now done something the Arabs find outrageous and, until now, unthinkable. They have decided to refuse to continue accepting, much less, bankrolling, this state of affairs. They want exactly one thing: for the world to define a “Palestinian refugee” as someone who left Mandatory Palestine, or Israel, between 1947 and 1949, and to stop pretending that the millions of descendants of those people are “Palestinian refugees” themselves. After the billions that the United States has poured into UNRWA, it has both the right and the duty to put an end to funding that bloated farce. It is willing to help UNRWA minister to the needs of the 20,000-30,000 Arab refugees still living, but not to those five million descendants. If UNRWA refuses to agree, let it go its own way. Our contribution, and ideally that of our Western allies as well, should at that point be reduced to zero.

Read the peerless Howard Jacobson's speech about Jeremy Corbyn and antisemitism

Something tells me you're expecting me to call Jeremy Corbyn an antisemite. There's been a bit about it in the press, and I... well, you know...

But I'm not going to call him anything. He says he isn't an antisemite, Hamas says he isn't an antisemite, the white supremacist David Duke says he isn't an antisemite, and that's good enough for me.

Am I being ironical? Ladies and Gentlemen, I'm incapable of irony.

We know what an antisemite look like. He wears jackboots, a swastika arm-band, and shouts Juden Raus; Jeremy Corbyn wears a British Home Stores vest under his shirt and is softly spoken. Antisemites accuse Jews of killing Jesus; Corbyn is an atheist and seems not to mind if we did or didn't. Whether that's because Jesus was Jewish and killing him meant one less Jew in the world, is not for me to say. And - and - he doesn't deny the Holocaust...

Mind you, he knows a man who does. In fact he knows a surprising number of men who do. That he denies ever having been in their company - until photographs turn up of him rubbing noses with them at the gravesides of mass murderers, offering to show them his belief systems if they'll show him theirs - 'Gosh, they're the same size!' - should come as no surprise. You can't spend your whole life in the company of blood-libellers and holocaust-deniers and expect to remember them all by name.

Labour MPs are conferring legitimacy on anti-Semitism

Former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has been roughed up enough lately and I am loath to add to the calumnies but something he keeps saying bothers me. ‘The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews.’ Sacks has dropped this aphorism into speeches and articles for the past few years and no wonder: it’s a pithier version of the Niemöller verse, a shorthand for the metastatic nature of prejudice.

First of all, I’m not convinced it’s true. They always come for the Jews but they don’t always come for the Communists or the Catholics or the trade unionists, not least because the Communists and the Catholics and the trade unionists are sometimes busy coming for the Jews themselves. There is a more fundamental objection. ‘The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews.’ To which I ask: So what if it did?

What if the fractious bigotries stirred by the Labour Party limited themselves to the Jewish people? Would they be any more tolerable? Why does the left recoil instinctively from hatred of blacks and Muslims and Asians but require a three-hour PowerPoint presentation and a course of diversity training when it comes to Jews? Why is empathy unlocked only by fear the tormentors of the Jews may one day turn on others?

The answer is that the left, specifically the brand of left which Corbyn appeals to, divides the world into three categories: Victims, victimisers and the virtuous. Ethnic and religious minorities have been targets of historical imperialism and contemporary intolerance and so they are victims. Western white men have been largely responsible and so they are victimisers. The left champions the former against the latter and so they are the virtuous.

!Shana Tova u'Metuka שנה טובה ומתוקה!

Once I saw a piece of art that turned the sounds of the shofar into a graphic format, done by Avraham Lowenthal of Tzfat. (h/t Amiyena and Vermue) I thought it was a nifty idea and made one of my own.

So here is a Rosh Hashanah poster for EoZ fans using the same motif, although using only the mandatory 30 sounds instead of the full 100, and mine is a bit more literal.

It would also make a great sukkah decoration!

I want to wish all of you a Shana Tova u'Metukah, a happy and sweet year. May this be a year of health, a year of prosperity, a year of joy, a year of peace, and a year of security.

I will not be blogging during the holiday.

(This is a repost from 2012 if it looks familiar....)

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Young Goodman Lumish came forth at sunset...

Young Goodman Brown by carinaka

One of the paradigmatic early American short stories is Nathanial Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown (1835). The link goes to the 1846 edition of the story as published in his collection, Mosses from an Old Manse. What fascinates me, oddly enough, is its potential resonance for diaspora Jewry within recent decades.

Hawthorne, of course, is an icon of American letters and closely associated with his Massachusetts Puritan ancestors as a primary subject of his work. His material is often surreal and dream-like and dark and represents one source of American literary Romanticism that later gave expression to major figures such as Edgar Allen Poe.

