Faculty and student members of the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis seek at all times to uphold this university’s basic principles of non-discrimination and equal opportunity in our relationships with other NYU departments and programs. We feel that these principles, set forth in the Code of Ethical Conduct, are being effectively violated in the operation of NYU’s study abroad program in Tel Aviv. Access to the program is clearly being obstructed by Israel’s long-standing discriminatory policies (as acknowledged by the State Department) of barring entry to Palestinians or persons of Arab descent and Muslim heritage, and by the recent amendments to its Law of Entry, which advocate for the exclusion of persons on account of their political speech. Moreover, the Israeli government routinely prevents Palestinian students from enrolling in higher education institutions outside of the West Bank and Gaza.
The NYU administration has indicated its disagreement with the Israeli state's policy of barring entry based on political speech. However, in noting that "no NYU student has been prevented from going to Israel," the administration fails to take into account the Palestinian members of the NYU community from the West Bank and Gaza who are unable to enter Israel, in addition to those with American citizenship who have been banned based on their Palestinian heritage and political activity. Participating in the program while members of our own department are barred entry to their homeland and sites of research serves to reproduce the racial inequalities of Israel's policies in our own workplace.
We pledge non-cooperation with the Tel Aviv program until (a) the Israeli state ends its restrictions on entry based on ancestry and political speech and (b) the Israeli state adopts policies granting visas for exchanges to Palestinian universities on a fully equal basis as it does to Israeli universities.
We urge other departments to pass similar resolutions in the spirit of abiding by NYU’s Code of Ethical Conduct and opposing racial and religious profiling on campus.
**According to the amendment, the excluded groups include
American Friends Service Committee, American Muslims for Palestine, Code Pink, Jewish Voice for Peace, National Students for Justice in Palestine, US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, and the BDS National Committee.
Does the State Department page they link to say that Israels bar people of Arab descent or Muslim heritage? Not at all. It says " Some U.S. citizens of Arab or Muslim heritage (including Palestinian-Americans) have experienced significant difficulties and unequal and hostile treatment at Israel’s borders and checkpoints. U.S. citizens who have traveled to Muslim countries or who are of Arab, Middle Eastern, or Muslim origin may face additional questioning by immigration and border authorities. U.S. citizens should immediately report treatment by border officials that they believe is discriminatory or hostile to the ACS unit of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem (JerusalemACS@state.gov), the ACS unit of the Embassy Branch Office in Tel Aviv (TelAvivACS@state.gov) or the Consular Office of the U.S. Consulate."
This is true. People who might be related to terrorists are subject to additional screening. This is true in every country on the planet - for example, in France in 2015 some 1000 people were refused entry in a mere two week period in 2015 because of suspicion of terror ties. That's far more than Israel ever has barred. The vast majority of people detained at Israel's airport are ultimately allowed in, and no student who wants to study in Israel has been stopped as far as I can tell. (One was denied entry and the decision was reversed.)
What about denying entry to people based on their political beliefs? The UK does it all the time. Wikipedia has a page of people refused entry to the UK for their political beliefs, from Pamela Geller to Louis Farrakhan.
Needless to say, this NYU department isn't boycotting the UK or France.
The real hypocrisy comes from the fact that the only people Israel bans are people who support BDS - and any supporter of BDS from NYU would be duty bound not to visit NYU Tel Aviv to begin with! Meaning that the Israeli restrictions do not stop a single NYU student from studying in Tel Aviv, and the entire argument that Israel is discriminating against some percentage of NYU students is false - as NYU itself observed.
Moreover, NYU has a Travel Advisory page for students visiting its campuses in Abu Dhabi and Sydney as well, and notes travel restrictions on students to those countries (those with Israeli passports cannot go to Abu Dhabi; NYU Sydney has a bunch of Australian visa rules to deal with, meaning that - just like Israel - some people have to jump through some hoops before ultimately being allowed in.
Needless to say, this NYU department is not boycotting the Sydney or Abu Dhabi campuses.
The hypocrisy of the BDS crowd is as bad as it ever was.
(One of the authors of this resolution is Andrew Ross, who we recently noted is a pretty nutty Israel hater, claiming that Arabs should be compensated for making more money by working for Israelis than they would otherwise. He was also editor of Social Text when the Sokal Hoax happened in the mid 1990s, showing that Ross literally cannot tell the difference between reality and nonsense in academic papers. In a sane world, no one that clueless should have any acadmic job, ever.)
UPDATE:
During 2018, Israel welcomed an unprecedented number of 55,000 tourists from Arab and Islamic countries who do not have relations with Israel, namely Indonesia, Malaysia, Tunisia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Kuwait, the UAE, Oman and Qatar.
17,000 tourists came from Jordan and Egypt.
So much for that "policy" of "barring entry to Palestinians or persons of Arab descent and Muslim heritage."
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When you look at a rabbi with a white beard wearing a black hat, a long black coat and a gartl, what do you see? Anti-Semites see a refugee from the ghettos of Europe, a secret emissary of a global power intent on ruling from within. But what do you see?
When you look at an Israeli living in Sderot, what do you see? Anti-Semites see an emissary of Israeli intolerance, a thumb in the face of Palestinians, a hypnotizer of the world. But what do you see?
When you look at a 60-year-old Jewish woman living near San Diego, what do you see? Anti-Semites see a recipient of privilege, an inherent victimizer in the hierarchical power structure. But what do you see?
