Friday, January 23, 2009
Not a joke: The Lesbian Academics for Jihad:
http://www.isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/Editorial%20-%20Lee%20Kaplan%20-%20Dalit%20Baum.htm
Dr. Dalit Baum and the Academic Lesbians for Jihad
By Lee Kaplan www.isracampus.org.il
If you were to seek an example of an Israeli "academic" serving as a
full-time instrument of campus anti-Israel indoctrination, you would be
hard pressed to find a better one than Mathematics Professor turned
Women's Studies "scholar," Dalit Baum.
She keeps getting herself hired as a professor in the field of Women's
Studies or "Peace Studies" (she once taught Women's Studies at the
University of Haifa). Baum is actually nothing more than an itinerant
pseudo-scholar in anti-Israel incitement. In certain circles she is
renowned for her anarchist anti-Israel pontifications, which have made her
a guest lecturer against Israel on the university circuit, especially on
the American Left Coast. She has been invited to teach and lecture at
University of California - San Diego, California State University at
Monterey Bay, twice at University of California - Santa Cruz, even at the
prestigious University of California- Berkeley.
Baum has a PhD degree in math, earned from Hebrew University in 1995. But
no one invites her to lecture about that. Her campus hosts want her
because of her malicious Jew-hating political opinions and also thanks to
her opinions about female homosexuality. She proclaims that Israel is the
root of all evil in the world. She is an active member in the pro-terror
anti-Semitic International Solidarity Movement (ISM). Baum herself
invented the anarchist group "Black (or sometimes Dirty) Laundry," which
calls for Israeli "apartheid," I guess meaning existence, to be destroyed.
Its slogan is "Transgendered, Not (population) Transfer!" Interestingly,
even CLAF, a Lesbian Feminist organization in Israel, refuses to have
anything to do with Black Laundry. Its web site solicits contributions to
be sent to it via the Communist Party front group "Coalition of Women for
a Just Peace." She has preferred to demonstrate in Israel against allowing
freedom of speech to those with whom she disagrees.
Back in Israel these days, Baum is teaching (if that is the right word) at
the "Community School for Women," a lesbian feminist "school" she helped
found. Baum, a loudly self-proclaimed lesbian, has managed to connect her
anti-Israel animus to support for the greatest homophobes and persecutors
of homosexuals in the world, the Arab Islamofascists and the Muslim
states. There homosexuality is often a capital offense. She is a leading
member of a group calling itself "QUIT," which stands for "Queers
Undermining Israeli Terrorism," a homosexual anti-Israel anarchist/Marxist
group set up to demonize Jews and Israelis while excusing Arab homophobia
and persecution of homosexuals. Dalit Baum embraces and supports the very
same people who would kill her for being gay!! Perhaps that explains why
she has never ventured into any Muslim country to preach her ideas.
Dalit Baum scored a major personal victory in the American university
system in 2003 when she managed to get appointed as a "Woman of Peace"
lecturer for 8 weeks at the University of California - San Diego's Joan B.
Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice. It should be noted that programs in
"peace studies" in the American university system (sometimes copied in
Israel) are really just fronts for Marxist indoctrination programs against
capitalism, against Western and Israeli self-defense against terrorism,
and in favor of terrorist groups. The Kroc for whom the Kroc Institute is
named is a pro-jihad Marxist "philanthropist," best known for her attempts
to recruit an Islamist with close ties to al-Qaeda and Hamas to come to
the United States as a "visiting scholar," an idea blocked by the American
government. Kroc is the widow of McDonald's hamburger franchise king Ray
Kroc. She was the driving force behind that plan to import Tariq Ramadan,
a scion of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna.
Baum's bio on the UC San Diego program's website reads: "Dalit Baum is a
young Israeli peace activist and teacher who has worked for eight years to
expose injustice and promote equality in communities long caught in deadly
and devastating conflict. The grassroots organizer and lesbian feminist
has led, inspired, or confronted those who could not or would not see the
connection between denial of human rights and the on-going and escalating
violence of the Palestinian-Israeli confrontations. She renewed an older
program when she started a new Women in Black vigil in Tel Aviv; she
expanded existing peace efforts by working from its inception with The
Coalition of Women for a Just Peace, which brought many peace efforts
together for concerted action; and, she created Black Laundry, a community
of lesbians, gay men and transgenders (sic) against the occupation (sic)
and for social justice. Additionally, she worked as a teacher and group
facilitator at the Community School for Women , a school (sic) she helped
found in 1999, whose mission calls on it (sic) to look at issues of
poverty, marginalized ethnicity and national oppression at the same time."
