Harvard professors: Being Jewish isn't a religious thing

At Harvard University, the Hillel is celebrating a week-long "Jewbilation". One of the events invited three Jewish Harvard faculty to discuss what Judaism means to them. The answers are saddening:

For the roundtable discussion called “Jewish in 2007,” some 60 people gathered at Hillel to hear Law School Professor Alan M. Dershowitz, former Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71, and Professor Stephen A. Marglin talk about how they have merged their intellectual and spiritual lives.

In Dershowitz’s case, the famed law professor claims that he hasn’t.

A self-described “agnostic at best,” Dershowitz was the first to explain the nuances of his “secular, perverse, and confrontational” Judaism.

“I am absolutely sure that there is no God who writes Bibles and answers human prayers,” Dershowitz said. “The God I don’t believe in is very much the Jewish God.”

Organizer Asher A. Fredman ’08 said he hoped the discussion, part of a week of events called “Jewbilation,” would give students a chance to reflect on the role of Judaism in their lives.

During the talk, Marglin reinforced Dershowitz’s emphasis on personal choice in religious practice.

“We all have to make our own decisions in light of our own histories and exceptions,” he said.
...
Marglin also considers himself to be culturally Jewish, but his beliefs make him a “secular humanist.”

He added that he continued to practice Judaism for the sense of community it provides.

“Through Judaism, I learned that I could be something other than a self-interested individual, that I could be a member of a community, a link in a chain that went from family to clan to village,” Margolin said.

“This was something that nothing had prepared me for: not my upbringing nor my work at Harvard,” he said.

Gross echoed Margolin’s words, saying, “What I feel most powerfully about being Jewish is being a member of a community.”

“This community has sustained me throughout much of my life,” Gross said.

What these esteemed academics are saying is that while it might be important for them personally to identify as being Jewish, for all their intelligence they have absolutely no answer to tell their children if asked why they should remain Jewish.

They belong to a Judaism of superficiality, of convenience, and, in Dershowitz' case, of redefinition.

It is telling that the Jewish campus organization couldn't find a single professor who actually subscribes to basic Jewish beliefs.

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The cycle of violence continues....

An Islamic Jihad leader succumbed to his wounds from Hamas/Islamic Jihad clashes last month.

Naturally, there was a big noisy funeral.

Naturally, Islamic Jihad members chose that solemn occasion to throw stones at a nearby Hamas headquarters.

And just as naturally, Hamas responded with live fire, killing one and wounding four more.

We'll see what the death toll will be at this next person's funeral.

My count of Palestinian Arabs violently killed by each other this year climbs to 571.

UPDATE 11/8: A bomb meant to kill IDF soldiers exploded prematurely in Nablus, killing one. 572.

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The Vast Gentile Conspiracy

After hearing an aged British professor launch a diatribe about how Jews control the media in the United States, Carol Gould decided to investigate:

If one accepts that the Sulzbergers are Episcopalian, they can be eliminated as ‘Jewish’ controllers of the New York Times. The Knight Ridder group controls many newspapers. Betty Scripps, who is a stalwart of my local Washington National Opera company, is not exactly a Hadassah lady. The mighty Scripps Howard empire, which rose to prominence a century ago alongside the Cowles dynasty, still controls numerous publications. Names like Gannett, Robinson and McClatchey dominate other media empires, along with Sumner Redstone of Viacom and Boisfueillet Jones of the Washington Post. Then there is the Southern Tennant-Bryan empire. Add to this mix Ted Turner, Murdoch, Dow Jones, Luce and Hearst and I do not see any Jewish conspiracy.

Katie Couric, Brian Williams and Charles Gibson are the three heavyweight network news anchors, and I do not recall any Jews ever sitting in these chairs in my lifetime. Peter Jennings was a fierce critic of Israeli policies and made this known in his ABC News reports. Israel is covered infinitely less on American television than on British media, but when it is it is often portrayed with a critical eye, most particularly on CNN.

The opinion-formers in the United States in primetime are non-Jews: Gwyn Ifyl, Stephen Colbert, Lou Dobbs, Chris Matthews, Bill Moyers Bill O’Reilly and finally Keith Olbermann, who is of German Lutheran extraction. In fact, except for the occasional appearance by Bill Kristol, the vast array of television and radio punditry is the exclusive realm of Christian commentators.

It may be time to create a GentileWatch website!

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Rumsfeld correct on Gulf Arab mentality

Last week a bunch of internal, informal memos written by Donald Rumsfeld were leaked out and caused a minor embarrassment to the White House. In one of them, Rumsfeld wrote that oil wealth has at times detached Muslims "from the reality of the work, effort and investment that leads to wealth for the rest of the world. Too often Muslims are against physical labor, so they bring in Koreans and Pakistanis while their young people remain unemployed. An unemployed population is easy to recruit to radicalism."

