Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, February 21, 2016

J-Street's curious stance on Soviet refuseniks

J-Street sent an email to its supporters about three members of Congress that they want to replace, and mentioning credentials of those they want instead.

What’s better than unseating one Congressman who voted to block the Iran deal? Unseating three.

And what’s even better than that? Replacing them with three pro-diplomacy women with strong ties to the Jewish community.

Replace Carlos Curbelo with J Street endorsee Annette Taddeo in South Florida (FL-26).
Replace Bruce Poliquin with Emily Cain in the largest district east of the Mississippi (ME-2).
And send Mike Coffman packing by electing Morgan Carroll in Denver (CO-6).

This is real. The DCCC just added all three of these endorsees to their "Red-to-Blue" program, meaning their numbers are showing a high chance of these seats flipping. Given that Obama carried each district in 2012, we're liking the odds too.

We're also loving the candidates. It's not just that they support the Iran agreement while their opponents tried (or are still trying) to sabotage it. Morgan Carroll lived on a Kibbutz and traveled to the Soviet Union with her mother to support Refuseniks. And, if elected, Annette Taddeo would be the first Hispanic Jewish Member of Congress.

According to J-Street, supporting Soviet refuseniks is a great metric for establishing one's Jewish bona-fides.

But there is something a little jarring about using that fact to help elect a woman who stands for what most former Soviet Jews in Israel would bitterly oppose.

Natan Sharansky, the most famous of all refuseniks, has passionately campaigned against the Iran deal.

Ida Nudel was against the disengagement from Gaza.

Yuli Edelstein is a member of Likud and against a Palestinian state that could endanger Israel.

Perhaps Morgan Carroll could give a little more respect to the actual opinions of the people she and her mother fought to free, rather than spit in their faces by supporting giving hundreds of billions of dollars to those who want to destroy the nation that these people risked their lives to live in.

To J-Street, the refuseniks are not heroes to be emulated, but pawns to be used to gain political points.

Carroll's opponent, Mike Coffman, on the other hand, has unquestioned pro-Israel credentials. He was part of a rally supporting Israel during the 2014 Gaza war.

J-Street was nowhere to be found at that rally as far as I can tell.

He has said, "Being a supporter of Israel in Congress means that I will fight those who believe that Israel should return to its ‘67 borders. Only Israel can determine what borders it needs for its own security and the United States should never dictate to Israel what its security requirements are.”

J-Street disagrees.

There is one thing that is unquestioningly Jewish about J Street, though. It has the chutzpah to claim that those who want to go around Israel's democratically elected leaders are "pro-Israel" and those who support them are anti-Israel.

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Goywashing

From JPost:

The Jewish Agency is seriously interested in increasing its involvement in the Israeli Arab community and in working with Druze and Bedouins, representatives of the representatives of the board of governors of the Zionist organization were told during the opening of their tri-annual gathering in Tel Aviv on Sunday.the jewish Agency is ser

Agency representatives announced that while as recently as five years ago they did not employ any Druze or Arab workers, today there are seventy five on the payroll and around ten million Shekels are allocated to programs among the non-Jewish minority groups in Israel.

“As a Zionist I believe that this is important for the future of our democracy,” Agency chairman Natan Sharansky announced, addressing board members during a session on the subject.

“It is so important nowadays to strengthen our society,” he asserted, calling the work currently being done only “the beginning.”

Faiz Suad, one of the director’s of the Agency’s Project Ten in Kibbutz Harduf and the surrounding Bedouin villages, said that he initially believed that the Jewish Agency only existed for Israel’s Jews and that when it began operating in his village, sending “young Jewish people all over the world to volunteer in Arab communities” it was “very special.”

Branded as the Agency's “Global Tikkun Olam initiative,” Ten sends Jewish youth to work in vulnerable communities around the world and in Israel.

According to Suad, who is himself a Bedouin, the program not only has helped to strengthen bonds between Jews and Arabs but has even helped to bring many of the participants closer to their own Jewish identity, recalling one young woman from Hungary who only celebrated Hannukah for the first time during her time in a local village.

As they learn to embrace their Jewish identity they also help the local Arab youth learn English and give them skills that will help them advance in life, he said.

Safi, a 35 year old Druze reserve IDF officer said that he believes that the opening up of programs for minority youths are “good for Israeli society because when you act for minorities it gives the message that is a democratic and tolerant and open society, creates a rapprochement and brings people together.”

Many young Druze, he said, are desirous of further integrating into Israeli society, realizing the benefits to be gained for further integration and cooperation.

Just remember, Israeli Jews help Arabs in order to distract the world from how much they can't stand Arabs.

It all makes sense when your worldview is to hate first and fit facts into your hate afterwards.

The Jewish Agency's Project Ten includes programs to help people worldwide.

The Jewish Agency’s Project TEN is a global tikkun olam program that harnesses the energy and passion of young Jewish adults.

Project TEN is a unique service-learning framework. Project TEN brings together young Jews from around the world and Israel to volunteer with vulnerable populations around the world while learning about Jewish values and practices. Together, Israelis and their peers from Jewish communities all over the world spend three months working and learning together in onsite service projects in vulnerable communities.

Project TEN puts into practice the Jewish values that speak directly to social justice, sustainable development, and leadership – while providing critical assistance to communities in Hyderabad, India; Gondar, Ethiopia; Kiryat Shmona, Israel; and Oaxaca, Mexico.