The bio then goes on to celebrate the fact that she has participated in
three demonstrations per week in Israel against the Israeli government and
in favor of the demands of the Palestinians. As for her academic
achievements, Baum has not produced a single book or article in an
academic math journal. Her actual career is as a "peace activist" and
rabble rouser accusing Israel of violating "peace" through its actions of
self-defense.
When she is not leading "Dyke Marches (evidently her term)," Dalit Baum is
a pseudo-scholar who has been able to open doors internationally to
lecture to college students against the state of Israel and its right to
defend itself thanks to her lesbianism and associations with some radical
feminists. She obsessively denounces Israeli self-defense as contrary to
"peace," lacing her proclamations about herself being a victim of societal
oppression against homosexuals and women.
An example of her "scholarly work" can be seen in the course syllabus for
a summer session course she taught at University of California - Santa
Cruz, where she was dignified with the title of Visiting Professor of
Women's Studies. The course was entitled "Violence and Non-violence in
Social Change." Holding a Math PhD is the only qualification needed to be
called a professor at that state-funded institution, where many a
department head is more interested in political indoctrination than
education.
The use of the term "non-violence" by Baum is the standard doubletalk
among the "anarchist" crowd; when "direct action activists" like Baum and
her friends serve as human shields for terrorists, violently assault IDF
soldiers, and vandalize Israel's security fence, they claim they are using
nonviolent tactics. But when Israel builds a Security Fence to keep out
suicide bombers and other Arab serial killers, then the Jewish state is
engaging in violence and state terror. The reading material in Baum's
course syllabus contains only articles published by activists in the ISM
and others who are virulently opposed to Israel's existence. There is
nothing there for students to learn about terrorist attacks that maim and
kill Israelis. Israel in the Baum course is nothing more than an abuser of
human rights, guilty of oppression.
Interestingly, a newspaper reporter who attended one of Baum's lectures on
that campus reported about how Baum deliberately distorted information or
used contortions repeatedly in her presentation to give false impressions
against and demonize the Jewish state, all the while passing such a
presentation off as scholarship. Nevertheless she was invited back a
second time to "teach" at UC Santa Cruz in a discipline unrelated to her
PhD, this time as a Lecturer.
At another University of California web site, Baum's area of expertise was
titled "Queering the Peace Movement in Israel/Palestine." Apparently she
is very popular with women in the annihilate-the-Jews protest movement.
Baum "reinvents" her academic background when she stages demonstrations
against the Israeli government in support of Israel's enemies. While she
taught math at UCSD back in 1996, ever since she has been teaching jihad.
The "Women in Black" chapter Baum takes credit for resurrecting in Tel
Aviv routinely insists they are for a "two-state solution;" but then
insist the Arabs have an unconditional "Right of Return" to areas inside
pre-1967 Israel so that they can dismantle the Jewish state. Although
"Women in Black" claim to be for "peace," their own statements, actions,
and associations tell another story. They call areas even within the
"Green Line" (the 1949 armistice line with Jordan) "Zionist occupied
territory." Speakers at their events routinely endorse violence. The
"Women in Black" have led public screaming sessions of "Palestine Will Be
Free/From The River to the Sea." Their literature always presents Israel
as an unprovoked aggressor, and never even mentions (let alone condemns)
the 60 years of terrorism and aggression against the Jewish State. Their
members routinely demonstrate together with the most venomous anti-Semites
on the planet.
On the website of the Coalition of Women for Peace is a rant by Baum
entitled, "Who Profits?" in which she implies that because corporations
build Jewish homes in the West Bank and Gaza, and because Palestinians are
employed there, therefore the "occupation" is just a moneymaking scheme.
She calls for "direct action" (terrorism and sabotage) against such
corporations. What wonderful scholarly reasoning. The real moneymaker is
Dalit Baum milking campus anti-Semitism to get paid a buck and promote her
agenda.
Baum created an organization of anti-Semitic Lesbians calling itself Black
Laundry (it includes some gay Arabs), who meet in gay bars in Israel. Baum
accuses the Jewish state of oppressing homosexuals, even while the Hamas
murders and kneecaps them. Black Laundry members of course never convene
in the areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority to protest
"oppression" of homosexuals. We wonder why.
Dalit Baum is in the business of "making anarchy." She has come out in
support of Hamas. She has consistently signed petitions endorsing a
boycott of Israel and Israeli goods. She openly supports Palestinian
"resistance," and we all know what that word means when people like Baum
use it. That educational institutions in America and Israel allow people
like her access to students is abominable.
2. Well, Israel's robed ones, its Supreme Court justices, have reversed
an earlier ruling by the country's electoral board, which banned two
fascist pro-terror Arab parties from running for the country's parliament
on grounds that they do not recognize the legitimacy of the existence of
Israel. It was an uncharacteristically courageous decision. The problem
is that the Supreme Court rather characteristically vetoed that ruling and
said the two parties can run. These two parties are in effect the
surrogates for the Hamas and Islamic jihad. The Supreme Court believes in
free speech absolutism when it comes to Arab fascism or leftist traitors,
but people who say, "I think Rabin was wrong when he pursued Oslo," should
be prosecuted as inciters.
