The biggest BDS fail in history! (updated)

The number of Palestinian Arabs working in Jewish settlements has increased since the PA announced they would ban such activity.

According to the head of the Federation of Trade Unions of Palestine, Shaher Saad, some 31,000 Palestinian Arab workers are now employed in Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. This is a significant increase compared to the number of such workers in April, 2010 - estimated at 25,000 - when Mahmoud Abbas signed a law banning Palestinian Arabs from working in settlements. (Saad claims that it is an increase of between one and two thousand workers.)

At that time, the PA Economic Minister stated that anyone working in the settlements after 2010 would face up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $14,000.

Saad said that some 70,000 others are working in Israel proper.

Workers in Jewish communities in the territories get paid at least double the amount that they get in PA-controlled areas.

While the BDS movement advocates boycotting everything Israeli, they especially concentrate on anything to do with settlements outside the Green Line. They claim that Palestinian Arab "civil society" is demanding such a boycott. Yet tens of thousands of Palestinian Arabs themselves choose to work in the supposedly illegal and despised settlements themselves, and more are joining them every day - a direct contradiction to what BDS supporters are claiming.

If so many Palestinian Arabs themselves choose to work in Jewish settlements, they are obviously ignoring BDS demands. And those same evil settlements are providing a good living for many thousands of ordinary Palestinian Arabs - something that no BDS proponent can come close to claiming.

In fact, if it was up to BDSers and no Palestinian Arab would work for any Israeli employer, the unemployment rate in the territories would skyrocket and the effect on the Palestinian Arab economy would be devastating.

Israelis - and even those evil "settlers" - are helping ordinary Palestinian Arabs to support and raise their families with dignity. BDS wants to take that away.

And Palestinian Arabs themselves have chosen which side they prefer.

UPDATE: Thillo reminded me of a story I didn't cover from Ha'aretz, describing a study that showed that Palestinian Arabs invest far more in Israel than in their own areas. So that might be a bigger BDS fail.

Read More

Ambassador Michael Oren's Thanksgiving message

From Michael Oren's Facebook page:

Thanksgiving in Hebrew is called הוֹדָיָיָה. On Thanksgiving, Americans traditionally eat turkey, which in Hebrew is called הוֹדו, and comes from the word thanks. Many of the Puritans who celebrated the 1st Thanksgiving 400 years ago knew Hebrew and perhaps the reason they ate turkey during that holiday was because the words for thanks and turkey are the same.

With that in mind, the People of Israel wish all our dear friends in America a fulfilling and joyous Thanksgiving.

It is a nice message, although since turkeys are a New World bird, the Hebrew appellation of "hodu" postdates the Pilgrims.

But either way, I wish my American readers a happy Thanksgiving!

Read More

The irony of a "Palestine" tourism video

Here's how the United Nations Development Programme describes its aims in the Palestinian Arab territories:

UNDP’s assistance to the Palestinian people in all sectors, in both the West Bank and Gaza and in times of emergency and of peace, is aimed towards reducing poverty and rebuilding livelihoods. Since 1978, our Programme of Assistance to the Palestinian People has been implementing projects in the occupied Palestinian territory worth over US$600 million, focusing on the areas vital to the Palestinian well-being and socio-economic development, such as water, health and education facilities, social services, infrastructure and rural and agricultural development.

All of these are worthy activities for people who are in desperate need.

Which makes the following video most interesting. Very professionally done, it was released by the PA Ministry of Tourism and it shows a place where you can get anything you want:



There is a bit of a disconnect between how "Palestine" is described in UNDP and other UN literature and how it is presented in this video. From reading the UNDP quote above, for example, you would believe that Palestinian Arabs are poor and in need of a lot of assistance from the outside.

Watching the video, one gets the opposite impression. "Palestine" is a place where businessmen and wealthy tourists do not have to compromise on their standards, where luxury is the norm:

The irony is that the video was funded by - the UNDP!

The UN has a vested interest in making the PalArab territories appear impoverished and oppressed, but it is funding a video that makes those same areas appear luxurious and trendy.

It is a bit hypocritical to claim poverty and a demand UN handouts in order to make a video that shows such apparent riches.

The UNDP does lots of impressive things - helping provide clean water, sustainable food supplies, medical infrastructure, microloans to help women in developing countries, and so on. Somehow I don't think that helping tourism is one of their core goals. (They do discuss eco-tourism on their site to help out impoverished countries and protect their natural resources, but this is nothing like that.)

The sad fact is that giving money to Palestinian Arabs is no longer even vaguely related to their need. It is trendy, not necessary. Their money train is now running on inertia.

No more proof is needed than the Hoping Foundation benefit "for Palestinian refugee children" held in England this week, where dozens of airhead celebrities dressed up and hung out - raising hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Look at their pictures. You can just feel how much they care about "Palestine."

Read More

Israel says it will defend Greek gas drilling from Turkey

From JTA:

Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said in Greece that Israel will defend Greek oil drilling in Cyprus.