See how they pretend to be liberal by talking about social justice and sustainable development and helping vulnerable communities?

And there is this:

Volunteer projects include teaching English and soft skills to Arab and Jewish children at local schools, working at the Beit Elisha Center for special needs adults, building new permanent, ecologically-conscious building facilities in the forest, working at the organic Gan HaBayit (Home Garden), and volunteering with at-risk youth at the Tuvia boarding school in Harduf.

The rich curriculum includes studying Hebrew and Arabic, sessions on Peoplehood and Tzedek (justice), the Jewish year cycle, and Israeli society, as well as a comprehensive workshop on social entrepreneurship, which will teach you how to map a local need and develop a professional plan, vision and budget to address it. Each cohort will have 1-2 free weekends a month, and will spend several weekends traveling and camping together all over the region, including participation in an Arab-Jewish theatre workshop.

The program is a personal journey, an opportunity to explore your connection with humanity, the Jewish people and the earth, to deepen compassion and empathy, and to truly explore the personal and religious questions underlying volunteer work with people in need as well as our relationships with people often seen as “the other.” This program presents opportunities to develop as a person, as a Jew and as a community leader and to clarify your personal beliefs and commitments.

Amazing how the evil right-wing Zionists are happy to ask volunteers to help Arabs while the liberal anti-Zionists will never, ever, want to expose their bright-eyed volunteers to speak to Jews who are proud Zionists.

It is almost like the people who pretend to be liberal are anything but, and those they accuse of bigotry are also anything but.

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02/21 Links: The dangerous hope of Two-Staters; Syrian refugee creates website to thank Israelis

From Ian:

A few questions the Independent could have asked Roger Waters

What’s the role of a journalist while conducting an interview about a charged political topic? In the UK, it seems that the accuracy clause of the Editors’ Code likely demands that questionable claims be challenged, or some minimal context provided to readers.
Yet, in an “exclusive” interview published at the Independent, Paul Gallagher allows famed rock star Roger Waters to level several misleading and inaccurate claims against Israel and its supporters without even suggesting that his views are in dispute.
Waters’ first claim unchallenged by Gallagher: His 2006 concert in Israel (at Neve Shalom, an Arab/Israeli peace village) was segregated, and attended by “Israeli Jews only”.
How Gallagher could have responded:
But, there is no racial or religious segregation in Israel. Further, the country’s population is 25% non-Jewish. As 50,000 people attended that show, are you really claiming that the entire audience was Jewish? No Christians or Muslims attended? How did you arrive at this conclusion?
Waters’ second claim unchallenged by Gallagher: there are “40 to 50 discriminatory laws” against non-Jews in Israel.
How Gallagher could have responded:
Can you name some of these discriminatory laws? How do you respond to media critics who refuted this very allegation?

IsraellyCool: Roger Waters Attacks Israel While Praising The “Humane” Palestinian Civilization

Waters rambles on about Israeli apartheid, which as I have posted about on many occasions, is an outright lie. He then compares it to the amazing thing that is palestinian society.
Waters likened Israeli treatment of Palestinians to apartheid South Africa. “The way apartheid South Africa treated its black population, pretending they had some kind of autonomy, was a lie,” he said.
“Just as it is a lie now that there is any possibility under the current status quo of Palestinians achieving self-determination and achieving, at least, a rule of law where they can live and raise their children and start their own industries. This is an ancient, brilliant, artistic and very humane civilisation that is being destroyed in front of our eyes.”
Yes, he said that. About a society that brought us the airline hijacking, a society that incites murder against Jewish civilians, a society that names streets after terrorists, a society of modesty police, honor killings and the murder of “collaborators.”
Meanwhile, Israeli society in which Arabs have more rights than anywhere else in the Middle East, in which homosexuals are not persecuted, in which there is religious freedom for all – that is what attracts his ire.
Roger Waters is accused of being antisemitic because all signs point towards it. And his statements in this piece only serve to make this clearer to me.

IDF Reservists Debunk ‘Breaking the Silence’ Tantrums, Offer Grownup Approach to Irregularities [video]

Deri’s organization Reservists in the Front has shifted gears in recent weeks, and he and his partners have been making the rounds among past and present decision makers and high ranking military officers, pushing a program that mixes long-term evaluation of the IDF role in various areas, as well reporting real problems on the ground.
According to reserve officer Shachar Debi, even when leftwing groups report events truthfully, they do it in a way that turns those events into a paradigm of what the IDF is about, rather than keeping them in proportion to everything the IDF is doing right while dealing with its never-ending mission of protecting civilians against countless enemy attacks. “This kind of conflict exists the world over,” Debi said, “and the IDF behavior can set an example for others — it shouldn’t be dragged to the negative place those NGOs are taking it.”
The new group is interested in coming to terms with the challenge faced by a squad of soldiers who are being attacked by a raging 14-year-old girl brandishing a sharp scissors. “Our challenge is to deal in a practical, real and purposeful way with complex situations and not to commit the sin of oversimplification of either ‘everything is wonderful,’ or ‘everything is terrible,” Shlomo Peled, a reserve officer in special force Sayeret Matkal, told Channel 10.
On Tuesday, March 1, the new group will hold its first large-scale conference in Rishpon, Israel, with President Reuven Rivlin as honorary keynote speaker. The conference will debate ethical and moral issues related to the war against Terror.