Now, just to put that into proportion, consider another party that was NOT
banned by the electoral board, a party considered much less openly
treasonous than those two unbanned terror parties: HADASH, a mainly Arab
anti-Israel party that never has gotten around to renouncing Stalin and
Pol Pot. A lot of leftist academic Jewish anti-Zionists are members of
HADASH.
The web site for the Stalinist HADASH party has come out openly (in
ARABIC!) on its web site in support of anti-Jewish jihad terror. It calls
this terror "resistance." See this story:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1057958.html
Among those denouncing the decision of the robed ones is popular Israeli
pop singer Arik Sinai, until recently a leading light in the Tel Aviv
bohemian Left: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3660729,00.html
3.
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=EABBD297-58AB-4E90-A419-70BA041AE214
Is Israel Doomed?
By Kenneth Levin
FrontPageMagazine.com | 1/23/2009
Israel's enemies assert that its destruction is inevitable, and those who
would destroy her are cheered on by many in the West. At the same time,
Western mainstream media, particularly in Europe but also major media
outlets in America, do puff pieces on Israel's genocidal adversaries,
slant the news to conform to her enemies' propaganda, and support the
delegimitization of the Jewish state.
The Gaza War, and the response to it across the world, have underscored
the threats to the state's survival, Israel's often maladaptive and
self-defeating reactions, and what is required of the state to counter
those who challenge her existence.
The Threats
There are obviously those eager for Israel's demise. Since the Jewish
state's creation, the Arab world has wanted it to disappear and this has
not changed. Promotion of Arab supremacism, which accords little if any
rights to non-Muslim or non-Arab groups in what the Arabs deem their
proper domain, extends beyond Israel to abuse of Christians throughout
that world as well as of Muslim but non-Arab peoples such as the Kurds of
Iraq and Syria, the Muslim blacks of Darfur, the Berbers of Algeria. That
abuse has repeatedly reached the level of genocidal campaigns, as
reflected not only in the slaughter in Darfur, but also in the murder of
some two hundred thousand Kurds in Iraq and some two million Christian and
animist blacks in southern Sudan.
In terms of genocidal incitement against minority populations, none is as
graphic and incessant as that purveyed in Arab media, mosques and schools
- even in countries with which Israel is formally at peace - against the
Jews and Israel. The existence of Israel is seen as an intolerable
distortion of the proper order of things, according to which Jews should
either be dead or, at best, subjugated members of society existing at the
sufferance of their Arab betters.
In recent decades, enlistment in this genocidal hatred has widened to
encompass many in the broader Muslim world. Obviously, the Iranian
Revolution of 1979, the installation of a clerical regime that has sought
to expand its influence by taking the lead in promoting Israel's
destruction, has presented the Jewish state with a grave new threat. In
terms of broader enmity in the Muslim world, however, the greatest factor
has been aggressive Saudi export of Wahhabi fundamentalism, its preaching
of virulent Jew-hatred (and hatred of other non-Muslims), and its ever
increasing influence not only in once tolerant Islamic nations but also in
Muslim communities in Europe, the Americas and elsewhere.
To the degree that some in the Arab world, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt,
feel threatened by Iran, its alliance with Syria, and their protege
organizations such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian
territories, those states have interests which converge with Israel's. But
this offers only very limited relief from the surrounding hostility Israel
faces. Noteworthy in this regard is that Saudi Arabia and Egypt, as well
as Jordan, continue to promote Jew-hatred in their media and schools, the
Saudis continue to finance many Islamist groups even as they fear and
sanction others, and any constraint on Saudi hostility towards Israel
inspired by fear of Iran would certainly be reversed were the Iranian
threat to "moderate" Arab regimes to disappear.
In terms of Israel's Palestinian Arab neighbors, the PLO, and its dominant
party Fatah, under Arafat and since his death, have been and continue to
be committed to Israel's ultimate destruction. So, too, of course, are
Hamas and the other Islamist parties. Whatever true moderates exist among
the Palestinians have no political voice or influence.
In addition to the animosity of the Arab world, Israel is faced with much
hostile sentiment in Europe, fed by traditional anti-Semitism, by leftist
anti-Americanism and association of Israel with America, by perverse,
ahistorical leftist twisting of the Israeli-Arab conflict into Israeli
colonialists brutalizing the supposedly indigenous population, and by the
European media being house organs for anti-Israel bigotry of all these
pedigrees. The growing threat of radical Islam to European states,
particularly as manifested within those states' immigrant Muslim
populations, has in some quarters led to greater sympathy with Israel's
predicament. But elsewhere, especially among the cadres of the Left, which
include most of the media, this threat has had the opposite impact and
inspired a wishful thinking that all would be well, Islamist hostility
would be appeased, if only Israel would make sufficient amends or simply
disappear.
