Sunday, October 31, 2021
From Ian:
Rushing to defend terrorism-linked NGOs: Why are so many Americans taking the side of groups that work with terrorists?
Michelle Goldberg and Angela Merkel seek moral absolution in the wrong place
Rushing to defend terrorism-linked NGOs: Why are so many Americans taking the side of groups that work with terrorists?
In light of the wealth of publicly available information linking these NGOs to the PFLP, multiple financial institutions have previously closed accounts and denied payment services. For instance, in 2018, Citibank and Arab Bank closed DCI-P accounts, and Visa, Mastercard and American Express shut down online credit card donations to Al-Haq and UAWC.
European governments and institutions have also expressed concern that their funds were being diverted by these terror-linked actors. In August 2021, the EU opened a preliminary investigation into its financial support to PFLP-linked Palestinian NGOs, and the EU’s anti-fraud mechanism, OLAF, has also launched an investigation. Similarly, the Dutch government froze support to UAWC and initiated an outside audit.
By defending the Palestinian NGOs, some of which may be implicated in murder, groups like HRW, IfNotNow and others undermine the basic human dignity they claim to so greatly cherish. They also prevent terrorist NGOs from facing proper accountability. Their impulsiveness can be attributed either to blind reverence to Palestinian NGOs, or worse, intentionally ignoring the facts that do not accord with their political priorities.
Caution and self-reflection might have been more appropriate responses to Israel’s carefully weighed decision. Instead, oblivious to the facts, these groups instantly condemned the move and again displayed their immoral agendas for all to see.
Michelle Goldberg and Angela Merkel seek moral absolution in the wrong place
Dr. Gerstenfeld is one of the many who concluded that at least when it comes to antisemitism there is little difference between mainstream Muslims and their Islamist masters. He specialized in Israeli-Western European relations, anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, and authored the book “The War of a Million Cuts.”The Moral Incoherence of an Academic Boycott Against Israel
And so Gerstenfeld noted that the report defines Islamism as a form of political extremism that aims to end democracy. Anti-Semitism is one of its essential ideological elements. He said: “The document starts by stating that for historical reasons, and in view of the country’s experience with National Socialism, anti-Semitism was long viewed as being inevitably related to the extreme right. Only gradually has it become clear that right-wing extremists do not hold a monopoly on anti-Semitism in Germany today.”
The fact that Islamists and even less politically active Muslims have extreme anti-Semitic beliefs, has long been the “elephant in the room” and leftists seek to minimize their complicity in the immigration of antisemites by misleadingly categorizing antisemitism as emanating from the Right. This became a huge problem during President Trump’s administration as leftist news media, such as The New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN , only could see the “racists’ on the right, when the numbers and influence of extremist views in the Right pales in significance to the Left in mainstream media, the universities and the Democratic Party.
This report is too important to be hidden from the public. The report, as summarized by Gerstenfeld, “states that the arrival of over a million Muslims in Germany between 2014 and 2017 increased the influence of Islamist anti-Semitism in the country. It cites Anti-Defamation League statistics on anti-Semitism among the populations of Middle Eastern and North African states. Turkey—a country from which many Muslims now living in Germany originated—is one of the least anti-Semitic countries on the list, yet even it is “nearly 70 percent” anti-Semitic. The study mentions that many children in these countries are raised on a steady diet of anti-Semitic indoctrination.”
Despite Goldberg’s contention that there is little Islamic extremism resulting from the mass immigrations of 2015, the report notes the uptick in Islamist anti-Semitism, which was really made clear as a result of a demonstration that took place in Berlin in 2017. At that event, demonstrators carried placards demanding that Israel be destroyed, and set an Israeli flag on fire
Goldberg is also contradicted in Gerstenfeld’s disclosure that German Health Minister Jens Spahn remarked that the mass immigration from Muslim countries was the reason for the demonstrations in Germany; and Stephan Harbarth, deputy chairman of the CDU/CSU faction in the Bundestag (the German parliament), said, “We have to strongly confront the anti-Semitism of migrants with an Arab background and those from African countries.”