Asked at a news briefing Tuesday what Israel's reaction is to a threat by Turkey regarding drilling in Cyprus, Ayalon said, “If anyone tries to challenge these drillings, we will meet those challenges.”

Ayalon, the first foreign official to visit Greece since the formation of its new government, added that he did not think that Turkey would challenge any drilling in the southeast Mediterranean. Turkey said last month it would send naval forces to protect its drilling rights.

I cannot recall any previous time that Israel publicly offered to defend another state from potential third-party aggression. If true, this seems to be a very visible statement of defiance towards Turkey's aggressive rhetoric in recent months.

Turkey started its own drilling off of the coast of Cyprus in September - escorted by naval boats.

The story is not reported anywhere else I can find.

Beyond that, Israel and Greece are strengthening their relationship in other spheres:

Greece's deputy foreign minister, Dimitris Dollis, stressed in his meeting with Ayalon that Israel-Greece relations upgraded in the past year would continue and be strengthened in the near future. Dollis said the ties would not be affected by the change of government in Greece.

“These are not meetings that are held just so we can get together," he said. "They are meetings that will help us to jointly promote the issues we are dealing with and, naturally, provide an institutional framework -- and thus continuity -- for this conference.”

The two officials agreed to convene in Greece members of the Jewish and Greek diasporas from countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia, France and Britain. The meeting is planned to take place in the spring in Salonika.

Ayalon and Dollis discussed cooperation among Israel, Greece and Cyprus concerning the subject of natural gas. A trilateral memorandum of understanding on the issue, as well as the management of water resources, has been drafted and is due to be signed soon.

The deputy foreign ministers noted that Greece and Israel have common strategic interests in energy and energy security, and immense prospects for collaboration in that area.

On Wednesday, Ayalon met with the new Greek foreign minister, Stavros Dimas, and defense minister, Dimitris Avramopoulos, to discuss strengthening relations between the two countries.

Next week, the Greek minister for the environment, energy and climate change, Giorgos Papakonstantinou, will visit Israel.

For some very good background on why Greece is a natural ally of Israel, with examples of specific historical and cultural similarities between the Jewish and Greek people, there is a nice article by Diana Muir Appelbaum in Jewish Ideas Daily from July. Also, check out an article in The Economist last week with a surprisingly optimistic quote by Cyprus' president.

I don't know whether Israel's being close to Greece is strategically better from a geopolitical perspective than her former alliance with Turkey, but it sure feels better.

(h/t D)

Read More

Israelis saving the world, again

From Israel21C:

Psychotherapy, drug therapy, hypnosis, cold turkey -- whatever the remedy for addictions such as gambling, smoking, or narcotics, doctors agree there is no one quick fix.

However, a new tool from Israel promises to help alleviate addictions and at least a dozen other brain disorders, such as depression, Alzheimer's disease and schizophrenia, in a non-invasive way with no side effects.

Developed by the Israeli company Brainsway, the new medical device provides deep-brain electromagnetic stimulation.

Maps of our brain's cortex are already well known, says Dr. Avraham Zangen, Brainsway's neuro-consultant, and stimulating specific areas of the brain electromagnetically is easy. Brainsway's new technology, deep TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation), takes it to a new level.

"We invented the ability to reach deeper, to reach the relevant brain regions in psychiatric treatment," he tells ISRAEL21c.

Unlike electroshock therapy, which is still used extensively today on people with clinical depression who do not respond to other treatments, the more refined Brainsway stimulates only the area of the cortex related to depression, rather than the whole brain. "We gain the beneficial effect of shock therapy without the side effects," Zangen explains.

Trial patients in Los Angeles, New York and Dallas have already benefited from the treatment. Trials are taking place at 22 centers throughout Europe, the United States, Canada and Israel including Harvard and Columbia universities. Once the device receives US Food and Drug Administration approval, it will start being sold, probably at first to private clinics.

The ability to stimulate different brain regions is not equivalent to discovering a new medication, he says. It is equivalent to developing a whole new set of drugs.

The first diseases expected to be tackled by Brainsway will be those for which conventional treatments do not work well. The company is also investigating ways to target the "craving" areas of the brain, by stimulating them in a negative way so the brain no longer craves harmful substances or behaviors.

Obesity is another area the Brainsway coil could potentially address, as well as autism, stroke and Parkinson's disease.

How will the hate-Israel crowd (many of whom are crowing about Sarah Schulman's incredibly unhinged op-ed in the NYT today, see here, here, and here) spin this to make Israel look as bad as possible?

• Those money-grubbing "Zionists" making expensive machines that the third world cannot afford
• Barbaric Zionists are pushing "Cuckoo's Nest"-style electroshock therapy
• All the research and development behind this was just to distract the world from Israel's crimes
• Jewish Zionists are building mind control equipment to make Arabs want to leave
• "Brain"-washing
• American aid to Israel being wasted on useless Israeli research
• Israel blockades essential medical equipment from Gaza
• See? I told you that Israel uses Joo-Rays!
• Depression is a "Zionist" myth created by the "Zionist" Freud to make money for "Zionists"
• The knobs on the device are made in the Occupied West Bank, all profits must go to Palestinians
• Send angry letters to Harvard and Columbia to protest their partnering with an apartheid company

Read More

"Pinkwashing:" Visceral hate for Israel in a NYT op-ed

The New York Times has an op-ed by Sarah Schulman, a professor of humanities at CUNY, that can only be described as pure, visceral hate for Israel under the veneer of fake liberalism.

