Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, April 30, 2010

Mearsheimer libels Zionists, panders to his Arab friends

John Mearsheimer, of "The Israel Lobby" fame, gave the Hisham B. Sharabi Memorial Lecture at the Palestine Center in Washington, DC yesterday.

His long speech is filled with unbelievable rhetoric where he accepts the Palestinian Arab narrative hook, line and sinker.

Like Goldstone and others, he builds his argument by first creating a framework that is false to begin with. Once he builds this straw-man edifice he can fill out his speech with "facts" that fit his fantasy worldview.

Here is one strawman:

To be viable, [a] Palestine state would have to control 95 percent or more of the West Bank and all of Gaza. There would also have to be territorial swaps to compensate the Palestinians for those small pieces of West Bank territory that Israel got to keep in the final agreement. East Jerusalem would be the capital of the new Palestinian state.

What is the relationship between "viability" and his list? They may be the Palestinian Arab minimum demands, which he accepts uncritically, but they have nothing to do with "viability." Other states are smaller, other states have fewer natural resources, other states somehow manage to exist without east Jerusalem. Why does an Arab Palestine require these things?

Mearsheimer also dismisses any problems with Palestinian Arab unity, subconsciously treating them like the children that liberals always do:

The Palestinians are badly divided among themselves and not in a good position to make a deal with Israel and then stick to it. That problem is fixable with time and help from Israel and the United States.

That's it. In a lecture that must have taken an hour, to an audience that actually has the power to help fix the biggest obstacle to a viable Palestinian Arab state, Mearsheimer dismisses it with two sentences - and doesn't even think that his heroes have the ability to fix their own problems without help from Israel and the US! Yet these infantile people, in his estimation, can responsibly run a nation-state.

It gets worse. Mearsheimer is convinced that Zionists are people who are just itching to murder and expel millions of people from their homes. Since he is convinced that Israel is going to create a Greater Israel (using more strawman arguments), he concludes:

...Israel could expel most of the Palestinians from Greater Israel, thereby preserving its Jewish character through an overt act of ethnic cleansing. This is what happened in 1948 when the Zionists drove roughly 700,000 Palestinians out of the territory that became the new state of Israel, and then prevented them from returning to their homes. Following the Six Day War in 1967, Israel expelled between 100,000 and 260,000 Palestinians from the newly conquered West Bank and drove 80,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights. The scale of the expulsion, however, would have to be even greater this time, because there are about 5.5 million Palestinians living between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.

...Then there is ethnic cleansing, which would certainly mean that Greater Israel would have a Jewish majority. But that murderous strategy seems unlikely, because it would do enormous damage to Israel's moral fabric, its relationship with Jews in the Diaspora, and its international standing. ...Nevertheless, there is reason to worry that Israelis might adopt this solution as the demographic balance shifts against them and they fear for the survival of the Jewish state. Given the right circumstances -- say a war involving Israel that is accompanied by serious Palestinian unrest -- Israeli leaders might conclude that they can expel massive numbers of Palestinians from Greater Israel and depend on the lobby to protect them from international criticism and especially from sanctions.

We should not underestimate Israel's willingness to employ such a horrific strategy if the opportunity presents itself. It is apparent from public opinion surveys and everyday discourse that many Israelis hold racist views of Palestinians and the Gaza massacre makes clear that they have few qualms about killing Palestinian civilians. It is difficult to disagree with Jimmy Carter's comment earlier this year that "the citizens of Palestine are treated more like animals than like human beings." A century of conflict and four decades of occupation will do that to a people.

To Mearsheimer, Meir Kahane is not an aberration whose party was made illegal in Israel - he represents the majority viewpoint of committed Zionists.

Mearsheimer goes on to label his concept of who the good Jews are and who the bad Jews are. Using obscenely insulting language, he says:

American Jews who care deeply about Israel can be divided into three broad categories. The first two are what I call "righteous Jews" and the "new Afrikaners," which are clearly definable groups that think about Israel and where it is headed in fundamentally different ways. The third and largest group is comprised of those Jews who care a lot about Israel, but do not have clear-cut views on how to think about Greater Israel and apartheid. Let us call this group the "great ambivalent middle."