Anti-Semites see the Jews as part of a pattern. Each Jew is a data point in that pattern; every Jew can be pigeonholed as a member of a broader conspiracy. Right-wing white supremacist anti-Semites see the Jews as an eternal threat, a racially “mongrelizing” threat to white purity, a religious blot, a nefarious group of schemers threatening their race-based civilization. Radical Islamist anti-Semites see the Jews as the sons of pigs and monkeys, religious threats who must be exterminated. Left-wing anti-Semites see the Jews as defenders of brutal hierarchies, purveyors of exploitation.
Each of these types of anti-Semitism carries its own level of threat. White supremacist anti-Semitism, in the United States, is the type most likely to end with dead bodies: White supremacists have been responsible for an ever-increasing number of terrorist attacks, as more and more young men are radicalized through online forums. Radical Islamic anti-Semitism is the type most likely to end with dead Jews worldwide, in anti-Semitic attacks throughout Europe, as well as terrorist attacks against Jews in Israel. Left-wing anti-Semitism is the type most likely to be mainstreamed — just view The New York Times’ decision to print a virulently anti-Semitic cartoon that could have come from the pages of Der Sturmer. The fact that the Times’ editors didn’t even notice the anti-Semitism shows how easily anti-Zionism has merged, for the mainstream left, into outright anti-Semitic propagandizing.
TMZ reports that a man in Washington state was arrested today for making death threats against Ben Shapiro and his family.
Law enforcement sources tell us, Shapiro, who frequently appears on cable news shows and has a hugely popular podcast, filed a police report with the LAPD…
We’re told the Department got in touch with the FBI and created a joint task force to hunt down the culprit…
We’re told these threats were “extremely serious” … not just someone blowing off steam.
Shapiro confirmed the gist of TMZ’s report by tweeting a link to the story and thanking law enforcement:
Israel's basic purpose is to protect the Jewish people, both by serving as a place of refuge and by maintaining a standing military to defend the nation. Israel is of course the homeland of the Jewish people, where Jews yearned to return for 2,000 years. But even more fundamental is physical survival, both as individual Jews and as a people who share beliefs and traditions—a luxury that too often could not be enjoyed in exile. No Israel in the 1930s and 1940s meant millions of Jews were trapped in Europe. Imagine how many lives could have been saved.
Today, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement and other efforts to destroy Israel as the Jewish state through demonization and delegitimization would undermine this basic purpose of protecting Jews. Indeed, they would undermine Israel to the point that it effectively ceases to exist as the world has come to recognize it. With anti-Semitism resurgent in Europe and all too prevalent in the Middle East, the implications for Israeli Jews would be disastrous. Moreover, these anti-Israel efforts are inherently anti-Semitic as they single out the Jewish state for boycott and condemnation when, by all relevant standards, other countries are far more deserving.
Abraham Foxman described the latter point well in 2015 shortly before retiring as national director of the Anti-Defamation League. "Fifty years ago," he explained, "prognosticators said: ‘Anti-Semitism, it's a historical fact of the past. You don't have to worry about it.' They said: ‘In 50 years, Israel will be a normal nation among all the nations.' Boy, how wrong they were! Israel has become ‘the Jew among the nations.'" What does that mean exactly? Foxman continued: "What everybody else can do, Israel can't do. Tell me a country in the world that can't decide its capital, has to defend its right to defend itself, has to deal with double and triple standards in terms of being told what it should do, how it should do it, who it can do business with, who it should play soccer with, what person can come and sing."
It is important to keep Foxman's words in mind on a day when Israelis, no matter what they were doing, stopped for two minutes of silence to remember the six million Jews murdered as sirens wailed across Israel. Remembering the Holocaust should be a reminder of why Israel is so important to the Jewish people, and why demonizing it is so nefarious. The wellbeing of the Jewish people—and of Judaism itself—is tied to the wellbeing of Israel. Those serious about fighting anti-Semitism should be serious about defending Israel. Anyone else is either a bystander or, worse, part of the problem, isolating Israel as the Jew among nations.
From The New York Times, December 4, 1942, page 11:
Not only was the story relegated to an easily overlooked part of the paper, but the language is detached. "Eight months of work of extermination columns" - well, OK.
Things improved slightly in this report from 1944:
There is passion and anger in the writing by Joseph M. Levy.
But the editors still put it on Page 5.
Editors are the ones who decide which stories are on page 1, which are on page 17, and which ones won't see the light of day. Which will have photos, how many column inches, whether there will be a followup story.
Joseph Levy did his job, unlike the anonymous author of the 1942 article. But he can only do so much when the editors decided that the mass murder of millions of Jews was simply not that important a story.
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Egyptian news site Vetogate has a story from Israeli media about an author, Ze'ev Shraga, who wrote a book about how the Holocaust also affected Jews in Arab countries.
The article isn't bad, but the headline is.
"Israeli writer tries to involve the Arab countries in the lie of the Holocaust."
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Israel came to a standstill at 10 a.m. Thursday as sirens wailed throughout the country in memory of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis during World War II.
The annual remembrance is one of the most solemn days on Israel’s national calendar, with much of the country all but shutting down to honor those who suffered under the Nazi killing machine.
The sirens will be followed by ceremonies marking Holocaust Remembrance Day in schools, public institutions, and army bases, including a wreath-laying ceremony at Yad Vashem’s memorial for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the Knesset’s annual recitation of victims’ names. The March of the Living at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland will begin at 1 p.m.
Events will officially come to a close in ceremonies at Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot (Ghetto Fighters) and Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, named after those who resisted the Nazis in Warsaw and the leader of the uprising, Mordechai Anielewicz.