In 2005, with help from American marketing executives, the Israeli government began a marketing campaign, “Brand Israel,” aimed at men ages 18 to 34. The campaign, as reported by The Jewish Daily Forward, sought to depict Israel as “relevant and modern.” The government later expanded the marketing plan by harnessing the gay community to reposition its global image.

Last year, the Israeli news site Ynet reported that the Tel Aviv tourism board had begun a campaign of around $90 million to brand the city as “an international gay vacation destination.” The promotion, which received support from the Tourism Ministry and Israel’s overseas consulates, includes depictions of young same-sex couples and financing for pro-Israeli movie screenings at lesbian and gay film festivals in the United States....

This message is being articulated at the highest levels. In May, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Congress that the Middle East was “a region where women are stoned, gays are hanged, Christians are persecuted.”

The growing global gay movement against the Israeli occupation has named these tactics “pinkwashing”: a deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians’ human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life. Aeyal Gross, a professor of law at Tel Aviv University, argues that “gay rights have essentially become a public-relations tool,” even though “conservative and especially religious politicians remain fiercely homophobic.”

Yes, a professor at a prestigious university is arguing that every positive Israeli action is not positive, but an immoral attempt to whitewash Israeli crimes.

We've seen this same kind of thinking before, when Israel set up field hospitals in Japan and Haiti after natural disasters. Critics charge that the doctors and other volunteers who spend countless hours helping ordinary victims far away from Israel are really doing propaganda for the evil state of Israel, and their efforts are a transparent effort to distract the world from Israeli crimes.

In both these cases, we have a pure manifestation of psychological projection at play.

Strident critics of Israel look at the state through a single lens: one that shows Israel to be a purely evil entity whose entire raison d'etre is the subjugation and oppression of innocent Arabs. There are no shades of grey, no other issues at play - everything Israel does is somehow connected to its inherently evil nature. (Shulman's "proof" is that homophobia still exists in Israel, as if there is anywhere on the planet that it has been eradicated.)

Since the critics define Israel this way, they assume that Israel defines itself this way as well. If Israel exhibits any whiff of charity, or liberalism, or kindness - it is nothing more than a smokescreen to cover for its genocidal, racist ways. The idea that Israel has both good and bad parts, or that different Israelis (outside the enlightened anti-Zionist variety) can ever do something different or orthogonal to their real goal of oppressing Arabs, is simply not possible. If some Israelis start a charitable organization it is not because they actually want to help people, but because they want to cover up their constant crimes. Kindness and morality are not possible, so any examples must really be sophisticated manifestations of Israel's inherent evil.

To these sick people, it is literally impossible for Israel or Israelis to do anything admirable outside the context of the conflict. The conflict is everything. To them, Israel itself is defined by its own desire to rid itself of Arabs. Any counter-proof is readily dismissed as nothing more than PR. The concept that most Israelis are just trying to live their lives like everyone else, and that they might even be nice, normal, relatable people, must be combated. If Israelis are perceived by the world as human beings, their message of Israeli criminality gets diluted - and that must be fought. Anything that could blunt the demonization of the Jewish state is by definition as evil as the Jewish state itself is.

This is hate, pure and simple. It is the exact opposite of the liberalism these haters profess. It is the bigoted stereotyping of an entire people and their democratically elected government in order to twist reality to reflect their own visceral loathing.

And just as the bullying Israeli Jews cannot possibly do anything positive for gays, the eternal victims in "Palestine" cannot do anything wrong:

Pinkwashing not only manipulates the hard-won gains of Israel’s gay community, but it also ignores the existence of Palestinian gay-rights organizations. Homosexuality has been decriminalized in the West Bank since the 1950s, when anti-sodomy laws imposed under British colonial influence were removed from the Jordanian penal code, which Palestinians follow. More important is the emerging Palestinian gay movement with three major organizations: Aswat, Al Qaws and Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. 

So not only is Israel incomparably evil, but Palestinian Arabs are incomparably tolerant and liberal, according to this faux crusader for gay rights.

A quick look through the websites of the three Palestinian Arab gay-rights groups she mentions reveals something interesting: it is nearly impossible to find the names of any of their members or leaders.

And the reason is explained at the Awsat site:

Most of Aswat members are "closeted" to some extent. Consequently, only one or two members can go public and identify themselves as Aswat members in our activities involving a certain amount of exposure i.e., advocacy & outreach, education etc. The 'closet' is an outcome of a homophobic and patriarchal society which has an undeniable impact on Aswat activities. Yet, group members develop different strategies in order to participate in various activities. For example, some members use nicknames when presenting themselves or reaching out to other community members, while others choose to promote activities which allow a reasonable degree of anonymity such as translations, Committee meetings, virtual support to others, information gathering, fundraising tasks etc. Thus, due to personal safety considerations, Aswat members have requested their names not to be disclosed.