...To give you a better sense of what I mean when I use the term righteous Jews, let me give you some names of people and organizations that I would put in this category. The list would include Noam Chomsky, Roger Cohen, Richard Falk, Norman Finkelstein, Tony Judt, Tony Karon, Naomi Klein, MJ Rosenberg, Sara Roy, and Philip Weiss of Mondoweiss fame, just to name a few. I would also include many of the individuals associated with J Street and everyone associated with Jewish Voice for Peace, as well as distinguished international figures such as Judge Richard Goldstone. Furthermore, I would apply the label to the many American Jews who work for different human rights organizations, such as Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch.

On the other side we have the new Afrikaners, who will support Israel even if it is an apartheid state. These are individuals who will back Israel no matter what it does, because they have blind loyalty to the Jewish state. This is not to say that the new Afrikaners think that apartheid is an attractive or desirable political system, because I am sure that many of them do not. Surely some of them favor a two-state solution and some of them probably have a serious commitment to liberal values. The key point, however, is that they have an even deeper commitment to supporting Israel unreservedly. The new Afrikaners will of course try to come up with clever arguments to convince themselves and others that Israel is really not an apartheid state, and that those who say it is are anti-Semites. We are all familiar with this strategy.

I would classify most of the individuals who head the Israel lobby's major organizations as new Afrikaners. That list would include Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, David Harris of the American Jewish Committee, Malcolm Hoenlein of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Ronald Lauder of the World Jewish Congress, and Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America, just to name some of the more prominent ones. I would also include businessmen like Sheldon Adelson, Lester Crown, and Mortimer Zuckerman as well as media personalities like Fred Hiatt and Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post, Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal, and Martin Peretz of the New Republic. It would be easy to add more names to this list.

The key to determining whether the lobby can protect apartheid Israel over the long run is whether the great ambivalent middle sides with the new Afrikaners or the righteous Jews. The new Afrikaners have to win that fight decisively for Greater Israel to survive as a racist state.

Again, he is spending the main part of a lecture about his perception of American Jews to a group of Arabs who fully accept his thesis that all of their problems can be blamed directly on Jews, as it supports their own bigoted worldviews.

He also doesn't disappoint with his comments on the all-powerful Jewish lobby, of course.

All in all, this is a despicable speech full of half-truths and a completely skewed viewpoint that ironically caters to Arab bigotry by accusing all Zionist Jews of that same trait.

Egyptian lawyers seek to ban "One Thousand and One Nights"

From Bikya Masr:

A new Hisba case has appeared in the Egyptian political arena this week after a number of lawyers calling themselves the Association of Lawyers Without Restrictions filed a complaint and submitted a copy to the Attorney General calling for the confiscation of the book “A Thousand and One Nights”. They are calling for the imprisonment of the publishers of the book from the General Authority of the Culture, claiming that the book “offends public decency.”
Hisba cases allow citizens to prosecute individuals who they deem to have insulted Islam, and, although fairly new to Egypt, they have been increasingly used against public figures.

A Thousand and One Nights does indeed have a number of passages that deal with matters that would make a Victorian blush.

But maybe the Egyptians are more upset at this story:

British press ignored attack on Israeli diplomat

A foreign diplomat is physically attacked in her host country by a screaming mob, and not a single media outlet in Great Britain outside the Jewish press has seen fit to mentioning it.

[Depiuty Ambassador] Ms Lador-Fresher had been asked back to the university after a previous arrangement to address students in February was cancelled when more than 300 protesters from the Action Palestine student society scuffled with Jewish students and police.

Speaking about Wednesday’s protest she said: “It was quite a shocking experience. I have had people stand up and shout and wave the Palestinian flag when I have spoken, but it was the first time I have been in this situation.
“When we finished I could not get out of the university building. The demonstrators saw me on the way to the car and they started running towards me.

“The security team rushed me back into the building and we were standing in the corridor for a few minutes.”

The diminutive deputy ambassador was eventually escorted through a back door to a security vehicle but the demonstrators discovered the evacuation plan and surrounded the car.

Ms Lador-Fresher said: “They were screaming and shouting. Two of them were on the bonnet trying to break the windscreen. It was very unpleasant.

“I don’t think they wanted to kill me but I genuinely believed they wanted to physically hurt me. If I had not had the police and security team I would have been beaten up.”
“No foreign diplomat should have to go through what I went through.”

The wire services have likewise ignored this story - and they were made aware of it.

Apparently, this sort of thing is not newsworthy.