PreOccupiedTerritory: NGOs That Badmouth IDF Obviously More Patriotic Than You (satire)

Non-governmental organizations that make it their business to paint Israeli security forces in the most negative light possible not only occupy a higher moral plane than you, sources reported today, but also demonstrate a more worthy form of patriotism than yours.
Groups that monitor IDF interactions with Palestinians, and that publicize incidents that depict Israeli soldiers in a way calculated to portray them as brutal or inhumane have always shown that their ethical sensibilities lie far above yours. However, the new reports also indicate that those groups have greater love for their country than you do, since they are even willing to flat-out accuse Israel of crimes based on partial or tendentious evidence in an effort to get the IDF to improve itself, whereas you, pathetically, do not demand that the country you claim to love live up to idealized notions of how its army should behave.
The reports give short shrift to the tired notion that IDF soldiers perform critical security tasks day in and day out, preventing terrorist attacks and apprehending people suspected of involvement in terrorism, instead nobly insisting that the military be defined by its treatment of the Palestinians as demonstrated only by selected incidents specifically chosen for the negative impression those incidents convey. Such an approach, according to the reports, are manifestly the only way the country will ever, ever change its ways, which are just leading to disaster, don’t you know. This attitude contrasts markedly with your naive, obsolete sensibilities, which would show appreciation to the IDF for its constant, continuous operations that allow you and the people running the NGOs to live relatively normal lives unmolested by would-be stabbers, suicide bombers, gunmen, or homicidal drivers who wish you harm for being Israeli. You Neanderthal.

Every once in awhile an honest anti-Semite drops by to say hello at Israel Thrives. The image to your left is the avatar of one Noor al Haqiqa.

Somehow or other Noor came across a piece that I wrote a little over two years ago entitled, Ryan Bellerose and the Indigenous Question and, lo, these 25 months later she decides to respond in the comments.

Normally it is not a great idea to "punch down" as news media people say, but it this case I feel compelled.

Our friend writes:

Everyone is all worried about this yidiot's this and that and no one speaks of the total idiocy of the concept that the Jews are comparable to Native Americans.

Wanna buy into the victim myth much? This kid bought that cruddy line hook, line and sinker. He has been talmudicized, poor boy.

Anyone who knows the true story of the creation of Israel and the reason for its existence, recognizes a flaw in the fact that this discussion is even taking place.

It is a diversion from the truth of the matter. The Jews of Israel and their supporters around the world are committing genocide and being allowed to get away with it. THAT is the crux of the matter, not some silly young deluded athlete of limited education and abilities who thinks he "understands" .... someone twanged his "fellow victim" sensibilities and set him loose... meanwhile he should learn REAL history, not what he might have been told in school.

Noor runs a peculiar little radically racist blog called Snippets And Snappits, which is a very cute name for a place wherein she encourages violence against Jews as a matter of "social justice."

Noor, very clearly, is a hard-line, anti-Jewish racist.

For example, this is an image found on the front page of her blog:

I absolutely love out-and-out racists like Noor because they are honest and, therefore, much easier to deal with than the insidious progressive-left variety who pretend to be anti-racist.

And then there is this:

So, Noor would have the world believe that the Jews, via the State of Israel, are controlling the US government. This is classic stuff, the kind of thing that the Nazis believed. It is the sprinkling of anti-Semitic magical-fairy-confetti that genocidal dreams are conjured from.

Just as the Nazis, in their malevolent hallucinations, believed that the tiny percentage of Jews in Germany (a grand total of 1 percent of the total population) were behind the scenes, nefariously pulling the strings so that Germany lost World War I - the Stab in the Back theory - so Noor seems to believe that the Jewish State of Israel is behind the scenes, nefariously pulling the strings of Washington, D.C. to the detriment of everyone but those subhuman Jews.

In any case, let's go through Noor's comment above bit-by-bit and see what we can see.

The comment is divided into four unlovely little paragraphs.

In the first she refers to Ryan Bellerose as a "yidiot." I have honestly never come across that usage before. It obviously implies "Jewish idiot." The general nastiness of anti-Semitic anti-Zionists is often hard to fathom. In this case, of course, Bellerose is neither Jewish nor an idiot, but "yidiot" is cute. It conveys racial hatred in a snippity-snappity kind of way.

It makes genocidal hatred toward the Jewish people, and disparagement of our friends, fun!

As for the Jewish people being comparable to Native-Americans, it just means that both are the indigenous people in their respective parts of the world. Just as Bellerose and the Metis stand up for the rights of the indigenous in Canada, so Jewish people stand up for our own indigenous rights in the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people, the Land of Israel.

In the second paragraph she comforts herself with Holocaust denial through the notion of a Jewish "victim myth."

Two-thousand years of persecutions and expulsions and pogroms and dhimmi status in Arab lands and the Inquisition and the Holocaust and the constant Arab-Muslim hostility and violence and war against the Jews of the Middle East, yet to this compassionate genius it's all just a myth.

The slaughter of much of my own family by the Nazis during Operation Barbarossa in the town of Medzhybizh, western Ukraine, in the summer and fall of 1942, was apparently also a myth. As Hitler's troops were marching on the Soviet Union, the Jews of Medzhybizh were crowded into hastily fashioned ghettos, forced to road building, and then once the road building was done they were made to dig trenches, remove themselves into those trenches, and then they were shot-dead by Nazi soldiers.