The cognitive dissonance that runs through Sarah Schulman's head must be overwhelming. According to their own activists, Palestinian Arab gays live under the constant fear of being physically harmed - a fear that the evil Israeli gay community simply does not have. Schulman is trying to give the impression that it is Israel that has the problems with gays, and Palestinian Arabs are the tolerant ones, even as this is shown to be a lie by the Palestinian Arab gay community itself!

The only way to explain this self-contradictory thought process is that logic and simple facts fly out the window when you are dealing with a hater. Their hate is all-encompassing. They are consumed by it, and their brains are infected by it.

We've seen the same hate and concomitant lack of rational thinking  in the absurd ramblings all over the Internet from the KKK, from neo-Nazis, from Islamists, from the far-right as well as the far-left. This same laughable "logic" has been used to justify hate against Jews, blacks, gays and women. They also have only one lens through which they look at the world. Pure, unbridled hate is no more moral when it is against members of a nation than when it is against any other group.

Being a professor does not inoculate one against infection with this virus of hate.

Sarah Schulman is just another hater.

And this op-ed proves it.

Read More

Hamas warns Gazans that Zionists recruit spies with p0rn

The Hamas-linked Palestine Times has a purported interview with a captured "collaborator" who describes how he got ensnared in doing the evil Zionists' bidding.

"Khaled," a young man of 26, is sitting now in prison, on charges of treason and collaboration with hostile parties, and may be sentenced to death...

I lived in a regular family environment. Like many people here, one of my friends taught me how to use the Internet and research methods - I wish he never taught me that ... I used the Internet to search for vice and pornography sites ... And sit for long hours in front of the computer... I kept a lot of porn sites and shared them among my friends and acquaintances; I was nicknamed the "King of pornographic sites." Many of my friends would trying to get video clips ... And I would give them free of charge...

Soon I began to feel bored and wanted to find a new way to satisfy my desires, so I started to learn how to chat, not any chat but the pornography chat ... I bought a camera and mike in order to enter these sites and I was not sensitive to anything, and begun to recognize the girls and talk to them directly to video and audio ... One of the girls was called "JUNIEN" and chose to be my friend ...I began to sit with her ​​for more than four hours a day in front of the camera .. "JUNIEN" said she lives in "Haifa" and was 22-years-old , and she likes pornography ... our relationship had continued for more than 4 days, and she asked me to take off my clothes and I imagine her in front of the camera doing so as well ... I did not hesitate much before the request and did what she asked me ... ...She asked for my mobile phone number ... I gave it her and she actually started calling me and talking in a way quite pornographic ... A few days later called me and told me that the director in the company which manages the pornography site will call me to coordinate a meeting with me ... so I was pleased and waited contact and he actually called me ...

He was disrespectful to me, laughing and telling me about some of the footage that I made ​​in front of the camera and I'm naked, and told me that he will post it and it will bring many visitors and viewers ... I refused so strongly ... And here began the bargaining. He said to me, and I quote: "You are an Arab looking for pornography, and I need intelligence information on terrorists" ... I was struck by this sentence did not know what to do and closed the phone directly ... He contacted me again and said to me, "Khaled, We know a lot about you" .... He began to recall information about me and my family and my friends and my place of residence and some details of my life ... much to my surprise. He continued, "We do not want serious information from you ... You live in a border area and know that the terrorists come to shoot the rocket fire on us and this causes the killing of innocent people ... We want only when you see anyone approaching the area that you call me directly and we will take care of them ". .

I told him immediately, "You want me to become a spy" ... He was laughing and said "no .. you help us all and protect your family and friends of these terrorists," I answered him: "Find someone else, I will not be a spy", there was more laughing and he said "I will take you over" JUNIEN, "and I will post your video in half an hour" .. . Then I surrendered to him and told him will contact you ... then I could not find "JUNIEN," and I discovered that I became an agent and I can not go back ...

I started to contact an officer of intelligence with the nickname "Abu Musa," and told him about a movement of resistance fighters in the region, and I noticed "drone" reconnaissance planes at the same time ... I continued like this for more than 3 years and he was communicating with me always has sent me some money and an Orange chip... In a few days I called "Abu Musa," to tell him about people about to launch a rocket .. And moments later I heard a big explosion and knew then that it was from them targeting the insurgents and the death of a number of them and wounding others .. After this incident I have been arrested and now I reap what planted....

The article goes on to say that many pornography sites are run by Zionists for this purpose, and how evil they are, and how they can take over the webcams on the computers.

Some of this rings true, although a couple of details seem unlikely (like immediately hearing a drone.)

There is clearly a subtext here of Hamas trying to make Gaza a more moral Islamic society and using the fear of becoming a spy as a way to dissuade people from watching salacious videos.

Read More

Israeli dancing group dropped from festival after refusing to change their name

From Australia's J-Wire:

A Melbourne Israeli Dancing group was dropped from participating in a Victorian dance festival after refusing organisers’ moves to drop all references to Israel.