The national day began Wednesday evening at sundown, as ceremonies were held throughout the country, with solemn songs, candle-lightings and remembrances from survivors and their descendants. TV channels and radio stations switched to exclusive programming about the Holocaust and stores and restaurants shuttered early in deference to the commemorations.
At Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial and Museum, an official state event featured six torch lightings from those who lived through the genocide.
In a fiery, spellbinding performance of less than 20 minutes on Wednesday night, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu showcased the oratorial mastery that helped him win reelection just three weeks ago, and showcased, too, his personal conviction that he is uniquely qualified to lead the Jewish state.
Addressing the nation at the start of the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day, Netanyahu delivered an address that built from astonishing stories of Holocaust suffering and heroism, as told to him by a group of survivors with whom he had met on Tuesday, to a resounding assertion of Israel’s legitimacy and denunciation of its critics.
Speaking at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem to a large audience that heard him in absolute silence, and to a nation watching on TV, the prime minister hailed survivors such as Fanny Ben-Ami, who as a 13-year-old led a group of children to safety in Switzerland from France but who turned back when she realized that a three-year-old girl in their group had been left behind in the demilitarized zone. “Fanny went back to get her,” the prime minister marveled; she “zig-zagged under gunfire” to bring the toddler to safety: “An angel of salvation, aged 13.”
He went on to detail visits he has made in recent years to European countries “whose land is soaked with the blood of our brothers and sisters, and where we were turned into human dust,” but that have today become some of Israel’s greatest admirers and supporters. In these lands, he said, “I felt terrible pain at the disaster that befell us,” but simultaneously “immense pride to represent our people, that rose from the ashes in our independent state.”
Unable to protect themselves, millions of Jews in the Diaspora were condemned to their deaths, he recalled bitterly. “In exile, our abysmal weakness doomed us to our fate.” But now, restored to their homeland, the Jews have achieved “a miracle of revival” and their country has become a rising world power.
For all of Israel’s achievements, Netanyahu said, it dare not be complacent in the face of its enemies. This assertion, he insisted, preempting critics who accuse him of whipping up fear among Israelis, was not a case of “artificial scaremongering.” Even the greatest world powers must always be aware of the dangers they face, he noted. Indeed, “awareness of danger is a condition for living.”
The “paradox” of Israel’s revival, he said, was that it has been accompanied by an ongoing rise in anti-Semitism. “The extreme right, the extreme left and extremist Islam,” he said, “agree on only one thing: hatred of the Jews.”
Helping them to recover so they can be sent to their deaths.
So many Jews asked the world to help them stay alive, and the world unanimously refused.
This is only one story of many, most untold.
This is why we need Israel.
And this is why those opposed to a Jewish state are antisemites.
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NEW LEGISLATION PROPOSED by Rep. Betty McCollum, a Minnesota Democrat, would ban Israel from using any of the billions of dollars in military assistance it receives from the United States every year to pay for the detention, interrogation, or torture of Palestinian children living under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank.
McCollum’s bill, HR 2407, would amend the Foreign Assistance Act to prohibit funding for the military detention of children in any country, including Israel. The proposed law would also provide $19 million a year to American, Israeli, and Palestinian nongovernmental organizations to monitor the treatment of children detained by Israel’s army and offer physical and psychological treatment.
This bill is heavily influenced by "Defense of Children International - Palestine," which is promoting the bill on its website. It appears that McCollum worked with DCI-P to craft the language of the bill. Indeed, the bill quotes from a DCI-P report to "prove" how Israel mistreats children:
The nongovernmental organization Defense for Children International Palestine collected affidavits from 739 West Bank children who were detained between 2013 and 2018, and concluded that 73 percent of the children endured physical violence following arrest...
We've looked at DCI-P before. It's methodology is to interview these children with leading questions and to prompt them to answer what they want. They almost admitted this in previous reports, saying that first they seek out people to write affidavits, and then "Lawyers and human rights documentation professionals reviewed testimonies and other documentation for accuracy and assessed any gaps that required further research." - meaning if there were problems with the "testimony" they would try to fit the evidence to their preconceived notions.
We know that DCI-P does not adhere to the "UN standards" they claim to use for interviewing people. During the 2014 war, it ludicrously claimed that the IDF kept a 16-year old son of a Hamas terrorist for five days to go, alone, into Gaza houses to look for Hamas tunnels and to dig for them with his bare hands. These were all obvious lies compounded by his father saying that the family disposed of the too-large clothes that the IDF supposedly gave him and "forgot" to take photos of his many injuries at the hands of the Israelis. (The New York Times reported this as fact, too.) These are laughable lies. UN standards for interviewing include being skeptical of what people say and how to corroborate the stories. DCI-P prompts or believes anything that makes Israel look bad.
In addition, DCI-P has listed children known to have been killed while involved in terror attacks as being innocent, and to count those killed by Hamas rockets as being killed by Israel. They know that some of the children they count as innocent victims are terrorists themselves - they've admitted it on Palestinian TV - but their official reports never mention that.
In other words, DCI-P reports have nothing to do with reality.
It would be bad enough if DCI-P was merely another NGO with dubious methodology whose entire purpose is to smear Israel. There are lots of those. But DCI-P is far worse.
DCI-P is associated with the PFLP terror group.
NGO-Monitor has documented many workers for DCI-P who were also officials of the PFLP. For example, here is DCI-P General Director Rifat Odeh Kassis addressing PFLP and DCI-P member Hashem Abu Maria’s memorial service in front of the PFLP flag and pictures of the group’s founder, George Habash:
HR 2407 doesn't just rely on bogus research by a NGO with known terror ties. It wants the US to give millions of dollars to that NGO!