Fortunately, my grandparents on my father's side had the foresight to get the hell out of there in-between the wars, but according to those like Noor al Haqiqa my family history was nothing but a myth. Jewish history, in other words, is nothing but a myth, a shadow, conjured by nefarious Jews in order to subjugate the pastoral Arabs who, we are told, want nothing more than to tend their Sacred Olive Groves in peace... even as they send their children out into the streets of Israel with their knives.

In her vague third paragraph she refers to "the true story of the creation of Israel" without giving us the slightest indication of what she means by that, although I feel reasonable certain that whatever it is, it is both false and malicious.

Finally, in her fourth and final paragraph she brings it all home by accusing the Jewish people of committing genocide.

Holocaust inversion.

According to our friend Noor, the Holocaust is a myth, but the Jews are committing an actual genocide against the perfectly innocent Arab population.

We tend to get caught up in the fights against BDS or Obama's strategically moronic empowerment of American and Jewish enemies, such as Iran, or the ongoing construction of hatred toward Jews by the Palestinian-Arab leadership, but every now and again it is not a bad idea to put a spot-light on classic anti-Jewish race hate.

It used to be that Jewish westerners primarily associated violent anti-Semitism with people who tended to have names more like Gunter.

Today anti-Semitism, in its most obvious and forthright forms, tend to come from people with names more like Noor al Haqiqa.

Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.

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More antisemitic and inciting cartoons from Arab media

I just came across another Palestinian Arab news site named omamh.net, and it has a large editorial cartoon section. Here are some that demonize and incite to murder Jews:

Balfour promise/Promise of Allah

"Cemetery of the invaders"

(h/t Ibn Boutros)

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Harvard Law School "Justice for Palestine" wrote at The Harvard Law Record:

We have a confession to make. We, Harvard Law School’s Justice for Palestine (JFP), are the organization responsible for the highly controversial pizza order that cost the law school (and its students) an annual $250,000 in funding for student activities.

For the uninitiated, the “Milbank Tweed Student Conference Fund” (or Milbank Fund, named after the multinational law firm that endowed it), was established in 2012 to support the activities of student-run organizations at Harvard Law School. The Dean of Students office allocates the funds through an open application process. As part of the arrangement, Milbank Fund recipients are required to recognize the contribution by ensuring that all promotional materials for Milbank-funded programming include at least one reference indicating Milbank as a headlining sponsor.

At the start of this semester, HLS announced, without explanation, the sudden termination of the Milbank Fund. We are writing today so that the record may reflect that the termination of the Milbank Fund is, in fact, completely our fault.

In our defense, we couldn’t have possibly foreseen how our actions would come to affect the rest of the campus community. On the eve of our first-ever Milbank-sponsored speaker event, titled “The Palestine Exception to Free Speech: A Movement Under Attack”, the only thing we were really concerned about was what type of food to order for our fellow classmates. Like many others, we are an organization that recognizes the value of quality food as a major key to the success of any lunch talk.

So we ordered pizza—about $500 worth. We made sure to get a little something for everyone, because inclusivity! We got some margheritas for the traditional, buffalo chicken for the carnivorous, and of course, some formaggio for our colleagues with a more refined palate. The pizza was delicious, and for that, we must take a moment to sincerely thank Milbank for its generous contributions.

Even though we had only used Milbank’s money for the pizza (our speakers, two civil rights attorneys and an undergraduate student, graciously offered their time at no additional cost to the school), we held up our end of the deal by including, in all promotional e-mails and at the bottom of the event’s official Facebook page, some iteration of the following sentence: “This event is brought to you by the generous support of Milbank LLP.”

Between bites of Milbank-funded formaggio, event attendees listened as speakers discussed the widespread suppression of Palestinian rights advocacy in the United States. One of the cases highlighted was that of Steven Salaita, an academic whose tenure position at the University of Illinois was revoked after he tweeted criticism of Israel’s 2014 aerial bombardment over Gaza. Salaita’s lawyers later discovered that the university had caved in to significant pressure from donors who had threatened to pull their donations if the university insisted on retaining him.

Ironically enough, a very similar sequence of events would unfold at Harvard Law School in the aftermath of our event. The very next day, the Dean of Students office—citing a flood of angry phone calls and emails received from Milbank executives and other off-campus parties over the previous 24 hours—asked an organizer of the event to disassociate from Milbank in all past and future Justice for Palestine programming.[1] As a start, the organizer was asked to immediately remove the reference to Milbank’s “generous support” from JFP’s Facebook event page.

After acknowledging that they recognized the irony in asking a student to retroactively edit the description for an event that was about free speech and its exceptions, the Dean of Students administrators proceeded to make it very clear that our cooperation would be greatly appreciated. Even though the event had already passed, it was evident that the administration was feeling tremendous pressure to do something, anything, to appease Milbank.

In exchange for a written guarantee that JFP’s future funding (be it from Milbank or any other source) would not be adversely affected, we agreed to remove the sentence from the Facebook event page. Though that guarantee was promised to us, we never got it.

Turns out, that’s because our request was directly incompatible with what Milbank was demanding. Administrators would later reveal that Milbank had gone so far as to demand that JFP’s Milbank funding be rescinded completely. According to Dean Minow, this was not a demand her administration could honor, so Milbank decided to pull out all of its annual $250,000 in student activity funding as a result of her administration’s “principled stance” in support of our right to speak openly and honestly about Palestine.