The Machol Israeli Dancing Club was scheduled to appear at Multicultural Folk Dance Festival of High Country in the Victorian country town of Mansfield earlier this month.

The festival was organised under the auspices of the Victorian Multicultural Commission and a grant had been awarded to Marta Balan who according to a submission to the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission approved the performance of the Machol Group.

When the participants’ names were released, Esther Blumenthal-Skop of Machol was surprised to learn that the name of the Machol Israeli Dancing Club had been truncated to Machol Group and all references to Israel had been removed with the club being described as a Jewish dance group.

No change had been made to other groups including Chinese, Hungarian, Armenaian and Ukrarnian Traditional Folk Dances and the Irish Reel and Jigs.

In her submission to VEOHRC, Blumenthal-Skop said she asked for an explanation and was told that the organiser would not be held responsible for consequences if the words “Israel” or “Israeli” were used to describe the group.

The submission states that Ms Balan agreed to the original wording but within hours Machol was told that choreographers had decided that the dance bracket was not suitable for the event…and that the artistic director was not made aware of this and was surprised at Machol’s non-appearance at the final rehearsal.

Chairman of VEOHRC John Searle told J-Wire: “The matter is now in the hands of the Victorian Muliticultural Commission and we await their findings.”

Here is a perfect case of where anti-Zionism is just as ugly and disgraceful as traditional anti-semitism is - but it cannot be called anti-semitism.

I really have to revive my attempt to get the word misoziony to be used for cases like this. I never liked "Zionophobia." It isn't fear of Israel - it is hate.

(h/t IsraelAwareness)

Read More

New Second Temple find causes Arabs to imply it was a myth

From Israel's MFA:

Who built the Temple Mount walls? Every tour guide and every student grounded in the history of Jerusalem will immediately reply that it was Herod. However, in the archaeological excavations alongside the ancient drainage channel of Jerusalem a very old ritual bath (miqwe) was recently discovered that challenges the conventional archaeological perception which regards Herod as being solely responsible for its construction.

In an excavation beneath the paved street near Robinson's Arch, sections of the Western Wall's foundation were revealed that is set on the bedrock - which is also the western foundation of Robinson's Arch - an enormous arch that bore a staircase that led from Jerusalem's main street to the entrance of the Temple Mount compound.

According to Professor Reich, "It became apparent during the course of the work that there are rock-hewn remains of different installations on the natural bedrock, including cisterns, ritual baths and cellars. These belonged to the dwellings of a residential neighborhood that existed there before King Herod decided to enlarge the Temple Mount compound. The Jewish historian Josephus, a contemporary of that period, writes that Herod embarked on the project of enlarging the compound in the eighteenth year of his reign (that is in 22 BCE) and described it as "the largest project the world has ever heard of".

When it was decided to expand the compound, the area was confiscated and the walls of the buildings were demolished down to the bedrock. The rock-cut installations were filled with earth and stones so as to be able to build on them. When the locations of the Temple Mount corners were determined and work was begun setting the first course of stone in place, it became apparent that one of the ritual baths was situated directly in line with the Western Wall. The builders filled in the bath with earth, placed three large flat stones on the soil and built the first course of the wall on top of this blockage.

While sifting the soil removed from inside the sealed ritual bath, three clay oil lamps were discovered of a type that was common in the first century CE. In addition, the sifting also yielded seventeen bronze coins that can be identified.

Dr. Donald Ariel, curator of the numismatic collection of the Israel Antiquities Authority, determined that the latest coins (4 in all) were struck by the Roman procurator of Judea, Valerius Gratus, in the year 17/18 CE. This means that Robinson's Arch, and possibly a longer part of the Western Wall, were constructed after this year - that is to say: at least twenty years after Herod's death (which is commonly thought to have occurred in the year 4 BCE).

This bit of archaeological information illustrates the fact that the construction of the Temple Mount walls and Robinson's Arch was an enormous project that lasted decades and was not completed during Herod's lifetime.

This dramatic find confirms Josephus' descriptions which state that it was only during the reign of King Agrippa II (Herod's great-grandson) that the work was finished, and upon its completion there were eight to ten thousand unemployed in Jerusalem.

Palestine News Network had this as the top story. While the article is pretty accurate, here was their headline:

New archeological discoveries undermine the narrative about the Jewish temple in Jerusalem

It will be recalled that the PA has said that there was no Jewish Temple in Jerusalem at all.

(h/t Yoel)

Read More

Anti-semitic crimes so prevalent in US, they aren't reported

From Bella at It's Complicated:

When, almost two weeks ago, a particularly serious anti-Jewish hate crime was committed in Brooklyn, the NY Times first reported it only in it's Metro section blog and then sat on the story for a full weekend before doing a follow up. In the meantime both NY tabloids, The Daily News and The NY Post reported it throughout the weekend as a matter of urgency. But they're just tabloids. 

