Friday, May 30, 2008
More Israeli Academic Disgraces
posting by an Associate Professor of education at the University of Haifa
to the Segel Plus chat list of professors. It is so breath-taking that I
am reluctant to comment on it or mock it. It does show you what passes as
academic inquiry at the University of Haifa. The professor in question
earlier published an article claiming that the tower in the center of the
University of Haifa is in fact a giant phallic symbol representing the
oppression of Arabs:
Dear Ilan,
I think you are right. And yet, there is an additional dimension to be
addressed.
If I may add, the boycotting of Israeli academia has to do not so much
with the "degree" of the implicit presence of old antifeminism as with the
explicit presence of the new-anti-Semitism. You might be interested to
read more about the boycott and the new anti-Semitism in the attached
lecture I gave on this topic in the Oxford 2006 conference on the issue of
boycotting Israeli academia.
In light of the relations between current postmodern rhetorical, psychic,
philosophical and political trends and its articulation within
postcolonialist frameworks it is a challenge well beyond the signification
of "degrees" of "old" anti-Semitic "influences" or "degrees" of Israeli
manipulations of anti-Semitic attacks as a gate for Israeli escape from
responsibility and self-awareness.
In my latest book I go into it in more detailed manner and here I will
offer it "AL REGEL ACHAT": you cannot disconnect the new anti-Semitism
from current global changes in cyberspace, post-Fordist
production-consumption-representation and postcolonialist/radical feminist
philosophy and the quest to trade "critique" with new relations with the
cosmos/body/spirituality.
It is not a mere political challenge; surely it transcends "Hasbara" or
"manipulations of bad consciousness". What we face here is a contextual
manifestation of the path-searching of the truth of "our" present
historical moment.
It is not so much a matter of the better argument having the upper hand,
surely not a matter of better being informed and political responsibility
headed by British academia that need so badly to purify itself from its
colonial essence and its colonialist history. It has much more to do with
the dialectics of the transformation of the humanist project and its
failure ito the opposing alternatives that serve-represent current
capitalist realities of "soft" poststructualist-postcolonialist politics,
on the one hand and the "new spirituality", on the other.
Many of these British professors are not committed to a serious
elaboration of the facts (more known as "facts") or the complexity of the
issue at stake in light of the burning quest for individual salvation in
the omnipotent presence of the colonialist cannibalistic triumph of
Judeo-Christian spirit that Israel and Jewish monotheism (and the quest
for homogeneity) represent and serve as its impetus. In boycotting Israeli
academia, therefore, you are closer to struggling the Lutziferian power,
or, the essence of colonialism, namely, the quest to overcome
heterogeneity, diversity, otherness and the quest for violent "consensus",
"truth", and (American like) "peace" that is conditioned by so much
suffering of the marginalized, silenced ones and all "others" to the
Judeo-Christian/phalocentrist colonialism that "America"/Israel serve
today as its most violent agent.
Boycotting Israeli academia, therefore, must overcome the facts of what
really happened in the Teddy Kats affair or in "Jenin, Jenin" and so
forth, since it is a moral and psychic drive to overcome this world of
facts, this triumph of the universalization of Jewish essence - AVODA
KODESH that many academics, NGO activist and so many
transformative-oriented frustrated soles are committed to, in face of the
absence of a guiding God, ideology or central committee of the party or
any of its subsidiaries. And, dear Ilan, it is so naive to try and face a
quest for redemption and AVODAT KODESH with challenging "facts"; not even
with facts and a serious invitation for a rational discussion.
With hope
ilan
Professor Ilan Gur-Ze'ev
Faculty of Education
University of Haifa, Haifa 31905 Israel
Website
http://construct.haifa.ac.il/~ilangz/
2.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=D2026EAF-3AB0-4950-8F46-1BADABD88486
In Praise of Deportation
By Myles Kantor
FrontPageMagazine.com | 5/30/2008
When your country is under attack, common sense means that enemies aren't
welcome to visit.
Our era loves abstract language, and words like "attack" often signify
anything but their primary meaning. A recent editorial in The Independent
of England, for instance, referred to a think tank's "ideological attack"
on British trade policy ("Fair trade is growing.and working," May 24).
Israel does not live in abstraction. Since its restoration in 1948,
foreign and domestic enemies have committed violence against Israelis with
the goal of conquering the nation.
By their own perverse admission, these enemies define their .liberation.
as Israel's destruction. Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar recently commented,
.After we defeat the Zionists we will persecute them. we will persecute
them to eternity, and the sun of the freedom and independence of the
Palestinians will burn all of the Zionists..
Pursuant to incinerating the Zionists and perpetrating a Middle Eastern
holocaust, Arabs in the Gaza Strip regularly launch rockets against
Israeli civilians. These rockets have murdered children like Dorit
Benisian, women like Shirel Friedman, and men like Roni Yihye.
This is how Israel is under attack.
So, when a notorious enemy of Israel recently tried to enter the country,
Israel made a logical decision: deport him.
To his credit, the American author and ex-professor Norman Finkelstein
makes his support for Israel's enemies obvious. In 2006, Israel fought
Hezbollah in Lebanon to stop its constant rocket attacks against northern
Israelis. On July 29 of that year, Finkelstein gave a speech in New York
City where he said, .Right now, and I say it publicly, right now we are
all Hezbollah. All of us..
To prevent any ambiguity, he added, .Every victory of Hezbollah over the
[Israeli] vandals and the marauders, the invaders and the murderers; every
victory by Hezbollah over Israel is also a victory for liberty and a
victory for freedom..
This January, Finkelstein praised Hezbollah.s .courage. on Lebanese
television and commented, .I have no problem saying that I do want to
express solidarity with them.. He also met with members of Hezbollah
including southern Lebanon commander Nabil Kaouk, who has called Americans
.all murderers and criminals..
In February, Finkelstein appeared on the London-based Arabic television
station Al-Hiwar. There he compared Israeli policies toward Gaza with Nazi
Germany, saying .The analogies are obvious.. He then called Israel a
.warmongering country. and a .lunatic state..
On May 23, Finkelstein arrived in Israel from Amsterdam with the stated
purpose of visiting an Arab friend. Israel.s security service detained
Finkelstein at Ben-Gurion Airport for approximately 24 hours, interrogated
him, and placed him on a flight back to Amsterdam with a ten-year ban from
Israel.
Finkelstein told Ha.aretz, .I told my interrogators I'm not an enemy of
Israel.. To paraphrase George Orwell, some claims are so obnoxious that
only an intellectual could make them.
Foreign media swiftly distorted Israel.s deportation of Finkelstein. .US
academic deported and banned for criticising Israel,. read the headline in
The Guardian of England. The Guardian must dislike fact checking, or it
considers terrorist sympathies the same as mere criticism.
Israel.s course of action was quite lenient; it simply made plain that
people who glorify and associate with anti-Semitic terrorists aren.t
welcome in the Jewish nation. This defensive policy of rational exclusion
is preferable to Israel dispossessing Israelis in the Gaza Strip,
releasing terrorists from prison, and contemplating surrender of the Golan
Heights.
In fact, Israel had a duty to deport Finkelstein. To permit him in the
country would have been an offense against Hezbollah.s victims. Would a
vocal foreign supporter of Al Qaeda who praised the September 11 attacks
be allowed to visit Manhattan?
No country should be expected to accept terrorist collaborators inside its
borders. Norman Finkelstein should thank Israel for only putting him on a
plane.
3. From Isracampus:
Israeli-Canadian Film Professor Dorit Naaman produces a different kind of
pornography
By Lee Kaplan www.isracampus.org
The dictionary definition of pornography is .obscene writings, drawings,
photographs, or the like, especially those having little or no artistic
merit.. While the popular connotation of the term used in media refers to
displaying lewd sex acts, Israeli-Canadian filmmaker Dorit Naaman from
Queen.s University in Canada doesn.t have to have sex scenes in her films
to make them pornographic; as she accomplishes her own manner of lewdness
by her encouragement of the murder of fellow Israelis by elevating female
Arab terrorists to a level of being just some women seeking equal rights
from men, rather than their being female primitives imitating their male
counterparts who engage in terrorism and the murder of Jews.
Naaman likes to contrast these Palestinian women with Israeli women who
defend the Jewish people in the IDF by using a form of equivalency that is
truly pornographic if one only takes time to smell the coffee, or look at
this woman.s work.
Get this description of her from another university.s website:
.Dorit Naaman is a film theorist and documentary filmmaker from Jerusalem,
teaching at Queen.s University, Canada. Her research focuses on Middle
Eastern cinemas (primarily from post-colonialist and feminist
perspectives), and she is currently working on a book on the visual
representation of Palestinian and Israeli women fighters. She published in
Cinema Journal, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Style and Third Text,
edited a special issue of Framework and co-edited a special issue of
Public. Dorit Naaman is also an activist for a just solution to the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict (italics are this writer.s).
Naaman has received money from the Ford Foundation for some of her films
which explains why she tosses around the anti-imperialist rhetoric
(.post-colonial perspective.), as well as what also sells so well on
college campuses these days (.feminist perspectives.) and .social justice.
(a just solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict).
Here.s one of her presentations:
.Brides of Palestine/Angels of Death: The Representation of Palestinian
Female Suicide Bombers. Dorit Naaman, a Five College Women.s Studies Ford
Associate from Queen.s University in Toronto, Canada, will examine the
ways in which media representations deal with the loaded image of the
Palestinian female suicide bomber. Seminar room, *Five College Women.s
Studies Research Center, 7:30 pm..
If Dorit Naaman really wanted to show a .socially just. .feminist
perspective,. why not do a film about the mother of little Afik Zahavi who
spent fifteen years trying to conceive her child, then finally did so
through artificial insemination only to have him die at age 4 from a
Palestinian Arab Kassem rocket hitting his day care center in Sderot.? Why
doesn.t she shoot films about the mothers of IDF soldiers who defend the
Jewish people instead of romanticizing the few women suicide bombers that
the pathological culture of Arabs who call themselves .Palestinians. has
produced?
Israeli and American universities as bastions of radical leftist Marxist
ideology combined with Arab attempts to boycott Israel have made bashing
Israel, particularly among Israeli academics extremely profitable and
career enhancing. Who needs logic or real talent any more? Of interesting
note is how Ms. Naaman in explaining about her work says she prefers the
.documentary. style of filmmaking where her films look more like .home
movies..
As someone who has a degree in Motion Pictures myself from UCLA, and one
who took several writing courses on critical theory in film, I.ve always
found those too lazy to adopt professional shooting and production
standards in selling themselves with a produced film product always
falling back on saying they intentionally shot a home movie not because of
a lack of skill or hard work (that is usually the case), but because they
really aren.t capable of making a professional polished film with good
production values, so .chose. to do sloppy unprofessional film work. Its
an easy copout. At the same time, one learns what sells in academia to
advance one.s career: talk about .post-colonialist theory,. the same
gobbledygook that Edward Said, the Palestinian from Egypt, who spoke such
nonsense espoused in his books lambasting Israel, then throw in a little
bit of talk about Gender Studies and the inequality of women (the Arabs
are the biggest misogynists in world, but discussing the .oppressed woman.
in any academic community is a sure-fire winner), and, to top things off,
become another Israeli mouthpiece for the Palestinians who in fact do not
seek a just solution but rather the annihilation of Israel, and one has an
unbeatable combination for a Ford Foundation scholarship (as Naaman
received) and the latest traveling sideshow in academia across America as
a .film studies professor.. This is Dorit Naaman.