Nor is America immune to these distortions of reality. As the Muslim
population in the United States has grown, and as it has become more
radicalized, largely by Saudi promotion of Wahhabi extremism, an alliance
has emerged between the far Left in this country and the forces of
genocidal Islamism. Their recent joint demonstrations against Israel have
included explicitly anti-Semitic "cheers," such as calls for "Jews to the
ovens." Regrettably, even less extreme elements of the Left, such as some
within the so-called "liberal" churches, have signed on as fellow
travelers with this alliance for Israel's defamation, delegitimization and
ultimate demise.
Israel is also attacked, and its very existence challenged, in the United
Nations, an institution that has largely become the monster it was created
to fight. The UN Human Rights Council, whose present members include such
paragons of domestic civil rights as Cuba, Saudi Arabia, China, Malaysia
and Bangladesh, routinely excoriates Israel in terms that single out the
Jewish national liberation movement as uniquely illegitimate. The UNWRA,
which for six decades has been responsible for Palestinian refugees and
their families, promotes genocide under the flag of the UN. UNWRA schools
teach the glories of suicide bombing and martyrdom in the effort to
destroy Israel, employ members of terrorist organizations on its staff,
including as teachers, and serve as a conduit for recruiting children into
terrorist cadres.
In addition to all these challenges to her existence, Israel faces a
domestic enemy. This extends beyond those within the Israeli Arab
community who identify with Israel's external enemies. In the face of
living under constant siege, some among Israel's Jewish citizens,
particularly within the nation's elites, choose to distance themselves
from the national predicament. They choose to find fault with the state
and side with her defamers and would-be destroyers, embracing her
adversaries' indictments. They urge, at a minimum, territorial and other
concessions to placate Israel's enemies, even at the cost of rendering the
state more vulnerable, and some even argue for the dissolution of the
state to mollify her enemies. Predictably, they cast their doing so not as
a desire to separate themselves from their embattled fellow citizens or to
appease those who would annihilate them but as embracing a higher
morality.
The same hypocrisy is seen among many Diaspora Jews, who likewise endorse
the indictments of those who would destroy Israel, join in defamation and
delegitimization of the state, and do so while averring only the highest
ethical motives. A list of American and European Jews of this ilk would
fill many pages.
The widespread and implacable hatred faced by Israel is seen by some, and
often characterized in the media, as virtually insurmountable. So too,
according to various voices in the media, is the translation of this
hatred into physical attack. If Israel has been able to prevail in the
past in conventional wars, the present and growing challenge of
unconventional assault - at one extreme, with weapons of mass destruction,
most threateningly an Iranian nuclear arsenal; at the other extreme,
incessant terror entailing rocket and mortar attacks from terrorist forces
imbedded within dense civilian populations - may be, it is suggested,
beyond solution.
In addition, Israel also confronts the challenge not only of the enmity of
its neighbors but of their fertility as well. Palestinian population
growth ranks among the highest in the world, fertility among Arab citizens
of Israel is also high, and together, it is often argued, Israel faces a
demographic challenge that it has no means of countering while preserving
itself as both the Jewish state and a democracy.
Managing and Mismanaging the Threats
But despite all these various, serious challenges, Israel's fate remains
largely in its own hands. Israel has peace agreements with Egypt and
Jordan because it convinced both states that, however much its leaders or
its citizens might like to see Israel gone, the price of pursuing that
goal is prohibitive. There is no peace with Syria, but Syria has long
refrained from direct hostile action against Israel for the same reason of
not wanting to pay the likely price.
Some argue that Islamist states and parties cannot be dissuaded by such
calculations because they are driven by religious zeal and are prepared to
pay any price, and imply that such adversaries therefore cannot be
defeated. But this thesis has not been tested.
Such regimes are immune neither to annihilation- that is, a weakening to
the point where others in their societies are able to seize control from
them - nor to a battering to the extent that, even if they retain control,
they are rendered unable to act, at least for an extended time, on their
genocidal agenda. The biggest challenge to Israel is an Iran close to
achieving nuclear arms, and - while ending Iran's nuclear program by other
means would be preferable - even this challenge is not without military
answers.
In terms of smaller players such as Iranian proxies Hezbollah and Hamas,
military dissuasion had hardly been tried prior to the current war in
Gaza.