Not surprisingly, the terror-supporting CAIR complained, and the White House distanced itself from the memo.

The White House on Thursday sympathized with Arab-Americans who took offense to a memo that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wrote saying that "oil wealth has made Muslims averse to physical labor."

Rumsfeld's belief is "not at all in line with the president's views," White House press secretary Dana Perino said.

Asked about Rumsfeld's memo, Perino acknowledged that some Arab-American groups took offense to his comment.

"We are aware that we have a lot of work to do in order to win hearts and minds across the Arab world and the Muslim world and I can understand why they would be offended by those comments," she said.

Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said Rumsfeld's comment reflects the "stereotypical attitude" that led the United States to invade Iraq.

"Our policy was never based on reality," Hooper said. "It was based on the wild ideas of those who wanted to invade the region. ... It shows you what kind of wrong-headed policymakers we had at the time."

The problem is that Rumsfeld's observations were dead-on accurate if you understand that he was referring to residents of the oil-rich Gulf states. In context, it is clear that this was what he was talking about.

Anyone reading the Saudi-based Arab News for any period of time will see more than a few stories about the problems Saudis have with the sheer number of foreign workers they've brought in, legally or illegally, and not only from Pakistan or Korea but also from poor countries in Africa. Amnesty International estimates over seven million foreign workers in Saudi Arabia alone, with limited rights.

And this is not a new phenomenon - hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs migrated to the Gulf in the fifties and sixties, not only because the the economic opportunities there but also because the local Arabs were simply lazy and the Palestinian Arabs who were willing to move and get off the UNRWA dole were hard working and ambitious. It has been observed that Palestinian Arabs essentially built Kuwait's entire infrastructure.

As far as the other half of Rumsfeld's observations, that young spoiled Arabs are ripe for recruiting into terror groups, this is also beyond dispute. As studies have shown, the average terrorist is not poor but comes from the middle class and has above-average wealth and education - and in Saudi Arabia, the middle class means that you only have two or three maids in your house.

It is not a stretch to think that these young men are the prime recruits for terror. As was reported this week, Saudi Arabia is the "hub of world terror."

So what exactly did Rumsfeld say that was wrong or offensive? His observations and inferences were as accurate as any can be about a group of people.

If the White House wants to capture the "hearts and minds" of the Arab world, it will not succeed by pandering to fantasies and myths. Distancing itself from the truth about the Arab world and the sources of terrorism is a giant step backwards.
(h/t Jihad Watch)

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Columbia professor: Muslims discovered everything!

From the Pakistan Daily Times:

LAHORE: Muslim scientists have made all discoveries of the current age, said University of Columbia’s Arabic and Islamic Studies prof George Saliba at a seminar at the Government College University (GCU) on Monday. The seminar, titled The Problems of Historiography of Islamic Science, was held at Fazl-e-Hussain Hall. Saliba gave a critique of the standard classical accounts of the rise of Islamic science. He detailed problems in the accounts and explained alternative historiography that described the rise of an Islamic scientific tradition as a result of social and political conditions within the nascent Islamic empire. He said Muslim philosophy was the impetus behind Islamic science that had contributed to various disciplines including botany, zoology, algebra, trigonometry, physics, chemistry, astronomy, physics, chemistry, physiology and mathematics in the pre-industrial era. He said the use of decimal fractions was not a Western invention and that it was discovered by a Muslim scientist. He said the binary system, on which the computer was based, was also invented by a Muslim scientist. He said Arab/Islamic science was not an intermediary between Greek science and European science, but was rather the Renaissance that integrated the Islamic science with European science. Saliba also visited the English Language and Literature Department where he engaged faculty members in a conversation on the Islamic and Renaissance paradigms.

From looking at the professor's web page it seems that he is even overstating his own research. For example, he writes much about how the Copernican theory would have been impossible without two crucial theorems from Islamic mathematicians, but that is a far cry from saying that Muslim scientists are responsible for what Copernicus discovered.

Now, it is possible that in this case the Pakistani reporter was not accurate, but what can we make of the assertion that the binary system was invented by an Islamic scientist? Binary arithmetic can be traced back to an Indian mathematician from 800 BCE, some 1500 years before Islam existed!

Saliba seems to contradict himself as well in the last paragraph of his on-line work describing Islamic influence on European science:

Even when such questions are asked, and their answers are debated -- and it will take more than political history to do that properly -- one could still ask the more perplexing question, namely, that of attaching cultural, civilizational, or linguistic adjectives to the scientists themselves when it is made so obvious that their works and concerns either knew no defined cultural, civilizational or linguistic boundaries, or whatever boundaries they encountered they were at best blurred boundaries. Most blatantly, one still has to find a name for the production of the Tusi Couple, that was first encountered in an Arabic text, written by a man who spoke Persian at home, and used that theorem, like many other astronomers who followed him and were all working in the "Arabic/Islamic" world, in order to reform classical Greek astronomy, and then have his theorem in turn be translated into Byzantine Greek towards the beginning of the fourteenth century, only to be used later by Copernicus and others in Latin texts of Renaissance Europe. What name could one possibly dream up for that kind of science, and whose science it was anyway?