Coincidentally, I happened to be perusing the Southern Poverty Law Center's website and was surprised to discover that Antisemitism is not listed as a specific 'ideology' (apart from Holocaust Denial) in its Intelligence Files. I found that rather confusing and wrote to Mark Potok asking for an explanation. He very graciously responded with a phone call and explained that because Antisemitism is to be found among just about every hate group/ideology -- from Left to Right -- it cannot be made to fit into SPLC's morphology. What I heard was that Antisemitism is so ubiquitous in our society that somehow it defies categorization. 

So prevalent, so expected is it in our society that the press barely mentions it when, as Jeffrey Goldberg  posted today, the FBI reports that crimes against Jews qua Jews tops the list of all religion-based crimes in the US. That is, 65.4% are committed against Jews, as opposed to, for example, 13.2% against Muslims.

This gets us back to Mark Potok of SPLC, who cited, in an Huffington Post article, a 50% increase in hate-crimes against Muslims, but, as Goldberg remarks, didn't mention anti-Jewish crimes. I guess that just doesn't rate a mention.

I don't know the reason that anti-Muslim hate crimes spiked this year. I do have a couple of observations, though.

In a "Caution to Users," the FBI warns against drawing conclusions about hate crimes from one year to the next:

Some data in this publication may not be comparable to those in prior editions of Hate Crime Statistics because of differing levels of participation from year to year.

When Muslims want to report hate crime or violations of civil rights, they can find a link off of the main page of the CAIR website to a form they can fill out. I assume that CAIR works pro-actively to report these to relevant law-enforcement agencies as bias crimes. I am not aware of any similarly widely-available method for Jews to report anti-semitic crimes.

The ADL has reports on anti-Muslim hate crimes. CAIR has a few mentions of specific anti-semitic acts but it seems perfunctory.

And the CAIR site has this interesting part about Islamophobia:

Islamophobia has resulted in the general and unquestioned acceptance of the following:

• Islam is monolithic and cannot adapt to new realities.
• Islam does not share common values with other major faiths.
• Islam as a religion is inferior to the West. It is archaic, barbaric and irrational.
• Islam is a religion of violence and supports terrorism.
• Islam is a violent political ideology.[i]

As such any criticism by Muslims of American policy towards the Muslim world is dismissed as being “reactionary,” “anti-Semitic” and “irrational.”

In this short section, CAIR shows that it has an even more simplistic and dismissive view of their critics than the critics have of Muslims!

(h/t O)

Read More

Rifts re-appearing between Hamas leadership

AFP reports:

President Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas chief Khalid Mashaal will meet in Cairo this week despite the unrest rocking Egypt, Hamas and Fatah officials said on Tuesday.

Egypt has been shaken in recent days by renewed protests calling for the ruling military council to step aside and allow an interim civilian government to take power.

But officials of the rival parties said the unrest would not derail a planned meeting between Mashaal and Abbas later this week.

The talks will go ahead "as scheduled on Thursday," Hamas official Ismail Radwan told AFP in Gaza, in remarks which were confirmed by senior Fatah official Azzam al-Ahmad.

The two leaders are due to finalize details of a reconciliation agreement between Fatah and Hamas which was signed in May but has yet to be implemented.

There's one missing ingredient in this meeting - the Hamas leadership from Gaza!

There has been friction for years between the Damascus-based Hamas leader Khaled Meshal and the Gaza-based Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh and Mahmoud al-Zahar. And while the "unity" meeting between Meshal and Abbas is grabbing headlines, Gaza's Hamas leaders are making noises that could result in their effectively torpedoing any agreement.

Palestine Press Agency reports that Zahar is questioning the possibility of a breakthrough in Cairo, and saying that Hamas in Gaza would insist on guarantees that a reconciliation agreement would be implemented. "Otherwise, the entire reconciliation will fail."

"From my experience with Abu Mazen [Abbas], it would be wrong to be optimistic (...) He was forced to reconciliation when doors were slammed in his face and he had no choice but to reconcile," he said.

He says that Abbas reneged on agreements made last May and he wants guarantees that it will not happen again, even if it means Egyptian and other observers on the scene.

Read More

Two more unexplained explosions at terrorist sites

First at a Popular Resistance Committees site:

An explosion was reported late Tuesday at a site operated by the armed wing of the Popular Resistance Committees in the southern Gaza Strip.

The Nasser Salah Ad-Din Brigades reported no injuries following the blast near Rafah, which locals blamed on Israeli aircraft. An Israeli military spokeswoman denied the reports.

And later at a Hezbollah arms depot:

A huge explosion shook a Hezbollah stronghold near Siddiqin in the southern coastal city of Tyre overnight, a security source told The Daily Star Wednesday.

The source said the cause of the blast, which was heard shortly before midnight, could not be determined due to the heavy security blanket by Hezbollah.

Lebanese security forces were unable to access the scene of the explosion after the resistance group set up a security perimeter around the blast site, which is located in a valley called Wadi Al-Jabal al-Kabir between Siddiqin and Deir Ames, the source added.

Local media said the explosion likely took place at a Hezbollah arms cache.