Israel, under Ehud Barak, left southern Lebanon in 2000 without assuring
that Hezbollah would not fill the void there. Barak and many other
Israelis were convinced that, in any case, Hezbollah would not pursue the
war across the border. Despite many subsequent episodes of Hezbollah
cross-border terror, including the murder of Israeli soldiers and
civilians, Israel downplayed the threat and offered no serious response.
When it did respond, in 2006, it was unprepared to do so. It then ended
its campaign and acquiesced to creation of a UN force in southern Lebanon
that has done nothing, despite its mandate, to prevent Hezbollah from
reconstituting and greatly expanding its rocket and missile arsenal and
from reestablishing itself in areas which are supposed to be prohibited to
it.
Some in Israel now argue that the nation nevertheless inflicted enough
damage in 2006 that Hezbollah is hesitant to restart hostilities. But it
is far from clear whether Hezbollah is cowed or simply biding its time or
awaiting marching orders from Tehran.
Vis-a-vis Gaza, many Israeli leaders, most notably its present prime
minister, deluded themselves into believing that Israel's full evacuation
of its communities and military from the territory in 2005 would be
followed by quiet and would be a step towards a more general peace. The
evacuation was followed instead by more rocket and mortar fire targeting
Israeli towns and villages, and this assault dramatically increased when
Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007. Israel's abandonment of the
Philadelphi corridor in the context of its general withdrawal opened the
way to large-scale smuggling of ever more powerful rockets and missiles
and other armaments into Gaza, yet Israel barely responded to either the
rocket and mortar attacks or the smuggling.
Now it has responded and has done so in an impressive manner. It has not
destroyed Hamas, but it is far from clear that the organization's
destruction at this point is desirable. Of course, the impact of weakening
the organization has yet to be seen. If Hamas continues to fire its
rockets, mortars and missiles, Israel can resume its attack and weaken it
further. Israel's most significant mistake may be not retaking the
Philadelphi corridor, as it is highly unlikely that Egypt is prepared to
stop weapons smuggling into Gaza or that any role given to third parties
such as European observers would do the job.
But if Israel will respond to further smuggling by seizing the corridor,
then this issue too can be addressed. Israel should adopt a zero tolerance
policy with regard both to smuggling of weaponry into Gaza and attacks
from Gaza. If it has the will to do so, it certainly has the means to
enforce such a policy.
Similarly, while Hezbollah offers greater challenges, renewed hostilities
on the Lebanese front too are manageable, if Israel has the will to
address them effectively.
In fact, what has exacerbated actual problems, and created an impression
of some of those problems being intractable, has largely been Israel's
failure over the last fifteen years to address the challenges it faces.
Too many Israelis became psychologically exhausted by the siege and
deluded themselves into thinking they could end it if they only made
sufficient concessions. In the Oslo debacle, they brought people dedicated
to their destruction into the territories as "peace partners," armed them,
closed their eyes to their "peace partners'" engagement in genocidal
incitement and vicious, wholesale terror, and convinced themselves that
their dead were "sacrifices for peace."
Only when they pushed for an "end of conflict" final agreement, and
Arafat, despite Israel's offering to return virtually to the pre-1967
ceasefire lines, launched a full-scale terror war, did Israel begin to
wake from its delusions. Yet, while it largely pacified the West Bank, it
still repeated self-destructive policies in its tolerance of terror from
Lebanon and from Gaza.
In addition, Israeli policies and rhetoric concerning the West Bank
likewise continue to reflect dangerous delusions. A national goal of
reaching an arrangement in the West Bank that entails Israel's retaining
defensible borders, including the areas where almost all the so-called
"settlers" live, while separating itself from the vast majority of
Palestinians, would be understandable and reasonable. What is neither
understandable nor reasonable is the belief that Israel can forego
defensible borders and can hand ceded areas to Mahmoud Abbas's PA and have
peace.
Nor is there merit to alarmist arguments that Israel must play the
supplicant and hand the territories to whomever will take them, however
hostile the recipient, because of the demographic challenges to the state;
that it moreover must forego retaining defensible borders because doing so
would also mean adding Arab citizens in numbers that would undermine the
state demographically. The latter is factually untrue; Israel could pursue
defensible lines while still separating itself from the vast majority of
Palestinian Arabs. Most of the areas it needs to retain are, in fact,
sparsely populated. And it need not be the supplicant to find a recipient,
however hostile, to take what it would cede. Various models have been
presented by sensible, strategically astute, Israeli thinkers of ways to
move forward to ultimate separation from areas of dense Palestinian Arab
population without compromising the security of the state.
Self-defeating Israeli actions over the last two decades have entailed
more than the grave errors in policy decisions. They have gone beyond
Israel's embrace of "peace partners" who had no interest in peace and the
adoption of delusions that, despite what the other side says and does,
sufficient concessions and self-reform and demonstrations of good will
would inevitably win relief from ongoing besiegement. Likewise of profound
negative consequence has been Israel's failure to make its case forcefully
to the world. This too has been largely motivated by the desire to
propitiate its enemies, to see salvation in concessions and self-reform
and to ignore the nature and the dimensions of the threat.