Here he is arguing that referring to certain scientific endeavors or even scientists as being "Greek" or "Chinese" or even "Western" is misleading, because there were many influences on them. Yet he seems to have no problem referring to "Arabic/Islamic science."

Certainly there have been major contributions to various sciences by Islamic scientists, especially in the first half the the last millennium. But it does no one any favors to overstate or exaggerate this influence as if they are solely responsible for every major scientific breakthrough. And it is a bit hypocritical to try to discredit the achievements of non-Muslim scientists on the grounds that they were somewhat influenced by Islamic science, and not to credit the science that pre-dates Islam for influencing Islamic science itself.

h/t Eye on the World

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Exclusive picture of "Jewish extremist"

The pro-Hamas Palestine Today website today published an article which it illustrated with this autotranslated caption:

متطرفون يهود Jewish extremists

What a scary looking guy!

It is especially telling that this same website is replete with photos such as this:

- and never will you see the word "extremist" applied to any of these fine upstanding gentlemen.

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Fatah/Hamas fighting is temporary - hate for Jews is forever

Remember a few months ago when Hamas released a "Lion King"-type cartoon that took direct aim atFatah in general and "strongman" Mohammed Dahlan in particular?

Looking at the news from just a few months ago one would think that their break was absolute. The fatal mistake is to base decisions on such faulty analysis:

The deputy chief of Hamas' political bureau, Mousa Abu Marzouq, approached Fatah's former Gaza Strip strongman Muhammad Dahlan this week in an effort to mend the division that has plagued Palestinian politics since June, the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper reported.

Al-Hayat said reliable sources indicated that the Hamas leader hoped to open a dialogue that will result in renewed cooperation between the two factions, in the interest of the larger Palestinian cause.

Dahlan reportedly rejected Abu Marzouq's overtures, saying he would not negotiate with Hamas after their takeover of the Gaza Strip.

Hamas and Fatah leaders have made a number of public gestures toward reconciliation recently, including a visit by four Hamas leaders to the presidential compound in Ramallah, the Muqata last Friday.

Al-Hayat said the Hamas officials' visit to Ramallah was not without problems, as the Secretary General of the Palestinian Presidency, Al-Tayyib Abdul-Rahim refused to host the officials in his Ramallah home after another Hamas leader made remarks last week that some Fatah officials interpreted as a plan to take over the West Bank.

Hamas leader Sheikh Nizar Rayyan had declared that Hamas would "pray in the Muqata," which is what the four Hamas leaders did last Friday at the invitation of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Fatah/Hamas rapprochement changes the entire calculus of the wisdom of the West propping up Fatah as a "moderate" alternative and pretending that Hamas has been marginalized. This is a basic mistake that underpins the entire idea of Annapolis.

Hamas' strength has not been appreciably hurt by its takeover of Gaza and world disapproval. There is no sea change in Palestinian Arab opinion against Hamas. It may be laying low in the West Bank but its influence there is much stronger than what the press is reporting.

This is yet more proof that wishful thinking will cause even intelligent people to ignore facts and embrace fantasy.

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Evidence of Arab collusion against Arab Jews starting in 1947

Today, "Justice for Jews from Arab Countries" is announcing new evidence that Arab nations colluded to persecute the Jews in their countries before 1948:

To back the claim, the group has reproduced copies of a draft law composed by the Arab League in 1947 that called for measures to be taken against Jews living in Arab countries. The proposals range from imprisonment, confiscation of assets and forced induction into Arab armies to beatings, officially incited acts of violence and pogroms.

Subsequent legislation and discriminatory decrees enacted by Arab governments against Jews were “strikingly similar” to the actions laid out in the draft law, Mr. Urman said.

In January 1948, the World Jewish Congress submitted a memo with the text of the draft to the United Nations Economic and Social Council. It accompanied the submission with a warning that “all Jews residing in the Near and Middle East face extreme and imminent danger.”

At a meeting two months later, however, Charles Malik, the Lebanese ambassador and president of the council, succeeded in a parliamentary maneuver that ended consideration of the memo. Though the event drew news coverage at the time, it has apparently gone unnoticed since.

The Arab League draft law had been drawn up in response to the Nov. 29, 1947, vote in the General Assembly to partition Palestine into two states, one Arab and one Jewish.