Hawthorne's portrayal of his ancestors' sense of a pagan and morally foggish world around Boston and Salem fits nicely with historian David D. Hall's analysis of the Puritans in Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Harvard University Press, 1990). Hall describes the Puritan imagination as filled with "wonders" and portents and visions wherein the reality of the Devil and the anger of God is revealed in terrible storms, shipwrecks, and deformed babies born to allegedly immoral mothers.

I hope that I will be forgiven for finding enough universality in Young Goodman Brown to relate it to my own little journey into "the woods," so to speak. A brief description of his trip may resonate with others.

Goodman Brown's story begins in Salem village, Massachusetts, as he leaves his wife, Faith, for a necessary trip into the forest in the seventeenth-century.

Young Goodman Brown came forth at sunset, into the street of Salem village, but put his head back, after crossing the threshold, to exchange a parting kiss with his young wife. And Faith, as the wife was aptly named, thrust her own pretty head into the street, letting the wind play with the pink ribbons of her cap, while she called to Goodman Brown.

We do not know why Goodman Brown must head alone into the wood, but he must and so he does.

The story is traditionally understood to have three settings. The first is that of departure from his beautiful wife and the well-ordered and morally-upstanding village of his youth. The second is the realization that the figures he discovers romping in the woods in a most devilish fashion are, in fact, his neighbors and friends. The conclusion represents Goodman Brown's gloomy disillusionment with the faith of his youth and the friends of his upbringing.

There is a reason that literary classics resonate throughout the centuries. It is the mythic universality of the story. Scholars like Joseph Campbell and Jordan Peterson -- not to mention Carl Jung -- analyze mythology because mythology and story-telling represent guidelines to human experience. A work like Young Goodman Brown is beautiful not merely because it is so beautifully written, but because it speaks to universal human themes. It is among what Peterson calls Maps of Meaning.

I hope that I am not stretching analogies too far to suggest that the story of Young Goodman Brown nicely reflects the ideological journey of many diaspora Jews.

Most "post-Vietnam" American Jews, such as myself, grew up in an environment that was not particularly antisemitic and generally decent for Jewish people. My folks raised me in Kingston, New York, and Trumbull, Connecticut and my life was filled with a hodge-podge of all sorts of different people. Black people and White people and This people and That people and we all got along pretty well.

But then, one day, for no good reason whatsoever, I just had to wander off into "the wood." And there, much to my sadness and dismay, I learned that my friends and neighbors were not necessarily who I thought that they were.

As I wrote my dissertation in twentieth-century American cultural and intellectual history for Penn State University, during the cusp between Bush and Obama, and as a former Green Party member, I got involved in Daily Kos under the nom de blog, Karmafish. Daily Kos was, at the time, and perhaps still is, the most prominent pro-Democratic Party blog in the United States. And it was within the surreal forest-like depths of emerging social media that I learned about progressive-left antisemitic anti-Zionism.

It amazed me in 2010 that when jihadis on the Mavi Marmara screamed for Jewish blood in the ancient cry of "Khaybar! Khaybar! Oh, Jews! The army of Muhammad will return!" that the western press and progressive-left political activists described them as "peace activists." The traditional "Khaybar" call among Muslims of the jihadist variety is a call for genocide. It is to remember the glory of when Muhammad ordered the beheading of hundreds of Jewish men, and the taking of their wives and children into slavery, sexual and otherwise, in the town of Khaybar on the Arabian Peninsula in 628 CE.

That response by the Western press and "social justice activists" is, in fact, very reminiscent of the recent description of environmental warfare against Israel by Hamas as something akin to peaceful protests. The attempt to burn Jews out of Israel while seeking to invade the border between Israel and Gaza was described as "peaceful."

It was the realization of the contempt for Jewish self-determination and self-defense that drove me away from them in a satiric farewell entitled, Breaking: Jew Builds Second Bathroom in East Jerusalem. What I discovered during my months of participation on Daily Kos was a toxic loathing for Jewish self-determination and self-defense residing within the heart of the progressive-left. This is not to say that most "progressives" or Democrats are antisemitic, but it is to assert that they have, nonetheless, made a home of themselves for antisemitic anti-Zionists.

And therein lies the dilemma and the problem.

For Young Goodman Brown his return to Salem village meant the end of innocence with no clear road ahead and that, in a sense, is what many American Jews are awakening to.

Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest, and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?

Be it so, if you will. But, alas! it was a dream of evil omen for young Goodman Brown. A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man, did he become, from the night of that fearful dream. On the Sabbath-day, when the congregation were singing a holy psalm, he could not listen, because an anthem of sin rushed loudly upon his ear, and drowned all the blessed strain.