Dorit Naaman also penned a book titled .The Silenced Scream: A Feminist
Point of View from the Israeli Checkpoints in Palestine.. Of course, the
checkpoints doubly .oppress. Arab women rather than protect innocent
Israelis, both Arab and Jew, from terrorist attacks and suicide bombers.
One can be sure that Dorit Naaman did not include in her .feminist
perspective. of Israeli checkpoints the story of the incident took place
at 6 o'clock one Tuesday morning at the checkpoint near Beit Jalla, just
south of the tunnel road that goes through Beit Jalla into Jerusalem. The
sun had just risen. A Palestinian Arab from Bethlehem, who looked familiar
to the young IDF troops at the checkpoint, proceeded to get out of his car
with a prayer blanket. This was the last week of Ramadan, and the young,
devout-looking man made a hand signal that he wanted to pray. The IDF
troops at the checkpoint afforded him the opportunity to pray and did not
conduct a security search of his vehicle nor his person. The man then
knelt to the ground, spread out his prayer blanket, and proceeded to pull
out an AK-47 and murder two young IDF troops at point blank range. Moshe
Belsky, age 23, who was speaking on his cell phone with his mother, and
Shaul Lahav, age 20, the checkpoint commander, were killed instantly. (No
doubt the .feminist perspectives. of these Israeli Jewish mothers of these
two boys, especially Moshe Belsky.s, were not discussed in Naaman.s trope
about .Israeli checkpoints. in .Palestine.).
But then again, Dorit Naaman never seems to consider terrorism and murder
against the Israelis by Palestinian Arabs as something to be taken
seriously. She signed a petition demanding that Tali Fahima be released
from detention. Fahima, was caught smuggling weapons and explosives for
her Palestinian Arab boyfriend to kill Israelis.
Naaman explained her reasons for signing the petition: .Clearly, the state
would like to scare anyone seeking dialogue with Palestinians..
So an Israeli woman helping her Palestinian Arab boyfriend to kill fellow
Israelis is merely .seeking dialogue?. No doubt Naaman also found some
.feminist perspective. in signing the document also, but certainly not one
of Israeli mothers murdered by Arab terrorists.
Ah well, whatever sells. But Dorit Naaman is just another example how in
academia, even in film studies, there.s a career even for the illogical
and those lacking any real common sense or academic talent beyond jumping
on the bash Israel bandwagon.
That.s the new kind of pornography.
4. Also
Professor Alice Shalvi and the NIF disguise their real intentions against
Israel while professing love for the Jewish state
By Lee Kaplan, www.isracampus.org.il
5. Tel Aviv University.s Moonbat of the Day Bar-tal does Tikkun
Magazine:
Tel Aviv University. - Daniel Bar-Tal (Dept. of Political Psychology)
conveniently omits Israel.s Academic Fifth-Column in his list of dangers
confronting Israel at Sixty
http://www.tikkun.org/magazine/tik0805/politics/webarticles/surveyatsixty
A Survey of Israel at Sixty
Thursday, May 29, 2008
When Israel Gives Finkelstein the Bum's Rush
The Eviction of Norman Finkelstein
By Steven Plaut
FrontPageMagazine.com | 5/29/2008
Whenever the media takes note of the antics of Norman Finkelstein, the
former DePaul University professor and anti-Israel activist, a flood of
disinformation seems bound to follow. Finkelstein.s arrest in Israel last
week was no exception.
The facts of the case are clear. Finkelstein had attempted to enter Israel
last Thursday to travel into the West Bank. There he would likely have
lent support to Palestinian extremists. Unquestionably, he would have
caused trouble. And while Israel generally does not prevent foreign
trouble makers from entering the country (a highly naive and short-sighted
policy), it made an exception this time: Finkelstein was detained at the
Tel Aviv airport upon landing, kept under watch for a few hours, and
eventually deported to Amsterdam.
The deportation served as a siren call for all Israel.s critics, both
foreign and domestic, to protest this alleged "suppression of academic
freedom of an academic critic of Israel." The leftist web sites and the
liberal media were immediately filled with reports of how "Professor
Finkelstein" was kicked out of Israel for, supposedly, having anti-Israel
opinions.
Finkelstein.s supporters, like Peter Kirstein of St. Xavier University,
cried "outrage. at Finkelstein.s eviction. Israel.s far-Left also got into
the fray. Finkelstein's own web site broadcast his martyrdom in lurid
terms.
As usual when Finkelstein is involved, the facts all got lost along the
way.
First, Finkelstein is no "professor.. In fact, he never was an academic in
any meaningful sense of the word. Finkelstein is a crackpot and an open
admirer of Holocaust denier David Irving. Finkelstein claims that all
Holocaust survivors are liars, hoaxsters, and thieves, extorting Germany.
Finkelstein was fired last year from DePaul University in Chicago because
he had no academic publications or achievements at all; he has yet to
publish his first academic paper. He is regarded to be a Holocaust denier
by the Anti-Defamation League, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and others. For
all the whining of his supporters that in DePaul he fell victim to
"outside interference" when he was denied tenure, the fact is that most of
the outside interference there was actually in Finkelstein.s favor.
Second, Finkelstein was not denied entry into Israel because he holds
anti-Israel opinions. Anti-Israel leftists come in and out of Israel all
the time. For instance, the Jewish state has long put up with the
International Solidarity Movement (ISM), whose members enter Israel to
engage in violent hooliganism and to assist Palestinian terrorism,
sometimes assaulting Israeli police and soldiers in the process.
Some of Israel's own tenured professors, moreover, are even more extreme
and anti-Israel than Finkelstein himself. As is clear from any fair-minded
reading of Israeli media reports, Finkelstein was denied entry into Israel
because he has spent the past few years serving as an all-but-official
spokesperson for the Hezbollah terror group and was suspected of wanting
to enter Israel for purposes of espionage and activities on its behalf.
Third, entry into Israel is not a universal entitlement. According to the
official Israeli statement as reported in Haaretz, Israeli intelligence
said Finkelstein "is not permitted to enter Israel because of suspicions
involving hostile elements in Lebanon," and because he "did not give a
full accounting to interrogators with regard to these suspicions." The
last point is especially critical. While still in Israeli captivity,
Finkelstein adamantly refused to answer questions about what he was
planning to be doing while in the country, as well as who was paying for
his trip. Given his refusal to cooperate, it.s difficult to see that
Israeli authorities had any alternative but to deport him.
That.s not how Finkelstein sees it, of course. Moments after arriving in
Amsterdam, Finkelstein sent out the following message to his fans
(spelling and grammar uncorrected):
"Before rumors report my premature death, I was kept in a holding cell for
24 hours and then deported to Amsterdam. It wasn't a Belgian bed and
breakfast but it wasn't Auschwitz either (although after six hours of
abusive treatement (sic) I did call them "f**king Jewish Nazis," not taken
well). It seems that to see Musa and his family again, I'll have to wait
until the end of the occupation. I have been been (sic) banned for "at
least 10 years." Another incentive to work towards ending the occupation."
Facts notwithstanding, some on the hard-Left were prepared to see
Finkelstein as the victim. The so-called "Association for Civil Rights in
Israel" or ACRI took the lead in this regard. The ACRI quickly dispatched
once of its leaders, a lawyer named Michael Sfard, to serve as attorney
for Finkelstein while he was being held at the airport. Sfard was then
cited in the media as saying, "A country that starts to fear what its
harshest critics write about it is a country that is already behaving in a
manner reminiscent of the darkest days of the communist regime."
But Finkelstein is not a substantive "critic" of Israel. By his own
admission, he is a supporter of a terrorist group . Hezbollah . that
explicitly seeks Israel.s destruction. Contrary to the amen corner loudly
commiserating with this disgraced academic, Finkelstein is not a victim of
Israeli censorship, but of his own extremism.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Haaretz Streetwalks For Neo-Nazi Norman Finkelstein
Haaretz Streetwalks for Neo-Nazi Norman Finkelstein
(see web site for links)
Haaretz Streetwalks for Neo-Nazi Norman Finkelstein
22 Iyar 5768, 27 May 08 03:50
The funniest thing in the Israeli media this week has got
to be the editorial in Haaretz criticizing the decision by Israeli
intelligence not to allow Neo-Nazi Norman Finkelstein to enter Israel.
Haaretz thinks he should have been allowed in, you know - all in the name
of political pluralism.
Finkie is a professional anti-Semite. I mean that quite literally. His
profession is being an anti-Semite. He was fired last summer by DePaul
University due to his complete absence of academic research publications
and has been unemployed ever since, living off you know who. Finkie
churns out "books" devoted to bashing Jews and Israel. He is best known
for his "book," The Holocaust Industry, which claims that Holocaust
survivors are frauds, liars, and hoaxsters, who extort Germany.
Finkelstein is widely regarded as a Holocaust Denier, maintains intimate
ties with Holocaust Deniers, has repeatedly declared himself a great fan
of Holocaust Denier David Irving, and claims Zionists exaggerate the scope
of the Holocaust in order to oppress Arabs (he always writes "Six Million"
with quote marks). He also is an infantile vulgar buffoon. He
commissioned a cartoon by Brazilian Neo-Nazi cartoonist Latuff showing
Prof. Alan Dershowitz masturbating while watching Lebanese civilians die.
Finkelstein is also for all intents and purposes a spokesman for the
Hezbollah, and was in Lebanon during the war two summers back, cheering on
Hezbollah rocket attacks on Israel. The reason the SHABAK gave him the
bum's rush from Israel last week was not because he was anti-Semitic. No
shortage of leftist anti-Semites enter Israel all the time, and some even
have tenure at Ben Gurion University (which, unlike DePaul, gives its
anti-Semitic pseudo-academics tenure; BGU's Neve Gordon has devoted much
of his career to promoting and praising Finkelstein). Rather, the bum's
rush was because of Finkelstein's ties to Hezbollah terror. The US a
while back denied entry to Tariq Ramadan, a radical Islamist professor in
Geneva, for exactly the same reason - namely, proof of ties to terrorists.
There is no entitlement for anti-Semites to enter Israel. And
Finkelstein, who should not be regarded as a Jew at all, would not be able
to enter Israel under the Law of Return (Haaretz insistence to the
contrary notwithstanding) for the same reason that Meyer Lansky could not.
Now what should we make of Haaretz, the Palestinian daily published in
Hebrew (my colleague Arnon Sofer dubs it al-'Ard), suddenly getting all
weepy-eyed about political pluralism?