With the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, the status of Jews in Arab countries changed dramatically, because most of those countries either declared war on Israel or supported the war to destroy the new state.

The group cites United Nations figures showing that 856,000 Jewish residents left Arab countries in 1948.

“This was not just a forced exodus, it was a forgotten exodus,” said Irwin Cotler, a former Canadian minister of justice who is scheduled to be the main speaker at Monday’s program to open the campaign on behalf of the Jewish refugees.

Ami Isserloff's wonderful resource site, zionism-israel.com, reproduces parts of this draft law created by the Arab League in 1947:

• “All Jewish citizens…will be considered as members of the Jewish minority of the State of Palestine and will have to register [“within 7 days”] with the authorities of the region wherein they reside, giving their names, the exact number of members in their families, their addresses, the names of their banks and the amounts of their deposits in these banks…”

• “Bank accounts of Jews will be frozen. These funds will be utilized in part or in full to finance the movement of resistance to Zionist ambitions in Palestine.”

• “Only Jews who are subjects of foreign countries will be considered ‘neutrals.’ These will be compelled either to return to their countries, with a minimum of delay, or be considered Arabs and obliged to accept active service in the Arab army.”

• “Every Jew whose activities reveal that he is an active Zionist will be considered as a political prisoner and will be interned in places specifically designated for that purpose by police authorities or by the Government. His financial resources, instead of being frozen, will be confiscated.”

• “Any Jew who will be able to prove that his activities are anti-Zionist will be free to act as he likes, provided that he declares his readiness to join the Arab armies.”

• “The foregoing…does not mean that those Jews will not be submitted to paragraphs 1 and 2 of this law.”

That same website reproduces a New York Times article from 1948 that described the World Jewish Congress' petition to the UN based on this draft memo:

JEWS IN GRAVE DANGER IN ALL MOSLEM LANDS

By MALLORY BROWNE

New York Times, May 16 1948, page E4

LAKE SUCCESS, N. Y., May 15 -- For nearly four months, the United Nations has had before it an appeal for "immediate and urgent" consideration of the case of the Jewish populations in Arab and Muslim countries stretching front Morocco to India.

Even four months ago, it was the Zionist view that Jews residing in the Near and Middle East were in extreme and imminent danger. Now that the end of the ,mandate has precipitated civil war or even worse developments in Palestine, it is feared that the repercussions of this in Moslem countries will put the Jewish populations in many of these states in mortal peril.

...Already in some Moslem states such as Syria and Lebanon there is a tendency to regard all Jews as Zionist agents and "fifth columnists." There have been violent incidents with feeling running high. There are indications that the stage is being set for a tragedy of incalculable proportions.

Nearly 900,000 Jews live in these Moslem and Arab countries stretching from the Atlantic along the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. Zionist leaders today are convinced that their position is perilous in the extreme.

When the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations meets in Geneva next July, this matter will come before it.

On Jan. 19. 1948, the World Jewish Congress submitted a memorandum on the whole problem to the Economic and Social Council, asking for urgent action during the spring session of the Council.

This plea arose to some extent from statements, made by Arab spokesmen during the General Assembly session last autumn, to the effect that if the partition resolution was put into, effect, they would not be able to guarantee the safety of the Jews in any_ Arab land.

The memorandum of the World Jewish Congress went into considerable detail on this danger. It cited the text of a law .drafted by the Political Committee of the Arab League which was intended, to govern the legal status of Jewish residents in all Arab League countries.

It provides that beginning on an, unspecified date all Jews except citizens of non-Arab states, would be considered "members of the Jewish minority state of Pales-tine." Their bank accounts would he frozen and used to finance resistance to "Zionist ambitions in Palestine." Jews believed to be active Zionists would be interned and their assets confiscated.


Later information submitted to the Economic and Social Council was to the effect that:

In Syria a policy of economic discrimination is in effect against Jews. "Virtually all" Jewish civil servants in the employ of the Syrian Government have been discharged. Freedom of movement has been "practically abolished." Special frontier posts have been established to control movements of! Jews. .'

In Iraq no Jew is permitted to' leave the 'country unless he deposits f5,000 ($20,000) with the Government to guarantee his return. No foreign Jew is allowed to enter Iraq even in transit.

In Lebanon Jews have been forced to contribute financially to the fight against the United Nations partition resolution on Palestine. Acts of violence against Jews are openly admitted by the press, which accuses Jews of "poisoning wells," etc.

...Conditions vary in the Moslem countries. They are worst in Yemen and Afghanistan, whence many Jews have fled in terror to India. Conditions in most of the countries have deteriorated in recent months, this being particularly true of Lebanon, Iran and Egypt. In the countries farther west along the Mediterranean coast, conditions are not so bad. It is feared, however, that if a full-scale war breaks out, the repercussions will be grave for Jews all the way from Casablanca to Karachi.