We are grateful to Dean Minow and the law school administration for refusing to buckle under intense anti-Palestinian pressure. We are also disappointed, though not particularly surprised, that at Harvard Law School, too, there exists such an exception to free speech when it comes to Palestine. Frankly, this whole ordeal should not have happened, and it is absurd that students will have to bear the (quite serious) consequences of our pizza order.

Of course, in its reaction to our event, Milbank has only proven the point we were trying to make that day.

It should come as no surprise that the "Justice for Palestine" group has fudged the facts.

Milbank did not pull $250,000 in funding for student activities, as this press release from Harvard clarifies:

Milbank has not terminated its five-year gift or its support for the Law School. Milbank was never involved in decisions about which events to fund or not to fund. The Law School and Milbank are committed to freedom of speech and they do not decide which events to fund based on point of view.

The firm has decided there are other ways its support could be used at HLS to avoid creating any misimpressions that the firm endorses the viewpoints expressed by any particular student organization or journal. The Law School is able to fund student conferences with other resources, and the Law School has continued to maintain the same level of funding to support student activities. We are grateful for the many terrific speakers, conferences, and events led by our thoughtful and creative students, and we look forward to many more to come. We have an exceptionally strong relationship with Milbank, which has acted appropriately and with the highest integrity in all respects. We look forward to continuing that strong relationship in the future, and to discussing with Milbank how best to deploy its gift to further the Law School’s mission.

Student groups seeking funds for conferences and speakers are invited to confer with the Dean of Students office and can receive advice about how to ensure the best quality of programming and to secure funding.

Milbank wrote a letter to NGO Monitor that described their problem with how the "Justice for Palestine" group acted, saying "The sponsoring student organization, without consulting Milbank, included a reference on the group’s Facebook page that created a false impression that Milbank endorsed the views expressed by group. "

The central thesis of the J4P article is that they were required to place the phrase “This event is brought to you by the generous support of Milbank LLP" on all flyers and announcements about the event. I am not so sure that is true. I could not find any mention of that specific phrase outside articles about this one event last year. Instead, I found variations of "through the generosity of the Milbank Tweed Student Conference Fund..." There is a difference between an event being "brought to you by" which implies being part of the organization of the event and "through the generosity of" which implies nothing more than funding. This would tend to support Milbank's claim that the J4P organization tried to misuse its name to imply support for their views.

Not surprisingly, the J4P's false version of events have been reproduced without any skepticism by Mondoweiss, Glenn Greenwald and many others.

Finally, J4P's assertion that withdrawing funding for some campus activities is an example of "an exception to free speech" is ridiculous. Free speech does not mean that all speech must be funded. (If it was, then I am still waiting for checks from all organizations that sponsor pro-Palestinian speech and websites to generously fund EoZ as well.)

(h/t Yenta)

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Iran subtly threatens Turkey, drawing link between Ankara bombing and "Zionist policy"

This article from Iran's Mehr News sounds like a backhanded threat:

Iranian senior MP, pointing to the terrorist blast in Ankara, said Turkey’s continued support for the Zionist movement is detrimental to the country’s security.

Noting Turkey follows wrong policies in the region, Head of Parliament National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Alaeddin Boroujerdi said Iran favors lasting security in Turkey, as a neighbor and an Islamic country.

He added that Turkey's policy in the region, which is playing with fire, would strengthen and train terrorists and provide arms to them.

He expressed regret over the recent terrorist blast in Turkey’s capital city and noted the continuation of the policy of strengthening Zionists poses a threat to the security of the countries which support terrorism.

The explosion occurred during evening rush hour in the heart of Ankara on Wednesday, in an area close to where military headquarters and parliament are located, killing at least 28 people and wounding dozens others.

"We really don't want to see anything bad happen to you. It would be a shame if there more more of these unfortunate incidents."

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02/20 Links: Abbas Gains More from Conflict than from Peace; Fatah: car rammer a ‘heroic martyr’

From Ian:

Richard Landes: The Shame of Israel: Panic in a Crooked Mirror

Peter Beinart has written many a piece about the growing split between American Jewish youth and Israel, which he sees as the inevitable cost of Israel’s failure to make peace with the Palestinians, on the one hand, and the long-term effects on liberal sentiments of seeing an Israeli Goliath bullying the Palestinian underdog, on the other. This “youth,” according to Beinart has “imbibed some of the defining values of American Jewish culture: a belief in open debate, a skepticism about military force, a commitment to human rights.” Studies show Jewish youth “resist anything they see as ‘group think’… want an ‘open and frank’ discussion of Israel and its flaws… and desperately want peace.”
To these folks, raised on bedrock values, every effort of Jews to defend Israel by criticizing the Palestinians offends their sense of fairness: blaming the victim is not a winning strategy. Beinart asserts:
For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead. Morally, American Zionism is in a downward spiral.”
Given a choice between Zionism and liberalism, American Jewish youth choose the latter.
For Beinart, at least, the case is pretty open and shut. Israeli political choices are illiberal, bad, and her politicians act in bad faith. The split between American Jews and Zionists, therefore, is inevitable. Beinart has little sympathy to the plaints from Israel that the neighborhood here does not permit such simplistic naïveté. Not much room in this worldview for Palestinian, Arab, contributions for the endlessness of the conflict, for their poisonous hatreds, for their insane religious violence. Don’t blame the [perceived] victim. Look at your own extremists which, you too have. Israel, says Beinart and a generation of Jewish critics of Israel, should act like a liberal, or lose our affections.
To which the obvious response from here is, “Are you kidding me? Do you know what we’re dealing with here?”
To which the apparent response is, “No. And I’m not listening… Nobody’s hearing nothing.”