It would be touching, if not for the fact that Haaretz thinks pluralism is
great everywhere except in Haaretz. The paper is less pluralistic than
Pravda was back in the days of Brezhnev, and is less pluralistic than many
papers in Arab countries. At Haaretz there is only a single opinion that
may be expressed - the far-leftist Post-Zionist opinion of its editors.
The Haaretz editorial bemoans Finkie getting the bum's rush, and says this
is hypocritical because Israel does not prevent "Kahanists" from entering
Israel. Of course, Finkie is a Neo-Nazi with documented ties to
terrorists who openly demands that Jews be murdered in escalated terrorism
and that Israel be annihilated. The main sin of the Kahanists is the
expressing of opinions of which Haaretz disapproves. The very fact that
Haaretz sees the two matters as morally and politically equivalent tells
you volumes about the newspaper. And the fact that Haaretz has never come
out against the silly arbitrary selective denial of freedom of speech in
Israel to Kahanists also tells you a great deal about the newspaper's
ideas of political pluralism, democracy, and freedom of expression.
2.
May 27, 2008
OPINION
A Hoax?
By NIDRA POLLER
FROM TODAY'S WALL STREET JOURNAL EUROPE
May 27, 2008
September 30, 2000, Netzarim Junction in the Gaza Strip: France 2
correspondent Charles Enderlin offers the world a front seat on the video
shooting of Mohammed al-Durra and his father Jamal. Targeted, according to
Mr. Enderlin's voice-over commentary, by "gunfire from the direction of
the Israeli positions." A few seconds later: "Mohammed is dead, his father
is critically wounded." The France 2 cameraman, later identified as
Palestinian stringer Talal Abu Rahma, caught the child killers in the act.
A prize-winning scoop!
AP
Mohammed al-Durra crouching behind his father at Netzarim junction, Gaza,
September 30, 2000.
Independent analysts and Israeli officials seeking clarification of
inconsistencies in the al-Durra news report encountered stubborn
resistance from the state-owned French channel and its Mideast
correspondent. An Israeli army investigation concluded the gunfire could
not have come from their position; independent investigators went further
and declared that the incident had been staged. Exasperated by the
controversy, France 2 and Mr. Enderlin sued four Web sites for defamation,
won three cases and lost the fourth on a technicality. Philippe Karsenty,
director of the Media-Ratings watchdog site (www.m-r.fr), convicted of
defamation for calling the al-Durra report "a hoax," took the case to the
Court of Appeals.
May 21, 2008, Palais de Justice, 11th Chamber of the Court of Appeals:
Presiding judge Laurence Trbucq announced the verdict with a delicate
smile: Philippe Karsenty is acquitted; the plaintiff's claims are
dismissed. France 2 counsel Matre Bndicte Amblard blanched, shrugged her
shoulders, and disappeared into thin air. Mr. Karsenty celebrated the
decision as an admonition to reckless media who provoke violence with
falsified inflammatory news.
An honest reading of the ruling calls into question the al-Durra myth.
French media didn't bother to come to the funeral. Were they confident
that Charles Enderlin would be vindicated? Did they think Philippe
Karsenty, whose honor they had sullied by likening him to Holocaust
deniers and 9/11 conspiracy nuts, was already dead and buried?
Mr. Karsenty's defamation conviction in the court of first resort had been
celebrated as proof that the al-Durra death scene was authentic. Reactions
to his acquittal, which can be counted on the fingers of one bony hand,
reassert that impression. In a three-second segment at the tail end of
Wednesday's primetime news, France 2 implied -- with the famous al-Durra
image in the background -- that the report had, once again, been
authenticated despite the acquittal of an -- unnamed -- defendant.
Playing on the complexity of the law dating back to July 29, 1881, Charles
Enderlin and his allies insist that Mr. Karsenty is still guilty of
defamation. The incriminated statements Mr. Karsenty made in 2004 on his
Web site did damage their reputations. But the court found that despite
the lack of absolute proof, the statements were nevertheless justified by
the defendant's good faith, due diligence and appropriate language. The
judge therefore acquitted Philippe Karsenty of all charges.
In a move unprecedented in media litigation, France 2 and Mr. Enderlin
have referred the case to France's highest court (the Cour de Cassation),
which rules solely on technicalities, not on substance.
The 13-page ruling is drafted with the same ethical and intellectual
clarity exercised by Judge Trbucq throughout the proceedings. The court
first establishes the principle that Charles Enderlin "...as a
professional journalist reporting from Israel and the Palestinian
territories for primetime France 2 newscasts...cannot shield himself from
criticism; he is...[necessarily] exposed to...scrutiny...from citizens and
colleagues." And then the court validates, exhibit by exhibit, the
evidence that led Philippe Karsenty to question and ultimately denounce
the al-Durra report.
While Mr. Karsenty submitted voluminous evidence, France 2 and Mr.
Enderlin relied on an above-suspicion strategy based on the elevated
reputation of the journalist, his total confidence in the Palestinian
cameraman who filmed those images without the French correspondent there,
and the unquestionable dignity of the state-owned television network.
Their position weakened when Judge Trbucq ordered them to submit the
unedited raw footage filmed on Sept. 30, 2000. They only partially
complied. In lieu of "unedited raw footage," Mr. Enderlin presented an
18-minute excerpt and, for the first time since litigation began, appeared
in court on Nov. 18 to oversee the screening.
Reinforcements were brought in for the final hearing on Feb. 27 -- news
director Arlette Chabot to bolster Mr. Enderlin, and Matre Franois Szpiner
to assassinate Mr. Karsenty's character, comparing him to 9/11 conspiracy
theorist Thierry Meyssan, Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, and "the Jew
who pays a second Jew to pay a third Jew to fight to the last drop of
Israeli blood." This aggressive strategy backfired.
The court kept its eyes on the evidence. It is impossible in the limited
space available here to do justice to a document that deserves
line-by-line appreciation. The following examples drawn from the decision
are a fair indication of its logical thrust: Material evidence raises
legitimate doubts about the authenticity of the al-Durra scene. The video
images do not correspond to the voice-over commentary. Mr. Enderlin fed
legitimate speculation of deceit by claiming to have footage of Mohammed
al Durra's death throes while systematically refusing to reveal it. He
aggravated his case by suing analysts who publicly questioned the
authenticity of the report. Examination of an 18-minute excerpt of raw
footage composed primarily of staged battle scenes, false injuries and
comical ambulance evacuations reinforces the possibility that the al-Durra
scene, too, was staged. (There is, strictly speaking, no raw footage of
the al-Durra scene; all that exists are the six thin slices of images that
were spliced together to produce the disputed news report.)
The possibility of a staged scene is further substantiated by expert
testimony presented by Mr. Karsenty -- including a 90-page ballistics
report and a sworn statement by Dr. Yehuda ben David attributing Jamal
al-Durra's scars -- displayed as proof of wounds sustained in the alleged
shooting -- to knife and hatchet wounds incurred when he was attacked by
Palestinians in 1992. In fact, there is no blood on the father's T-shirt,
the boy moves after Mr. Enderlin's voice-over commentary says he is dead,
no bullets are seen hitting the alleged victims. And Mr. Enderlin himself
had backtracked when the controversy intensified after seasoned
journalists Denis Jeambar and Daniel Leconte viewed some of the raw
footage in 2004. The news report, he said, corresponds to "the situation."
The court, concurring with Messrs. Jeambar and Leconte, considers that
journalism must stick to events that actually occur.
The frail evidence submitted by France 2 -- "statements provided by the
cameraman" -- is not "perfectly credible either in form or content," the
court ruled.
The landmark ruling closes with an eloquent affirmation of the right of
citizens to criticize the press freely, the right of the public to be
informed honestly and seriously, the right of expression guaranteed by
Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, a right that
applies not only to inoffensive ideas but also to those that are shocking,
disturbing, troubling.
The media that dramatically reported the killing of Mohammed al-Durra are
deathly silent today. They didn't inform the public about the ongoing
controversy, didn't attend the trials and have apparently decided to place
this story into an artificial coma. As if this judgment against a
colleague who placed blind trust in his Palestinian cameraman and, when
called to clarify his report, attacked the questioner instead of
questioning his own competence were not newsworthy?
The press corps has consistently closed ranks with Charles Enderlin. One
week before the verdict was announced, pay-to-view TV station Canal+ aired
a documentary seemingly concocted for the purpose of branding Philippe
Karsenty -- and anyone who challenged the al-Durra story -- as
conspiracy-theory crackpots.
Mr. Enderlin is the dean of French Middle East reporting. On France 2, he
has full latitude to present his editorializing as factual news. Pointedly
ignoring the al-Durra controversy, France 2 continued to give Mr. Enderlin
-- in tandem with cameraman Talal Abu Rahma -- high-profile status on
primetime news. Every few years Mr. Enderlin collects his material into
another "authoritative" book on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Mr. Enderlin
has been the driving force in convincing French public opinion that Israel
was to blame for the breakdown of the July 2000 Camp David talks. Further,
Mr. Enderlin argues that the "Al Aqsa" or second intifada turned violent
because of the disproportionate repression of civilian protest by
uncontrolled Israeli military personnel.
Mr. Enderlin claims ultra-Zionist Likudniks want to prevent him from
reporting objectively on the Arab-Israeli conflict. He is now replaying
the Karsenty case on his French state-TV blog where, in the absence of the
wise Judge Trbucq, he wins hands down. He claims the al-Durra controversy
was fomented in response to the publication of "Le Rve Brise" (Shattered
Dreams), where he pinpointed Israel's responsibility for the collapse of
the peace process.
(http://blog.france3.fr/charles-enderlin/index.php/2008/05/25/72983-quelques-verites-sur-la-campagne-de-desinformation-et-de-diffamation-contre-france-2-et-moi-meme)
France Tlvisions director Patrick de Carolis and the CSA -- roughly
equivalent to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission -- have been
repeatedly called by media watchdogs to intervene in the al-Durra
controversy. Can they all remain deaf to the wisdom of a courageous judge
who has reasserted the journalist's responsibility to serve the people and
account for the way he does his job?
Ms. Poller is an American writer living in Paris since 1972.
See all of today's editorials and op-eds, plus video commentary, on
Opinion Journal1.
And add your comments to the Opinion Journal forum2.
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121183795208620963.html
3. http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3548292,00.html
Cowardice Inc.
4. School daze:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=53BE6719-CB65-4572-8FE6-FB95FACB89BE
Monday, May 26, 2008
Why the Left is suddenly Anti-Olmert
national prizes to haters of Israel and anti-Zionist extremists. Here is
its latest boondoggle - handing a science prize to a pro-Palestinian
moonbat professor who then sent the money to Bir Zeit "university" and to
one of the extremist Israeli leftist seditious groups:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/986898.html
How about if we send the entire annual allotment to Ben Gurion University
to Bir Zeit, instead - you know, for peace of course!!