The National Post (Canada) adds that the UN was complicit in this affair as well, essentially ignoring months of entreaties by the WJC:

[Cotler] said he and his research colleagues will also present evidence showing the United Nations failed to investigate the matter, in part because an Arab League representative ran the agenda at one of its key debating chambers.

"It is now clear the United Nations has played a singular role in expunging the whole question of Jewish refugees from Arab countries on the Middle East agenda for the last 60 years," Mr. Cotler said.

The atrocities done by the Arabs against Jews in the wake of partition and Israeli independence are well documented - and the pages of the Palestine Post had many stories, big and small, contemporaneous with this persecution:

But this is the first time that proof has been offered that this persecution appears to have been pre-planned and coordinated.

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What people search for to find me

Here are some recent keyword searches that people have used to land on this blog:

palestan
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This time at least there were no entries for "elder sex" which I've seen multiple times.

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Hate speech at University of Oregon

As I mentioned last week, Holocaust denier Mark Weber ended up speaking at the University of Oregon and he publicly stated his sickening, anti-semitic views with campus approval:

A much-hyped lecture by revisionist historian Mark Weber and an accompanying protest of it happened last weekend - just not at the same time.

Originally scheduled for Friday night at McKenzie Hall, Weber's lecture was postponed because his flights were delayed. But the protest of about 50 people went on.

Quakers and local peace activists gathered outside the hall in the cold and listened to speeches from preachers and rabbis. One sign summed up the basic argument of those present: "Support Palestinians, Not Nazis."

Pacifica Forum is a weekly discussion group that meets in McKenzie Hall. Founded by Professor Emeritus Orval Etter, the groups' Web site has links to "Holocaust Revisionism" sites. Mark Weber is the director of the Institute for Historical Review, which describes itself as "the world's leading Holocaust denial organization."

Weber's speech happened on Saturday in the Fir Room of the EMU. Titled "Free Speech vs. Zionist Power," it focused on the influence of the Israeli lobby on U.S. foreign policy.

Weber compared himself to Desmond Tutu, opponent of South African apartheid, and former President Jimmy Carter, who have both come under fire for public criticism of Israel's policies toward Palestinians.

Weber dismissed what he called "silly arguments" presented in editorials and letters in The Register-Guard leading up to his visit, and said "the same arguments used by bigots throughout history" had been used to silence him or discourage people from attending his lecture.

The main point of Weber's speech was that the U.S. stands in opposition to the rest of the world when it supports Israel, and it does so because Jews are a minority with disproportionate power that comprises 11 percent of the nation's elite, including 25 percent of all journalists and publishers. Weber attributed those statistics to political science professor and author Benjamin Ginsburg.

Not only is it dangerous to give such influence to such a small minority, Weber argued, but he said Jews are by nature distrustful of non-Jews and are part of a worldwide separatist movement.

Weber said that history had already been revised by others who ignore that "Jews wielded tremendous if not dominant power in the first years of the Soviet regime."

"Bullshit!" junior Andy Saxton shouted.

"No, he's right," a man in the front row shouted back.

"I wanted to see if he really believed it or if he was just getting paid for it," Saxton later said of Weber's talk. "I think that his speech was anti-Semitic drivel in the guise of political dissent."

Saxton said he is a Democrat and leans "more toward supporting Israel than I do supporting this guy."

That seemed to be untrue of many in the room, even those who came to protest Weber.

"I find myself in 65 percent agreement with you tonight," John Saemann said. A self-described Jewish Quaker, Saemann said he opposes Israel's treatment of Palestinians and many other policies, but disagreed with Weber's broad strokes against all Jewish people.

"When I declared I was a Quaker, I said when I smell anti-Semitism I become an instant Jew," Saemann said.

Many in the crowd raised objections to Weber's past and his association with the National Alliance, a white nationalist organization. Weber served as the editor of that groups' newsletter, which he described as a "white racialist" publication.

But Weber said that was a red herring.

"It's irrelevant," he said.

"If (conservative author) David Horowitz is speaking, no one mentions he was a Communist. What I say should be judged on its own merits," he said.

Catherine Berger, who described herself as a non-traditional undergraduate, called Weber's remarks "a different generation of misinformation."

"My mother is German and grew up under the Nazis. I was told to be here to see if anything had changed, if they had gotten the right ideas, and they haven't. It hasn't changed," she said.

So U of E allows this group of bigots to have weekly meetings using its facilities. If they are willing to talk about all Jews as being a threat to the world in a publicized speech like this, who knows what they say when the press isn't there?

An interesting inference if one accepts Weber's premises: If Jews only comprise 11% of the nation's "elite" and 25% of our journalists, and they still manage to create the entire agenda for the nation, then Weber must feel that the other 89%/75% of non-Jews are really, really gullible and stupid.