FUNDING.—There is authorized to be appropriated not less than $19,000,000 each fiscal year to the Secretary of State to be made available to nongovernmental organizations from the United States, Israel, or the Occupied Palestinian Territory for the following purposes:
(1) MONITORING HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES ASSOCIATED WITH ISRAEL’S MILITARY DETENTION OF PALESTINIAN CHILDREN.—
(A) IN GENERAL.—Nongovernment organizations with human rights experience are eligible to receive funding under this subsection.
Such funding shall be used to monitor, assess, and document incidents of Palestinian children subjected to Israeli military detention, including interviews with victims, family members of victims, relevant community members, health care providers, legal advocates, civil society monitors, and Israeli military officials.
This is exactly how DCI-P describes itself! The rest of the description of the role of these "NGOs" - annual reports showing affidavits from children - shows that DCI-Palestine is the only organization in the world that adheres to the requirements of the bill.
A US member of the House of representative, Betty McCollum, is introducing a bill to give millions of dollars annually to a fake NGO, associated with a US-designated terror organization, that knowingly and consistently lies in its reports.
This is scandalous and sickening.
(h/t Daled Amos)
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To make the Shoah a little more real for you, look up your (Hebrew) name in the Yad Vashem database of Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
Although I know I was named after an uncle who was murdered, I found another person besides him with my first, middle and last name - probably a distant relative, since my surname is rare - a man who was around 50 years old when he was murdered.
I even found his picture.
More creepy was that I found a child with my son's name, who was murdered in Treblinka in 1942 at the age of 10.
I also found a 23 year old woman with my daughter's name who was murdered in 1940.
Since I don't know if anyone is saying Yizkor for these people, I will.
If you can't find someone with your exact name, look for variants for you to remember.
Seeing your loved ones' names in lists of those who were slaughtered is jarring. It is a scary, sober and rewarding exercise to find your own "twin" and those of your loved ones who was murdered by the Nazis, yemach shemam.
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The publication in the International Edition of the New York Times of a classically antisemitic cartoon ignited a firestorm of criticism (see also here) against the paper. The ADL, American Jewish Committee, Israeli Ambassador to the US, US Ambassador to Germany, Israeli Foreign Ministry, Mike Pence, and President Donald Trump joined in. Even Rabbi Rick Jacobs of the Union for Reform Judaism, whom I suspect rarely met an anti-Israel article in the Times that he didn’t like, criticized the Times on the URJ’s Facebook page (although at this writing, J Street has had no comment).
The cartoon is an example of a genre going back at as far as the Middle Ages, through the Dreyfus affair and Nazi period, and common today. Ask the Internet. Ugly, hook-nosed Jews look back at you, grinning as they drain blood from their victims, ravish blonde women, hoard gold coins, entrap the world in octopus tentacles or spider webs, enslave world leaders, exploit the poor, and – more recently – dress in Nazi uniforms and eat Palestinian children.
Today you will find them regularly in the media of Europe and the Muslim world, unremarked. The cartoonist, Antonio Moreira Antunes, produced the usual explanation: it was not antisemitic, just anti-Israel. It doesn’t fly: it was not only anti-Israel, it was anti-Jewish in ways reminiscent of Arab and Nazi propaganda. Trump wore a kipa, Netanyahu was portrayed by a dog, the dog had a Magen David attached to his collar, and the message – that world leaders are blindly led around (even hypnotized) by international Jewry – is a traditional antisemitic proposition.
I believe that as a European, Moreira genuinely did not see the problem. Jew-hatred is part of the daily intellectual diet in Europe, only a little less so than in Egypt. They are used to it. But in America people are still a bit shocked, although now that shooting Jews in synagogues seems to have become almost as common as shooting children in schools, the milder forms of antisemitism may become less upsetting.
Another cartoonist, the Brazilian Carlos Latuff has produced dozens, perhaps hundreds of viciously anti-Israel cartoons. While his cartoons carry unsubtle messages – the IDF are murderers, Israel is like the Nazis – he mostly avoids the dogs and big noses. Latuff too claims that he is only a political opponent of Israel, not a hater of Jews.
These cartoonists, and writers like NY Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, often argue that antisemitism and anti-Zionism – hatred of the Jewish people and hatred of the Jewish state – are fundamentally different, and while the former is unacceptable, the latter is perfectly legitimate political speech.
They are wrong. We don’t need to waste time looking for hooked noses, dogs, spiders, octopi, dollar signs and so on in order to draw a line between traditional antisemitism like the Moreira cartoon and the sanitized but still obsessive demonization and persecution of the Jewish state that Latuff and the New York Times regularly engage in, because they are two closely related forms of the same thing.
Today, the Jewish state is the home of more Jews than any other country, and almost as many as all the others put together. The Jewish population in Israel is growing while it declines in other places. It is the heart of Jewish culture, religious and secular. Today’s North American Diaspora is moribund. Many of the “Jews” that live there are Jews in name only, having abandoned the Jewish people for a progressive “one world” ideology, with or without a pseudo-Jewish religion based on “tikkun olam.” They can’t be accused of dual loyalty: they will consistently place their progressive politics above the good of the Jewish people whenever there is a conflict. The few hundred thousand Jews that still survive in Europe are irrelevant, and may find refuge in Israel, North America, or other places when conditions become worse, as they surely will.