"There are no comments so far," Hezbollah’s office said when contacted by The Daily Star.

As Ehud Barak saud after the giant and mysterious Iranian blast last week - may these multiply.

(h/t CHA)

Read More

Egypt and Turkey: Middle East basket cases (Spengler)

The big story that is finally being told.


From David P. Goldman (Spengler):

The mainstream media has finally picked up the story I’ve been telling since February about Egypt’s impending economic collapse. The country is nearly out of money. Under the headline, “The Egyptian pound has a distressed future,” The Financial Times reported Nov. 16, just before the last days’ slaughter on Tahrir Square, “Investors are betting against the Egyptian pound, expressing their belief that it is soon to take a dive through the futures market while the spot market is held up by Egyptian government support. The pound’s twelve-month non-deliverable forwards (NDFs) weakened 2.8 per cent on Wednesday on fears that Egypt’s reserves, which are being used to support the currency, might be reaching critical levels. The spot market, in contrast, held steady – but for how long?”

Reuters reports this morning:

CAIRO Nov 22 (Reuters) – Egypt’s pound fell to its weakest against the dollar since January 2005 on Tuesday as mass protests against army rule prompted the cabinet to tender its resignation and threw polls into doubt, giving a fresh jolt to a shaky business climate.

The Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) has sought to defend the currency during the nine turbulent months since the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak, but now traders said the pound could soon break through 6 to the dollar as investors run for cover.

They said demand for dollars among local companies and individuals had grown with the street clashes that have left 36 people dead since Saturday. Voting in the three-phase poll for the lower house of parliament is due to start on Nov. 28.

Egypt’s stock market is in free-fall, down 50% since the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak. What’s interesting is that Turkey’s stock market isn’t far behind.

The economic crisis overwhelming the Middle East stretches from Libya all the way through to Turkey. The problems are of a different order, to be sure. As I reported earlier, Egypt’s spendable foreign exchange reserves are down to just $13 billion and falling daily as the central bank buys its own unwanted currency from the market in order to postpone the inevitable collapse in the change rate. Why not just devalue? The probable answer is that the generals and their civilian front men are moving as much money as they can out of the country before Egypt goes bankrupt. Last month the generals fired all the private-sector board members of the central bank, as I reported at Asia Times Online. Everything that can be sold abroad for cash is being sold. Al-Ahramreported Nov. 19 that there is no enforcement of the ban on rice exports, because controls have simply broken down. Egypt subsidizes rice at a fraction of the world market price, so traders have an incentive to sell it overseas. Not only the country’s capacity to buy food in the future, but its existing stocks of food are disappearing. And Egypt imports half its caloric consumption.

No wonder the country is blowing up. An out-of-control kleptocracy is frantically trying to close on townhouses in Chelsea and apartments in the 16th arondissement before the central bank’s foreign exchange reserves run out. What will ensue, will be horrifying.

Turkey is in no danger of starvation, to be sure, but it faces a severe economic setback: Tayyip Erdogan, the country’s Islamist prime minister, spurred the country’s banks to lend huge amounts to consumers in advance of last June’s national elections. Bank lending rose at by 40% in 2010 and by another 40% in 2011, and Turks bought consumer goods from abroad, running up a balance of payments deficit exceeding 10% of GDP (the same level as Greece). Most of that is financed by short-term debt. Turkey won’t go bankrupt–it’s overall debt levels are manageable–but its economy will have to shrink by a good 5% to staunch the bleeding. That will deflate the neo-Ottoman balloon that Erdogan has been floating, and make it much harder to suppress Turkish grievances in the impoverished Eastern corner of the country.

There is no center of power, no reorientation, no neo-Ottoman empire, no Shi’ite crescent, no Arab Spring, no coherent description of what is occurring in the Middle East. There is only catastrophic social breakdown, civil unrest, despair and violence. If Iran gets nuclear weapons, they will be used. We cannot fix the Middle East. We can only protect ourselves from the fallout, starting with acquisition of WMD by a terrorist state. The last sentence of my book How Civilizations Die (and why Islam is Dying, Too) quotes Virgil’s warning to Dante in Canto III of the Inferno: Non ragionam da lor, ma guarda e pasa. Nothing to see here, folks. Keep moving.

Read More

"Humanitarians" visit Gaza, vow to fight Israel

From IMEMC:

A solidarity convoy made it into the Gaza Strip on Monday evening, through the Rafah Border Terminal, between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. Members of the "Freedom Spring" convoy will be holding meetings with political and social figures in Gaza.

Representatives of Arab Spring movement are part of the convoy and plan to hold a meeting with Ismail Haniyya, Prime Minister of the dissolved Hamas-led government in Gaza, and several Palestinian officials, in addition to holding meetings with Gaza businessmen, representatives of women movements, and representatives of local NGO’s.

Dr. Salah Sultan, head of the “Egyptian Popular Committee Against the Judaisation of Jerusalem”, stated that convoy members came to Gaza to aid it and its people, and will “return as fighters and liberators of Jerusalem and the Al Aqsa Mosque”, the Hamas-affiliated Palestine-Info reported.