He hates goyim more than the Jews do!

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Put not your trust in princes

YNet has a provocative editorial by Sever Plocker, arguing for territorial compromise from a purely economic perspective:

Oil-exporting Mideastern countries earned roughly $600 billion from oil and gas exports. In the years 2003-2006, the export revenues of these countries totaled about $2,100 billion.

This year, export revenues of Middle Eastern oil-rich nations will reach another $700 billion; should the price of oil reach $100 dollars a barrel, the revenues will leap forth to $850 billion. Next year, in 2008, the Arab-Muslim Mideast’s oil revenues will cross the $1,000 billion mark. We should remember this number: One thousand billion dollar revenues from oil and gas exports in one year.

Israel’s GDP, that is, the total value of all the products and services produced in Israel, will total roughly $170 billion this year. Or in other words, the Muslim-Arab world’s oil export revenues are at least six times higher than all of Israel’s domestic production….

It’s hard to exaggerate the implication of such figures. They shape a new Middle East, but not the kind of Mideast President Shimon Peres dreamed of. Arab and Muslim oil exporters no longer need Israel’s assistance in order to integrate into the global world. The world is knocking at their doors. The approved investment plans of the Emirates alone are estimated at $800 billion for the next five years.

And we are not there.

A two-hour flight away from Tel Aviv, on the sands of the desert, we are seeing the emergence of an oil- and gas-based Arab-Muslim economic empire never before seen in this region. Its power will grow from one year to the next. It will be a major player in deciding the fate of the global economy.

Yet all of this is happening without us. The Arab economic prosperity, which is so close to our borders, is completely skipping us. It is still not being directed at us. The Arabs have not yet internalized their power and wealth. It came too quickly and too easily. Yet they will internalize it, grasp it, and start conducting themselves accordingly.

For Israel, this is the last chance to “get on the bandwagon” and join this new reality. We must change our national perception: Israel’s economy, with all its technological achievements, will continue to dwarf in the face of the accumulated wealth of the Arab-Muslim Mideast. Our economy will decline to a much greater extent if we do not have any access to this wealth.

Such access can only be facilitated by signing an Israeli-Palestinian agreement to end the conflict. The most blatant Israeli existential interest is to advance the signing of such agreement, and through it normalize our ties with wealthy oil exporters – we can then start trading with them, selling to them, and taking part in their development plans.

The opening of Mideastern markets to Israel could double the annual growth rate of our economy from 5 to 10 percent. The Arab wealth would also enable an economic-financial resolution of the Palestinian refugee problem, once such agreement is reached by all parties. This will require no more than a donation of 5% of the foreign currency reserves of oil-exporting countries or of their annual export revenues. There would still be money left, via wise business investment, to turn the future Palestinian state into a growing region.

Those who prefer to keep dozens of West Bank settlements over the opening of Israeli embassies in Riyadh and Qatar and over opening the Saudi and Libyan market to Israeli exports are anti-Zionist in my view. They understand nothing when it comes to the new Mideastern balance of power. They will leave Israel deep in the shadow, and in practice jeopardizes the foundations of our existence.

This is a seductive argument, one that many Israelis subscribe to.

It is also wrong, shortsighted and dangerous.

While he spends most of the article discussing the undeniable growth of the oil economy, Plocker papers over exactly how Israel’s withdrawal from the West Bank would turn the implacably hostile Arab world into a friendly trading partner. More importantly, he completely ignores the character of the resultant Palestinian Arab state that would be his neighbor.

The Arab economic boycott of Israel has been in place, officially or unofficially, since before 1948. Israel’s trade with Egypt and Jordan has not skyrocketed in the time since their respective peace agreements; in fact some Egyptian firms have been penalized by the WTO for still complying with the boycott. Conversely, clandestine trade with Arab countries still nominally at war with Israel continues to grow. Israel would probablybenefit economically by an agreement but the trade would remain clandestine and hidden to the Arab public and would be hampered by the anti-semitism that has not abated at all in the Arab world. There would be no bonanza for Israel.

Plocker somewhat deceptively implies that Israel’s economy is shrinking in the face of this tsunami of Arab growth: “Our economy will decline to a much greater extent if we do not have any access to this wealth.” Of course, Israel’s economy is not declining at all; as even Plocker observes in other columns. He probably means “relative to the Middle East” but this is much different from the doom and gloom he is implying. It is not clear why Israel is threatened by an annual economic growth of 5%, regardless of the growth of the oil rich countries. It is also a fantastic guess on Plocker’s part that Israel’s economic growth would double should trade increase.