And so the nation's leaders, and its foreign service bureaucrats, have
failed to point out and protest strongly Palestinian and wider Arab
indoctrination, in media, mosques, and schools, to Jew-hatred and
genocide. They have failed to emphasize, as they should indefatigably, in
every forum in which the nature of the conflict is distorted and Israel is
pressed for concessions, that there can be no peace as long as the
Palestinian Authority and Hamas and virtually every other Palestinian
group and the Arab world more broadly aspire to Israel's ultimate
destruction and promote this goal among their people and educate their
young to it.
The government, including the foreign service, are too often mute when
confronted with the most bigoted and unconscionable anti-Israel libels,
distortions of reality, by Arab spokespeople or media factotums or others,
even though their silence in the face of defamatory lies, or their weak
and almost apologetic rebuttals, serve only to lend credence to the
defamations and legitimacy to their purveyors.
The repeated emphasis by Israeli spokespeople during the Gaza War of the
provocations that triggered Israel's actions, of the months and years of
rocket and mortar assault from Gaza on Israeli towns and villages, the
repeated assertion of the obvious point that no other sovereign state
would tolerate such assault or refrain from responding forcefully, has
been a step forward from past performance. Likewise, the response to
misinformation and disinformation during the war - the shift, for example,
from knee-jerk apologies in the face of claims of indiscriminate force to
investigation of the claims and a fact-based answer supported by video and
other evidence - is certainly an improvement on what has been the typical
handling of such situations during previous hostilities. But there is
still far to go in Israel's responsibly making its case. It has yet to
publicly challenge, with a force appropriate to the animus of Israel's
accusers, the routine slanderous assaults by Palestinian and other Arab
leaders, by NGO's, by UN officials, by various political figures on the
world stage, and by so many in the media.
To argue that Israel's fate is essentially in her own hands, in the hands
of her people, is hardly to make light of the problems Israel faces. But
as long as the great majority of Israelis do not succumb to the bigotry of
their enemies and their enemies' fellow travelers, domestic and worldwide,
as long as they remain steadfast in the conviction of the rightness of
their cause - a rightness evident to any informed and fairminded observer
- then, just as they have overcome dire threats in the past and indeed
built a society whose achievements have been far beyond the wildest dreams
of the nation's founders, the odds are well in their favor of continuing
to meet whatever challenges confront them.
________________________________________
Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist and historian and author of The Oslo
Syndrome: Delusions of a People under Siege (Smith and Kraus, 2005;
paperback 2006).
4. Once again, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1232643727590&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
5. Bad vibes about Obama:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=7E652C4D-2AAF-4D28-8660-0F1619D7D7E3
6.
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=D7B74C98-9C56-4C82-90F5-C998106E5B72
Defining Anti-Zionism
By David Solway
FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, January 23, 2009
7. Ben Gurion University's second worst jihadist:
http://www.isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/BGU%20-%20Lev%20Grinberg%20-%20Symbolic%20Genocide.htm
. 8. From the Wall St Journal: OPINION: HOUSES OF WORSHIP
. JANUARY 23, 2009
How Father Desbois Became a Holocaust Memory Keeper
By JORDANA HORN
Father Patrick Desbois is a French Catholic priest who, virtually
single-handedly, has undertaken the task of excavating the history of
previously undocumented Jewish victims of the Holocaust in the former
Soviet Union, including an estimated 1.5 million people who were murdered
in Ukraine. Father Desbois was born 10 years after the end of World War II
-- and yet, through his tireless actions, he exemplifies the "righteous
gentile." The term is generally used to recognize non-Jews who, during the
Holocaust, risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazis. Father Desbois
is a generation too late to save lives. Instead, he has saved memory and
history.
Ukraine, Patrick Desbois gets help finding undocumented sites where Nazis
murdered Jews.
How much he has accomplished since 2002 can be seen in "The Shooting of
Jews in Ukraine: Holocaust By Bullets," which runs until March 15 at the
Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. The exhibit was created by the
Memorial de la Shoah Paris in cooperation with Father Desbois's
organization, Yahad in Unum (the words for "together" in Hebrew and
Latin). It follows the publication last August of his book "Holocaust By
Bullets" (Palgrave MacMillan).
Using forensic evidence, eyewitness accounts and archival research, Father
Desbois has taken it upon himself to document the murders of Jews after
the Nazis invaded the former Soviet Union. In Ukraine, where he has begun
his work, these Jews were not killed in the relatively well-documented
machinery of the death camps. They were the victims of mobile killing
units that shot their captives and deliberately left few records of their
crimes. At each location, according to Father Desbois, local Ukrainians,
including hundreds of children, were requisitioned at gunpoint to assist
with the logistics of murder. In August 1941, for instance, these death
squads were killing an estimated 82 Jews every hour.