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09/09 Links: On Rosh Hashanah 5779, Netanyahu Expresses Optimism About Future of Israel and Jewish People; A Greater Threat to Israel than Iran: The Deception of NGOs

From Ian:

On Rosh Hashanah 5779, Netanyahu Expresses Optimism About Future of Israel and Jewish People

In a Rosh Hashanah message he shared on Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed optimism about the future of his country and the Jewish people.

“Our people are united not only by a common past, but by a common and burning support and reverence for liberty, for pluralism, for debate,” Netanyahu said. “As we debate, we remember our common heritage, our commitment to our common future, and our common values, of liberty, of inquiry, of ensuring the Jewish future, of contributing to the betterment of the world, and Israel and the Jewish people are doing all of that.”

Watch Netanyahu’s message below:

Shana tova!
Happy new year from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. #shanatova pic.twitter.com/9205cBCIYQ
— PM of Israel (@IsraeliPM) September 9, 2018

The 50 most influential Jews of the year

As we begin the Jewish New Year 5779, it’s more difficult than ever before to predict what will happen in our rapidly changing world, and who will most impact Israel, the Jewish world and the world at large. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been the powerful leader of the Jewish state for more than 12 years, and wields significant influence with a range of global leaders from US President Donald Trump to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Netanyahu’s fate, however, lies in the hands of Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit, who is due to decide within the next few months whether or not to indict him in one or more cases involving alleged corruption. That’s why Mandelblit tops our list of influential Jews this year, followed by Netanyahu. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, who led last year’s list, retain huge influence over President Trump, perhaps the most powerful person on the planet, and are in third place. Following them is the US ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, the man primarily responsible for the historic decision to move the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, on May 14, 70 years after the establishment of the State. To highlight his special role, this special supplement features a fascinating interview with Friedman by diplomatic correspondent Herb Keinon. We don’t expect our readers to agree with all our choices, but we hope to provide food for thought and discussion over the High Holy Days. As Shimon Peres once told me, it’s our job to tell our readers what (or in this case who) to think about, and not what to think.

Mazal tov to all those on this list, and shana tova to all our readers!

50 Most Influential Jews:
1. Avichai Mandelblit
2. Benjamin Netanyahu
3. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump
4. David Friedman
5. Maggie Haberman
6. Steve Mnuchin
7. Audrey Azulay
8. Ayelet Shaked
9. Ronald Lauder
10. Gal Gadot
11. Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Liberman
12. Yossi Cohen and Gadi Eisenkot
13. Ruth Bader-Ginsberg, Elana Kagan, and Stephen Breyer
14. Michael Cohen
15. Isaac Herzog
16. Sheldon Adelson
17. Claudia Sheinbaum
18. Miri Regev
19. Esther Hayut
20. Reuven Rivlin

Greenblatt: ‘Pray with me’ for release of Hamas held Israeli captives

United States envoy Jason Greenblatt called on Jews around the world to pray with him this new year for the release of the Israeli captives and the remains of two IDF soldiers that Hamas is holding in Gaza.

“This Rosh Hashanah I will pray for the Goldin and Shaul families that Hamas will return Hadar and Oron to them. I will pray for the Mengistu and al-Sayed families, that Hamas will return Avera and Hisham to them. Please pray with me,” Greenblatt tweeted on Friday in advance of the holiday.

The Mengistu and al-Sayed families also issued a call on Thursday for the release of the two men, both of whom are suffering from mental illness and as a result crossed into Gaza.

They unveiled a new campaign, #SpecialNeedsCaptives, which highlights the fact that these men have a psychological disability.

This Rosh Hashanah I will pray for the Goldin and Shaul families that Hamas will return Hadar and Oron to them. I will pray for the Mengistu and al Sayed families, that Hamas will return Avera and Hisham to them. Please pray with me. pic.twitter.com/VjdjogKvpW
— Jason D. Greenblatt (@jdgreenblatt45) September 7, 2018

J-Street's Rosh Hashana message again reveals its cynicism in claiming to be "pro-Israel"

From J-Street:

As we approach the High Holidays this year, many of us will engage in cheshbon hanefesh—taking account of our actions over the past year. As individuals dedicated to bringing about change and building a better future for our own country and for Israel, we are continually striving to fully realize our own power, to find our own voice and to live in accordance with our values. Thankfully, Judaism gives us this unique opportunity to process, to repent, to renew our energies and to steel our resolve in commiting to the important work that lies ahead.