Freedom of expression in Sweden

Let's see if we can figure out how these two news stories make sense together.

First, the Swedish government subsidizes an anti-semitic, racist and homophobic publication, giving it hundreds of thousands of dollars to spread hate, because it wants to encourage freedom of speech.

Yet at the same time, Comedy Central in Sweden will not be airing the South Park Mohammed episodes because of fears for the safety of its employees.

It's a mystery.

(h/t Zvi and Jihad Watch)

The Islamic Jihad Students organization arranged a poetry competition, where the poets had to write about their love of Jerusalem. The winners were announced last night.

Meanwhile, I still have not found a single example of Arabic poetry extolling Jerusalem from before the 20th century. (I'm not sure there was any before 1967, to be honest.)

For some reason, Jews throughout the centuries didn't need competitions to give them incentive to write heart-wrenching poems about their love of Jerusalem.

Just saying...

Hamas kicks family out of their home

Ma'an writes:

A family apartment was seized and handed over to de facto government police after its owner temporarily moved out of the home to take care of her sick father-in law.

A’lyia Aweida said she returned to the apartment on 3 April to collect some belongings, only to find a de facto government police officer, who she identified only by his initials, RAH, and his wife living in her home.

The article goes on to quote a Hamas official as being totally shocked that such a thing happened.

So Hamas scheduled a hearing to see whether the family can return to their home - to take place in September.

The issue of Hamas stealing people's apartments was one of the issues that the PFLP complained about in a letter sent earlier this week.

New anti-Iran web ad

The Weekly Standard links to a new web ad directed at the White House:

The organization behind it, Keep Israel Safe, is brand new and was founded by Tom Rose, former editor of the Jerusalem Post.

(h/t Love of the Land)

The "racist traffic light" story originated in The Economist

It wasn't Al Jazeera that first came up with the story that Jerusalem traffic lights were rigged to discriminate against Arab drivers - it was The Economist, in a side comment last month:

Further impeding access, traffic lights flick green only briefly for cars from Palestinian districts while staying green for cars from Jewish settlements for minutes.

Because such a respected magazine made this absurd charge, CAMERA asked them for details - and fisked it.

I predict it will be mentioned in some UN document as fact within six months, just like the charge that Israel kidnaps Arabs and steals their organs is now enshrined in an official UN document submitted by a lying - and award-winning - NGO, EAFORD, whose founding purpose is to promote the idea that Zionism is racism.

Noam Shalit's video message

I had missed this Yom Ha'atzmaut video message, and it is worth watching:

EoZ Gossip Minute: Hollywood Goyishe Bris

The big news in Hollywood is, of course, Sandra Bullock's adoption of a son in conjunction with her divorce with Jesse James, the tattooed weirdo with the secret Nazi obsession.

However, the EoZ gossip column is more interested in the question:

Why did Sandra give her new son a bris?

Not just a hospital circumcision, mind you. She hired a mohel who went to her house and did the whole ceremony with her family in attendance.

And she's not Jewish!

Neither is her soon-to-be ex, or anyone else remotely close to her (although, apparently, more Jews want her to be Jewish than any other shiksa.)

So, nu, what's with the goyishe bris? Is it trendy in Hollywood? Does she think it will get her better roles? Is she considering joining the Tribe? Is she raising little Louis to be Jewish? (At least one clueless news outlet thinks that the bris automatically made him Jewish. Unless his mother was Jewish, which doesn't appear to be likely.)

Now I'm going to have to watch The Blind Side.

Israeli diplomat attacked at U. of Manchester

Things are seriously messed up in Britain:

A lecture given by Israel's Deputy Ambassador to Britain Talya Lador-Fresher at the University of Manchester deteriorated Wednesday into violence when pro-Palestinian protesters stormed at the diplomat in an attempted attack.
The protesters were waiting for Lador-Fresher outside the lecture hall, but this did not deter her from entering as planned. Immediately upon her exit, the protesters lunged at the diplomat, prompting security guards to whisk her back into the hall. Following a consultation on the site, it was decided to escort her out of the premises in a police car.

The deputy ambassador was removed from the hall and into the police vehicle. However, this did not block the protesters, who surrounded the car and climbed on the hood, trying to break the windshield.

Let's make one thing clear: these are not pro-Palestinian protesters. Protesters who support something do not act this way. These are anti-Israel - and often anti-Jewish - rioters.