“We will stand with you, the world will stand with you, to defend Jerusalem, especially after the Zionists declared plans demolish the historic Moghrabi (Magharba) Gate in Jerusalem that links between the Al Boraq Wall and the Al Aqsa Mosque”, Sultan added.

On his part, Dr. Arafat Madi, head of the European Campaign to end the Siege on Gaza, stated that this convoy carries two messages; solidarity, as activists from more than 40 countries are part of this convoy, and to tell the people of Gaza “that they are not alone in the struggle against the Zionist occupation, that will vanish and end soon”.

So peaceful!

Read More

What is the progressive case for Israel?

An avowedly left-wing and pro-Israel organization in Great Britain, Engage, was set up to counter anti-Israel boycotts. Its website has some interesting articles.

Here's part of one recent article by its founder, David Hirsh:

What is the progressive case for Israel? Why should a nation state need somebody to make its case? What is the progressive case for France or for Poland? Before the French Revolution, the question of France was still open. Was Marseille to be part of the same Republic as Brittany? When there was a political movement for the foundation of France, then there was a case for and also a case against France. When Poland was half engulfed by the Soviet Union and half by the Third Reich, there was a progressive case for Poland. But today, thankfully, Poland exists. It doesn’t need a ‘case’.

There are reasons to be ambivalent about nationalism. Nationalist movements have often stood up against forces which threaten human freedom. Nationalism offers us a way of visualising ourselves as part of a community in which we look after each other. But being part of something also means defining others as not being part of it, as being excluded from it. The left should fight for freedom with the nationalists but we should also remember the dangers of nationalism. Like John Lennon, we should imagine a world where people no longer feel the need to protect themselves against external threat, but until it exists, it is wise for communities to retain the possibility of self-defence.

Progressives in France or Poland might hope to dissolve their states into the European Union, or into a global community. In that sense there is still a possible case to be made for Poland or for France. But nobody thinks that either has to justify their existences to anybody outside. Not even Germany after the crimes of the Second World War had to justify its existence.

...But as the Holocaust had defeated the Socialists and the Bundists, so these other criticisms were answered, not by argument or reason but by huge, irreversible events in the material world; in this case by the UN decision to found Israel and by the defence of the new state against the invading armies of neighbouring states which tried to push the Jews out. The Jews, armed by Stalin via Czechoslovakia, in violation of a British and American arms embargo, were not pushed out. About 700,000 Palestinian Arabs left, fled or were forced out during the war and were not allowed back by the new state of Israel. For them this was truly a catastrophe but the Israel/Palestine conflict was never inevitable. It was the result of successive defeats for progressive forces within both nations. It is still not inevitable. Neither could the fact of the conflict possibly de-legitimise a nation. Nations exist and do not require legitimacy.

Isaac Deutcher, Trotsky’s biographer, who had been a Socialist anti-Zionist before the Holocaust, wrote the following in 1954:

I have, of course, long since abandoned my anti-Zionism, which was based on a confidence in the European labour movement, or, more broadly, in European society and civilization, which that society and civilization have not justified. If, instead of arguing against Zionism in the 1920s and 1930s I had urged European Jews to go to Palestine, I might have helped to save some of the lives that were later extinguished in Hitler’s gas chambers.[2]

Deutscher was not embracing Zionism as an ideology, he was recognising that the debate was over. Israel now existed in the material world and no longer just in the imagination. Antisemitism treats ‘the Jews’ as an idea rather than as a collectivity of actual human beings; an idea which can be opposed was transformed into a people which could be eliminated. To think of Israel as an idea or as a political movement rather than as a nation state makes it possible to think of eliminating it too.

Israel needs to find the peace with its neighbours, amongst whom hostile and antisemitic movements have significant influence. It needs to continue to fulfil contradictory requirements, as a democratic state for both its Jewish and non-Jewish citizens, but also as a Jewish state, guaranteeing the rights of Jews in particular. There is nothing unusual about a social institution finding pragmatic and difficult ways to fulfil contradictory requirements.

But what if it turns out that Zionism’s promise to build a ‘normal’ nation state was utopian. Perhaps the poison of the Holocaust is not yet spent. Maybe Israel is, as Detuscher thought, a precarious life-raft state , floating in a hostile sea and before a careless world. Perhaps the pressure on Israel from outside, and the unique circumstances of its foundation are creating too many agonising internal contradictions and fault-lines. Whereas people used to tell the Jews of Europe to go home to Palestine, now they tell the Jews of Israel to go home to Europe. Whereas ‘the Jews’ were thought to be central to the workings of capitalism, today Israel is said to be the keystone of imperialism. If the Palestinians have come to symbolise the victims of ‘the West’ then ‘the Jews’ are again cast in the symbolic imagination as the villains of the world. Perhaps Israel is precarious and perhaps we have not yet seen the final Act of the tragedy of the Jews. And if it comes to pass, there will be those watching who will still be capable of saying, with faux sadness, that ‘the Jews’ brought this upon themselves.

(h/t D)

Read More