As an organization, J Street is undertaking our own cheshbon hanefesh—reflecting on the record of our movement this past year and on our goals for the coming year. We protested the Israeli government’s demolitions of Palestinian villages; we spoke out about the nation-state law, which erodes israel’s foundation as a tolerant, democratic and pluralistic state; we fought for humanitarian aid to the most disenfranchised Palestinian communities; and—here at home—we opposed President Trump’s cruel immigration policies.

Today, we are fighting for important victories in the midterm elections that will enable us to build a bulwark against the administration’s most reckless inclinations going forward.

Not surprisingly, J-Street's cheshbon hanefesh shows that it has nothing to apologize for in the past year. It is proud of what it did so this Rosh Hashana provides no opportunity for it to think there is anything wrong about an organization that is against every single thing Israel and the US does - including declaring Jerusalem to be Israel's capital. No introspection about supporting UNRWA to the hilt, including the so called "right to return" whose only purpose is to destroy Israel No problem being adamantly against a peace plan before it becomes public.

As you look at the examples of J-Street's activism in this letter and the linked newsletter where activists talk about how proud they fought for Palestinian rights, it occurred to me that not one person said that they helped the poor or downtrodden in Israel. Not one said that they worked against Arab terror. Not one said that they were trying to mainstream haredim into Israeli society. Not one talked about how they might have volunteered to help Ethiopian communities in Israel. No, the only examples of cheshbon hanefesh they had is how aligned they are with Israel's enemies.

Yes, J-Street needs to engage in some cheshbon hanafesh - not self-congratulatory nonsense that they care about every human being.

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Palestinians make up an ancient Gaza kingdom

From Al-Monitor:

Palestinians started using coins for transactions in the 5th century BCE, with the Persian conquest of Palestinian lands. The Persian coins replaced the barter system, said Mohammed al-Zard, head of the Palestinian Association of Coins and Stamps Collectors.

He told Al-Monitor that the Persian coins were not used in the entirety of the Palestinian territories, as the coastal areas were controlled by the Canaanites, who introduced their own coins in their dealings with Persians.

“In the third century BC, after the conquest of Alexander the Great, Palestinians traded using Greek coins, which were minted in the ancient Kingdom of Gaza and were also accepted across the Greek territories,” he added.

There were Greek coins minted in Gaza, actually from the 4th century BCE.

But there was no ancient Kingdom of Gaza! (Except in Africa in the 19th century.)

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09/08 Links: Frantzman: The Trump Doctrine and the end of the ‘new world order’; Glick: The Immoral Foreign Policy of the 'Resistance'; Britain’s left wing, Israel and antisemitism

From Ian:

Seth Frantzman: The Trump Doctrine and the end of the ‘new world order’

THE TRUMP administration has forced Europe to do what the EU largely failed to do for 30 years, which is to take a seat at the table. For many years after Bush Sr. brought his new world order, the European powers accepted US leadership and preferred to let the US make mistakes and then critique the US, but not to take the baton and run with it themselves. It is hard to find one major case where the EU led the way on a foreign policy decision since 1990. That is partly Washington’s fault for wanting to muscle in. Europe plays the wise skeptic to Washington’s flailing, from George W. Bush’s “war on terror” to Obama’s promise to “secure the peace” in Berlin in 2008. Europe was rightly skeptical of neoconservatism, WMD and preemption. But it generally went along and got dragged into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then joined the Global Coalition against Daesh.

Since the 1990s the brief period of American global hegemony has withered. Former US ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul met a mild-mannered man in 1991. “If you had asked me to list 5,000 Russians that might be the next president of Russia, he would not have made this list.” That man was Vladimir Putin. Putin was thinking about a mutlipolar world in the 1990s. I was studying in Russia when he was about to be appointed prime minister by Boris Yeltsin. We thought Russia was Dickensian and cool. But he knew the country could do better and command respect on the global stage. Now he holds court with Turkey and Iran’s president.

For all the anti-Russian rhetoric in the US now, none of those who complain about Putin today did much to stop Russia marching into the Caucuses and into Ukraine, or Syria. Clausewitzians failed. Clausewitz himself probably would have sensed the Russian rising power. The new world order failed. It didn’t restrain Russia or China or Iran or Turkey.

Trump’s policy has made Turkey and Iran think twice. Turkey didn’t expect US sanctions over a jailed pastor. It expected a quiet deal. Iran expected the US to leave Syria and hand over Iraq.

The Trump Doctrine is the end of the new world order. It is its graveyard. It is America’s decision to accept a multipolar world. It has to accept that Turkey, Iran and Russia have run into each other’s arms. It accepts Chinese sovereignty over the islands China built on under Bush and Obama. Trump has birthed a new European policy. The Trump Doctrine tore up decades of foreign policy. What will replace it, relatively quickly, is a new multipolar world.