Last February, the same diplomat was forced to postpone her speech at Manchester because of threats of violence. And a student shouted out "Itbach al Yahud," which means "Kill the Jews," at Danny Ayalon at the Oxford Student Union.

A couple of months earlier, the Action Palestine movement at Manchester invited to speak a man who threatened to make pro-Jewish South Africans' lives hell, saying they are not welcome in their own country. After his statements were publicized, their members defended him.

This is nothing but hate. These students don't give a damn about Palestinian Arab rights or anything else - they just hate the idea that Jews have a degree of self-determination. This is today's anti-semitism, and people who claim that actions like these are merely anti-Israel are fooling themselves.

UPDATE: The British press has still not written a word about this incident, nearly 24 hours later.

The five-star occupation

In Ha'aretz, in an article about how ordinary Palestinian Arabs are warming up to Salam Fayyad (and Fatah is upset), Avi Issacharoff mentions that the PA communications minister referred to Israel's "five-star occupation." The reporter's point was to contrast how well the PA was doing while it cooperates with Israel compared to how Gazans are faring.

A, EoZ reader emailed Issacharoff to verify the quote. He wrote back that he heard it himself at a press conference in Ramallah yesterday, and that "it was a kind of a joke but a serious one..."

It is not the first time that this expression was used. A prominent Ramallah businessman, flush with success of his Italian restaurant in Ramallah, used the same term to describe his situation.

It seems that the "occupation" is not nearly as awful as it is portrayed in the media. In fact, it appears that Palestinian Arabs living under the yoke of this oppression in the West Bank are living better lives than their Arab brethren across the Jordan River or the Syrian border - specifically due to Israel's policies of helping them economically and easing up restrictions in return for better security.

Which brings up the question - how would things be improved if the "peace process" moved forward? Because, arguably, the biggest gains for Palestinian Arabs have occurred while it was moribund.

Egypt denies "poison gas" in tunnel killed 4 Gazans

This morning, Hamas wrote a press release:

-Egyptian forces pumped gas into a cross-border tunnel used to smuggle goods into the Gaza Strip late on Wednesday, killing four Palestinians, Hamas officials said.

A Hamas security official in charge of the tunnel area along the border said the Egyptians filled the passage with some type of crowd dispersal gas.
The Hamas Interior Ministry later said in a statement the gas used to try to clear the tunnel was poisonous. Besides those killed, six people were injured, it said.

"The Interior Ministry confirms that the citizens' cause of death was the Egyptian security forces spraying poison gasses into one of the tunnels."

"This is a terrible crime committed by Egyptian security against simple Palestinian workers who were trying to earn their daily bread," Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum to The Associated Press. "It was a killing in cold blood. Hamas and all the Palestinian people condemn it strongly."

The story gets even weirder. From Ma'an:

Wednesday night medics said workers had gone to the tunnel that had in fact been "filled with poisonous gas a week ago, to confirm the toxin had dissipated," Adham Abu Salmiya, spokesman for Gaza medical services, told Ma'an. "They were shocked to find it had actually remained in the tunnel, resulting in the deaths and injuries."

So they went into the tunnel to see if poison gas was still inside. Human canaries?

The entire idea of Egypt spraying poison gas in tunnels makes no sense, as there is nothing to be gained by such a move. Far more likely is that either an Egyptian explosion sucked the air out of the tunnel, or that fuel being smuggled caused the deaths by being exposed to air, or - very possibly - there was an explosion of munitions en route that Hamas doesn't want to admit.

Egypt denied the charges. Palestine Today writes that Egypt always coordinated tunnel demolitions with the Gaza government to ensure that no one is inside, and does not confirm that any demolitions occurred at the time of these deaths.

AP followed up:

The intelligence official confirmed that Egyptian security forces destroyed the entrances to several tunnels this week, but said that no gas was used in the operations. He said that Egypt routinely blows up the mouths to the tunnels to seal them off, and that the blast and an ensuing fire could quickly use up all the oxygen in the confined space, causing people caught inside to suffocate.

It was not immediately clear what evidence Hamas was basing its allegations on.

Mohammed al-Osh, the medical director of the Abu Yusef al-Najar hospital in the Gaza border town of Rafah where some of the dead and injured were taken, could not confirm those killed had inhaled poison gas. He said the hospital did not have the equipment or specialists needed to conduct the necessary tests on lungs and clothing.