2. Many people in Israel are asking why the leftist establishment is
now suddenly going after Olmert with its subservient Attorney General's
office and its hegemony over the media. After all, for years the Left's
stooges were content to sit back and turn a blind eye to Olmert's personal
corruption because he was carrying out the Left's agenda. The Attorney
General and media in Israel only uncover "sleaze" and dirt and corruption
in politicians whose politics they dislike. That is why they just can't
ever seem to take notice of all the personal corruption of Ehud Barak and
Amram Mitzna. (And we all recall the whitewashing of Ezer Weizmann!) But
let Bibi and his wife remove some trinkets and ashtrays without permission
from the PM's residence and the media have a field day! Or let Aryeh Deri
fail to provide documented explanations for all of $40,000 out of his
funds used to purchase his home....
So why the sudden determination to drive Olmert from office? It is
obviously not a sudden squeamishness about bribery on the part of the
stooges of the Left.
One explanation being whispered about Israel, and one I find highly
plausible, is that the Left and its captive institutions are upset at
Daniel Friedmann, Olmert's Minister of Justice, and his determination to
end judicial tyranny in Israel. The Left is in favor of judicial tyranny
because it allows it to impose its political agenda on Israel through the
courts without the inconvenience of actually having to win elections. The
Left has placed Friedmann in its sites and is willing to topple Olmert to
get what it wants.
3. Finding New Ways to Express Jew-Hatred
By Dr. Dvir Abramovich
FrontPageMagazine.com | 5/26/2008
I am often reminded of Martin Luther King.s statement about anti-Zionism:
.You declare that you do not hate the Jews, you are merely anti-Zionist.
And I say, let the truth ring forth from the high mountain tops.When
people criticize Zionism they mean Jew; we are talking
anti-Semitism..Zionism is nothing less than the dream and ideal of the
Jewish people returning to live in their own land. Anti-Zionist is
inherently anti-Semitic and ever will it be so. And what is anti-Zionist?
It is the denial to the Jewish people of a fundamental right that we
justly claim for the people of Africa and freely accord all other nations
of the globe. It is discrimination against Jews, my friend, because they
are Jews. In short, it is anti-Semitism..
Late last year, Israeli author A.B Yehoshua observed: .Instead of
attacking Jews they are attacking Zionism, and this is the way because you
cannot attack Jews anymore openly..
Anti-Zionism gives old fashion anti-Semitic intent a sheen of civilised
discourse, but people of good conscience should not be deceived or
intimidated to deal with it or let down their guard. As they say, the
devil is in the details. Principally, anti-Zionism is an accurate
reflection of unbridled street level anti-Judaism feeding on anti-Semitic
myths that in turn nurture the battle against the existence of Israel.
Obviously, it.s easier to disseminate age-old anti-Jewish feeling cloaked
as anti-Zionism. But in no way should Anti-Zionism serve as a convenient
cover, a euphemism, a loophole for those spewing and fomenting
anti-Semitic slander.
For the record, not every criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. No one
wants to stifle a free, honest and open debate on all sides. It.s all
about the pitch the criticism reaches. Moreover, there.s no problem with
champions of the Palestinian cause who dissent and use industrial strength
criticism to make a point about the specific policy of the Israeli
government. As long as they recognise Israel.s right to exist, do not deny
individual Jews self-determination and the right to live and do not seek
Israel.s destruction because it is .a racist entity. guilty of genocide
and crimes against humanity. (NGO declaration before Durban).
To wit, who can forget the blatantly hypocritical circus of the Durban
conference where a considerable number of nations insisted that every
reference to Anti-Semitism be linked with the racist practices of Zionism.
while simultaneously arguing that Zionism was a movement based on racist
supremacy akin to apartheid.
It has been noted that the line is crossed when Israel is imbued with
known antisemitic stereotypes, when Israelis and Jews are compared to
Nazis and blamed for worldwide disasters (the Mel Gibson syndrome), when
they are singled out and attacked in a disproportionate manner, and when
Israel.s right to exist as a Jewish state is questioned.
For Gabriel Schoenfeld, editor of Commentary, anti-Semitism is .the right
and the only word for an anti-Zionism so one-sided, so eager to indict
Israel while exculpating Israel's adversaries, so shamefully adroit in the
use of moral double standards, so quick to issue false and baseless
accusations, and so disposed to invert the language of the Holocaust and
to paint Israelis and Jews as evil incarnate.. In a similar vein, Ruth
Wisse reveals that, .Contemporary Anti-Zionism has absorbed all the
stereotypes and foundational texts of fascist and Soviet anti-Semitism and
applied them to the Middle East.. Swedish statesman Per Ahlmark wisely
doubts that anyone would believe this declaration, .I am against the
existence of Great Britain, but I.m not anti-British..
History has shown us that rarely has there been anti-Zionism without
anti-Semitism. Dr King named the lie, saw that anti-Zionism is often used
to mask the face of anti-Semitism and so do I. Take Resolution 3379
(Zionism=racism), a strategy to de-legitimatise Israel.s right to exist.
Arab Historian Bernard Lewis has written that the insidious resolution was
chosen as the best stand in for a vicious anti-Semitic campaign by Soviet
and Arab Ideological goals. Once accepted, it erased the taboo against
publicly expressing anti-Semitic sentiments in the wake of the Holocaust.
And as then US Ambassador to the UN Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan
recalled in his book A Dangerous Place, the shameless resolution was not
only aimed against Israel but also against world Jewry. Intellectual
William F. Buckley observed at the time that the UN had become .The most
concentrated gathering of anti-Semitism since the days of Hitler.s
Germany. while Lionel Trilling maintained that with this legal travesty
the ghost of Hitler haunted the halls of the UN.
Recognising the interdependence of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, the US
Senate passed a resolution condemning the vote as an encouragement of
Anti-Semitism as did the Australian Parliament. In 1991, President Bush in
an address to the UN assembly, stated, .Zionism is not a policy, it is the
idea that led to the creation of a home for the Jewish people in the state
of Israel.To equate Zionism with racism is to reject Israel itself, a
member in good standing of the UN.. Even the Vatican, in its document The
Church and Racism of the Holy See.s Council acknowledged that,
.Anti-Zionism.serves at times as a screen for anti-Semitism feeding on it
and leading to it.. (part II, no. 15).
Consider that anti-Zionism is the first type of Jew hatred to deny that it
hates Jews. Today, those who hate Jews and who fan the flames of bigotry
call themselves anti-Zionists, seeking new modes of packaging their
virulent ideology and knowing that .if one tells the same lies long
enough. as Goebbles stated, .people will begin to believe them.. Yet, it
is beyond dispute that throughout the world, classical anti-Semitism is
being dressed us as anti-Zionism, a more respectable, but no less
poisonous and vile, type of hate.
There is hard and fast evidence that all too often anti-Semitic figures
brand themselves anti-Zionists. Consider Kwawe Ture. When speaking on
American campuses, the Black Nationalist figure.s favourite punchline is
.The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist.. Ture asserts he is not
anti-Semitic, merely anti-Zionist although he heads the AAPRP, one of the
most radical anti-Semitic groups on the left, tells audiences that Jews
dominated the slave trade and that Zionists collaborated with the Nazis to
create the Holocaust. Clearly, animosity towards Zionism by high profile
hate mongers is always bonded to smearing against Judaism. Robert Wistrich
remembers an interview with Valery Emelianov a leading member of the ultra
right wing Russian group Pamyat in which Elianov kept using the word
Zionists where it was plain it was a transparent codeword for Jews, also
repeatedly employing the term .Jewish Nazis.. And what about Syrian
Defence Minister Mustafa Tlas and his 1983 book The Matza of Zion, a blood
libel clocked as insight into Zionist behaviour and intention. One could
also add the Peronist congressman in Argentina who classified Zionism as
device for taking over Latin America and the Court in Crete that ruled in
1984 that Jehovah.s Witnesses are part of a Zionist conspiracy to rule the
world as prime examples.
Even left-wing icon and peace activist Israeli author A. B Yehoshua has
recognied the anti-Zionism agenda. In March last years he observed:
"Instead of attacking Jews they are attacking Zionism, and this is the way
because you cannot attack Jews anymore openly." Let us also recall that
that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran spoke at anti-Zionism
conference when he infamously spoke about wiping Israel off the map.
The establishment of a Jewish state has not erased anti-Semitism. There is
still a need for a demonized scapegoat and Israel itself has become the
world.s Jew, its favorite scapegoat. Anti-Zionism is an ingenious way to
defame Israel and the Jewish people. And for that very reason,
anti-Zionism should not lose its seat on the bus of political correctness
that protects certain groups; it should never be made acceptable,
tolerated, ignored or hushed up.
________________________________________
Dr. Dvir Abramovich is Director of the Center for Jewish History and
Culture at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is president of the
Australian Association of Jewish Studies.
4. Hebonics:
New York City Public Schools have officially declared Jewish English, now
dubbed Hebronics, as a second language. Backers of the move say the city
schools are the first in the nation to recognize Hebronics as a valid
language and a significant attribute of American culture.
According to Howard Ashland, linguistics professor at Brooklyn College
and renowned Hebronics scholar, the sentence structure of Hebronics
derives
from Central and Eastern European language patterns, as well as from
Yiddish.
Prof. Shulman explains:
"In Hebronics, the response to any question is usually another question,
with a complaint that is either implied or stated.
Thus 'How are you?' may be answered, 'How should I be, with my bad feet?'"
Prof. Shulman says that Hebronics is a superb linguistic vehicle for
expressing sarcasm or scepticism. An example is the repetition of a word
with
"shm" at the beginning: "Mountains, shmountains. Stay away. You should
want a
nosebleed?"
Another Hebronics pattern is moving the subject of a sentence to the
end, with its pronoun at the beginning: "It's beautiful, that dress."
Prof. Shulman says one also sees the Hebronics verb moved to the end of
the
sentence. Thus the response to a remark such as "He's slow as a turtle,"
could be: "Turtle, shmurtle! Like a fly in Vaseline he walks."
Prof. Shulman provided the following examples from his best-selling
textbook,
"Switched-On Hebronics":
Question: "What time is it?"
English answer: "Sorry, I don't know."
Hebronic response: "What am I, a clock?"
Remark: "I hope things turn out okay."
English answer: "Thanks."
Hebronic response: "I should be so lucky!"
Remark: "Hurry up, dinner's ready."
English answer: "Be right there."
Hebronic response: "Alright already, I'm coming. What's with the 'hurry'
business?"
Remark: "I like the tie you gave me; I wear it all the time."
English answer: "Glad you like it."
Hebronic response: "So what's the matter; you don't like the other ties I
gave you?"
Remark: "Sarah and I are engaged."
English answer: "Congratulations!"
Hebronic response: "She could stand to lose a few pounds."
Question: "Would you like to go riding with us?"
English answer: "Just say when."
Hebronic response: "Riding, shmiding! Do I look like a cowboy?"
To the guest of honour at a birthday party:
English answer: "Happy birthday."
Hebronic response: "A year smarter you should become."
Remark: "It's a beautiful day."
English answer: "Sure is."
Hebronic response: "So the sun is out; what else is new?"