Israel’s economy is also far more diversified than that of the Gulf states. Plocker makes a basic error in assuming that the boom in oil prices will continue unabated. It is quite likely that these high energy prices will spur the faster development of alternative energy resources as they become more economically feasible, and the stunning growth that he forecasts would then disappear. The Arab world’s economy is so heavily weighted to energy that it is not a very stable area to subsume Israel’s security interests.

Plocker is an economic editor for Yediot Aharonot so perhaps he can be forgiven for looking at the world through the prism of economics. Even so, how much has Israel benefited economically from its withdrawal from Gaza? The IDF still makes daily forays into Gaza to root our terrorists; Israel is spending money to develop anti-Qassam defenses, Sderot’s economy is close to nonexistent. Israel’s economy has grown since then but how much has been because of the goodwill engendered from the withdrawal and how much would have happened anyway? If Plocker wants to use a purely economic viewpoint to argue for a Palestinian Arab state, these are the questions he should be researching.

Which brings up the weakest part of Plocker’s argument: Israel’s security. It is likely that an independent Palestinian Arab state will, in short order, turn into an Islamist state. Israelis so desperately want peace that they are willing to turn a blind eye to what is happening in the Palestinian Arab world in particular, and the Arab world in general. Only last year Hamas won a popular election and even with the hundreds of millions pouring in to prop up Abbas it is far from clear that a new election would have any different results. An Islamist state on Israel’s eastern and southern borders - with only a few miles between it and the Mediterranean - is not worth any amount of money.

Even if Abbas retains leadership, he has little control over the terrorism that is sure to follow any agreement. Instead of Israeli checkpoints stopping countless terror attacks over the Green Line, Israel would return to being a nation under siege.

Plocker’s wishful thinking comes into full display when he airily says that the powerful oil-fueled Arab states would put billions of dollars into solving the “refugee” problem. Why, exactly, would a peace agreement with Israel make Arab states more likely to help their Palestinian “brethren” when their trillions have failed to do so up until now? On the contrary, the Arab states have made it clear that they want to keep the Palestinian Arabs in as much misery as possible, giving next to nothing to UNRWA and giving more money towards Palestinian terrorism than housing. They have passed laws enshrining discrimination against Palestinian Arabs. They have made it clear that they want to “refugee” problem to fester, not disappear.

And, unfortunately for the Israeli optimists, the reason is because they are still more interested in destroying Israel than helping Palestinian Arabs. While they might allow some Israeli agricultural equipment or medicines to arrive on their lands, they are still living with the ultimate insult to Arab masculinity - the existence of a Jewish state on Arab lands and the constant reminder of their war losses. Economics does not trump the deep-seated bigotry that the average Arab has against Jews having any control over land in the Middle East. Even should Israel help create another terror state next door, there will inevitably be border disputes a la Shebaa Farms and there will always be perceived insults to Arab honor a la Danish cartoons and Israel will always be the lightning rod for Arab anger. No amount of concessions can change that.

Perhaps King David put it best when he said (Psalms 146:3)”Put not your trust in princes…in whom there is no hope.” Israel cannot mortgage its security to the promise of an economic boom that the princes of Arabia may - or may not - agree to.

(cross-posted to Israellycool)

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Some PalArabic news

Palestine Press Agency (pro-Fatah) says that a Hamas jeep recklessly hit and killed a 38-year old woman in Gaza City, bringing our 2007 PalArab self-death count to 568.

The same agency reports that Hamas leaders are preparing to escape to Egypt via tunnels if Israel invades Gaza. Brave fighters!

Palestine Today (pro-Hamas) picks up on a Maariv story (also in YNet) that Israel will deduct from the tax revenues it gives the PA the cost of the damage from rocket fire. Of course Hamas won't feel any of that shortfall.

Ma'an (Arabic) reports that Fatah in Gaza is trying to get a massive rally for Monday to commemorate the third anniversary of the death of Yasser Arafat. Since everyone loves Abu Ammar they are trying to leverage that into a show of support for Fatah in Gaza.

Al-Hayat al-Jadida (Fatah) said that Mahmoud Abbas demanded Israel to adhere to its obligations under the "roadmap" and called on the US to pressure Israel to do so. Since the roadmap puts as a precondition that the Palestinian Arabs stop trying to kill Israelis this is beyond hypocritical.

Al-Hayat adds another demand from Mahmoud Abbas - that Israel release 2000 prisoners as a "confidence building" measure as well as demolish roadblocks before the Annapolis summit/meeting/gathering.

UPDATE: A Gaza "policeman" was killed during a clan clash. 569.

UPDATE 11/7: An Islamic Jihad leader died from wounds from Hamas last month. 570.

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Tenure for a bigot

Nadia Abu El-Haj, who teaches anthropology at Barnard College, has received tenure from that institution.