Another strange part about this story is that, to the best of my knowledge, the names of the victims have not been released , which could indicate that they were not just smuggling candy bars. (UPDATE: Their names can be seen here. h/t Soccer Dad)

Either way, Hamas' flat accusation of "poison gas" is a lie, as no one in Gaza could possibly confirm that charge.

French journalist tries a burqa for a week

Interesting story from Al Arabiya:

As the heated debate about banning the face veil rages in France, a journalist with the women's magazine Marie Claire decided to put on the controversial cloth and walk the streets of Paris for five days.

In an article entitled "Ma semaine en Niqab" (My Week in a Niqab), published with photos in the May issue of Marie Claire, journalist Elizabeth Alexandre described her experience.

"I wanted to know what it feels to be fully veiled," she wrote. "I wanted to feel the fabric on my cheeks and forehead and see the world from this tiny slit. I also wanted to know how the world would see me."

"I felt as if I am inside a tent. I couldn't see my feet and when I walked the garment rolled around my legs and I had to slow down. I was terrified I was going to fall on my face."

She then went to a café where she found it very hard to drink her coffee or smoke a cigarette from under her veil.

"I had to keep lifting the veil in order to take sips from the coffee or to smoke. This was very difficult."

The full veil also proved impractical when Alexandre tried to read as couldn't wear her glasses because her entire face was covered. The fabric of the veil also rubbed against her eyelashes making it very inconvenient for her to blink.

Getting on the metro, Alexandre realized that people were reluctant to talk to her because they did not feel at ease talking to someone whose face they cannot see.

"They looked at me then looked away. I tried to start a conversation with the passengers, but I failed. I felt isolated."

When she went to her office in the magazine pretending she had decided to wear the face veil for real, her colleagues started treating her differently.

"I found out that I could neither see nor hear properly and that made team work nearly impossible."

Going back home and taking off the veil made Alexandre breathe a sigh of relief. She felt she was free.

"I discovered how the face veil isolates the woman as it turns her into someone who cannot interact with people. I felt that after only three days of wearing it."

On the fourth day, Alexandre drew the third conclusion: the full veil made her extremely self-conscious and overly sensitive about anything related to her body.

"I felt that I am both invisible and too visible. It felt like I was placed in a window ship and everyone was invited to watch."

Alexandre explained that wearing a full veil eliminated any feelings of vanity or self-esteem and made her ovely self-conscious whenever the smallest part of her body was revealed.

"Being totally covered made me feel that my body is a disgrace. All men around me turned into sexually obsessed beasts that want to devour me.

It is then that I felt I need the veil to protect me from this imminent danger. For the first time in my life, I felt I was a sex bomb and a source of sin."

Which is exactly how Muslim men who insist that women wear the veil think of them.

When I was a kid and didn't know any better, I would eat and enjoy Pop-Tarts.

Unfortunately, as soon as my family discovered that Pop-Tarts were not kosher, I have been deprived.

For years now I have been looking for a decent Pop-Tart clone that tastes as I remember the original. Specifically: Strawberry, non-frosted.

I tried Pillsbury Toaster Strudels, which were kosher for a time, but they weren't the same. Not bad, though.

A couple of years ago Tradition Foods created a kosher version, but it wasn't very good - and not close to how I remember my Pop-Tarts tasting. Other consumers apparently agreed, and that product is no longer being sold.

Another company, Nature Path Organic, makes their own version of Pop-Tarts and they have a Canadian kosher certification. They were edible, but alas, not good enough (and that's not only my opinion.)

Then, a couple of weeks ago, I noticed at Costco a product called Special-K Fruit Crisps. The picture on the box looked a lot like my old Pop-Tarts - and it is by Kelloggs! So I bought a couple of large boxes.

This is as close as I'm going to get.

They are not toaster-tarts, rather they are more like the size of granola bars. They are thinner than Pop-Tarts. They have a smattering of frosting. But - they taste just as I remember Pop-Tarts tasting!

And after 8 seconds in the microwave or a time in the toaster oven, they are even better! At 100 calories for two crisps, they are not too fattening either (unless you eat massive amounts, which is a serious danger for me.)

One of my goals in life is now fulfilled.

And, just maybe, some Muslim will read this and be equally happy.