Answering a phone call from a son:
English answer: "It's been a while since you called."
Hebronic response: "You didn't wonder if I'm dead already?"
5. A Golan Heights History Refresher:
http://israelbehindthenews.com/Dec-21-99.htm#eshkoli
6. Jewish Voice for Peace and the New Blood Libel
Jewish Voice for Peace and the New Blood Libel
posted by Dr Mike at www.bluetruth.net
Jewish Voice for Peace needs a new motto, something like "We're not really
anti-Zionist, but we always act that way." Their latest screed about the
Palestinian Nakba reads like a textbook produced by the Palestinian
Authority, full of allegations designed to incite hatred and prevent
peace. It levels charges of atrocities allegedly committed against Arab
civilians by the Jews of 1948 Palestine, who had the temerity to try to
defend themselves not only against 5 invading Arab armies, but also
against local villages that had long been launching attacks against Jewish
civilians and besieging Jewish Jerusalem.
Their "fact sheet" accuses Israel of war crimes, in blood-curdling detail
that brings to mind accounts of the horrors of the Holocaust. This of
course is not by accident. There are three themes that anti-Zionists use
to try to relate the Palestinian narrative to the Holocaust. First, they
attempt to present the Arabs as nothing more than peaceful innocent
bystanders who became secondary victims of the Holocaust (ignoring the
fact that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin al Husseini spent the war
years in Berlin where he encouraged the Nazis to commit full scale
genocide against the Jews, recruited Muslims for the Nazis, and toured
Auschwitz with Eichmann, probably to help plan a similar facility should
the Germans have overrun Palestine). Secondly, they insist on the false
equation of the mass industrial-scale extermination of European Jewry
based on a horrific racist ideology, and the dislocation of Palestinian
Arabs caused by another war of extermination against the Jews.this one
started by their fellow Arabs. Finally, and most outrageously, they claim
that current Israeli self-defense actions against the terrorist
organizations Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad are morally or legally on
a plane with Nazi Germany's treatment of the Jews.
The descriptions used by JVP are almost all credited to one source: Ilan
Pappe's book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Pappe, for those
unfamiliar with him, is a former Israeli lecturer at the University of
Haifa who has since relocated to the University of Exeter in the UK. A
doctrinaire Marxist who once ran for Knesset with the Communist-led Hadash
party, he opposes the existence of Israel as a Jewish state but
nonetheless supports "resistance" by Hamas, a radical Islamist movement
that seeks to impose sharia law and at least tolerates, if not incites,
violence against Christian "infidels" . Most tellingly, he also frankly
admits that he is not really interested in facts: "'We do [historiography]
because of ideological reasons, not because we are truth seekers... 'there
is no such thing as truth, only a collection of narratives'." This
philosophy was exposed when one of Pappe's graduate students, Teddy Katz,
was shown to have falsified evidence about an alleged massacre at Tantura
in 1948 by claiming that his interview subjects said one thing while the
tapes of the interviews proved otherwise.
There are historians such as Benny Morris who have indeed documented
incidents of expulsion and even murder of Arabs during Israel's War of
Independence, when the Jews were fighting for their lives and the Arabs
were fighting to kill Jews. Israel, no more and no less than other
countries, was not born without violence, without wrongs being committed,
without people being displaced. All Americans who are not part of the
original Native American population live on their land by virtue of
military conquest, much of it involving acts worse than anything Israel is
accused of by its worst enemies-- and Americans are not returning to a
homeland for which we have pined and prayed for centuries. The same holds
true for Canadians and Australians. So by what moral right do those who
point the finger at Israel and bellow "J'accuse!" continue to reside in
their own comfortable homes?
The blood libel is an old staple of anti-Semitism. Jews through the
centuries have been slaughtered because of the now-rejected Catholic
teaching that the Jews were responsible for killing Jesus, then for the
myth that Jews killed Christian children to use their blood for matzah.
Now we have the new blood libels against Israel. The most prominent has
been the al-Dura affair, used as a bloody shirt to create a jihadist
frenzy during the Arafat's terror war.and now that the entirety of the
filmed evidence has been aired in a French courtroom, the questions about
what might have been a fully staged hoax are larger than ever. Other
examples of media gullibility to Arab manipulation abound.the "Jenin
massacre" in 2002 during which world media eagerly swallowed Palestinian
claims of hundreds of deaths during Operation Defensive Shield, the
doctored pictures from Lebanon , blame placed on Israel for the deaths of
civilians killed by Hamas mines on a Gaza beach. Of course, while the
sensationalist false reporting of these incidents makes headlines, the
"corrections" are always buried in small type at the bottom of page 10.
JVP has chosen to perpetuate the tradition of the blood libel, hiding
behind anti-Zionism as a politically correct shield. As self-described
experts on anti-Semitism, their leadership can't claim to be ignorant of
what they are doing. So one can only conclude that they agree with Pappe:
facts aren't important, advancing the ideology is. And the ideology,
sadly, is not one of peace, but of fanning the flames of anti-Israel
hatred.
Original content copyright by DrMike 2008. Posted at www.bluetruth.net,
where your intelligent and constructive comments are welcome. Disributed
by ZNN list. Subscribe by sending a message to
ZNN-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. Please forward by e-mail with this notice,
cite this article and link to it. Other uses by permission only
Please join the battle:
7. The battle against Campus Pogromchiks:
http://www.aish.com/jewishissues/jewishsociety/The_Battle_on_Campus.asp.
8. Store sells 'Jews Against Obama' shirt
NEW YORK, May 24 (UPI) -- An Israeli immigrant says he has received death
threats since he began selling "Jews Against Obama" T-shirts at his store
in New York.
Doron Braunshtein, who operates a boutique on the Lower East Side, told
the New York Post he changed his mind about U.S. Sen. Barack Obama,
D-Ill., because of the flap about the Democratic presidential candidate's
former pastor and having discovered Obama had visited Pakistan.
A T-shirt in the window of his store, Apollo Braun, has on it a yellow
star with the word "Jude" inside, a checked scarf or keffiyeh like that
worn by Yasser Arafat, a belt of bullets and a copy of "Survival In
Auschwitz" by Primo Levi. Braunshtein said he wants to remind Jews of what
can happen.
"You open the door for Obama, you have no idea what can come your way," he
said.
Most people who saw the T-shirt disapproved with Michael Idov, a magazine
editor, calling it "nauseating." One woman liked it, so Braunshtein gave
her one.
Copyright 2008 by United Press International
9. Get yours today!
http://www.thoseshirts.com/mic.html
- I am the
first in Israel to wear one!
10. Tel Aviv University's Aviad Kleinberg's Jihad against America:
http://isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/TAU%20-%20Aviad%20Kleinberg%20-%20no%20America.htm
11. Partial Holocaust Denial on List run by Haifa University:
http://isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/HaifaU%20-%20parital%20denial%20on%20ALEF.htm
12. Hebrew University's Moshe Behar has a fact-free viewpoint:
13. More Bibi:
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Blog.aspx/1#2809
Friday, May 23, 2008
The Real Bibi
OPINION
1. How to Think About the World's Problems
By BJORN LOMBORG
May 22, 2008; Page A15
The pain caused by the global food crisis has led many people to belatedly
realize that we have prioritized growing crops to feed cars instead of
people. That is only a small part of the real problem.
This crisis demonstrates what happens when we focus doggedly on one
specific . and inefficient . solution to one particular global challenge.
A reduction in carbon emissions has become an end in itself. The fortune
spent on this exercise could achieve an astounding amount of good in areas
that we hear a lot less about.
Research for the Copenhagen Consensus, in which Nobel laureate economists
analyze new research about the costs and benefits of different solutions
to world problems, shows that just $60 million spent on providing Vitamin
A capsules and therapeutic Zinc supplements for under-2-year-olds would
reach 80% of the infants in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, with annual
economic benefits (from lower mortality and improved health) of more than
$1 billion. That means doing $17 worth of good for each dollar spent.
Spending $1 billion on tuberculosis would avert an astonishing one million
deaths, with annual benefits adding up to $30 billion. This gives $30 back
on the dollar.
Heart disease represents more than a quarter of the death toll in poor
countries. Developed nations treat acute heart attacks with inexpensive
drugs. Spending $200 million getting these cheap drugs to poor countries
would avert 300,000 deaths in a year.
A dollar spent on heart disease in a developing nation will achieve $25
worth of good. Contrast that to Operation Enduring Freedom, which
Copenhagen Consensus research found in the two years after 2001 returned 9
cents for each dollar spent. Or with the 90 cents Copenhagen Consensus
research shows is returned for every $1 spent on carbon mitigation
policies.
Focusing first on costs and benefits means that we can reconsider the
merits of policies that have gone out of fashion.
The unpopular war in Iraq has undermined rich nations' belief in the
success of military intervention as a way of reducing conflict. But
Copenhagen Consensus research reveals that a peacekeeping force is even
more effective than aid in reducing the likelihood that a conflict-prone
nation will relapse into violence.
Four new civil wars are expected to break out in the next decade in
low-income nations. Compared with no deployment, spending $850 million on
a peacekeeping initiative reduces the 10-year risk of conflict re-emerging
to 7% from around 38%, according to Copenhagen Consensus research by
Oxford University's Paul Collier.
Because of war's horrendous and lasting costs, each percentage point of
risk reduction is worth around $2.5 billion to the world. Thus, spending
$850 million each year to reduce the risk of conflict by a massive 30
percentage points means a 10-year gain of $75 billion compared to the
overall cost of $8.5 billion, or $9 back on the dollar.
In other areas, too, sound economic analysis suggests solutions that we
may at first find unpalatable.
Poor water or sanitation affects more than two billion people and will
claim millions of lives this year. One targeted solution would be to build
large, multipurpose dams in Africa.
Building new dams may not be politically correct, but there are massive
differences between the U.S. and Europe . where there are sound
environmental arguments to halt the construction of large dams and even to
decommission some . and countries like Ethiopia which have no water
storage facilities, great variability in rainfall, and where dams could be
built with relatively few environmental side effects. A single reservoir
located in the scarcely inhabited Blue Nile gorge in Ethiopia would cost a
breathtaking $3.3 billion. But it would produce large amounts of
desperately needed power for Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt, combat the
regional water shortage in times of drought, and expand irrigation. All
these benefits would be at least two-and-a-half times as high as the
costs.
In each of these areas . and in the areas of air pollution, education and
trade barriers . the world's scarce resources could be used to achieve
massive amounts of benefits.
Next week, some of the world's top economists, including five Nobel
laureates, will consider new research outlining the costs and benefits of
nearly 50 solutions to world problems . from building dams in Africa to
providing micronutrient supplements to combating climate change. On May
30, the Copenhagen Consensus panel will produce a prioritized list showing
the best and worst investments the world could make to tackle major
challenges.
The research and the list will encourage greater transparency and a more
informed debate.
Acknowledging that some investments shouldn't be our top priority isn't
the same as saying that the challenges don't exist. It simply means
working out how to do the most good with our limited resources. It will
send a signal, too, to research communities about areas that need more
study.