In the Middle East that may not be a bad thing. For years US hegemony didn’t provide security in the region, because the US was balancing too many interests to confront the multiplicity of threats. A more narrow American policy, tailored to deal with certain types of threats, such as Iran and Islamist extremism, can bolster US allies, rather than balancing all the allies against each other.

Caroline Glick: The Immoral Foreign Policy of the 'Resistance'

Netanyahu said, “The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end, peace is made with the strong.”

The same cast of characters who condemned him for welcoming Duterte to Israel also attacked his speech. Jacob Siegel, for instance, writing in Tablet magazine, derided the remark as un-Jewish, and referred to the speech as “Bibi’s Bismark speech.”

But as Duterte’s visit shows — and indeed, as Saudi Crowned Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s cooperative policies towards Israel also show — Israel’s power is what attracts new allies. And through its intrinsic morality, Israel also encourages these nations to diminish their prejudice and hatred – because they think doing so will serve their own nations better.

Moreover, just as Israel helps others to fight common foes, it opposes governments that support those foes. So it was that on Wednesday, when Paraguay’s new government announced that it was revoking its recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and returning its embassy to Tel Aviv, Netanyahu’s response was swift and brutal. He did not merely recall Israel’s ambassador to Paraguay for consultations. He announced that Israel would be closing it embassy in Asuncion. Certainly, Israel has no reason to allow Paraguay to open an embassy in Tel Aviv.

The same tactics – reaching out to other leaders on the basis of common interests, using common interests as the basis for relations, and striking out at those who harm his country – are the guiding principle of Trump’s “America First” policies.

Like Israel, the U.S. cannot help its allies if it doesn’t help itself. The U.S. cannot advance its interests if they are subjected to automatic vetoes by allies acting selfishly. It cannot advance its interests if it maintains faith with “moral” policies, like the Iran nuclear deal and similarly failed nuclear agreements with North Korea, at the expense of actual counter-proliferation strategies that may involve smiling and waving while standing next to Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin.

The hypocrisy and substantive failure of the “moral” policies of Trump’s and Netanyahu’s critics show that the assaults against these leaders are not about the proper ends of foreign policy, or even about morality.

They are a power play. And given the disastrous failures of the “Resistance’s” foreign policies, it is clear that the outcome of this power struggle is something to which no one can be indifferent.

09/07 Links Pt2: Glick: AIPAC loses the script; Phillips: The west’s antisemitism crisis; Why Clinton Sat with Farrakhan; 5779: A New Year of Hope

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: AIPAC loses the script

In short, the version of the AIPAC-sponsored anti-BDS bill that is set to be voted on before the full House of Representatives does more to legitimize UN and European Union efforts to economically discriminate against Jews in Israel than it does to counter them. AIPAC and AIPAC-supported Republicans like Rep. Royce opted to gut the bill in order to retain the support of Democratic legislators who have been cowed into ending their substantive protection of Israel by the rising forces in their party that are hostile to Israel.

This dire situation – which foretells a future where, in the interest of preserving the fiction of bipartisan support for Israel, all pro-Israel bills are gutted to secure the support of the lowest-common denominator of pro-Israel sentiment among the Democrats – can be reversed.

The Senate version of the bill is the original version of the legislation. It is the version of the bill that should be adopted into law. Republicans in the full House can refuse to approve the Foreign Affairs Committee’s bill and wait instead to pass the Senate version.

Looking ahead, Republican lawmakers in the House and Senate need to stop agreeing to water down their initiatives to secure support from their Democratic colleagues who have been cowed into paralysis by the rising anti-Israel forces in their party. After all, if the Democrats retake control of the House in November, they will not lift a finger to secure Republican votes.

AIPAC may have made perpetuating the myth of strong bipartisan support for Israel its cri de couer. But Republicans, who are truly pro-Israel, have no reason to join them.

Melanie Phillips: The west’s antisemitism crisis

Confronted by reports of rising antisemitism, officials decided that the Jews themselves were to blame because of their “inordinate attention to the possibilities of the ‘black market’ and a lack of pleasant standards of conduct as evacuees.”

Only when the enormity of the Holocaust was finally revealed after the war did hatred of Jews become unsayable. It thus went underground — until the left’s adoption of the Palestinian narrative made it sayable again.

Now the Arabs who want to wipe out Israel are regarded falsely and grotesquely as the victims of the Jews. As a result, western antisemites are once again licensed to treat Jews with disgust.