Haaretz Op-Ed: Abbas Gains More from Conflict than from Peace

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has many compelling reasons not to achieve statehood, which may explain why peace negotiations have failed, Gadi Taub argued in a Haaretz op-ed Thursday.
Taub was prompted to examine why Abbas doesn’t seem to be taking the steps necessary to “liberate his people from Israeli military control and be free to rebuild their national life” after a Palestinian journalist recently asked him, “What makes you think we will let you leave the territories? Who will protect us?”
Taub pointed out that in order to make a peace deal with Israel, Abbas would have to give up the “right of return” for Palestinian refugees and their descendants. But it would be very difficult for Abbas to do that without losing his credibility “after swearing allegiance to this right so many times, and after immortalizing the refugee problem for three generations with the help of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.”
Additionally, if Abbas thought that peace would lead to improved human rights for Palestinians, independence may not be an easy answer: “the Palestinian Preventive Security force isn’t exactly Amnesty International and it isn’t clear it will abuse those rights any less.”
Abbas might prefer to have Israel protecting his rule in the West Bank from a Hamas takeover (as occurred in Gaza in 2007) rather than being forced to fight his own people to maintain control. Abbas is able to declare “that it will never stop the struggle for liberation from Zionist colonialism” while benefiting from Israeli protection. Absent the Israeli presence in the West Bank, PA leaders would lose both the personal security the links with Israel provide, as well as a rallying point to demonstrate their relevance.
Taub also noted that Abbas’ chief concern with ending the Israeli occupation would be the questionable viability of a Palestinian state. A nascent Palestinian state “with institutions that have not been groomed for nation-building and with a shaky economy that’s dependent on others … would not be a particularly safe bet.” The only buffer between a weak Palestinian state and ISIS would be Jordan, which is currently burdened with a huge refugee population.
Finally, accepting responsibility for his own state would end Israeli occupation and the resulting diplomatic and political problems that result from it. The end of occupation would be “a gift” to Israel that “the PA won’t be too happy to give.”

Douglas Murray - Modern Student Political Activists

02/19 Links Pt2: Phillips: Two cheers for Britain’s BDS ban; Canada to reject Israel boycott

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Two cheers for Britain’s BDS ban

The British government has done something in support of Israel, and the progressive intelligentsia is in shock. Prime Minister David Cameron is taking action against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
New government guidance will prevent any public body from imposing a boycott on a member of the World Trade Organization to which Israel belongs.
Local boycotts breach the WTO Government Procurement Agreement, which demands that all suppliers are treated equally.
The guidance aims at preventing publicly funded bodies such as municipal councils or National Health Service trusts from boycotting goods produced by what they believe to be “unethical companies,” such as firms involved in arms trading, fossil fuels or tobacco products as well as companies based in Israel.
Matthew Hancock, the British government’s Cabinet Office minister, revealed the development on a visit to Israel this week. Such boycotts, he said, were divisive, potentially damaging to the UK’s relationship with Israel and risked fueling anti-Semitism.
The enemies of Israel are beside themselves in fury.

BDS: censorship disguised as justice

Central to the demand that academic justice should dominate higher education is a critique of the principles that have shaped scholarship in general and academic freedom in particular. To engage in a meaningful power struggle, BDS-supporting academics argue it is necessary to have concerns that go beyond academic freedom and encompass political positions on a range of issues. Questions as to whose view of justice should prevail and which views are unacceptable are rarely raised.
Qualifying academic freedom with caveats of political judgement negates all that is universal and progressive about the demand. Abandoning objectivity and establishing a political position not only prevents academics from aspiring to contest truth claims — it also enforces a consensus and encourages political conformity in a way that curtails questioning and criticality from the outset. Academic work undertaken to pursue politics rather than knowledge is just propaganda.
Those who believe in scholarship and academic freedom need to call out BDS for what it is: an illiberal, censorious and sometimes anti-Semitic movement. Lecturers who are happy in some circumstances to preach the rhetoric of academic freedom must lead by example in showing students how to engage critically with ideas, policies and politics, rather than resorting to censorship.

Telegraph removes ‘Shylock’ references from article on Jewish hedge fund manager

Last Tuesday (9 February) the Daily Telegraph published an article about the role played by Elliott Management hedge fund, and its founder and President Paul Singer, in ongoing negotiations over debt relief for Argentina. The article was changed following a complaint by CST about its use of antisemitic cultural references from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.
The article, written by Daily Telegraph assistant editor Jeremy Warner, was critical of Singer for refusing to join other creditors in accepting a deal on debt relief, arguing that “His case for more may be legally watertight, but it is also morally indefensible.”
In its original version, the article opened with this sentence:
“Latter day Shylocks at Elliott Management allowing, Argentina will soon have renewed access to international capital markets.”
Warner returned to this theme near the end of the article, writing:
“Debt restructuring provides a fourth option, yet as both Argentina and Greece have discovered, the trouble with borrowed money is that adjusting its value takes difficult negotiation, frequently obstructed by aggressively litigious hedgies such as Mr Singer demanding their pound of flesh.”
Paul Singer is widely known in Argentina and the United States to be Jewish. His philanthropic and political engagement includes public support for Jewish causes.