The global food crisis has sadly underlined the danger of continuing on
our current path of fixating on poor solutions to high-profile problems
instead of focusing on the best investments we could make to help the
planet.
Mr. Lomborg, organizer of Copenhagen Consensus, is the author of "Cool It:
The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming" (Knopf, 2007).
See all of today's editorials and op-eds, plus video commentary, on
Opinion Journal1.
And add your comments to the Opinion Journal forum2.
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121141221734512357.html
Hyperlinks in this Article:
(1) http://online.wsj.com/opinion
(2) http://forums.wsj.com/viewtopic.php? t=2640
2. A New "New Historian"?
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/126248
3. Appeasing Appeasers
By R. EMMETT TYRRELL Jr.
May 22, 2008 NEW YORK SUN
http://www.nysun.com/opinion/appeasing-appeasers/76855/
4. See a really superb article on Israeli judicial tyranny at this web
site of Americans for Safe Israel, starting on page 3:
http://www.afsi.org/OUTPOST/2008/Outpost_2008_05.pdf
5. More Oslo Success:
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/126267
6. The REAL Bibi
No comment necessary (see attachment):
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Why Olmert suddenly wants to "Withdraw" from Golan
The Seditious Israeli Academic Radical "City Planners for Palestine" and
"Bimkom"
At
2. There is a truism in Israel that, every time a political leader faces
prosecution for personal corruption, he starts giving away Israeli lands.
The reason is that the Left controls most of the media and the judiciary
and the Prosecutor's offices. So when a politician in Israel is playing
ball with the Left, the Left leaves him alone. Polls are showing that
more Israelis oppose giving up the Golan than the number who oppose giving
up Jerusalem.
Sp Ehud Olmert is now "negotiating" turning the Golan Heights over to
Syria's fascists.
Any questions?
3. Check out "Islamist Watch" at http://www.islamist-watch.org/
4. The "Left's "Anti-McCarthyism" form of McCarthyism:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=E0DE76AC-4424-4C76-8E88-2AEA34FF77D9
5. Interesting story:
6. Pornography on Haaretz. Where are the feminazis?
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/984922.html
7. The evolving Palestinian narrative:
Arabs caused the refugee problem
PA daily: Arabs left homes on their own to facilitate
destruction of Israel -- and thus became refugees
by Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook
The Arabs who became refugees in 1948 were not expelled by Israel but left
on their own to facilitate the destruction of Israel, according to a
senior Palestinian journalist writing in a Palestinian daily. This plan to
leave Israel was initiated by the Arab states fighting Israel, who
promised the people they would be able to return to their homes in a few
days once Israel was defeated. The article in Al-Ayyam concludes that
these Arab states are responsible for the Arab refugee problem.
A backbone of Palestinian English-language propaganda is the myth that
Israel expelled hundreds of thousands of Arabs from Israel and created
Arab refugees. But in recent years, PMW has documented an increasing
willingness among Palestinians to openly blame the Arab states and not
Israel.
Following are five such statements of blame, starting with this most
recent article and including testimony from refugees themselves and
corroboration by Palestinian leaders. Clearly, there is a growing
Palestinian willingness to blame the Arab leaders, which corroborates
Israel's historical record.
1. Jawad Al Bashiti, Palestinian journalist in Jordan, writing in
Al-Ayyam, May 13, 2008
"Remind me of one real cause from all the factors that have caused the
"Palestinian Catastrophe" [the establishment of Israel and the creation of
refugee problem], and I will remind you that it still exists... The
reasons for the Palestinian Catastrophe are the same reasons that have
produced and are still producing our Catastrophes today.
During the Little Catastrophe, meaning the Palestinian Catastrophe the
following happened: the first war between Arabs and Israel had started and
the "Arab Salvation Army" came and told the Palestinians: 'We have come to
you in order to liquidate the Zionists and their state. Leave your houses
and villages, you will return to them in a few days safely. Leave them so
we can fulfill our mission (destroy Israel) in the best way and so you
won't be hurt.' It became clear already then, when it was too late, that
the support of the Arab states (against Israel) was a big illusion. Arabs
fought as if intending to cause the "Palestinian Catastrophe". [Al-Ayyam,
May 13 2008]
2. Mahmoud Al-Habbash, Palestinian Journalist in PA official daily,
Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, December 13, 2006
"...The leaders and the elites promised us at the beginning of the
"Catastrophe" in 1948, that the duration of the exile will not be long,
and that it will not last more than a few days or months, and afterwards
the refugees will return to their homes, which most of them did not leave
only until they put their trust in those "Arkuvian" promises made by the
leaders and the political elites. Afterwards, days passed, months, years
and decades, and the promises were lost with the strain of the succession
of events..." [Term "Arkuvian," is after Arkuv - a figure from Arab
tradition - who was known for breaking his promises and for his lies."] "
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, December 13, 2006]
3. Asmaa Jabir Balasimah, Woman who fled Israel in 1948, Al-Ayyam, May 16,
2006
"We heard sounds of explosions and of gunfire at the beginning of the
summer in the year of the "Catastrophe" [1948]. They told us: The Jews
attacked our region and it is better to evacuate the village and return,
after the battle is over. And indeed there were among us [who fled Israel]
those who left a fire burning under the pot, those who left their flock
[of sheep] and those who left their money and gold behind, based on the
assumption that we would return after a few hours."
[Al-Ayyam, May 16, 2006]
4. Son of man who fled in 1948, PA TV 1999
An Arab viewer called Palestinian Authority TV and quoted his father,
saying that in 1948 the Arab District Officer ordered all Arabs to leave
Palestine or be labeled traitors. In response, Arab MK Ibrahim Sarsur,
then Head of the Islamic Movement in Israel, cursed those leaders, thus
acknowledging Israel's historical record.
"Mr. Ibrahim [Sarsur]. I address you as a Muslim. My father and
grandfather told me that during the "Catastrophe" [in 1948], our district
officer issued an order that whoever stays in Palestine and in Majdel
[near Ashkelon - Southern Israel] is a traitor, he is a traitor."
Response from Ibrahim Sarsur, now MK, then Head of the Islamic Movement in
Israel:
"The one who gave the order forbidding them to stay there bears guilt for
this, in this life and the Afterlife throughout history until Resurrection
Day."
[PA TV April 30, 1999]
5. Fuad Abu Higla, senior Palestinian, Al-Hayat Al-Jadidah, March 19, 2001
Fuad Abu Higla, then a regular columnist in the official PA daily Al Hayat
Al Jadida, wrote an article before an Arab Summit, which criticized the
Arab leaders. One of the failures he cited, in the name of a prisoner, was
that an earlier generation of Arab leaders "forced" them to leave Israel
in 1948, again placing the blame for the flight on the Arab leaders.
"I have received a letter from a prisoner in Acre prison, to the Arab
summit:
To the [Arab and Muslim] Kings and Presidents, poverty is killing us, the
symptoms are exhausting us and the souls are leaving our body, yet you are
still searching for the way to provide aid, like one who is looking for a
needle in a haystack or like the armies of your predecessors in the year
of 1948, who forced us to leave [Israel], on the pretext of clearing the
battlefields of civilians...
So what will your summit do now?"
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, March 19, 2001]
Conclusion
It is clear from these statements that there is general acknowledgement
among Palestinians that Arab leaders bear responsibility for the mass
flight of Arabs from Israel in 1948, and were the cause of the "refugee"
problem. Furthermore, the fact that this information has been validated by
public figures and refugees in the Palestinian Authority media itself
confirms that this responsibility is well-known - even though for
propaganda purposes its leaders continue to blame Israel publicly for "the
expulsion."
To support the work of PMW, donate by credit card, check or wire
VISIT PMW VIDEO ARCHIVES
Incitement of children to Shahada
Teaching hatred with music
Children as combatants in PA ideology
Denying Israel's right to exist
Hamas in its own words
Support for terrorism
Understanding Shahada
Mothers joy at sons' Shahada
Hatred of America and the West
Holocaust denial
Clarifying history
Arab world TV
Contact Palestinian Media Watch:
p:+972 2 625 4140 e: pmw@pmw.org.il
f: +972 2 624 2803 w: www.pmw.org.il
8. Leftist McCarthyism at "The Nation" :
http://www.campus-watch.org/correction/36
9. This is moderate compared to what is held on Tel Aviv University:
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/126257
10. Frog media nailed:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3546311,00.html
11. The New Lobby of Jewish Leftists for Jihad:
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Good Morning, Elijah: Amos Oz Does The Peace Tour
Good Morning, Elijah: Amos Oz Does The Peace Tour
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By:Steven Plaut Wednesday, May 21, 2008
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I have long believed the world would be much better off if Hollywood
airheads would stick to entertainment and never pretend to be
intellectuals, spouting off with their .ideas. about politics, diplomacy,
etc. I am no less convinced that popular literary figures do little more
than embarrass themselves when they attempt to serve as political
commentators.
Amos Oz is arguably Israel's best-known writer and at the same time
the leading member of Israel's Literary Left. Proudly declaring himself a
major thinker in the 'peace movement,' Oz celebrates his political biases
openly.
I am in the large hall of a Belgian university to listen to a speech
by Oz, who is to receive an honorary doctorate and meet with students and
faculty. Oz's books have been translated into many languages and he is
well known in Europe. He has been invited to speak about literature to the
university audience, but devotes the entire speech to politics, without
mentioning literature even once. Oz is an eloquent speaker, but there is
an enormous gap between his command of words and images and the depth of
his understanding of political reality.
There is an old saying that a shallow moral symmetry is the
hobgoblin of small minds. Oz is the master of shallow moral symmetry. The
Arab-Israeli conflict (which he invariably calls the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict, which it is not) is neither black vs. white nor good against
bad, he tells his listeners, but rather a conflict between two goods, even
if the behavior of both sides is often that of two bads. He condemns
Israeli 'oppression' and mistreatment of Palestinians as morally symmetric
to Palestinian terrorism and xenophobia.
Oz is at his silliest when he tries to distinguish between stark
unequivocal moral choices and complex ambiguous ones. 'You Europeans have
a tendency to frame everything in simplistic good vs. bad terms,' he says.
'This is OK for some conflicts, like that between fascism and
anti-fascism, or that between colonialism and anti-colonialism, or that
between the U.S. and Vietnamese, but the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is
not that.'
Of course, the allegedly simple moral conflicts offered by Oz tell
us more about him than about the conflict. Anti-fascists have at times
been worse than fascists; anti-colonialists generally were far more savage
and brutal than European colonialists; and Oz's insistence that the U.S.
was the unambiguous evil power in Vietnam is little more than the attempt
of an Israeli leftist to pander to fashionable anti-Americanism, to
ingratiate himself with those who imagine Europe is the moral superior of
the U.S. - something Oz tries to do repeatedly throughout the evening.
The other problem with Oz's silly characterization of moral clarity
vs. ambiguity is that the Arab-Israeli conflict is actually as morally
unambiguous as was World War II. Yes, Allied troops sometimes conducted
acts of injustice and, yes, German and Japanese civilians were often
killed as the war was fought out, but that changes nothing about the moral
unambiguousness of that conflict.