The Jewish state today is the real, concrete expression of the Jewish people. Destroy the former, as its enemies have not ceased trying to do since 1948, and you destroy the latter. The protestations of Latuff, for example, that he is not anti-Jewish, only critical of “Israel as a political entity,” are as if someone insisted that he had nothing against Brooklynites, he only wanted to destroy Kings County, and kill or drive out its inhabitants.
The obsessive demonization of Israel, with its associated double standard by which only one state in the world – which happens to be the one belonging to the Jewish people – is singled out for obloquy and persecution, is not conceptually identical to antisemitism, in which the Jewish people itself is singled out and ill-treated. They differ because the targets of these two parallel, violent and irrational hatreds are different. One is a state and the other is a people. But almost everything else about these ideologies of hate is the same. And someone who professes one of them is usually in the grip of the other, whether or not he admits it.
It’s difficult to understand this phenomenon without noting its historical origins. Until 1973, Israel was more or less treated like a normal 3rd world state, buffeted by the struggle between the West and the Soviet Union, with the US as its patron, and the Arab states as local enemies. But in the late 1960s, the Soviets developed a narrative for the Arabs, more sophisticated than the ethnic and religious prejudice and damaged Arab honor that had previously served them – and did not work in the West. The Palestinians were presented as an oppressed indigenous people with a national liberation movement, the PLO.
Nothing really changed immediately, except for the extreme Left, which welcomed the PLO into its pantheon of liberation movements. But after the 1973 war, the Arabs activated their oil weapon, tripling oil prices. Markets crashed, fuel prices shot up, shortages of gasoline, heating oil, and diesel fuel became common. The Arabs made sure the entire world understood that it was Israel’s fault.
In 1975, the UN punished Israel by declaring Zionism a form of racism, and the PLO carried out several high-profile acts of international terrorism to emphasize the point made by the oil embargo – that Israel was the problem. Governments and other institutions around the world understood. The combination of these practical actions with the “appealing” Soviet-developed Palestinian narrative, facilitated the mutation of traditional European antisemitism into obsessive anti-Zionism. It has only grown stronger since.
In 2001, the Durban conference on racism was turned into an anti-Israel hatefest, focusing on the alleged Israeli denial of human rights to Palestinians; the outlandish idea of “Israeli apartheid” was introduced, and it proved to have legs. In a manner similar to the events of the 1970s, it was immediately followed by the 9/11 attack, with kinetic terrorism driving home the ideological point.
Recently, the traditional “extreme right-wing” style of highly violent Jew-hatred has become more visible in the US. It is aided by internet communications, and fueled by a general breakdown in social structures. It is more violent and frightening (at least in the US) than the anti-Zionist movements; but the latter are far more dangerous to the Jewish people in the long run.
Back to the cartoon: personally, I’m tired of listening to excuses. I don’t accept the NY Times’ apology. Let them apologize for years of continuous negative focus on Israel as well as the stupid cartoon. Or not apologize; they could just admit that they would prefer that there were no Jewish state. It’s always best to know who one’s real enemies are.
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The immediate result of Israel’s recent election was a victory for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a close ally of American President Donald Trump. But the election results have also revived the perennial interest outside the country in the political lives of Israelis and Palestinians. Paradoxically, while formal relations between the governments of Israel and the U.S. appear to be at a high, anti-Israel political movements have also been getting stronger as the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement has inched closer to normalization in American progressive and to some extent liberal politics.
The growth of the BDS movement in America presents a serious challenge. It means that even as the U.S. alliance with Israel may grow stronger on some fronts it will always remain vulnerable to changes in political administration and sudden setbacks and it has a negative impact on the relations between Israel and left-leaning Jewish Americans. It is imperative, therefore to confront the false premises on which the BDS case has been constructed and expose the great distance between the polite myths repeated by BDS supporters and the violent realities inherent in a political cause that holds as its ultimate goal the destruction of Israel.
Setting the record straight on the issue of the ‘two-state solution’
One place to begin examining the misconceptions surrounding BDS is with a long article written in The Guardian last August by the American journalist Nathan Thrall, which purported to explain the historical roots and current aims of the movement. In fact, Thrall’s thousands of words on the subject highlighted the fallacies animating the beliefs of progressive Americans on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Thrall mentions “two-states” 15 times in his Guardian article, but not even once does he mention “two-states for two-peoples,” which indicates his deep misunderstanding of the issue. Indeed, the Palestinian leadership is ready to have a “two-state solution” as long as it is not a “two-states for two-peoples, with a mutual recognition of their national identity” solution. The Palestinian narrative thus negates the existence of a Jewish people and of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine throughout history, and treats Zionism as a racist, colonialist movement created by the Europeans to promote Western interests. It therefore rejects the idea of a state for the Jewish people on any grain of soil in Palestine.
This is the core of the conflict and has been so since this narrative was formed after the Balfour Declaration in 1917, since, before 1900, namely before the emergence of Zionism, the Arab residents of this piece of land did not consider themselves Palestinians.
Israel will begin marking national Holocaust Remembrance Day on Wednesday evening, launching 24 hours of ceremonies, services and events honoring the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis during World War II and more who lived through the Shoah.
The annual remembrance is one of the most solemn days on Israel’s national calendar, with much of the country all but shutting down to honor the victims of the Nazi killing machine.
Cities, towns and schools throughout the country will hold ceremonies featuring candle lightings and the memories of survivors, TV and radio station will focus exclusively on memories of the genocide. At Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial and Museum, an official state event will feature six torch lightings from those who lived through the genocide and addresses by Israeli leaders.