New "Apartheid?" poster - Hebrew U

Latest in the never ending series:

(Miriam Alster/FLASh90)

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Hebrew site 0404 points out that it has been two weeks since holy books at a makeshift synagogue were piled up and burned by Palestinian Arabs. In a bitter article, it says "if the security establishment would have invested one percent of what they invested after arson at the bilingual school in Jerusalem, the case would already be solved."

Shamefully, this is probably true. Israel doesn't care about antisemitic attacks nearly as much as it cares about attacks that can be blamed on Jews. I saw this firsthand when I visited the tomb of Shumel HaNavi, a major shrine, right outside Jerusalem in 2007 - hours after it had been vandalized and at least one Torah stolen.

The incident was roundly ignored in the media.

If the purpose of Zionism is to create a safe place for Jews to live, one would expect that the leaders of the Zionist state would act decisively against those who try to take away that safety by attacking Jewish sites.

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02/19 Links Pt1: Writer Houellebecq: Palestinians have lost legitimacy; Israel’s dangerous consensus

From Ian:

Writer Houellebecq: Palestinians have lost legitimacy

Famed French writer Michel Houellebecq defended Israel in an interview he gave to the popular magazine Le Point, which devoted a journalistic project to the Jews of France.
According to news site Walla, Houellebecq – who is not Jewish – has identified as pro-Israeli for several years. He reconfirmed this position in the interview, and explained: "Israel is more moral than the Palestinians. At first I was neutral, but the Palestinian suicide bombings shocked me. Unlike the Israelis, who strike at pre-marked targets, the Palestinian attacks are blind, and that is much less moral. The end does not justify the means, and that is why the Palestinians have lost legitimacy in my eyes."
Houellebecq blamed the French Left for turning Israel into an enemy and inciting French Muslims against it. Intellectuals, journalists and radical leftist politicians, he said, are the ones responsible for the tension between the Muslim and Jewish communities in France.
"What connection is there between Muslims in France and the Palestinians?" he asked. "Why do the Muslims in France not raise a hue and cry about what is happening to their brothers in Africa and Asia, but only (do so) about their Palestinian brothers? It is only the fault of the radical Left's anti-Israeliness and its connection to Islam."

Caroline Glick: Israel’s dangerous consensus

Recently I found myself in a chance conversation with a former head of the Mossad’s Directorate of Operations. The former master spy, whom I had never met before, knew that I am a journalist.
He was aware of my political views.
Directing his remarks at a friend of mine, he declared that 99 percent of Mossad and Shin Bet officers are leftists. He then added triumphantly that according to a former commander of the air force whose name he cited, 99% of the air force’s pilots are similarly leftists.
Initially, I dismissed his comments as obnoxious chest-beating by a man who felt like irritating a group of right-wingers.
But given the source, it is impossible to simply brush off what he said. And to be clear, far more troubling than the prospect that Israel’s security establishment is uniformly leftist is the notion that there is any intellectual or ideological uniformity of any kind in the ranks of our defense community.
But given our defense community’s record in recent years, there is ample reason to believe that there is more than a grain of salt in the spy chief’s boast.
Consider Israel’s handling of Gaza.

21-Year-Old Israeli Killed in Palestinian Stabbing Spree in West Bank Supermarket

Two Palestinian teenage terrorists on Thursday stabbed two Israelis at a supermarket north of Jerusalem.
The Israeli victims, ages 21 and 35, were evacuated to a Jerusalem hospital. The 21-year-old later died from his wounds. The attackers, Bassem Subach and Omar Salim, both 14, were also taken to the hospital after being shot by armed civilians at the scene of the attack—the Rami Levy supermarket in the Sha’ar Binyamin area.
The civilians who stopped the attackers, Ben Hamo and Hanamel Even Chen, recounted the attack in interviews with Israel National News.
“I came to shop at Rami Levy, I was in the aisle of aluminum foil and the like, Shabbat candles, and suddenly I heard shouts and immediately I understood that an attack was happening,” Hamo said.
“I ran in the direction of the shouts, I saw a terrorist in front of me with a knife in hand approaching me,” he said. “I told him, ‘Stop, throw away the knife.’ He took another step, I shot him with a precise bullet to bring him down.”

Damascus Gate terrorist wrote "IDF" as his workplace on Facebook

The terrorist who was killed this morning while trying to stab two Israeli border police officers said that he worked at the IDF on his Facebook page.

Presumably he meant to be ironic.

He is getting lots of congratulatory notes on his "martyrdom" from his friends and admirers.

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Palestine Press Agency has an expose on the huge market in Gaza for fake medical paperwork.

Apparently, this has turned into a huge industry, with doctors and nurses soliciting bribes to write up diagnoses for various illnesses.

Students are bribing doctors to avoid exams. Families are obtaining the faked reports in order to get benefits from social services. The bribes can range from $50 to $3000.

The practice is widespread and everyone in Gaza knows about it, admitting it freely but justifying it because everyone else is doing it.

In September, the New York Times wrote about the phenomenon of Gazans faking injuries in order to get out of Gaza, to see family or attend conferences. This means that some people who are in real need for medical help are not getting it.

The PalPress article adds another aspect, though. The Gaza war in 2014 gave people a wonderful excuse to fake injuries - because they know that NGOs will pay them.