The Arab-Israeli conflict exists because the Arab world, controlling
22 states and territory nearly twice that of the United States (including
Alaska), is unwilling to allow the Jews to enjoy any self-determination or
control over even a tiny piece of territory. Ultimately, the tremendous
damage that Oz and his kind have done has been in muddying what should be
a clear moral understanding of the Middle East war, all in the name of the
sanctity of moral symmetry, and this muddying has undercut Israeli
willingness to resist and fight.
Oz devotes his entire speech to promotion of the 'two-state
solution,' by which Israel will withdraw to the pre-1967 borders, removing
nearly all settlements, making way for a Palestinian state. This solution
is not liked by either side, says Oz, but perhaps 80% of those on both
sides declare they expect that this is what in fact will happen. That of
course is not exactly the same as accepting a plan or policy as
legitimate, and Oz diplomatically skips over the inconvenient fact that
nearly all Arabs see this 'solution' as a temporary stage in the process
of destroying Israel. Oz declares over and over that the bulk of
Palestinians understand that Israel is 'here to stay' - something that
would come as a great shock to them.
In reality, Israel's decades-long pursuit of a national policy of
surrender, cowardice and weakness has convinced virtually all Palestinians
that the Jews are on the run and that achieving their dream of
exterminating Israel is now within their grasp. Oz declares that less than
30% of Palestinians support Hamas, and the audience smiles approvingly at
this complete lie.
Very few in the audience know that two partitions for the purpose of
creating 'two states for two peoples' have already been attempted. The
first was the detachment of Eastern Palestine in 1921 to form Transjordan,
a step that was supposed to make a Jewish homeland in all of Palestine
west of the Jordan possible. Then, in 1947, the UN proposed a new
partition of Western Palestine, creating an Arab Palestinian state in one
half and a Jewish one in the other. The Arabs reacted by attempting to
commit genocide against the Israeli Jews.
No one in the audience thinks to ask Oz about the total failure of
his 'ideas' in the Gaza Strip (in a sense, a third partition). Almost
immediately after Gaza.s Jews were expelled and the territory turned over
to the Palestinians, Sderot became the first Israeli Guernica, bombarded
daily by rockets; Ashkelon is now well on its way to becoming the second.
In other words, Oz's lovely 'two state solution' was already implemented
in part in Gaza, and it produced the worst terrorist bombardments of
Israeli civilians in history.
Oz is at his most 'Peresian' (Peres-like) when he insists over and
over that history is irrelevant, that there is nothing to be gained by
trying to dredge up the past, to draw lessons from it. An inverse of
George Santayana, who wrote, "Those who cannot remember the past are
condemned to repeat it," Oz tells the audience that his dream is to
disconnect all the microphones whenever Arabs or Jews start to mention the
past.
'I refuse altogether to look at history,' he says. Of course,
learning from the past might allow na.ve audience members to pick out Oz's
factual errors or to understand how his 'two-state partition' will achieve
nothing more than a new all-out Arab war against Israel.
A few years back, a group of Israeli Jewish literary figures met in
Haifa with Arab writers to discuss politics. Each of the Jewish writers -
good doves all - got up and declared that he accepted the legitimacy of
the Palestinian people, supported their right to a state, and acknowledged
their having as much moral right to independence as that of the Jews. (I
believe Amos Oz was one of the people present.) They waited for the Arab
writers to get up and make similar statements about the legitimacy of
Zionism and Jewish self-determination. Not a single one did.
A slang expresion among Israelis is 'Good Morning, Elijah.' It is a
sarcastic statement, roughly analogous to the American 'Well, duh!' It is
a wonderful literary summation of Israel's obtuse literary leftists.
2. Dear professor S
http://www.acpr.org.il/ENGLISH-NATIV/issue1/plaut-1.htm
DEAR PROFESSOR .S.
A Letter to an Academic Critic of Israel
Steven Plaut
Dear Professor .S.:
Thank you for your note asking me what my reaction is to the recent event
in which an Israeli tank crew fired a shell that killed some civilians.
Professor, I am not sure I understand your question. You asked what is my
reaction to this incident.
My reaction is quite simply that if the Palestinians would stop sending
mass murderers out to murder Jewish children and other Israeli civilians
intentionally, then Israel would not have to send out tanks and other
units to hunt down the murderers. If it were no longer necessary to send
out Israeli tanks to hunt down Palestinian mass murderers, then errors in
judgment, mistakes and mishaps in which Palestinian civilians and minors
accidentally get killed would not take place.
It is all very simple. When the Arabs stop mass murdering Jews, there will
no longer be any innocent Arabs accidentally killed or injured by Jews.
My reaction, in other words, is exactly the same as it would be had you
asked me what was my reaction to the fact that many, many Japanese and
German children died in the bombings of Cologne, Dresden, Berlin, Hamburg,
Tokyo, Okinawa, and Hiroshima.
My reaction is: Tough.
Those who do not want innocents to be accidentally targeted must stop the
fascist aggression and terrorism by the Arabs (like that of the Germans
and Japanese), which makes such incidents inevitable. How many innocent
children were killed in Afghanistan thanks to Islamist fascism? How many
Iraqi civilians were injured in the two Gulf Wars? Whose fault was that?
People who support Palestinian terrorism make such deaths of Palestinian
children inevitable and bear much of the blame.
Meanwhile, you claim that it is unfair of people to accuse you of being
anti-Israel, and all the more so of being an anti-Semite. You say you are
merely endorsing the positions of some Israeli leftists, and you name Uri
Avnery and Shulamit Aloni. You say you endorse a complete withdrawal of
Israel to its 1967 borders, removal of all settlements, and creation of a
Palestinian state with half of Jerusalem as its capital . because you love
Israel and want it to live in peace.
I do not believe you.
I do not believe that you love Israel. I do not believe that you desire
Israel to survive and live in peace. I do not believe that YOU believe
that your prescription will bring peace.
Suppose someone . a non-American . would announce that he is not
anti-American, but he merely endorses the political position of people
like Taliban John and Edward Said and Louis Farrakhan regarding the United
States. Suppose he were to insist he is in fact PRO-American, but just has
pro-positions of .dissident. Americans.
Of course, such a claim would be ludicrous. Such a person would be
supporting American traitors, people driven by hatred of America. Such
people.s .ideology. is nothing more than anti-Americanism, and foreigners
supporting such people would be in effect admitting that they themselves
are anti-America and wish America harm.
Your support of Uri Avnery and Shulamit Aloni is exactly the same thing.
Israel.s leftist extremists are motivated by anti-Israelism and
anti-Semitism in exactly the same way that the extremist left camp in
America is motivated by hatred of America.
Moreover, your own positions belie your pretended love for Israel. When
you support sanctions against Israel and against Israeli academic
institutions because you disapprove of Israeli government policy, you are
revealing your hostility to the existence of the country, not to this or
that specific policy. You are not trying to influence Israel.s
decision-making, you are delegitimizing all of Israel and exhibiting a
desire to see Israel destroyed.
When you encourage those who are organizing mutiny and insubordination in
Israel.s army, you are showing that you wish Israel destroyed. You are
also showing your fundamentally anti-democratic proclivities.
If Israel.s far leftists wish to try to persuade the rest of the country
of the correctness of their ideas, they are free to do so democratically.
But mutiny is anti-democratic and designed to divide and paralyze Israel.s
military and prevent Israel from making decisions about its own
self-defense in a democratic manner.
But your position is even more untenable. At least Israel.s extremists
will bear part of the costs of the foolish policies they advocate if such
policies are adopted by their country. They have already borne parts of
the costs of the Oslo debacle and they are at risk every time they go
outside thanks to their own policies having been pursued.
You bear none of those costs or risks. You are seated on your comfortable
suburban sofa over there and spouting advice. And if your advice turns out
to be harmful, you can just sit back and say, .OOPS., and switch the
channel.
But there are other reasons why I do not believe your protestations of
affection for Israel. Israel has already applied your philosophy and your
approach. It already turned most of the West Bank and Gaza over to the
PLO, agreed to the establishment of a PLO state, offered the PLO parts of
Jerusalem, and at Camp David Ehud Barak offered the PLO its entire wish
list, including a partial .return. of Palestinian .refugees., the Old City
of Jerusalem with the Western Wall, all of the West Bank and parts of
pre-1967 Israel. You know the result perfectly well.
For the past ten years, every single step Israel has taken to implement
YOUR philosophy and YOUR vision of peace has produced escalated violence
and bloodshed. You have had more than ample empirical proof that YOUR
approach is simply incorrect. Israel.s goodwill gestures and flexibility
have ALWAYS produced Arab atrocities, not reductions in Arab hatred and
violence. Israeli moderation always produces Arab aggression.
Israeli niceness is interpreted by the Arabs as weakness and
destructibility. This is NOT a matter of .ideological disagreement. but of
empirical proof.
The fact that you still advocate endless Israeli submission to Arab
demands can be interpreted in one of two ways. Either you are too stupid
to acknowledge the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of empirical proofs that
your approach to settling the Arab-Israeli conflict is incorrect, or you
in fact understand perfectly well that your approach is really designed to
produce the destruction of Israel. I happen to believe the second
explanation for your behavior as the correct one.
You continue to oppose all forms of Israeli self-defense short of
capitulation, since the only form of defending herself you are willing to
allow Israel is her complete submission to the Arab world.s dictates and
her placing her neck in a noose where she has to trust the goodwill of the
Arabs not to pull the rope.
I do not agree that you are a real Jewish patriot. I think you are a
Jewish Taliban John, a Jewish Uncle Tom. I think you really want Israel
weakened and destroyed because it will allow you to posture and feel
righteous, that it will allow you to save face and avoid embarrassment
when you are hanging out with your leftist friends.
Sincerely yours,
Professor Steven Plaut
University of Haifa
3.
http://www.freeman.org/m_online/mar98/plaut1.htm
The Grand Marching Song of the Anti-Zionist Left
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Wikipogrom
disseminated via the anti-Semitic 'ALEF' chat list that operates under the
auspices of the University of Haifa, attempting partially to deny the
Holocaust. The material can be read here:
http://zioncon.blogspot.com/2008/05/when-haaretz-was-enamoured-by-hitler.html
The ALEF list is a list for outright anti-Semites, cheerleaders for
terrorism, and Neo-Nazis. The 'dialogue' concerning the Holocaust began
when Shraga Elam, an ex-Israel best known for his lavish praise for David
Irving, claimed that 'at most' 5.1 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis
during World War II. This was supposed to be based on an estimate of the
world Jewish population posted on a Hebrew University web site by HU's
demographer Prof. Sergio DellaPergola at
http://www.huji.ac.il/cgi-bin/dovrut/dovrut_search_eng.pl?mesge121057565332688760
.
There it says that there were 11 million Jews world wide (elsewhere it
says 11.4) after World War II and 16.5 before the war in the entire world.