Goldberg has a history of whitewashing the antisemitism inherent in anti-Zionism. She infamously wrote in 2018 that it’s entirely possible to oppose what she calls “Jewish ethno-nationalism” without being a bigot.
It is a new low for her to run interference for German antisemitic pro-Iran, pro-Hamas, leftists and join them in their attempt for a national “redemption”, once again at a horrible cost to the Jews.
Seeming to give credence to George Orwell’s wry observation that “there are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them,” the fatuous members of the Virginia Tech Graduate and Professional Student Senate (GPSS) passed a “Resolution to Divest in Compliance with the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions Movement,” tendentiously pronouncing their solidarity “with the Palestinian people in their struggle for liberation from Israeli apartheid, colonialism and military occupation.” Resolution 2021-22N3 calls on the university administration and staff, Virginia Tech administrators, and employees to “immediately begin to implement the academic and cultural boycott of Israel” by “adopting as a general principle a boycott of all Israeli academic institutions complicit in maintaining the Israeli occupation and the denial of basic Palestinian rights.”Literary intellectuals who pan Israel
The poisonous and historically inaccurate language of the GPSS resolution, including such loaded terms as “apartheid, colonialism and military occupation,” was troublingly similar to that found in the dozens of unctuous statements that oozed from university departments, faculty unions, student groups and other organizations in the wake of the latest Gaza war in May. All of the blame and condemnation for the ongoing conflict was assigned to Israel, and conveniently, for instance, no mention was made — either in this resolution or the many solidarity statements in May — of the more than 4,000 lethal rockets Hamas had fired into Israeli towns with the express purpose of murdering Jewish civilians, nor any recognition that each of these instances of rockets being fired constituted a war crime, or that Israel had every legal right under the laws of war to suppress such aggression and to retaliate in an effort to protect its citizenry from attack.
What was different about the Virginia Tech resolution, however, is that included a demand for Virginia Tech to join the BDS campaign since, the resolution claimed, “academic institutions are not neutral arenas of knowledge production, exchange and dissemination” and, therefore, “academic institutions are demonstrably key sites of contestation that can either uphold or challenge Israeli apartheid and colonialism.” Moreover, any consideration that an academic boycott, in practice, constricts academic freedom should be ignored because, the resolution asserted without providing any evidence, “it is clear then that the existing status quo is not one which upholds academic freedom, but rather is one which violently denies Palestinian academics the ability to freely participate in academic institutions and conferences around the world.”
Imagine. In 1922, Irish author James Joyce published his novel, Ulysses, and the central character Leopold Bloom, holds both court and Jewish blood. It would be remiss to believe Joyce could ever have held Anti-Semitic views,after creating such a loveable character as Bloom. Instead, you just know Joyce had to have been an ardent admirer of Jews, even though he dwells not on Bloom's Hebraic roots, but on Bloom as a personality of interest.
But where Joyce, as author, was highbrow enough to offer literary if not humanistic acceptance of a member of the tribe, certainly at a time where the same lovefest for Jews in Britain, if not the world, was questionable, the same humanity Joyce expended cannot be said today of others, including Irish authoress Sally Rooney, who has made public her distaste for Israel, the only Democracy in the Middle East.
So much so, that she decided - in a well-publicized photo opportunity - not to permit Modan, the Israeli Publishing House which had originally translated her works into Hebrew, to continue their professional relationship.
While no doubt, librarians and other enthusiasts of humane underpinnings against censorship must pity of find repugnant Rooney The Fool, her decision to relinquish her relationship with Modan, certainly shows that she has an intended audience for her latest book, Beautiful World. This elite group could include others.
How about having a literary evening with such UGLIES as Ben & Jerry, Unilever, Haaretz, Roger Waters, Lorde, The Islamic Republic of Iran, Al Qaeda, The Taliban, United Nations, UNRWA, Hamas, Palestinian Authority, Jimmy Carter, Holocaust Revisionists, Britain's Labour Party, and likeminded literary intelletuals, like the JVP ones to be found on college campuses?.