The Yad Vashem event will begin at 8 p.m., and be attended by the president, prime minister and other dignitaries.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday his speech would include comments about a cartoon denounced as anti-Semitic that appeared in the New York Times last week. The Times has since apologized for the drawing.
The ceremony will air live on Israeli television. It will also be available with simultaneous translation into English, French and Russian on Yad Vashem’s Facebook page as well as on YouTube.
“In 1942 the Italians, who had already determined to adopt a more radical policy against the Jews, used the Jewish community’s enthusiastic welcome of the Allied soldiers as a pretext to punish the Jews of Libya for their betrayal. Mussolini determined to disperse or remove the Libyan Jews; this campaign was called “sfollamento”. The sfollamento of the Libyan Jews was different depending on the area in which they lived. In the Cyrenaica area, the Jews were divided into three groups according to their citizenship:
Jews with French citizenship or under Tunisian protection were to be sent to concentration camps in Algeria and Tunisia;
Jews with British citizenship were to be sent to camps in Europe. Though initially they were thrown into detention camps in Italy, once the Germans occupied Italy in 1943 they were taken to Bergen Belsen, in Germany, and Innsbruck-Reichenau, an affiliate of Dachau, in Austria;
Jews holding Libyan citizenship, especially those from the Cyrenaica region, were to be deported to concentration camps in Tripolitania, the most infamous of which was Giado (Jado). […]
Giado (or Jado), on the border of the desert, 235 kilometers south of Tripoli, was the most brutal of the camps in Libya. Jado was a former army camp, surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. Its commandants were Italian, and the guards were Italian and Arab policemen. By June, 1942, the Italians had deported, in stages, a total of 2,584 Jews to Jado; all but 47 of them were Libyan Jews. Living conditions in the camp were miserable. The camp was overcrowded – tens of families slept in a space of four meters and separated only by bedding and blankets. Daily food rations consisted of a few grams of rice, oil, sugar and coffee substitute. Men over the age of 18 were sent out everyday to forced labor. Water shortages, malnutrition, overcrowding, and filth intensified the spread of contagious diseases. Inmates buried the dead in a cemetery on a hill outside the camp which had been an ancient Jewish cemetery. On top of this wretched existence, the Italian guards of the camp enjoyed humiliating the Jews. Out of the almost 2,600 Jews sent to Jado, 562 Jews died of weakness and hunger, and especially from typhoid fever and typhus. This was the highest number of Jewish victims in Islamic countries during World War II.”
Holocaust Survivor Testimony: Iris Mozzeri
Watch my new whiteboard animation which explores the connection between #Jews as a people, #Judaism as a religion, & #Israel as a state. It shows how this connection is intrinsic to the link between antisemitism and anti-Zionism; something too often overlooked or misunderstood. pic.twitter.com/zJjedgZ2ZX
We
were sorry when Bret Stephens left the helm of the Jerusalem Post. We liked him. He was young and intelligent, and not
(yet) poisoned by the left.
He
gave class and weight to our small town paper, with his Wall Street Journal editorial creds. It gave us pride to think we’d
snagged him for ourselves.
But
then he left. It was 2004, the Second Intifada, when bus bombings were a near
daily event. One of those bombs exploded near the Stephens’ family residence,
in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Rehavia. From the Sydney
Herald:
Bret Stephens, editor in chief of the
Jerusalem Post, said he heard the boom and ran to the scene.
"There was glass everywhere, human
remains everywhere, shoes, feet, pieces of guts. There were pieces of body
everywhere," he said.
We
well understood the fear, why he left. But it seemed, nonetheless, a betrayal. We
needed Stephens and his reasoned editorials. We needed him in Jerusalem.
With
regret and a longing for what might have been, we kept our eyes on Bret as he
returned to the Wall Street Journal,
taking his talent and insight with him. He usually got it right on Israel, and
for that at least, we were grateful.
Then
he went to the New York Times. As did
Bari Weiss, after having served at Tablet,
a respected Jewish interest publication, and like Stephens, a subsequent stint
at the Wall Street Journal.
When
these two went to the New York Times,
Jews collectively wondered what in the actual hell was going on. Both Stephens
and Weiss were known to be pro-Israel centrists, which is almost like being
conservative. Why would they go to the New
York Times, which has long been seen by many Jews as anti-Israel? It felt
like they’d gone to the dark side. And it was fishy.
We
had no idea what was behind the move. All we could do is hope they’d bring
reason to the pages of a newspaper that had never liked the Jews or Israel.
A
review of their columns since the move offers mixed messages. Stephens, for
instance, told us in one editorial, written on the occasion of Israel’s 70th
birthday, that some Diaspora complaints, especially with respect to religion
and refugees, are valid
and should be heeded by Jerusalem. That didn’t sit well with those of us who
feel that having left, he has no valid business telling Israel what to either heed
or disregard.
Regarding Lara Alqasem,
who was expelled from Israel (and ultimately allowed back by a turncoat Israeli
High Court), Stephens wrote,
“The case for such liberalism today is both
pragmatic and principled. In practice, expelling visitors who favor the B.D.S.
movement does little if anything to make Israel more secure. But it powerfully
reinforces the prejudice of those visitors (along with their supporters) that
Israel is a discriminatory police state. If the Israeli government takes
umbrage — and rightly so — when Israeli academics or institutions are boycotted
by foreign universities, the least it could do is not replicate their illiberal
behavior.
“Detaining people like Ms. Alqasem also does
little to stem a worrying trend among young American Jews, who are increasingly
alienated from Israel because of its hard-line policies. . .