Elam and his ilk then claim that 'at most' 5.1 million Jews were murdered,
and the 'Six Million' number is Zionist propaganda. Elam was then joined
on the ALEF list by Stalinist British anti-Semite Tony Greenstein and
others, including a professor of [psychology from Haifa University), who
not only agreed but claimed that as few as 1.5 million Jews may have been
murdered.
This is all familiar stuff taken from Neo-Nazi and Holocaust
Denial web sites, who make similar 'statistical arguments.'
What is one to make of all this?
First of all, the 11 and the 16.5 numbers on the Hebrew University web
site are hardly firm authoritative data points and are little more than
wild guesses.
But suppose for the sake of argument that they are correct.
Would this give credence to the claims of the anti-Semites and Neo-Nazis
that the Six Million number is a fabrication? An invention of Zionists?
Where is the 'missing million' if we take those numbers at face value?
The answer is that the claim reveals far more about the demographic
illiteracy of the anti-Semites than about the actual scope of the
Holocaust. The 'claim' of the anti-Semites that the numbers show that
fewer than Six Million were murdered in the Holocaust ignores natural
growth of Jewish populations in other, non-European parts of the world,
that is, the excess of births over deaths there. (These included all
high-birth Jewish populations in North Africa and Asia.) It assumes a
static world Jewish population between 1939 and 1946, other than the
effect of the Holocaust. If the Jewish populations outside Europe in 1939
were about ten million, and if these Jewish populations were growing
naturally at 2% per year during the years of World War II, which is
probably close to or less than they were actually growing, then do the
math and that more than 'explains' the supposedly 'missing million' in the
data of the anti-Semites.
In fact, the number of Jewish deaths during the Holocaust may have been
closer to 7 million than six million.
The anti-Semites, including the Jewish anti-Semites, are misusing
demographic data about the Holocaust so that they can engineer a second
Holocaust of Jews.
2. As you may know, Wikipedia, the amateurish web 'encyclopedia,'
although a reference source that no one with a high school diploma would
regard as reliable, has been systematically sabotaged by a group of
anti-Semites, who distort and vandalize any entry having anything to do
with Israel or Zionism. These anti-Semites seem to be working as a team
of editors.
Details about a campaign, led by CAMERA, to correct this can be read here:
and
http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=118&x_article=1485
Since so many high schoolers and .laymen. too lazy to do real research on
topics use Wikipedia, it is important to assist those attempting to
correct the problem. Contact CAMERA for ways you can help.
3. Tel Aviv University held 'Nakba' events this week mourning
Israel.s existence on campus facilities, conducted with university
official approval and support.
4. Getting high with Hebrew University's Timothy Leary (Benny
Shanon):
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3e2bc1ac-14c6-11dd-a741-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1
First Person: Benny Shanon
As told to Serge Debrebant
Published: May 3 2008 01:31 | Last updated: May 3 2008 01:31
I don.t think of myself as naive. But I was too innocent to foresee the
reactions to an academic essay I published recently. It suggested that
Moses and the early Israelites might have used psychoactive plants.
After I gave an interview to an Israeli newspaper about it, the story was
picked up by news wires all over the world. Hundreds of people wrote to me
because they.d seen headlines like .Was Moses high on psychedelic drugs?.
Some of them called me a sinner or an idiot, others heaped praise on me
because they thought I was some kind of 1960s Timothy Leary
counter-culture figure advocating hallucinogenic drugs. Just to be clear:
I.m not.
I.m a professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem; my expertise is in the study of human consciousness and the
philosophy of psychology. I became interested in non-ordinary states of
consciousness when I was on holiday in the upper Amazonian region of
Brazil. I got the chance to take part in a religious ritual that meant
drinking a powerful psychoactive brew called ayahuasca. This potion plays
a central role in the cultures of the indigenous tribes of the region,
where it is used in religious rituals and medicinal practices. Ayahuasca
is famous for the vivid visions that it induces. Common effects include
psychological insights, philosophical-like reflections and deep religious
and spiritual sentiments. I have had similar experiences, which had a deep
personal impact on me.
I decided to study the potion from a psychologist.s approach. Since then,
I have consumed ayahuasca about 160 times and published my research in an
academic book, called Antipodes of the Mind.
The article on Moses was just a small offshoot of this work. I had started
noticing clues showing that the early Israelites might have used a potion
similar to ayahuasca.
I should explain that although I am not religious, I deeply respect
religious feelings and the Jewish tradition in which I was raised.
I believe that Moses was an extraordinary man.
Journalists simplified my theory and misquoted me, saying that Moses was
stoned when he received the 10 commandments. It was like the children.s
game called .broken telephone.: a child whispers a message to a friend and
this child to another, and so on . and in the end the message is totally
distorted.
Most people who wrote to me had never read my essay. I received about 100
hate messages, mostly from American fundamentalist Christians. One
Christian woman wrote to say she was praying for me and urged me to
repent. A Muslim called me a stupid Jew and said I had better never write
anything like that about the Koran.
Other people just thought I was in favour of drugs. A father wrote to say
that his son was a drug addict and that I shouldn.t publish such theories.
He didn.t know that in traditional native American societies, only mature
people are allowed to use ayahuasca. I was 42 when I first drank it . not
exactly a kid taking drugs at a rave party.
There were other people who realised I had been misinterpreted. One
message I liked a lot came from a religious Jew living in the US. He said
he thought I was right but that I should have kept my theory secret.
Indeed, in the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah esoteric knowledge is
not meant for everyone. But I.m a scientist and believe in the power of
arguments.
I don.t want to hide a theory just because it could create an uproar.
5. Daniel Barenboim is back:
"We wanted to own land that had never belonged to Jews and build
settlements
there. The Palestinians see this as imperialistic provocation, and rightly
so. Their resistance is absolutely understandable - not the means they use
to this end, not the violence nor the wanton inhumanity - but their
~Qno.~R
We Israelis must finally find the courage to not react to this violence,
the
courage to stand by our history."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/14/israelandthepalestinians.classic
almusic
6. Remembert hat old definition of chutzpah - where someone kills his
parents and then asks the judge for mercy cause he is an orphan? Well,
read this
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1210668639064&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
7. Nutty Nadine:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1210668636801&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
8. MES Fiction:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=EB88598E-D17C-44DD-A142-4F63A1377651
9. Jews and Jew Haters II: From Cranks to Clowns
May 8th 2008, 9:28 am
(This is a guest post by Mikey)
Six months ago, I posted Jews and Jew Haters: The Anti-Zionist Jewish
Squabble. It was about the nasty feud between Tony Greenstein, an
anti-Zionist British Jew, and Gilad Atzmon, an anti-Zionist Israeli.
Greenstein wants "the state of Israel to be destroyed" and claims that
Hamas and Hizbollah are not antisemitic. Atzmon says that burning down a
synagogue is a "rational act." I wasn't sure if a sane person could
support either side, but I concluded: "this argument is set to run and
run."
And so it has turned out. The Tony Greenstein camp has established its own
blog, Anti-Zionists against Anti-Semitism, to "opppose [sic] that small
current around Israel Shamir and Gilad Atzmon who wish to introduce the
ideas of racism and anti-Semitism into the Palestine solidarity movement."
A large proportion of the posts are attacks on Atzmon, described as "a
holocaust denier" who is "fundamentally racist and reactionary."
The blog is very dull and only masochists will enjoy it. Apparently even
Greenstein finds it boring, which may explain why he is anxious for the
excitement of a court case. He has initiated legal proceedings against
Atzmon in respect of:
False allegations of serious criminal conduct and fraud concerning
alleged offences over 20 years ago, contrary to s.8 of the Rehabilitation
of Offenders Act 1974.
False allegations of violent crimes, in particular against Jewish people
False allegations of race hate crimes against Jewish people
False allegations of vandalising church property
In full litigation mode, Greenstein has also threatened to sue Google for
hosting the website of Atzmon's main defender.
In the Nazi mind, the ultimate evil is being a Jew. In Atzmon's mind, the
ultimate evil is being a Zionist. This is worse than being a Nazi:
there is no room for comparison between Israel and the Nazis. If a
comparison is to be made, then it is the Israelis who win the championship
of ruthlessness. Israel and Zionism endanger our world. We have to admit
that Israel is the ultimate evil rather than Nazi Germany. We should never
compare Israel to Nazi Germany. As far as evilness is concerned, we should
now let Israel take the lead.
Since it is the worst insult he can imagine, Atzmon has taken to calling
the Greenstein camp crypto-Zionists. Since it is the worst insult he can
imagine, Greenstein throws the same accusation against the Atzmon camp,
whose ideas "can only lead in one direction - to the strengthening of
Zionism." But Greenstein is more promiscuous with his abuse. Not long
after the BNP's legal adviser attacked the Board of Deputies as "a clique
of self serving Zionist racists" and a "Zionist-Nazi organisation" and the
Jewish Chronicle as "the mouthpiece of the same clique of Zionist
parasites and crooks," Greenstein wrote that the BNP is "pro-Zionist."
Perhaps he was trying to enliven his blog by making it hard for his
readers to keep a straight face.
It may become a double-act. Both Gilad Atzmon and Tony Greenstein despise
Anthony Julius for his criticisms of anti-Zionism. Greenstein recently
dismissed Julius as "quite a simple fellow" under a headline that
screamed, "Gilad Atzmon Joins with Anthony Julius to Attack Jewish
Anti-Zionists." That was shortly after Atzmon attacked Julius for his role
in "the destruction of history revisionist David Irving's career."
Meanwhile the Trotskyist Alliance for Workers' Liberty has rallied to
Greenstein defence. This is in spite of Greenstein's boast on the very
same webpage that he
would lose no sleep if they [AIPAC], the Bush White House, the leadership
of the Republican Party, New Labour's cabinet and any other warmongers I
can think of, were vaporised.
As Paul Bogdanor commented:
Previously I exposed Greenstein's thoughts on vapourising as many as
100,000 American Jews in AIPAC, along with the inhabitants of the White
House, as well as his endorsement of the IRA atrocity at the Brighton
hotel. Greenstein now extends the list to the leadership of the Republican
Party, New Labour's cabinet "and any other warmongers I can think of."
Thus Greenstein's "anarchist wishful thinking" encompasses the mass murder
of the entire democratically elected leadership of America and Britain,
and, apparently, anyone at all who supported the Iraq war. That would
presumably include everyone from Iraqi voters who support Coalition forces
to those he has elsewhere described as "the racist warmongers of Harry's
Place"!
Greenstein's troubles go beyond allegations of serious criminal conduct
and the exposure of his "wishful thinking" about terrorism. While coping
with the tedium of his own blog, he faces the humiliation of a spoof blog
by a supporter of Atzmon. The unidentified blogger has even started
posting videos mocking a certain "Mony Gripstein" and his comrade, the
irreplaceable Roland Rance.
Watching the farce of the Jewish anti-Zionists, you may think that the
lunatics have taken over the asylum. I prefer to say that the clowns are
now running the circus