Their investigation found that a large number of those who claimed injury during the Gaza war faked their papers in order to be given monthly payments. There is less scrutiny on that money because those whose injuries can be blamed on Israel are a high priority. The war was an opportunity to claim injuries without any real vetting.

How many of the thousands who were said to be injured in the war simply made it up?

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Can someone who criticizes Israel and Jewish supporters of Israel in harsh terms be called antisemitic? That question may go before the courts in Australia.

From The Guardian:

A defamation suit against News Corp journalist Sharri Markson by a New South Wales MP aims to test when criticism of Israel can be equated with antisemitism, according to a solicitor running the case.

Labor’s Shaoquett Moselmane will on Friday serve Markson, a senior writer with the Australian, with a statement of claim about a column published online on 2 February under the headline “ALP’s antisemitic views behind push for trip ban”. It ran in print on the same day under a different headline.

The piece highlighted a May 2013 speech by Moselmane in which he attacked the Australian’s coverage of Israel and Palestine, referring to a “political lobby group that is cancerous, malicious and seeks to deny, misinform and scaremonger”.

Markson wrote in February that Moselmane, the first Muslim MP in the state, had been referring to “Jewish advocacy groups” and said the speech was “racist commentary” that expressed “antisemitic sentiments”.

She was writing about a debate within the ALP over whether to ban study trips to Israel funded by Jewish organisations.

A letter of concern by Moselmane’s lawyer, Rick Mitry, said the Labor MP “opposes some policies of the government of Israel and some actions of the group that lobbies on Israel’s behalf”.

“But his views in this regard are entirely free of prejudice against or ill-feeling towards Jews,” he said.

Guardian Australia understands News Corp offered Moselmane a right of reply, which he declined. Mitry said the matter aimed to “test whether criticism of the Israeli government’s policies by anyone can be called antisemitic or racist, as often happens, and that’s why my client is pursuing this”.

The statement of claim, obtained by Guardian Australia, accuses Markson of saying or implying Moselmane was a racist, antisemite, “a hypocrite because he decries racism but holds racist views”, and deserved to be expelled from the NSW parliament.

The article he was referring to, which was an op-ed, said:

Jewish advocacy groups are “cancerous” and “malicious” and try to “deny, misinform and scaremonger”.

A NSW Labor politician voiced these incendiary words — the first NSW Muslim MP, in fact, Shaoquett Moselmane.

He didn’t utter them in the privacy of his own home. He felt comfortable enough broadcasting this anti-semitic sentiment within the walls of the NSW Parliament. This is terrifying in itself.

The MP, who ironically decried racism in his first speech to parliament, made the remarks just two years ago, in May 2013. He was not shouted-out of the high office he holds for racist commentary. On the contrary, Labor continues to support him and Moselmane is now a vocal advocate behind a push to ban Labor MPs from visiting Israel on trips funded by Jewish organisations.

A group Moselmane is aligned with, Labor Friends of Palestine, supports the ban on the trips while the Netanyahu government continues settlements, refuses a Palestinian state and “brutally mistreats Arab residents of the West Bank.”

This is one of 39 resolutions critical of Israel submitted to the NSW Labor conference this month.

By comparison, just 17 motions have been put forward that relate to other countries, including Iraq, Syria, China or Libya. There are none on Saudi Arabia or Iran.

Countries that kill women for adultery. That jail writers, like Raif Badawi, for supporting free-speech. That censor the news. That destroy ancient relics. That fund terrorists who kill innocent people as they go to the theatre or draw cartoons.

But no, NSW Labor is most worried about Israel, a tiny Jewish state. A democracy. A country that has lively political debate within its society and media. Where one of its mainstream newspapers, Haaretz, criticises the government daily. Where some of its population complain and campaign loudly about Netanyahu and illegal settlements.

Here is what Moselmane said about "Israel lobby" groups in context:

In a democratic country such as ours there are many ways in which people can express their views - the opportunities are wide open. I am a person who will not shy away from having my say. I will always say and do what is right, even in the face of the trash I have read in the Australian-Israeli media. One or two reporters writing in the Murdoch press - namely the Australian - have been attacking me and denying the truth of Israel's occupation of Palestinian land and the killing and dehumanising of the Palestinian people. This is utter garbage. I accept the right of people to express their views, even when they are wrong, naive, ill-informed, indoctrinated and blinded by the power of a political lobby group that is cancerous, malicious, and seeks to deny, misinform and scaremonger. What I do take exception to is foreigners intervening in the right of Australian politicians to speak out. Therefore, I say to the Israeli ambassador, Yuval Rotem, 'Butt out and stay out. Your perceived right to bully as you do in the Middle East does not extend to the Australian political arena.'

Moselmane is echoing antisemitic stereotypes of a Jewish lobby and a Jewish stranglehold on the media - but he is careful to use the word "Israeli" instead of "Jewish" (as if The Australian is an Israeli paper!)

One person at least is not fooled by Moselmane's use of language to pretend to distance himself from antisemitic attitudes. That person is proud antisemite David Duke, who reported the 2013 story as "A Lebanese-born lawmaker in Australia has attacked the Jewish lobby in that nation as 'cancerous' and 'malicious.'" In other words, Moselmane knows that his fans will understand that he really means "Jews" when he says "Israelis."

This lawsuit will be quite interesting.

(h/t Joe)

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