“. . . Societies that shun or expel their
critics aren’t protecting themselves. They are advertising their weakness. Does
the Jewish state, which prides itself on ingenuity, innovation and
adaptability, really have so much to fear from a 22-year-old graduate student
from Florida?”
This
too, did not sit right with those of us who remained in Israel. The attempt to
expel Alqasem was popular in Israel, as her intention in coming here was to punish
and hurt the Jewish State, and to poison the minds of young Israelis. For far
too long, we’d been a doormat and let people like her in the front door to do
their damage. At last we’d grown a pair and told someone capable of doing harm that
she was not welcome. In criticizing Israel’s attempt to bar her entry, we
definitely felt that Stephens was playing for the wrong team.
Then
there was his response to U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, a
town that had hosted Stephens and his family. Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem
was another move popular with Israel, but apparently not with Stephens, who wrote:
“There’s the view that recognition is like giving your college freshman a
graduation gift: a premature reward for an Israeli government that hasn’t yet
done what’s needed to make a Palestinian state possible.”
It
is difficult to believe that Stephens is unaware of just how much Israel has
done to advance the cause of peace, and conversely, how little the other side
has done with its continuous famous no’s; its refusal to accept normalization
with Israel on any level. Stephens, having heard and witnessed the aftermath of
a bus bombing, having lived in the heart of the city that Trump recognized, would
seem to be the last person to tell Israel that it has not done “what is needed”
to satisfy the other side. In suggesting that Israel had omitted some act that
would somehow change the Arab refusal to accept anything less than all the
territory Judenrein, Stephens most
definitely drew a line in the sand between him and us, meaning between Bret
Stephens and Israel.
While
we might wonder what the New York Times
offered to get Stephens (and Weiss) on board, both physically and
metaphorically, it’s important to note that their views have not been confined
to the Grey Lady. In the pages of the Pittsburgh Post
Gazette, Stephens came
out of the closet on settlements:
“Israel is not a nation of saints and has made
its mistakes. The most serious of those is proliferation of West Bank
settlements beyond those in historically recognized blocs.”
Really?
Settlements are the problem, a mistake? This is what prevents peace? Jews
building homes in indigenous
territory? Or is it that intransigent non-peace partner who refuses a Jewish
State within any borders one might name? The “partner” who blew up the bus that
made Stephens and his family, pick up and leave?
As
for Bari Weiss, she also gets it wrong on settlements.
“So the big criticism, right, is that they're
occupying another people and that is corrosive to the State of Israel, sort of morally
like to occupy another people. On the other hand what happens if they pull out
of the West Bank tomorrow, right?
"I'm for a two-state solution ultimately ending
the occupation but if I'm real I have to be honest about what that would look
like. Well, what it looks like in Gaza is that now you have a terrorist State
right at the border which is ruled by Hamas.”
Why
is this position on settlements wrong? Because Jews have a right to build homes in Judea and Samaria. They
have the legal right and the moral right. It is their indigenous territory. Building
homes hurts no one. Building homes does not prevent peace or coexistence. Also, Israel occupies no one. Arabs either live as Israeli citizens, or under Arab
leadership in towns and villages in Judea and Samaria, or in Gaza.
The
Arabs could have had a state, and rejected every offer. And in fact, they
received 78% of the British Mandate to build their own national home. This is
Jordan, where 80% of the population is “Palestinian.” Israel furthermore gave
the Arabs a second territory to rule, expelling thousands of Jews to do so, in
the Disengagement from Gaza.
There
is so much more I would say to Bari if only we could sit down for a
heart-to-heart. I feel I know her. Both of us are from Squirrel Hill. Her
grandmother was my beloved English teacher.
Andy Weiss was not only a beloved English teacher, but served as my student adviser, inviting me to her beautiful home for Sunday brunch just so we could chat at length. I could tell her anything. And did.
Her late aunt, Ellen Weiss Kander, was my dear bunk mate at summer camp, a woman who was kind and sweet as sugar. Her untimely death from liver cancer was a loss to all of Pittsburgh and certainly to the Jewish community.
Ellen Weiss Kander, A"H, is second from right, top row. She was sweet as sugar. The author, Varda Meyers Epstein, is second from left, bottom row
But aside from the settlement issue, Bari gets it wrong on Israel. Especially here,
where she says, “Zionists love Israel because of the way in which it brings
together the values of individual freedom and Jewish civilization, not because
of some blood and soil nationalism.”
That
is exactly wrong. I love Israel because of exactly neither of those values, but
in particular because of blood and soil nationalism. I would eat Israel’s dirt
with a spoon. I love it that much. (I kissed the tarmac at Ben Gurion. And that
was not tasty. But I digress.)
Having reviewed the evolution of views regarding Israel since the move by Stephens and Weiss to the New York Times, we come to Stephens' latest op-ed on the now infamous antisemitic cartoon of a blind, be-yarmulked Trump led by the dachshund Netanyahu.
Stephens
begins:
“As prejudices go, anti-Semitism can sometimes
be hard to pin down, but on Thursday the opinion pages of The New York
Times international editionprovided a
textbook illustration of it.”
. . . and then
did so again on Saturday:
The
second antisemitic cartoon appeared a day after the publication of Stephens’
op-ed, and the same day an antisemite 1) killed Lori Kaye; 2) peppered little kids
with shrapnel; and 3) blew off a rabbi’s finger(s). Here we will give Stephens credit:
he could not have prophesied, as his deadline approached, that the second
cartoon would be published. But the second cartoon blows away Stephens’ premise
for his piece: that the (first) cartoon was an oversight, not policy.