Because Israelis take up arms to defend themselves against extermination and thus kill some of their attackers, they are viewed as aggressors. Jews can only be considered victims if they are passive, helpless and, above all, dead.

Since relatively few Israelis are being killed, they are said to be up to the Jews’ habitual trick of claiming to be victims in order to manipulate the world to their advantage.

Israelis are thus presented obsessively, falsely and malevolently as brutal, willful killers of the innocent. This unique demonization is profoundly antisemitic. But the Israel-bashers really do think it is legitimate criticism—because they believe these deranged and demonstrable falsehoods are actually true.

They resent the claim of antisemitism because they think it’s constantly used to give the Jews in general a free pass for their misdeeds. But these “misdeeds’ are lies. The Israel-bashers believe that they are true because they are antisemites.

This is why Labour’s antisemitism problem cannot be solved. Far beyond the unlovely person of Corbyn himself, it is rooted in bigotry over Israel that has become the default position of mainstream progressive politics. And that, in turn, is part of a broader picture.

Israel is the paradigm nation-state, while Jewish principles lie at the very core of Western civilization. In Britain and America, a culture war is being waged against the west and the nation state. Who can be surprised, therefore, that the Jews are at the very center of that battleground.

Melanie Phillips: Corbyn, Farrakhan, Franklin funeral sermon

The holidays are over! Please join me here in discussion with Avi Abelow of Israel Unwired as we pick up developments in our crazy world (which has got even crazier in our absence, if that’s possible). We’re talking about the continuing antisemitism crisis in Britain’s Labour party, the emergence of America’s party of hatred and the remarkable sermon delivered at Aretha Franklin’s funeral.

Why Clinton Sat with Farrakhan

You don’t have to have much of an imagination to ponder what would happen if Duke [KKK Leader] received a similar place of honor at a funeral for a famous singer. Or the storm that would follow if a former GOP president were to share a platform with Duke, or, as Clinton did with Farrakhan, shake his hand. That would have been the only story coming out of such an event, dwarfing the coverage that Franklin’s funeral or even the John McCain funeral received.

But that didn’t happen when Clinton treated Farrakhan as just another friend of Aretha’s who deserved respect last Friday.

The only explanation is that, for many in the media and the liberal political establishment, hate coming from a black or Islamic group or individual is somehow less odious than hate from white supremacists — even if their rhetoric is remarkably similar.

This may stem in part from the bogus theory about prejudice that holds that it’s impossible for blacks or anyone without power to be guilty of racism. But the problem goes deeper than that absurd assertion. Hate from any source that can’t be identified as somehow tied to conservatives or Trump is simply of no interest to the political Left these days. Even worse, such hate is sometime even whitewashed by the Left — recently, in a YouTube video, Vox and Pro Publica sympathetically depicted MS-13 gang members as nice teenage kids who ride bikes and hold part-time after-school jobs.

The claim that Trump has empowered the far Right continues to be repeated by many liberals even though there is no proof that such a thing is remotely true. Trump’s policies and his administration’s personnel are diametrically opposed to the hate that Duke, the KKK, and the neo-Nazis promote.

But whatever they may think of Trump, the mainstream media should not excuse Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism and hate for whites, or pretend that it’s a result of a misunderstanding.

The Franklin funeral may be dismissed as a meaningless media event with no impact on society. But the truth is that it was a major triumph for Farrakhan and his efforts to bring his message of Jew-hatred into the mainstream. The willingness of the networks to ignore Farrakhan’s hate and the ability of figures such as Clinton and Stevie Wonder to embrace him with impunity allows the virus of hate to spread. A society in which Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism is normalized, as it was last week, is one in which Jews cannot claim to be entirely safe.

"How hard can that be -- saying that Nazis are bad?"

-- Barack Obama

"The Jews don't like Farrakhan, so they call me Hitler. Well, that's a good name. Hitler was a very great man."

- Louis Farrakhan pic.twitter.com/KXz0Wxm4zU
— Benny (@bennyjohnson) September 7, 2018

09/07 Links Pt1: The Oslo handshake, 25 years on; Palestinians, You Don't Have to Live Like a Refugee; The Myth of an Independent Lebanon

From Ian:

The Oslo handshake, 25 years on

From the perspective of 25 years, however, it’s clear that Rabin’s deep skepticism was sound and the public’s euphoria groundless. The Oslo process didn’t lead to peace. Arafat’s pledge to renounce “terrorism and other acts of violence” was a sham. In an Arabic-language broadcast on Jordanian TV the very day of the White House ceremony, he assured Palestinians that he was signing the accords not to end the conflict, but to acquire territory from which the war to “liberate” all of Israel could be pursued.

