Friday, November 23, 2018
From Ian:
Melanie Phillips: Israel shows the West the real source of national resilience
Douglas Murray: Does America oppose female genital mutilation – or not?
Melanie Phillips: Israel shows the West the real source of national resilience
National identity was replaced by factional interest groups. Morality was replaced by a Marxist view of the world based on competing power blocs. Biblical morality was replaced by man-made, universalizing ideologies, such as moral and cultural relativism or multiculturalism.
Above all, the Western nation could never defend itself by force. Every conflict had to be resolved through negotiation, compromise and peace processes – even with non-negotiable, genocidal agendas. Hence the terrible Iran nuclear deal, and the reframing altogether of the Arab war of extermination against Israel as a conflict between two rival claims to the land.
In the Western progressive mind, therefore, Israel is damned many times over: as a (supposedly) Western, ethnic nation that defends itself with force.
Perhaps even more enraging to the Left than that, the ancient kingdom of Israel was the original paradigm nation, on which at some level America and Britain modeled themselves.
The current resurgence of antisemitism in the West is part of a far deeper and wider struggle. It’s a fight between two views of the world and of humanity itself. A fight over how we should live in this world, what it means to be moral and what it means to be human. And Jews are on both sides in this great battle.
But if the West is ever to learn to love the Jewish people and their nation in Israel, it will first have to learn to love again the Western nation itself.
Douglas Murray: Does America oppose female genital mutilation – or not?
Twenty years ago almost no one in the West had heard of Female Genital Mutilation. Then in the 2000s, thanks to a few brave and vocal campaigners like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, knowledge of this barbaric practice began to spread.Putting Jewish Refugees from Arab States on the Global Agenda
Originally there was some queasiness about taking up the subject at all. Lawmakers and opinion formers took a while to work out their line. There was an early question mark over whether FGM wasn’t just the same as male circumcision. Most people swiftly learned that the difference was, gynaecologically speaking, almost everything. There were some hold-outs among people who thought that since FGM was practiced among Muslims there might be something ‘Islamophobic’ about objecting to the mutilation of young girls’ genitals with knives. On such fine judgement calls (‘child mutilation’ vs the suspicion of prejudice?) is the modern liberal conscience formed.
Eventually by this decade most countries in the West had settled on a consensus that FGM was wrong. Although the question of exactly what to do about it remained.
In the UK, a law banning the practice has actually been on the books for three decades. Yet to date only a handful of people have been charged with the offence and there has not been a single successful prosecution. Some of the reasons are understandable. Collecting evidence in such cases is difficult, and it often relies on children giving evidence about someone close to them. Nevertheless there is a huge question mark over the whole matter. If thousands of girls are being tortured and mutilated in your country every year why would the state not move heaven and earth to bring all those responsible to justice?
Do you know what we commemorate on November 30?
Sadly, for most Israelis and Jews around the world, it is just another day. However, according to a law passed in 2014 by Knesset member Dr. Shimon Ohayon, November 30 is now the official day of commemoration for Jewish refugees from Arab countries.
It should be an important day on the official global Jewish calendar, because the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa are an essential part of Jewish history, even for those of us who did not come from there.
One of the issues I was able and proud to raise during my time in government was the ethnic cleansing of almost a million Jews from the Middle East and North Africa — communities massively predating Islam and the Arab conquest of the region in the seventh century — and the appropriation of their assets, estimated in today’s prices to be many billions of dollars.
Unfortunately, this history — the forced exodus of Jews who, along with their descendants, constitute the majority of Jews in Israel — is barely studied, mostly ignored, and seemingly of little interest to the general population and Diaspora Jewry.
Apart from the great work of organizations like Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, Justice for Jews from Arab Countries, and Harif, I was amazed that the issue had only seldom been raised in any meaningful way around the world.
Growing up in a thriving Jewish community, attending a Jewish school, and being involved in the Jewish community and Zionist organizations, I am astounded now, thinking back, how little was taught about the long and illustrious history of the Jewish communities of the Middle East and North Africa, and their subsequent expulsion.