Stephens
says what Jews long known about the New
York Times: that it buried news of the Holocaust during World War II and ever since, has been rabidly anti-Israel. “For these readers,” says
Stephens, “the cartoon would have come like the slip of the tongue that reveals
the deeper institutional prejudice. What was long suspected is, at last,
revealed.”
Stephens
fails to mention the Congress
Jew tracker that appeared, then quietly disappeared, in 2015. He also
neglected to bring up the “Jesus is a Palestinian” piece
that had been published in the pages of the NY
Times just one week prior to either antisemitic cartoon.
But with his brief mention of selected historical
facts, Stephens now thinks he has us in the palm of his hand—that we’ll now buy
anything he has to say. At this point, the op-ed becomes an apologia.“The real story is
a bit different, though not in ways that acquit The Times. The cartoon appeared
in the print version of the international edition, which has a limited overseas
circulation, a much smaller staff, and far less oversight than the regular
edition. Incredibly, the cartoon itself was selected and seen by just one
midlevel editor right before the paper went to press.”
This
does not pass the smell test. This is the New
York Times. Oversight is its middle name. But even if we were to be
persuaded it was a mere editorial oversight, what happened in the wake of
publication proves otherwise. There was the non-apology that stood only until
we wouldn’t stand for it, at which point, a “real” apology was issued. There
was the second cartoon, which, like nothing else before it, reveals the endemic
antisemitic policy at the New York Times.
Finally, there is the lack of action: no one was fired.
And there
is definitely a feeling that someone must be fired. A head needs to roll, and if, as is
suggested by Stephens, it was “just one midlevel editor” than that is the
elected head.
What happened, this situation, cannot be left as is, allowed to fester and stink. This is an
ugly bloom that must be nipped in the bud.
So first Stephens tells us it was an oversight. Then he tells us that the publication of the (first) cartoon was not a willful
expression of antisemitism, only ignorance. (Which is it? Ignorance or an oversight?) He writes:
“The problem with the cartoon isn’t that its publication
was a willful act of anti-Semitism. It wasn’t. The problem is that its
publication was an astonishing act of ignorance of anti-Semitism — and that, at
a publication that is otherwise hyper-alert to nearly every conceivable
expression of prejudice, from mansplaining to racial microaggressions to
transphobia.”
This too, does not wash. Of the two actors who let that cartoon go to press, the cartoonist and the editor, neither of them were ignorant. The grudging non-apology, as well, was a
purposeful expression of the newspaper not being sorry for hating Jews. All of what happened
sprang, indeed, from willful antisemitism.
But
this is what Jews do when they are a part of the problem: they make excuses for
the bad behavior of others toward them and their people. This is wrong. The New York Times, precisely now, must
remain in the hot seat, and do much, much more to rectify this sickness, this
evil.
Almost
as an afterthought, Stephens finishes his defense of the Times, by committing an act of fealty to the anti-Trump overlords
at his place of work: treason by omission. Stephens refers to a need to
apologize to the Israeli prime minister, “The paper owes the Israeli prime
minister an apology,” but then goes on to say nothing about the insult to his own president.
Here
was POTUS depicted as the big blind hulking Jew led by Israel, but Stephens deems this unworthy of even a pat New York Times apology. Because in Stephens’ world, it is apparently
a mitzvah to kick Trump in the teeth, to overlook any insults to him, and to
never apologize for any of it.
I’m
not sure what happened to Bret Stephens. Was this always how he felt—what he
believed? It is difficult to understand, and it is not very pretty. All I know
is, I used to admire the man, and now I find I cannot.
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.
Gaza City, May 1 - Military planners of the Islamist movement that governs this territory conducted a missile test today that involved shooting a salvo of the weapons into the waters off the coast, in preparation for the eventual defeat of the Zionist Entity and the consequent forcing of all its Jews into those waters. Hamas fired the rockets in coordination with several other factions with a presence in Gaza, both as a warning to Israel and as part of a strategic effort to maintain readiness if and when the hoped-for victory over the Jews occurs and the faithful can finally achieve the vision that Palestinian leaders of the 1940's first promulgated: driving the Jews into the sea. Once that occurs, a spokesman for the movement explained, its fighters must continue to fight the Jews driven into the sea, by whatever means, and the group's continued development of missile technology aims partly toward that stage of the conflict. "We must be prepared for victory," stated Fawzi Barhoum. "What good is defeating the Zionist usurpers if we are unready to exploit that defeat? To that end we have continued to hone our rocket capabilities along two fronts: the current stage of the war, targeting the soldiers and settlements where the rapist scum Jews ravage our native soil, and the next stage, when we have driven them all into the Mediterranean and must target them there." Analysts note that Hamas's attention to a future without Israel marks an important shift in the movement's orientation, which until now has focused solely on ridding the world of the Zionist scourge, and not in any serious way on what to do after achieving that goal. "It's significant that there's now been some practical thought given to the post-Israel situation," remarked Phil Latio of the Brookings Institution. "Most revolutionary movements, which is what Hamas and its parent, the Muslim Brotherhood, are, need an enemy, the better to unify the masses and remove potential focus from the leadership's failings or crimes. That usually results in poor governance once the revolution succeeds, since the enemy has been vanquished, so now what? As with Iran, for example, Qaddafi's Libya, or Chavez's Venezuela, the leadership feels compelled to continue insisting the enemy remains. It's encouraging that Hamas appears to be looking beyond victory at what actual policy looks like in the absence of their lifelong enemy. It's a breath of fresh air."
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Thursday, May 02, 2019
Elder of Ziyon