The Oslo process was the worst self-inflicted wound in Israel’s history. Palestinian terrorism didn’t end, it spiked. In the 24 months following the handshake, more Israelis were killed in bombings and suicide attacks than in any previous 24-month period in the country’s history.

Yet Rabin, of all people, refused to pull the plug. He had declared at first that the Oslo accords were reversible; if Arafat and the new Palestinian Authority didn’t uphold their commitment to halt all violence, Rabin had said, Israel would reoccupy the territory it relinquished.

It was a threat he never carried out. Instead, as terror attacks surged, Rabin grimly repeated that the empowerment of the Palestinians must go forward. “For all his exasperation, he could not bring himself to break with Arafat,” writes Karsh. “Acknowledging that Arafat had made no serious effort to fight terrorism or to enforce law and order in Gaza, he nevertheless insisted that ‘there is no other partner. . . . We must abide by our commitments.’ ” It was as if, having surmounted such a steep psychological barrier and forced himself to publicly shake Arafat’s hand, nothing could ever again induce him to reverse course. Perhaps that would have changed had Rabin not been assassinated, but there’s no way to know.

Twenty-five years on, Oslo is a monument to the folly of magical thinking in diplomacy. Land-for-peace was a deadly delusion. The crowd swooned at the White House that day, but it was Rabin whose instincts were right. He should have trusted his intuition and refused to take that anti-nausea pill. Instead he shook hands with a mass killer, and led his nation into disaster.

David Singer: Jordan’s Re-entry into West Bank Looms Large as Trump Dumps PLO

2. The PLO announced it had refused Trump’s proposal to create a Jordan-West Bank confederation:

Israel and the PLO have been unable to agree on the creation of an additional Arab State between Israel and Jordan after fruitless negotiations conducted over the last 25 years.

Rejecting a Jordan-West Bank confederation now sees the PLO hoisted by its own petard– leaving Jordan to fill the yawning diplomatic void by stepping in and negotiating with Israel to engineer Jordan’s return to a large part of the West Bank – occupied by Jordan from 1948 until its loss to Israel in the 1967 Six Day War.

Restoring Jordanian citizenship to the West Bank Arab population – as existed between 1950 and 1988 – would once again see parity of rights re-established between the Arab populations spanning both sides of the Jordan River.

The 29 refugee camps in Jordan and the West Bank could be closed and their inhabitants integrated into the general population. “Palestinian refugees” would be relics of the past.
No Arab or Jew living in the West Bank would be forced to move.

Palestinian Arabs residing in other Arab countries could emigrate to this newly-merged Jordan-West Bank entity – which might even choose to rename itself “Palestine” – comprising as it would about 80% of the territory contained in the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine. Israel would end up exercising sovereignty in about 19 per cent – leaving sovereignty in the remaining 1 per cent – Gaza – to be determined by Israel, Jordan and Egypt.

As with any good settlement – no-one would be 100 per cent happy – but 100 years of conflict would be ended and Trump would have pulled off yet another stunning success.

Palestinians: Spitting in the Well

In reality, the Palestinians have one main message for the US administration: We hate you and incite against you, but we fully expect that you will continue providing us with cash, to the tune of billions of dollars. And, when you do try to help us, we reserve the right to spit in your face.

The entire existence of Fatah, the faction that dominates and controls the Palestinian Authority, relies heavily on financial aid from the US, EU and other Western donors.

So, while the protesters in Ramallah were demanding that the US rescind its decision to cut off its funding to UNRWA, Abbas's men in east Jerusalem were trying to block a US-sponsored meeting to discuss ways of helping the Palestinian economy.

Abbas and his top officials in Ramallah evidently want to have it both ways -- to continue their incitement against the Trump administration while being bankrolled by US taxpayer money.

Abbas and company would do well to learn that when they spit in the well they drink from, the water they draw will be bitter indeed.

Latest Israeli innovation: Injuring Palestinians in ways that cameras cannot capture

From PMW:

Fatah Salfit Branch Secretary Abd Al-Sattar Awwad: "We see the occupation’s policy and the methods of the occupation’s policy. I've seen our young men, the young men of the Committee [to Resist Settlements and] the Wall, and our young men in the Jerusalem district, and everyone located there, and the ways in which they are treated. When an Israeli soldier directly grabs a civilian in this way, his body immediately receives blue or red marks. They have a policy that they can harm in a certain way. They harm a person in this way despite the cameras. The cameras can’t reveal this policy that they implement. I've seen their bodies [that were harmed] in this way - blue and red marks - by the occupation forces, which the cameras are incapable of revealing."
[Official PA TV, Topic of the Day, July 10, 2018]

Maybe their cameras have red filters on the lenses?