The exhibit is excruciating, and encompasses videos of eyewitness
testimony as well as step-by-step descriptions of the executions. From the
forced preparation of the grave sites through the painstaking
pre-execution activities (like the forcible removal of the Jews' jewelry
and gold teeth), the firing squads and the aftermath (including the Nazi
banquets celebrating a job well done), the exhibit documents the Holocaust
in a part of the world where the specifics of murder, and the location of
specific sites, were previously omitted from the historical record. At one
point, it describes the technique pioneered by Nazi Einsatzgruppen Leader
Friedrich Jeckeln in 1941 of positioning the victims-to-be face down on
top of those who had just been executed. Jeckeln called this method
Sardinenpackung, or sardine-packing, and noted its purpose: "to avoid
having to rearrange the bodies and to gain space."
In one corner of the exhibit, a haunting series of recently discovered
photographs taken by the German photographer Johannes Hahle flash by
without commentary: They are pictures of the Jews of Lubny, being
assembled for execution. The photographs are brutal in their simplicity.
Men, women and children wait, in a vast field, for what might be minutes
or hours. Adults stare into space; impatient children cry. Over the course
of the photographic series, the pile of collected clothing behind them
slowly grows bigger, in a grim parallel to the growing number of ended
lives.
Father Desbois's French grandfather was imprisoned in a forced-labor camp
in Rawa Ruska in the Ukraine during the war with 25,000 other French
soldiers captured by the Germans. This initially motivated the priest to
travel to the region and learn more about all of the Nazis' victims.
In 2004, Father Desbois founded Yahad in Unum, along with French Cardinal
Jean-Marie Lustiger and Rabbi Israel Singer. It was created with two
goals: to support dialogue between Jewish and Catholic authorities, and,
in the words of a founding statement, to reply "to issues of the world
with common projects founded on the ethic inspired by the gift of the law
on Mount Sinai."
Father Desbois is tired, as the circles beneath his eyes attest, but he
wants to learn more. In 2009, he and his team will expand their work into
Belarus and Ossetia. He hopes people will contact him through his
organization's Web site, yahadinunum.org, and tell him where to look for
more mass graves and more eyewitnesses to history.
"These were young children who were forced, in the course of one day, to
fill the grave and to witness," Father Desbois said. "They heard the last
words of the dead. They want to speak."
Time is working against the priest, who accompanies researchers on most of
their trips into the former Soviet Union and has, to this point,
personally interviewed 823 witnesses. Each interview takes up to two
hours, and his team takes 10 to 15 trips a year to the region, each
lasting no more than 17 days because, he explains, "We can't bear more,
psychologically." But the surviving witnesses, most of whom were children
at the time of the massacres, are already in their late 70s and early 80s,
and Father Desbois worries that they won't be able to tell their stories
for much longer.
But this project that has become his life's work, he says, is inspired by
two sources far greater than either history or circumstance. One is "min
hashamayim," Father Desbois says in Hebrew -- from heaven, which inspires
us to build relationships with our fellow human beings. The other
inspiration, he explains, comes from the earthly world, and what is
written in Genesis about the blood of Abel, murdered by Cain: "The voice
of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground."
As the unmarked mass graves are slowly located, one by one, and sanctified
with the recitation of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning for the
dead, the cries can at last be silenced. Are we our brothers' keepers? To
Father Desbois, the answer is a resounding "Yes."
Even so, I ask him: How can you bear to listen to a woman talk about when
she was 14 years old and was forced to walk on corpses, between shootings,
in order to pack them down in a mass grave? "I keep my faith in God,"
Father Desbois responds, "not in humanity."
Ms. Horn is a lawyer and writer at work on her first novel.
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W11
Copyright 2008
9. To Get Away From Col. Gadhafi
Why did the Libyan Jews cross the road--and why won't the New York Times
tell its readers?
By JAMES TARANTO
The New York Times op-ed page has an interesting new contributor today:
Moammar Gadhafi, Libya's dictator. Gadhafi, whose name the Times spells
Qaddafi (see this 1986 Straight Dope column for an exegesis on the varying
transliterations of his name), styles himself "Guide of the First of
September Great Revolution of the Arab Libyan Popular and Socialist
Jamahiriya," but the Times's author bio blandly says, "Muammar Qaddafi is
the leader of Libya."
Gadhafi's subject is the territory formerly known as Palestine, now
divided between the nation of Israel and the disputed territories, the
West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which were occupied by Jordan and Egypt,
respectively, after the Arabs rejected a U.N. resolution calling for
Jewish and Arab states in Palestine, and which came under Israeli
occupation after the Six Day War in 1967.