Much has already been written about her book criticizing any archaeology that indicates a presence of an Jewish kingdom in what is now Israel, even though she has no archaeology experience herself. Her pre-conceived notion that there were never ancient Jews in the Middle East is so overpowering that she essentially dismisses the entire field of archaeology as being hopelessly biased against her version of the truth.

This was the only book she ever wrote, and it seems on its own to be pretty powerful evidence that her scholarship is suspect, to say the least. But what most people haven't caught on to is that more recently she has been doing to the field of genetics what she had previously done to archaeology - to reach the identical conclusion. In an article in American Ethnologist she says modern genetics has disproved the idea that the Jewish maternal line originated in ancient Israel (what she calls "Palestine" even when she is talking about a kingdom that predates that term.)

It is an amazing coincidence that she has looked at two disparate fields, neither of which she is an expert in, and reached the identical conclusion - the Jews have no historic right to live in Israel. The fact that she is of Palestinian Arab origin surely has nothing to do with this eerie juxtaposition of separate proofs by assertion.

Perhaps if her only "scholarship" was concentrated in deconstructing archaeology, a case could be made that she is just doing the same as what other postmodernists do. But the fact that she uses her anthropology background as a blunt instrument to pretend to be a scholar in two separate, specialized fields of which she has no real knowledge shows not only that El-Haj is no scholar, but that she has a purely Jew-hating agenda. It is almost beyond belief that such a person, who can only be described as a bigot, can reach such a level at any university, let alone one as formerly prestigious as this one.

Columbia University (of which Barnard is part) certainly has seen its reputation collapse in the past year.

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Suleiman built a synagogue on the Temple Mount?

Arutz Sheva mentions in a meeting between Israeli rabbis and White House officials that

[Chief Rabbi of Haifa and Chairman of the Chief Rabbinate Communications Committee Rabbi She'ar-Yashuv] Cohen also recalled the historical fact that the Muslim Caliph Omar Suleiman built a synagogue on the Temple Mount where Jews prayed, and that it was later destroyed by another Caliph.

Does anyone have a source for this?

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Honor/shame and sexual harassment in Egypt

From AFP:

CAIRO (AFP) — From lewd looks to inappropriate touching, experts say Egypt's growing street harassment of women is a deep-rooted and largely ignored problem shackling the country's progress.

Sexual harassment in public areas is not limited to a specific age category or social class, says the independent Egyptian Centre for Women's Rights (ECWR), which is spearheading a campaign against this "social cancer" in Egypt.

Nor does an outward expression of piety protect from sexual harassment, generally defined as "all unwelcome behaviour of a sexual nature, making women feel uncomfortable and unsafe."

"As soon as I step onto the street, I am surrounded by sexual predators," Rasha Shaaban, 23, from the Mediterranean city of Alexandria told AFP. "I don't feel safe, the problem is getting worse. It has become so bad that I want to leave Egypt."

According to the state National Centre for Social and Criminal Research, sexual crimes are on the rise but while they give no official figures, ECWR says that two women are raped every hour in this country of 80 million and that 90 percent of offenders are jobless men.

There are many contributing factors to the increase in sexual harassment. Rising unemployment may push some men to display their machismo on the streets. The huge cost of marriage and the fact that sex outside marriage is forbidden may also explain the behaviour, experts say.

"Men take out their frustration, not just sexual, against women," Engy Ghozlan, who runs the anti-harassment campaign at ECWR, told AFP.

But some men, who believe a woman's job is to look after the home, say that those out on the street are fair game.

"When (a woman) walks out into the street in tight trousers and tight belts, she deserves what she gets," said Mohamed al-Sayyed, 32, who works as an assistant at an upmarket hairdresser in Cairo.

"The women who come here are different from the ones in my village," he said.

Sayyed grew up in a village near Menya, in the conservative Egyptian south. "My female relatives would never be seen swaying in the street like this," he said, defensively explaining the occasional wolf whistles "and more" he directs at Cairene women.

One sociologist, Dalal al-Bizri, sees a strong link between growing religious conservatism and sexual harassment.

She told AFP that a puritan view of Islam brought over from religiously strict Saudi Arabia is partly responsible for the "culture of hate" against women.

"In the sermons of wahhabi (ultra-conservative) preachers on satellite television, we hear the worst things about women, like the fact that they should not be on the street but at home... that they have an inferior status," Bizri said.

In the Arab honor/shame culture, it is inevitable that men with low self-esteem will try to boost their egos by degrading women. People who are mentally healthy have no need to put others down but those living in cultures where honor is more important than life need to feel superior to others - whether the "others" are women, Jews or infidels. Any admission that they are no better than women is a fatal injury to their bruised self-esteem.

See also my posting that 40% of all Egyptian women have been sexually harassed.
(h/t Watcher)

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