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DJs boycotting Israel don't care about Palestinians - they are just scared of BDS bullies

Haaretz has a long article on the wave of DJs who have decided, many at the last minute, not to play in Israel - even though many of them have played in Tel Aviv in the past.

It quotes some of them giving their varied and hypocritical reasons for not playing now. But one section tells the truth:

Amotz Tokatly, who’s responsible for bringing DJs to Tel Aviv’s Beit Maariv club, isn’t feeling much of a change. “The cancellations or refusals by DJs and artists based on a political platform didn’t begin just this year. I’ve been encountering this for many years now. There are even specific countries where we know the prevailing mood is political and tending toward the boycott movement. For example England. The rhetoric there is a priori much stronger,” Tokatly says.

“But take Ben UFO, who has played in Tel Aviv in the past. When we got back to him about another spinning gig he said explicitly, ‘It simply isn’t worth it for me from a public relations perspective, and it could hurt me later on.’ DJs like him make their own calculations.”

Ben UFO has played in Lebanon, whose Palestinians would love to trade places with their brethren under "occupation." He's played in China and Russia and Turkey, where human rights are a joke. He's played in Morocco, the occupier of West Sahara.

At least he admits privately that he has no principles.

Other DJs who now pretend to be so moral by not playing in Israel have also played in nations whose human rights records are abysmal like DJ Seinfeld (Russia, Turkey), Shanti Celeste (Russia, China), and Leon Vynehall (Morocco, UAE).

And all of these artists hate Donald Trump and US policy but happily play to big crowds in the US.

I'm not saying that these artists should play in Israel because there are other countries that are worse. I'm saying that they are so brainwashed that they don't understand that Israel's human rights record is outstanding for a nation in a state of war for 70 years which must interact with millions of people who are taught from birth that killing Israeli Jews will get them to Paradise.

The hypocrisy is crystal clear. But until people actually point out to them that we all see what hypocrites they are, nothing will change.

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I received a fundraising email from UNRWA-USA where they give a reason why UNRWA must exist:

UNRWA was created nearly 70 years ago by the United Nations at the will of the international community to provide assistance and protection to Palestine refugees until a just and durable solution to their plight was achieved.

If we look at UN General Assembly resolution 302 that created UNRWA - on the UNRWA webpage - here is the entire part of the resolution describing the creation and purpose of the agency:

7. [The General Assembly] Establishes the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East:
(a) To carry out in collaboration with local governments the direct relief and works programmes as recommended by the Economic Survey Mission;
(b) To consult with the interested Near Eastern Governments concerning measures to be taken by them preparatory to the time when international assistance for relief and works projects is no longer available.

Nowhere does it say that UNRWA must exist until a permanent solution is found to peace in the Middle East. On the contrary - UNRWA was always meant to be a temporary agency, to work with all the countries in the Middle East (later reduced to Gaza/Egypt, Jordan/West Bank, Syria and Lebanon) to provide works projects and temporary aid with the goal of integrating the Palestinian Arabs into the existing countries of the region. The expected lifetime for UNRWA was meant to be only a year or two, because the resolution didn't expect to continue funding UNRWA forever - the refugees from the 1948 war were expected to be integrated into the countries they fled to as all refugees had throughout history and UNRWA's job was to assist them.

The original mandate of UNRWA has been trampled upon by the Arab world and self-declared Palestinian "leaders" who insist that Palestinians must remain stateless and "refugees" until "return."

The UNRWA of the early 1950s was conscientious and actually tried to do its job. It tried to find permanent solutions to the refugee issue. It tried to create works programs so the Palestinian Arabs could be integrated into the economic life of the Arab world. It tried to reduce the rolls of those it provided assistance to, eliminating tens of thousands who pretended to be refugees in order to get free food and shelter. All of these efforts were fought against and ultimately thwarted by a cynical Arab world and the so-called Palestinian leaders themselves, against the wishes of the majority of actual Palestinian refugees who just wanted to have a home in an Arab country to raise their families with honor.

The UNRWA of today is a joke that justifies its existence on the back of millions who are now permanently considered "refugees" by its bizarre administrative definition that it now claims (falsely) is international law.

The idea that UNRWA was always meant to exist until there is a diplomatic and "just" solution is just another lie its spokespeople tell a gullible world. The only reason that Palestinians are uniquely considered refugees forever - not Syrians, not Iraqis, but only Palestinians - is because of the Arab desire to destroy the Jewish state.

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