The common view is that the ultimate resolution of this conflict is the
"two-state solution," in which Israel would cede all or most of the
disputed territories to a new Arab state called Palestine. It seems
reasonable, even obvious, but there are practical impediments. One is the
asymmetry of Arab demands for a "right of return"--i.e., that Palestinian
Arabs whose ancestors lived in what is now Israel be allowed to resettle
there. By contrast, no one talks about a Jewish "right of return" to Arab
countries, and Arabs demand that Jews who have settled in the disputed
territories be expelled. There is also a question of whether the
Palestinians, or the regimes that rule other Arab countries, really want a
Palestinian state as opposed to (in theory) the destruction of Israel and
(in practice) an excuse to continue using the Jewish state as a scapegoat.
Anyway, Gadhafi rejects the two-state solution in favor of a one-state
one, "an 'Isratine' that would allow the people in each party to feel that
they live in all of the disputed land and they are not deprived of any one
part of it." Gadhafi writes:
Assimilation is already a fact of life in Israel. There are more than one
million Muslim Arabs in Israel; they possess Israeli nationality and take
part in political life with the Jews, forming political parties. On the
other side, there are Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Israeli
factories depend on Palestinian labor, and goods and services are
exchanged. This successful assimilation can be a model for Isratine.
If the present interdependence and the historical fact of
Jewish-Palestinian coexistence guide their leaders, and if they can see
beyond the horizon of the recent violence and thirst for revenge toward a
long-term solution, then these two peoples will come to realize, I hope
sooner rather than later, that living under one roof is the only option
for a lasting peace.
Whatever appeal this idea may have in theory, in practice it is even more
fanciful than the two-state solution. Even assuming that Israel's
democratic institutions remain intact in form after the transition,
"Isratine's" Jews would soon be outnumbered by Arabs, given demographic
trends and the "right of return," which Gadhafi endorses.
In theory there is no reason an Arab majority in a democracy could not
respect the rights of a Jewish minority. In practice, however, the Arab
track record in this regard is dismal--and the Arabs of the disputed
territories have been indoctrinated for generations in Nazi-style
Jew-hatred--often, especially in recent years, with a religious
justification. An actual "Isratine" would likely be another backward
Arab-dominated regime, with Jews subjugated or worse. Israeli Arabs would
be far worse off than they are today; Palestinian Arabs, probably not much
better off.
Gadhafi's Times article includes a glaring falsehood that bears on the
impracticality of his proposal, and suggests that he is not offering it in
good faith. By way of conceding a point, he writes:
The basis for the modern State of Israel is the persecution of the Jewish
people, which is undeniable. The Jews have been held captive, massacred,
disadvantaged in every possible fashion by the Egyptians, the Romans, the
English, the Russians, the Babylonians, the Canaanites and, most recently,
the Germans under Hitler. The Jewish people want and deserve their
homeland.
In fact, the Germans under Hitler are not the most recent persecutors of
Jews. Many Israeli Jews are refugees from persecution in Arab countries
since World War II (and Iran since 1979). Aside from Morocco, no Arab land
has more than a handful of Jews left--and that includes Libya. Vivienne
Roumani-Denn, director of the 2007 documentary "The Last Jews of Libya,"
recounts the fate of Libya's Jews on this Web page:
By 1941, the Jews accounted for a quarter of the population of Tripoli and
maintained 44 synagogues. In 1942 the Germans occupied the Jewish quarter
of Benghazi, plundered shops, and deported more than 2,000 Jews across the
desert, where more than one-fifth of them perished. Many Jews from Tripoli
were also sent to forced labor camps. Conditions did not greatly improve
following the liberation. During the British occupation, there was a
series of pogroms, the worst of which, in 1945, resulted in the deaths of
more than 100 Jews in Tripoli and other towns and the destruction of five
synagogues.
A growing sense of insecurity, coupled with the establishment of the State
of Israel, led many Jews to leave the country. Although emigration was
illegal, more than 3,000 Jews succeeded in leaving, and many went to
Israel. When the British legalized emigration in 1949, more than 30,000
Jews fled Libya.
At the time of Colonel Qaddafi's coup in 1969, some 500 Jews remained in
Libya. Qaddafi subsequently confiscated all Jewish property and cancelled
all debts owed to Jews. By 1974 there were no more than 20 Jews, and it is
believed that the Jewish presence has passed out of existence.
In fairness to Gadhafi, he did not begin the persecution of Libyan Jews.
But isn't there some rule of journalistic ethics that should have
compelled the Times to disclose to its readers that its author is the man
who, in his own country, finished what Hitler started?
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